The Book of Dave

by Will Self

  – Yeah, rí, Symun began, U Ió av sussed Eyev bin angin aht in ve Zön. Bú wotchoo doan no iss Eyev bin ailed bì Dave, C, an Eyem iz fare. Ee gayv me iz sekkun Búk. An ee sat wiv me wyl Eye red ve öI fing – coz Eye can dú fonix nah – an ee mayd me tayk í awl on bord so az Eye can caul í ovah, rì?

  – So caul í ovah, ven, clevah clogs! shouted out Symun's uncle, Fil Edduns, from the back of the little throng. His sister, Effi, may have been the repository of the old folkways, but Fil was the most rigidly dävist of the daddies. Despite the long years that Ham had been beyond the PCO's writ, he still looked to London in all things spiritual.

  If Fil had been hoping to expose Symun and to put paid to this new Geezer, he was utterly vanquished. The granddad stood, kneading the mulberry birthmark that stained the left side of his face, while the Knowledge flowed out of his nephew: a flood of eloquence that slaked his audience's thirst for poetry. While Symun spoke, skipping from verse to verse of the new book – so az Eye can stikk í strayt 2 yer – a remarkable thing happened.

  The older lads who'd been away on the other side of the island tending the motos came fanning down from the woodland, their charges plodding at their heels, and joined the congregation. It was said years later, when the boilers met together in secret, away from the ears of the new Driver, and recalled this time of delirious heterodoxy, that even the birds fluttered from the trees to hear Sy Dévúsh preach. Perching here and there on the shoulders of the Hamsters, or the broad backs of the recumbent motos, they twittered their assent to his words. The only Hamsters who were absent were the infants, still propped in their furrows at the top of the home field; their reedy cries could be heard piercing Symun's calling over with their own message of eternal need.

  There was no mystery as to why the Hamsters heeded the Geezer: the message he brought them from Dave was highly congenial. Henceforth they should regard Ham and all its fruits as theirs and theirs alone.

  – Dave sez stikk í 2 ve Ack, stikk í 2 ve Loyah uv Chil inall – loyahs, vare awl skum. Vay swyp arf uv awl we mayk, an weave nuffing 2 shew 4 í. Stikk í 2 Nú Lundun ëvun. Iss nó abaht bildin nuffing but Am – Am iz 4 U an U iz 4 Am. An ee sez ve mummies can dú wottevah vay lyke. If Ewe wanna B wiv a dad, fayre Enuff, iss no bovvah, juss dú í. Ee tayks bakk all vat guff abaht mummitym an dadditym, ve Braykup an ve Chaynjova. Ve kids shúd B wiv vair mums an vair dads awluv ve tym. Í aint dahn 2 ve granddads 2 decyd awl vat stuff, iss dahn 2 awluv uz in R arts.

  Many of the Hamstermen spoke with Dave on the intercom – such was the effect of their calling over. It was an angry voice, a harsh voice – a voice that drowned out their memories of the mummytime. Now, in turn, Symun's words shouted that voice down. Furthermore, if the granddads were inclined to dispute with the Geezer, they were silenced by their own uneasy acknowledgement that he was only restating the true status quo of the community, long disrupted by Dävinity and now triumphantly reasserted.

  The original Book was spurned by the Geezer in its entirety:

  – Dave sed ee roat í wen ee woz off iz rokkah, vass wy iss fulluv awl vat mad shit – runs an poynts an stuff. U doan aff 2 dú awl vat 2 luv Dave – awl we gotta dú iz luv eech uvvah. Ee sez weer awl Carl – weer awl iz lads, an if we luv eech uwah iss lyke luwin im.

  Concerning the whereabouts of the miraculous, second Book, the Geezer was equally emphatic:

  – Dave tuk í bakk, he told those who asked. Ee borrered me í, an ven ee túk í bakkoffuv me. Iss nó 4 uz 1ó 2 reed, we shúd be reedin uvvah stuff, maykin R oan búks ëvun.

  Those Hamsters disposed to follow the new teaching took this to heart and began, under Symun's tutelage, to learn their phonics. However, they didn't believe what he said about the second Book, for the Geezer never went anywhere without his changingbag.

