Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall Read Free

third birthday.
    That morning, after breakfast, my jealous brother told me he was going to run away from home. I said I would come as well and carefully packed one of my mother’s old handbags with toy cars, but when the time came to leave he said he wasn’t interested any more, so I set off alone. I can see now the terror-annihilated face of the lorry driver as I dashed across the North Circular in front of his wheels, and also the police car pulling up at the bus stop where I was waiting with what I imagined was mature casualness. And lunging up from that car, her face mottled and cracked like a saltpan, my mother – she was only forty-four when I ran away, but I fancy the taint was already on her: green grave weeds, rotting at the edges.
    The bus stop was right beside the synagogue, at the end of Norrice Lea.

     

    About three or four years after
Behemoth
was installed, my brother – who knew my love for all things out of scale – gave me a 1:200 scale model of Sherman’s sculpture. The metal figurine was dubbed a ‘minumental’ and had been made by Paul St George, an artist my brother knew. I’ve no idea whether St George is successful or not, but I thought it likely that it was his own massive sense of failure and envy that had been compressed into this, and the other teensy travesties he had made of his contemporaries’ works.
    I placed the minumental
Behemoth
in among the little wooden blocks and cylinders modelled on London landmarks – Big Ben, the Millennium Wheel, Telecom Tower – that my daughter had bought for me at Muji, and that I had ranged about the base of the anglepoise in the middle of my desk. Attached to the lamp was a tuft of wool I had picked up from a hillside on the Shetland island of Foula – this was the off-white cloud on the horizon of the diminished capital.
    The memory that preyed on me was both definite and embodied; it visited me on waking, dissolving only imperfectly to reveal the expected things – penis sputtering, kettle whistling – then reforming into Sherman’s rock-hard shoulders, the leaden disc of the garden pond, his pile-driving fist and the mouse mush.
    I avoided Sherman because of my shame – and so Vamana played tricks on me. Over the years I betrayed an increasing preoccupation in my work with littleness, hugeness and all distortions of scale. Nobody gave a damn about the big stuff, but the wilful insertion of dwarfish characters into my stories was ... insensitive. Worse still were the riffs on smallness I retailed to my cronies, and the paltry anecdotes they reciprocated with. How this one had attended the LittlePeople of America convention, where he had seen a primordial dwarf * brother and sister treated like film stars. While that one had written a play about the actors who played the Munchkins in
The Wizard of Oz
; they had stayed at the Culver City Hotel in Los Angeles during the shooting, and it was said they slept four to a bed, with predictably ‘comic’ antics.
    Most shaming of all was the ‘game’ I devised for my children’s amusement when they were small, ‘Child or Dwarf’. Driving in the car, if one of us saw an ambiguous figure walking along the pavement we would cry out ‘Child or dwarf?’ and the others would make their guesses until we pulled past and turned to observe his or her face. What could possibly have been my motivation for this sick and derogatory form of ‘entertainment’, which was nothing less than laughing at someone’s misfortune? What was the difference between my behaviour and that of the Victorian showmen who had exhibited Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, or Caroline Crachami, the Sicilian Dwarf? Even those who had taken these poor folk’s bodies when they died, dissected them, rearticulated their bones, then put their skeletons on show in the Hunterian Museum had science – or at least pseudo-science – on their side, but I had nothing but the sham jocundity of those who, having much to hide, expose