Read Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall for Free Online

start or finish,and although everyone is promised a prize, only a select few ever receive them.
    A minute envelope materializes, the flap of which opens and closes while arrows arc up and down, conveying the strong impression to the user – and the suggestion of physiological addiction is highly appropriate – that vital communications are being transmitted through the ether. She sits there, radiation pinging off the back of her retinas, unable to tear her eyes from this very little thing – the envelope icon – which is an insult to the illustrious history of the epistolary – I mean to say: who’s this email from, Laclos?
    Of course, of course, all new technologies cannibalize their predecessors: the horses are put down and the carriage rolls on complete with postilions and oil lamps. If futurological imaginings establish anything at all, it’s woe betide anyone who dares to conceive of the un become in too great a detail – and yet here we are, with the entire Library of Babel inscribed on a pin, and a trillion web pages expressed by the digits 1 and 0.
    A few days later I set off, leaving wife, children and dog, all laid out on this weekend morning like idols in their great bed of wear. The last vision of home I took with me was of the fat woman who lives in the block of flats opposite, and whose bedroom window is exactly level with that of my writing room. As I slid notebook, passport, etc. into the pockets of my waxy jacket she swished back her curtains then proceeded to plump up her duvet, punching the white slug with her yellowy-black fists.
    At the end of the road I paused to check I had turned off the cooker, shut the fridge and closed the front door. At my feet a concrete bollard lay toppled on the pavement: the severedpenis of a god at once Brutalist and
kaloi
. I looked for Lysippus among the bus drivers smoking outside their garage ... the lime trees in their raised beds were losing their foliage ... and then, quite suddenly, I was at Paddington – no, Heathrow, and wandering shoeless and un belted through security.
    If I was going to be infantilized, why couldn’t I be miniaturized? Miniaturized along with Jane Fonda in a mini-submarine, then injected into America – but no, there would be no fantastic voyage, only the atomizers of Arpège on the shelves of the Duty Free,
why not 5mls or 500?
, empty suitcases chained outside a luggage store, and beneath a TV monitor some frummers davening as they laid tefillin. There was the travelator, a grooved tongue glistening as if with saliva, ready to slurp me up into the belly of the beast.

     

    Since I’d started to see Sherman again I’d had a revulsion from any ‘humour’ associated with dwarfism. Unfortunately, I’d been at it for so long that people still brought me anecdotes they thought would amuse me. Only the day before I left, a friend told me of a rash of audacious thefts from Scandinavian luxury tourist coaches. The authorities were confounded: the tourists’ suitcases had been in the locked luggage compartment of the coaches all day, yet when they reached their hotel and went to unpack they found all their valuables had been spirited away.
    The police could find no leads, until at last an informer of restricted height came forward. He had been, he told them, a member of a gang of dwarfs who had enlisted larger accomplices to go on the tours, while they hid in their suitcases. Once the coaches were under way the dwarfs unzipped themselves and went to work. The inversion of drug smugglers’ modus operandi had a certain symmetry – here was the package that ingested the mule – but I didn’t believe a word of it.
    I took off the Barbour and dropped it in the corner of the toilet stall where I squatted shortly before boarding. It was so stiff with stuff and waxing that it leant there – about the height of a small child, or a dwarf. I strained, fixating on the creases in its collar,
pursed black lips
. After only a few days’ ownership