by Will Self
'Stigma, you mean?'
'Thassit – not me, mindjoo, but other people might think you're mental. Still, they won't be getting anything out of me – I was bullied at school, they said I 'ad a touch of the mongs. Lissen, it's Tuesday, come up the meeting tonight?'
'Oh, I dunno – '
'No, come – I tellya it'll be worf it.'
In the Trophy Room everything had changed. Dave realized this as he walked in through the door. No longer were the plastic chairs grouped in an egalitarian circle; instead there were fully tenanted rows of seats all facing a makeshift podium. On this stood Daniel Brooke in his outsized T-shirt. He gave the newcomers a curt nod, but his attention was mostly on a banner he was fixing up over the trophy cabinet together with a Fathers First member Dave didn't recognize. There was no sign of Keith Greaves at all, and the few faces Dave did know were outnumbered by at least twenty new men. The banner was stretched tight; FIGHTING FATHERS it shouted. 'Right!' called Daniel Brooke. 'Settle down, you lot, we've a lot to get through this evening, and I need maximum attention and positivity … Gary.' Brooke fixed Fucker, who was still chatting to his neighbour, with a pointed eye. Fucker fell silent.
'I applaud those of you from the old Fathers First group who've had the courage to come with us on this new journey of self-discovery and personal evolution, believe me you won't be disappointed. Keith has his good points, but they're soft ones.' Brooke's eyes kept ranging along the assembled men's faces as he spoke, as if probing them for any softness. 'That touchy-feely stuff may be OK for dads who want to lie down under all the shit they've been dealt out, but that's not what we are. What are we?' He paused and raised his beautifully manicured fist in a swift uppercut.
'We're Fighting Fathers!' the men all bellowed.
'And whadda we want?' Brooke called back.
'Justice now!' the men cried.
The atmosphere of resentful aggression in the room reminded Dave of sour-faced old cabbies moaning on in their shelters. The Fighting Fathers had the distorted mouths and clenched eyes of some bloody Muslim fanatics burning an American flag …
'Motivation is the key,' Brooke resumed, pacing the little podium. 'Without motivation we cannot hope to have any success with direct action, which is why I'm happy to welcome here this evening a motivational speaker who's going to give it to you straight concerning the Judaeo-Feminist forces lined up against us.' Judaeo-Feminist? 'He runs his own, hugely successful data-retrieval business, Transform Services.' Transform Services? 'He's a leading light in our brother organization, the Stormfront Nationalist Community. Will you give a big dads' welcome please to Barry Higginbottom!'
A man dramatically bashed open the swing doors and stood in the characterless strip lighting of the Trophy Room. It was the Skip Tracer – and the sweat was lashing off him.
'A book, you say?' Anthony Bohm looked at the cabbie through the thick, round lenses of his vintage, wire-rimmed spectacles. When a young man, Bohm had affected the glasses as a badge of maturity – the lenses had been of clear glass. However, with an irony that was not lost on him, as Bohm's career had progressed, so his eyesight had satisfactorily deteriorated, until he acquired the searching gravitas of the genuinely myopic.
'That's right, a book.' Dave looked around at the gloomy room, which was dominated by an enormous duct running across the ceiling, the housing of which was covered by flaking tinfoil. A decade-old flyer hung from bashed chipboard by yellowing tape, proclaiming DON'T DIE OF IGNORANCE. The room was somewhere deep in the basement of St Mungo's, a rundown hospital off the Tottenham Court Road.
This wasn't his and Bohm's first session together – they'd had one up at the Halliwick in Friern Barnet, another down at King's on Denmark Hill. Bohm told Dave that he was seeing him 'on an unofficial basis, it's very much a personal thing between me and Zack Busner', and as the psychiatrist took a series of locum positions around the city, his patient was required to follow. This was no hardship for Dave, who had resumed cabbing as gently as possible, only going out for a couple of hours during the off-peak. He used his weekly sessions as a low-anxiety conduit, picking up fares along the way as he wended to the next rendezvous with the mobile shrink.
'When I was … well, y'know, Tone, when I'd lost it,' Dave said, 'I thought there was this book inside me, this book I'd written … but now I dunno – I dunno.'
