During the Second War there had been extensive defences along this stretch of the coast; now sections of wall — concrete Z’s, L’s and double U’s, bearded with reinforcing — and even entire blockhouses were embedded in the beach. For a while the mudface was scattered with a selection of the things I had brought with me on my holiday — girders, spars, plastic sheeting, the neuritic plaques, the senile plaques, the braindruse — which, while soiled, nonetheless anchored this liminal desert to the world up above, to the kitchens still fitted, the carports yet intact, beside the bungalows that crouched well away from the edge. Soon enough, though, these relics of the distant present had tumbled by, while the fret still draped offshore, hiding the turbines, and the only player was me, walking on the spot as one shingle spit then the next revolved towards me, each a miniature Spurn Head.
If before I had been held by the loess, now it sucked me in; I had only to let my glimpse penetrate its moist gashes for the entire body to shiver, then contort, as if it were a monstrous and living thing. The heat mounted, the beery waves frothed on the rim of the land, my vain boots ate my feet, while, incontinently, the Andante of Mahler’s Sixth began to syringe my ears — at first a slow seep of syrupy violins and sucrose melody, but then, with recursive eddies of flute and woodwind, larger flows of sound began sloshing around my brainpan, rocking then floating my hollow soul.
Spooked, I gripped the plastic water bottle that had served me for the entire walk as something to hold on to, the all-too-real limb of that phantom body, the Other, who walked beside me yet said nought. The bottle crackled — the Andante flooded on, its cascades of sweet sadness spurting through my eyes, mouth and nose. I put the bottle down on a mud plinth, hoping its mundane shape would trump all this amorphous weirdness. This didn’t work: the Mahler became more turbulent; I slid across glassy sound-boils, whipping into whirlpools of timpani — massed triangles, cow bells and old hubcaps smitten with fenders: ‘Zing! Boom! Tanta-ra!’ A cartoon Cleopatra was hauled towards me reclining on a pyramidal juggernaut drawn by naked and burnished Nubians. ‘Zing! Boom! Tan-ta-ra!’ And although she vanished into the haze, once she was gone the patterns of the pebbles, the gulls twisting into the sky at my approach, the very winding of the sea fret — all these phenomena assumed a demented congruence with the Andante, responding to its every glissade.
It got worse, the mud Romantically writhing, the sandbars flip-flopping, the very rods and cones of my optic nerves made visible, frenziedly dancing to the brassy blare of the movement’s crescendo — until all was blissfully and terribly silenced by the bomb: which lay, small and rusted, a few sustained glockenspiel notes and oboe tones curling into silence around it. I’d nearly trodden on the fucking thing and sat down abruptly, my rucksack marrying my back to the sand, so that I lay panting, parenthesized by my calves.
When I got upright again, I saw there was a shoal of these death fish beached along the tide line — perhaps a hundred in all. Fear renders the body down so that each movement becomes clarified, so, keeping close to the cliff face, I tiptoed past the bombs to the accompaniment of the arrhythmic rasping of my breath in my ears, and atonal cries desiring my life to be not just longer — but forever.
Then the beach was a hard flat pan. Up above on the bluffs stood the stark forms of ruined military installations about to surrender. My bowels slackened and I squatted, back to the cliff, to add my lava to the glacial till. Standing to wipe myself, I saw two small figures coming on along the beach, maybe a quarter of a mile distant. It had been so long since I’d seen another human that, for the aeons until we met, I speculated on what life forms these might be — were they the luminous beings, descended now, their gossamer wings folded into yellow nylon jackets?
It was a Yorkshireman — rotund but hard, like a well-inflated beach ball, his smooth-shaven face cut into by the shadow of his baseball cap. Both he and his son — aged perhaps thirteen — were wearing Hull City football shirts; the black-and-yellow stripes widened over their tummies, then narrowed at the broad leather belts they wore, dangling with chisels and hammers. They rolled towards me across the bled, so at ease that I could not bear to let them pass — had to seize them, tap into their reservoir of honeyed love. As I drew level I cried out, ‘I saw a bomb back there!’
‘Oh, aye,’ the man said. ‘What were it like?’
He had three gold front teeth, two incisors and a canine; also a heavy gold chain in the fold of his thick neck — these I registered, rather than his relaxed manner, so ran on nervously: ‘You see all those signs warning of unexploded ordinance all the time, but I never think anything of them — then I nearly trod on this bomb.’
‘Aye,’ he reiterated, ‘what were it like?’
‘Um… well,’ I flustered, ‘I dunno, about this long,’ I held out my hands to bracket an implausible catch, ‘and sorta bomb-shaped — with tailfins.’
‘Four of ’em, squared off?’
‘Y-yes, four fins, square ones.’
‘That’ll be a tank-buster, an A10. I’ve come out here after a high tide and seen thousands of ’em.’
‘There were at least a hundred of them back there!’ We were both taken aback by my vehemence. ‘Are they, y’know, live?’
‘Soom are, uthers ’re joost dummies — practice bombs.’
The boy stayed a way off, took a rubber-handled hammer from his belt and swung it idly at a mud outcrop — in the seconds it took to connect I saw this as an orbit within an orbit, the boy as a sun, the father as a satellite, myself at the aphelion, the whole as an orrery designed to explain the emotional pull that children exert—
The hammer struck, cleanly splitting the mud to reveal its pebbly lode and we all staggered two steps sideways as the beach jerked beneath our feet. Over the fossicker’s left shoulder a section of the cliff face dematerialized into dirty fret that boiled towards the sea. I couldn’t understand what had happened, but the man — turning to look so that the gold chain was spat from his neck folds — said casually, ‘That were a big one.’
‘Was it a bomb?’ I gasped.
He laughed, ‘That? No, it were only an ordinary fall, haven’t you seen wun yet? ‘Ow long you bin walking?’
The shock of the cliff fall seemed to have jolted my memory and without needing to consult my notebook I was able to explain I’d come from Skipsea that day, and Bempton via Flamborough Head the one before. Thrilled by my own lucidity, I rambled on about the Holderness coast, its strangeness, and how there must be some odd connection between its progressive engulfment and the ignorance of the wider world.
The fossicker was also thrown into loquacity by the cliff fall and spoke of his fossil hunting, how the Yorkshire coast was perfect for this, exhibiting three successive strata — the Jurassic, the Cretaceous, the Cainozoic — exposed successively from Whitby in the north to the Humber estuary, and how he himself had found, ‘All sorts. I dug up a whole bloody bison in Tunstall mere last year and a fossilized tree the year before.’
He told me that he and his family lived in Goole, and I pictured them there at once: sitting in a conservatory tacked on to the back of a small terraced house beside the docks. The fossicker sat watching the racing on television, the fossilized bison serving him as an awkward sofa. The boy stood by a fulllength UPVC window lazily swinging his steel hammer until it hit the TV set, which neatly split, spilling its ancient microcircuitry of ammonites and trilobites. The father-god and the son-god looked on, one substance, at peace.