  The two young Hamsters lay a pace apart from one another. Beyond their bare and horny feet the curryings spread away into lapping water. Here and there the green tendrils of samphire twitched in the breeze, and small mounds of pebbles showed where the mummies had piled up the shingle to blanch the kale. A small flock of oyster-catchers picked at the seaweed frilling the tide line, their black and white plumage sharp strokes on the bobbled ground. From where the couple lay, on the east side of the spit, there was nothing to seaward save for the islet of Hitop in the far distance, which, having no colony of seafowl, the Hamstermen never visited. Symun Dévúsh and Caff Ridmun had never known the confinement of landscape; only in the dark core of their gaffs or the deepest thickets of the woodland were they ever parted from the sea's effortless superfluity.

  The legends spoke of giants in former times, yet each generation of these isolates were giant to one another, looming large and pale against the island's arboreal backdrop. When carnal love struck a Hamster, he or she tossed in its fiery embrace. So Symun groaned in his motorage, Eye wan yaw sex, and reached towards Caff again and again, while she slapped him away again and again. Giwi a ress, willya! she cried, Freds yer best bluddë mayt. Symun had already made his seductive speeches and spoken of how, under the new dispensation, all were free to do as they wished: ĺ doan má-er vat ewe an Fred woz wed coz í wurnt 4 reel. He'd even insinuated that if it had been his and her baby who'd been anointed by Effi, the child would have lived.

  Caff was in turmoil. It was true, she had no great feeling for Fred – she barely even knew him, and, while some of the daddies had got to know their wives since the Geezer came among them, Fred was not one of their number. Caff couldn't deny that she found Symun attractive, and the older mummies and boilers told her there would be great honour in lying with the Geezer, yet still she slapped him away. He wouldn't give up – he pursued her, over the fields, through the underbrush, along the foreshore guarded by its umbelliferous sentinels, until at last, here, in the blue of noon, he reached for her and she didn't slap him away. His hand pulled up the hem of her cloakyfing, then lay brown on her white thigh; it lingered, then advanced, his fingers gliding over pinky-brown moles, their tips caressing the golden down. Soon they were married – Caff leaned back against the shingle bank, her thighs imprisoned in his.

  Effi Dévúsh took all the new opportunities the Geezer's reign provided to discourse with the dads. She seemed intent on vitally reconnecting them with the ancient lore. Yet towards his person and his teaching she remained aloof and even openly critical. As buddout swelled into summer the Hamsters laboured with a curious fervour. The notion that they alone were entitled to all the fruits of Ham possessed them – and some of the younger dads even spoke wildly of sinking the Hack's pedalo with bricks when he arrived for his midsummer visit. At the same time the promiscuity of the daddies and mummies became desperate and frenzied. At night the little manor was busy with flitting figures; then, when the foglamp was switched on, they stumbled back to their own gaffs. Effi stalked among them uttering prophecies of doom.

  One morning, before the foglamp was on, Effi managed to catch her son as he returned from performing his necessary offices in the Shelter. Effi grabbed his arm in a nasty grip.

  – Givovah, Mum! He shrugged her off, saying, Wass yaw problum?

  – U bluddë R! She was breathing heavily, the taut tendons in her neck exposed by a flap of her cloakyfing. U fink Eye dunno wot vis iz awl abaht?

  – Wotcher meen? The Geezer was highly aggrieved. Eye onlë dun wotchew toll me 2.

  – Eye toll U! Eye toll U! Eye aint eevun spoakin 2 U 4 bluddë yeers! Nah Uve adda crakkat Caff Ridmun U gonna avta tayk ve consikwencis. U fink yul gé away wiv í coz yaw so fukkin smart, but U wont, ve Acks gonna B ear juss lyke ee iz evri summer, an awl vem uz kepp shtum R gonna fukk U ovah.

  Rather than remonstrate with him further – because she knew he desired even this commerce with her – Effi flapped away to the mummies' gaffs. Symun took himself off to the Ferbiddun Zön to brood. This wild, overgrown place held no terror for him now that his revelation was complete. Symun could read the Book, so he could read the zone; all the island of Ham was legible to him. He understood
its origin – and he felt certain he knew its future as well.

