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

stratospherically famous actress who was slumming in the lead – our seats were on a two-foot-high dais. When we arrived Sherman hoiked himself up on to this with no prevarication, then, when the lights came up at the end of the single act, he stood, turned to me and raised his arms. Responding involuntarily I lifted him down.
    When Sherman visited our home for the first time, he descended the steep steps to the basement kitchen quite unafraid, despite our yapping snapping Jack Russell. I yanked the dog away and slapped it, but Sherman only remarked, ‘I’m not too fond of dogs for obvious reasons.’ He charmed my wife and saw fit to ignore our youngest son – then aged six – who, having been cowering upstairs prior to Sherman’s arrival, saying he was scared of ‘the elf’, now tiptoed up behind him so he could compare their heights.
    Grace is what my wife said Sherman possessed, and, although this was a quality I had never associated with him when we were young, I could concede it to him now. My own behaviour had by contrast been utterly graceless – was it any surprise that my children had been corrupted by my facetiousness? As I grew closer to Sherman once more, I tried to squeeze this bladder, inflated with mockery, into the smallest cavity inside of myself. The disappearing trick didn’t work.
    Dreams began to plague me. In them, trampolining children shot inexorably skywards from the back gardens of suburbia. In my reverie I saw first one, then two or four, their trainers skimming past the cherry blossom. Then my perspective changed: I was out on the marshes to the east of the city, and looking back could see a purple-grey cyclone hunched overthe endless rooftops, rising up into the firmament, into which were being sucked a myriad vortices, each one comprised of a myriad children.
    The children of London – they were being taken up. Yet this was no Rapture, for I knew there was nothing above them but the vacuum. I had to warn someone, but I’d lost my shoe and slashed my cheese-white foot on some razor wire. Up in the heavens the haemorrhaging had begun, tens of thousands of little lungs filling up with blood.

2
Round the Horn
     
    Sherman Oaks stood stabbing the end of his unlit cigar at the South Downs and described his latest project to me: a 30-metre-high iron statue that he wished plunked in the River Seine: ‘It’ll be ten times life size, knee-deep in those
bière
-coloured waters and slap-bang opposite the Bibliothèque Nationale. Unlike
Behemoth
this one’ll be a hollow figure, the outer layer of which will be cut away in transverse sections – like an anatomical model – to reveal its interior.’
    ‘And what will be inside?’ I felt obliged to ask.
    ‘Aha!’ He sucked on the damp butt. ‘Inside it will be hundreds – thousands probably – of smaller solid figures, varying in size from the very little to the twice life size.’
    ‘So, the big figure is Pantagruel the giant, while the small figures it contains—’
    ‘Are representative of all the odd distortions of his size in the novels – yes, yes, of course. You would’ve thought that in the city where Rabelais died there’d be enormous enthusiasm for such an exciting piece, but the planning committee are proving almost wilfully obstructive – banging on about the preservation of the skyline!’
    I tried to be tactful. ‘You have to concede, Sherman, that this would be a very, um, radical, addition, to a traditionally, er, traditional city. But, tell me, is there a Rabelaisian anniversary of some kind – I mean, what’s the pretext?’
    Sherman put his sculptural head to one side of his plinth of a body and scrutinized me. He seemed on the verge of a crushing put-down, but was interrupted by the cheap-bleepof his mobile phone, which he fetched up from one of the pockets of his self-designed silk waistcoat. He turned away and began barking into it:
    ‘No, no, call Klaus in Stuttgart, he has the plans, he’ll be able to