'We've talked about your childhood,' Bohm continued, 'your relationships, your work. I like to think we've built up some trust between us.' He smiled, and his white goatee flicked like a hairy digit. Dave smiled too – anyone with such preposterous facial hair could hardly be malevolent. 'When Doctor, ah, Fanning, prescribed Seroxat for you in 2001 I'm sure he did what he felt was the right thing. However, the facts are that a small minority of patients have bad reactions to the drug – psychoses even. Your book dates from this period. If we can somehow dig it up from your unconscious and, so to speak, read it together, I think it would resolve a lot of your issues.'
Each of these measured remarks had been ticked off by Bohm, one plump finger pulling back the others. He now held the annotated hand aloft. 'Goodbye until next week,' he said, 'when we'll be meeting' – he consulted a fat little Filofax opened on his hefty thigh – 'at the Bethesda in Bermondsey.'
Dig up the book. Dig it up – search for it in the scrubby desert of his own mind. On the poxy little colour telly in the corner of his room, Dave Rudman saw clip after clip, all featuring the same stock characters: UN Inspectors in short-sleeved shirts and sweat-soaked jackets; Baathist apparatchiks in tan fatigues; to one side a gnarled old Bedouin in a dirty white cloakyfing. Behind them, on a plain of gravel that faded to a wavering horizon, stood corrugated-iron sheds and hunks of industrial equipment – hoppers, conveyor belts, ducts – all of them streaked with rust and dust. A mechanical digger petted some sand, arid wind plucked at the corners of the Inspectors' clipboards, riffling the computer printouts. Hard to think of them manufacturing anything there . . . Don't look like they could turn out a bloody widget, let alone nuclear-bloody-weapons … Yet Dave could see, in this taut confrontation, a sinister evocation of his own troubled life. Buried inside me … all that sickening guff… poisonous thoughts . . . got to dig it up …
What was he doing with Phyllis? Not that they'd actually done anything together. A couple of cuddles on the duffed-up sofa in Dave's flat, a chaste kiss on parting – no tongues. Phyllis wouldn't even invite him out to her place, which was in the sticks, out by Ongar … off the edge of the world … Instead she saw him in Gospel Oak, after visits to Steve in the hospital. Or else Dave drove into town and ranked up in Bow Street. Phyllis worked in Choufleur, a vegetarian restaurant on Russell Street, and, despite the fact that she looked even freakier in her voluminous smock and blue-striped apron, a mushroom-cloud hat perched on her curls, Dave couldn't help but recognize the feeling in his chest when she came out from the back entrance to share a B & H with him by the bins as one of affection, that's it… affection . . .
Slowly, methodically, Phyllis invested what spare affection she had in pushing the cabbie back into the mainstream of life. She persuaded him to contact Cohen, his ex-lawyer, and to begin to probe out the situation with Carl. She helped him to amalgamate his debts, and by taking a new mortgage on the little flat get enough money to start repaying them. Together they wrote letters to the County Court, asking for fresh reports, suggesting that his mental breakdown be taken into consideration. They paid off his arrears and then appealed to the Child Support Agency for a reduction in payments. Then they picked up his paper trail, finding anomalous things, like a bill from a Colindale printer for £9,750. It was dated December of the previous year and had been paid. Along the bottom was stamped: RUSH JOB.
The year whimpered to its end. One day Dave Rudman was by the lights at the top of Lower Regent Street. Limos stretched out beside the Fairway while buses bent around it. First Dave stared at a man holding a sign for a GIANT GOLF SALE. Then he looked at a souvenir stall flogging miniature cabs with Un
ion Jack decals, figurines of tit-headed coppers and tiny red model phone boxes … toyist crap. Finally, he peered up through the windscreen of the Fairway at the huge electronic signboards covering the buildings of Piccadilly Circus. One showed the Circus itself – the teeming crowds, the enmeshed traffic. Then, without warning, water began to flood between the buildings, a tidal bore that came surging along the rivers of light. Dave was shocked – what could this apocalyptic vision be selling? Then the flooded concourse wavered, fragmented and was replaced by a slogan: DASANI MINERAL WATER, A NEW WAVE is COMING.