  Ever since the day when the Geezer had preached outside the Shelter, Fred Ridmun had been preparing for this eventuality. He had made no public objection to his friend's teaching, nor did he foment discontent, yet neither was he among Symun's disciples. For blobs Fred had been engaged on a simple yet momentous job of carpentry: first chopping, then shaping, and finally whittling a seasoned smoothbark bough, so as to contrive the sturdy lines of a miniature pedalo. His task was undertaken in the tangled core of the Perg, far from the prying eyes of the other Hamsters and foraging motos.

  At first tariff on the day after his best friend had first lain with his wife, Fred took the clay bottle he had earmarked from the brick dresser in the Funch gaff. He also took a small tank of moto oil and some twine. From a hidden nook in the Shelter itself, he retrieved a missive he had laboriously composed. He slipped across the home field through the spectral dawn, over the brow of the hill between the moto wallows, then down into the Wess Wud. At the Perg, he retrieved his odd craft and hoisted it over his shoulder. He walked on through the dips and hollows of Sandi Wud, hardly conscious of his progress, lifting his legs over the trunks of fallen trees as if they belonged to another.

  On the very spit of land where he'd been betrayed, Fred Ridmun mated earthenware and wood. The bottle sat snugly in the hollow he'd carved out of the deck. He rolled up the ragged sheet of A4 – a blank endpage torn from the Book itself – then inserted it in the neck. He stoppered the bottle and wound the oiled twine around its neck, pulling each loop tight. Then he lashed the bottle to the pedalo with strips of moto hide. He erected a little mast whittled from a sapling in a notch forward of the cargo, then rigged a diminutive sail of precious London cloth.

  Pulling the keel of the pedalo over the shingle, the scraping sound merging with the rattle of the waves, Fred was aware that he was doing something that had been done before in times of distress. When, in the era of his great-great-grandparents, the pox had carried off half the island's population, just such a vessel had been dispatched to Chil. There was every chance that the prevailing currents would fail him, or that the little craft would become waterlogged and sink. However, if it was spotted by a Chilman, recovered and the bottle opened, and if the message was understood, then taken on to its intended recipient, the crude phonics Fred had scrawled could brook no misinterpretation: FLIAR ON AM. DAD SEZ EE IZ DAVE. CUM NAH PLEEZ KWIK MISTAH GREEVS. Fred Ridmun pushed the pedalo off and sat back on his haunches. A thin smile cut through his sharp features as the wind caught the patch of sail and the craft began to slap up and over the waves, heading due northeast. It was a providential course – for him.

  Two nights later the equinoctial headlight rose over the big lagoon, and it was an earthy blood-red in colour. In the far distance sheet lightning slashed across the Surre hills. The restive Hamsters gathered outside their gaffs. They soon became terrified, because, as if these portents weren't bad enough, when it was barely above the horizon the headlight began to be blotted out by a black crescent that moved slowly but inexorably across its flys peckled surface. Effi Dévúsh cried out in the crowd that huddled in the streambed, saying:

  – Iss a syne orlrì, me luvs, issa bluddë syne! Iss ve édlyt uv Dave, thass fer sure. Ees pu í on, an nah ees turned í off. An U wanna no wy?

  There was a groaned chorus of whys from the other Hamsters.

  – Eyel tell U wy – ees turned í off so as ee can run that fukkin fliar dahn!

  She swivelled to confront her son, who, unnoticed by the others, had come among them, and now stood in their midst, his face covered with thick, fearful sweat and dark with dreadful incomprehension.

  4

  The Family of Man

  June 1987

  'Orlright, put 'em on full,' Dave Rudman called to Kemal the mechanic. The headlights flared in the gloom of the railway arch. 'Orlright, orlright' – Dave was blinded for several seconds, until earthy Victorian brickwork swam back from the blood-red aureoles and artificial mauve sundogs – 'now try dipped.' The lights flared again but with less intensity. 'Full again . . . and DIPPED.' Kemal turned the lights off and came out from the cab shaking his tousled head; Dave stepped towards him, his face dark with incomprehension. 'Beats me,' he said, 'if it's not the bulbs.'

  'Could be the alternator,' said Kemal, patting down the pockets of his oily overalls for his cigarettes.

  'Yeah, yeah,' Dave laughed, 'it's always the alternator, innit? I dunno why I'm bothering, it ain't like I'm doing nights.'

