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

be doing it.
    What was my own life beside such finicky precision? Cack-handed! Anomic! Eton-messy! True, the parchment scrolls ofTorah verses were by no means the smallest books in existence, * but they had the virtue of being fragments of a single work that was all you ever needed to read – if, that is, you believed the universe had been created by a omnipotent games-playing deity with attention-deficit disorder as a real-time moral-philosophic experiment. I had my doubts.

     
    Mm, house truffle, Earl Grey pearl and liquid salted caramel – popping one of the dusty balls into my mouth I preferred to think of Him as a cosmic
artisan du chocolat
. The plane had reached its cruising height of 35,000 feet over Ireland,
but why not 350,000 so we could orbit the earth with fiery Apollo, or 3,500
so we could see the zephyrs comb the heathery chest of the Black Mountain?
Ach! The vicious constraint of worshipping the infinite through the contemplation of the vanishingly small was getting to me – that and the multiplying and then dividing of truffles, clods, bald-headed men and book pages ... I must have slept, exhausted – or at least assumed I was dreaming, otherwise it would’ve been madness to pop the catch of the overhead locker with the frummer’s great crate in it.
    The plane hit an air pocket and the case slammed down on top of me. The zip was already open and Sherman tumbled out, dressed in a black rollneck and black jeans, equipped with a head torch and wire cutters. ‘What the fuck!’ he exclaimed. ‘I assumed the frummer would check me in as hold baggage.’
    I looked up the aisle, but the cabin crew were all goofing off in their curtained booth; as for the passengers, not a single one seemed to have noticed – they were all lost in the light caves hollowed out of the back of each other’s heads. Sherman disentangled himself from old-fashioned flannel underpants, long black socks and a prayer shawl. I watched him, thinking of the first six-inch TV I’d had back in the early 1980s.
    While the miners had fought the Battle of Orgreave, I lay on a slagheap of mattresses watching James Robertson Justice play Vashtar, the leader of an enslaved people (I don’t recall the J-word) compelled to build a mighty pyramid for the Pharaoh. The wide open desert, the massed teams of extras pulling stone blocks on rollers, the whole CinemaScope sweep of the epic compressed into that tiny screen – I squinted at it, awed.
    ‘C’mon,’ hissed Sherman, leading me aft.
    As we prowled up the aisle the plane banked slightly and my eyes were flung sideways down through a window to where, 17,000 feet below, the emulsive cloud had congealed into avast simulacrum of the paths, box hedges and yew avenues of a formal eighteenth-century garden. As I watched, humbled, a monstrous baby staggered upright from the horizon 300 miles away, its chubby arms formed by vortices of cumulo-stratus. As the plane drew closer I saw that this apparition was one of my own children; it seemed that Gaia had been busy uploading the essence of my sentimentality and fashioning it into this towering love object – which we flew straight through.
    ‘Will you come on!’ Sherman pulled my sleeve, and reluctantly I joined him between the stainless-steel galley and the flimsy toilet doors, where he went unerringly to a section of carpet and lifted it to expose a D-ring. He opened the hatch and we let ourselves down into the cold booming hold, the beam of his head torch picking out the Samsonite blocks on pallets.
    ‘Y’know Faulkner had a screen credit on
Land of the Pharaohs
,’ I remarked, apropos of everything, but Sherman only hissed:
    ‘Will you shut the fuck up,’ and went about his task with a will, snapping combination locks with his clippers, then unzipping the bags so that their contents spilled on to the aluminium deck.
    ‘Look at this drek,’ he said, snatching up a handful of stuff. I recognized the seat covers we had had in my childhood