  Dave was renting from Ali Baba on the half-flat for eighty quid a week, and the night driver he shared the cab with was a fucking animal. Dave had given him the nickname Mister Hyde. Strictly speaking Dave didn't have to return the cab to the garage in Bethnal Green until eight, although he usually had it back an hour earlier. Early, clean and filled up – even though only the last was his responsibility. This particular evening Dr Jekyll had prevailed on Kemal to examine the headlights, which he'd noticed weren't working when he went through the Blackwall Tunnel.

  Mister Hyde showed no such consideration. After the night shift the cab was always filthy: the ashtrays full, the driver's compartment rattling with discarded soft-drink cans. One morning when he picked the cab up, Dave found a used condom glued to the back seat by spunk and hair. Hyde was also nicking diesel, a couple of quid every fill-up. It was pathetic criminality, because ever since the Big-fucking-Bang the year before, the City Boys had been hellbent on booting the Footsie right back up again. If you got a getter, they'd double up on the meter, maybe treble it. Dave had whole days of cream fares splurging across town. He harvested tourists as if they were wheat and he was driving a fucking combine 'arvester. While Mister Hyde didn't even keep up with his rent, which was fucking stupid … You never owe a Turk. Never.

  Ali came out from a glassed-off office – a heavy man with iron-filing hair who walked on the balls of his feet. His top lip bulged as if he had a moustache growing inside of it. 'Your man,' he said, showing Dave peg teeth,' 'e juss rang, 'e ain't gonna be in.'

  'Oh, yeah.'

  'Yeah, you wan' the cab?' Ali jabbed a tripod of fingers at the old Fairway. It was a gambler's gesture: twist, fold, hit me again.

  'Um … well… yeah … why not? Ta.'

  'My plezzure.' Ali stalked off again. Kemal tootled smoke and a high-pitched note. Dave realized the mechanic was giggling – but at whom?

  At around seven thirty, after he'd dropped off the cab, Dave Rudman was in the habit of stopping by the old Globe in Stepney for a drink with his mates. By day Dave kept a lid on it, but, after a few beers and a row or five of barley, he was ready for anything. The quiet pub funnelled into the noisy bedlam of a dance club. They went up west to the Wag or Camden Palace, or out to the sticks, where innocuous doors turned out to be fissures leading to subterranean reservoirs of sweat. At the end of a shift Dave got out of the cab feeling like a fucking cripple, so he liked the dancercise, but it was mostly home alone, or, even if accompanied by a damp, drunk girl, alone again by morning, a cooling depression in the pillow beside him.

  The girlfriend Dave had when he was a teenager in Finchley went off to university. Some of the lads he'd been at school with went as well, and most of the others got management trainee positions and were issued with middle-class uniforms. Dropping out was passé – dropping in was cool. Into business, into the City, into property, into lifestyle. Everyone wanted mobility – on a graph. Dave Rudman should have been with them but he baulked. He didn't want to go away to work, or study, or even score cheap hash abroad. All Dave's peers wanted to get out of London – at least for a bit – while Dave wanted to go deeper in. Lun-dun – how could such leaden syllables be so magical? He craved London like an identity. He wanted to be a Londoner – not an assistant manager on twelve grand a year, married to Karen, who liked Spandau-fucking-Ballet.

  There were only four years between the three Rudman kids, Samantha, David and Noel. They stuck together. On summe
r mornings they'd set off down the steep slope of Ossulton Way, carrying Tupperware containers of sandwiches in their dad's old army rucksack. Sam had five bob for Tizer and crisps. In the shoe-box house they left behind them was the senseless slaughter of a one-sided row, their father a sitting duck in the weedy pond of his hangover, their mother railing against him. In front of the children lay the valley of the Mutton Brook, and beyond it the hills of Hampstead and Highgate rose up, a mass of shrubbery, studded with the red-tiled roofs of detached villas.

  It would take them hours to reach the Heath, dawdling along the Avenues of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, sweet with the smell of warm tar, fresh-cut grass and clipped privet. Dave and Noel pelted each other with the orange buckshot of rowan berries and tore satisfying slabs of bark from the silver birches. Serious Samantha – her mother's daughter – sought out the gaps in the net curtains and scrutinized the interiors of rooms, noting three-piece suites, Sanderson's wallpaper, television cabinets – all the aspirational durables.