'Excuse me? Excuse me?' The fare was an elderly priest and he wanted to go to Mill Hill. 'St Joseph's College, d'you know it?' Dave did. Who could miss it, with its strange painted bust of Thomas More out front, flesh tones as realistic as those of a showroom dummy? The fare was ill disposed to chat – and that suited Dave fine. He drove up the long, straight thoroughfare from Marble Arch. Then, as the cab passed through Kilburn and Cricklewood, then over the North Circular to Colindale, it began to come back to him. Dropping off the fare at the College, he made change in a cursory fashion, unconcerned by the nugatory tip. Dave drove along the Ridgeway to the Institute and, parking up, retraced his footsteps of the previous year.
I used to come up here all the time … all the time … strange to forget it … He looked across the dark valley towards Hampstead. Yeah … came here to look over there . . . over there where he was … where he is … Dave found himself on his knees, the damp earth blotting into his jeans. Then it returned to him.
Phyllis took the call on the payphone that was between the kitchen and the toilets. She'd never got the hang of mobiles. 'Phyl,' he said, sounding out of breath, shocked, 'it's Dave.'
'Alright, Dave, you sound like something bad's happened.'
'Well … well, it has … but a while back … Phyllis– Phyl, I've found it … I've found the book … It's not-not in me, Phyl – it's in the ground, a real bloody book, buried. Fucking buried.'
11
The Forbidden Zone
Kipper 522 AD
It took him almost a year before he could even bear to contemplate the disturbing forms of the motos. Even with myopic eyes downcast, he could not avoid seeing their repulsive hands and feet, which, while human-like, were surrounded by large cartilaginous discs. Their mopeds were a dull pinky-beige colour – as they grew, so they darkened in hue, becoming brownish and brindled. The hides of the fully grown motos reeked of oil. For such large creatures they were horribly adept at concealing themselves, and oftentimes on his peregrinations the teacher would move to place his trainer upon a mossy boulder, only to feel it wobble beneath him. He would start back – the moto, roused, would rear up, and Böm would be confronted by the face of an enormous obese infant, with clear blue eyes hidden in its fleshy folds.
When he saw one come lumbering through the woodland towards him, he took off his eyeglasses and walked swiftly, circumventing its blurred bulk. To touch one of the grotesque anomalies would have caused him such intense revulsion that he feared he would vomit up his curry, should the motos, not sensing his disquiet, cluster about to give him a nuzzle; food, like as not, both cooked in and flavoured with their own oil.
Antonë Böm did become accustomed to the motos in time – and accustomed also to the oddities of the remote community to which he had been exiled. In coming to love Ham and the Hamsters, Böm was, in part, reconciled to that bit of himself that had been isolated during the Changeovers of his own childhood.
As a kid Tonë Böm had run and jumped and played with the others. His dad was a mechanic at the bus garage in Stockwell, responsible for the jeejees that drew the lumbering vehicles through the London streets. Surrounding the dads' block where Böm senior lived were the market gardens of Clapham, which provided London with its fruit and vegetables. Tonë's mum, San, lived in a mummies' block on Brixton Hill, and on Changeover day he'd join the lines of children winding through the orchards back to their dads' gaffs. The older kids carried the little ones when they tired and comforted them when they cried – for in London Changeover came early. When he was small, Tonë, like the rest, soon forgot mummy stuff and his mummyself after the Changeover. Yet as he grew older the consciousness of the different lad he was with his other parent stayed with him, shadowing his mind like a waking dream.
Böm spoke of this to his mates – but they either gave him very odd looks or suggested, in no uncertain terms, that he should speak to a Driver. While only in their early teens, these lads already had eyes for the opares, and they were keen to become dads in their own right. This prospect did not enthuse Tone at all. He realized he must be queer.
Antonë Böm grew into a plump, shambling young man, quick of eye although slow of speech. His amiable doughy features bore the impress of the pox – which was in nowise unusual for a modern Londoner. He guarded his quizzical, inner eye fiercely, for always he saw the mummies' world in terms of the daddies', the daddies' in terms of the mummies'. He knew that many others did as well; he could detect it behind their closed faces. Yet they had no way to speak of such things, for they were all – dads, mums and queers alike – bound into the immemorial Wheel of Dävinanity, which, with its rituals and precepts, circumscribed their conduct and governed their inmost thoughts from when they arose at first tariff until they lay down as the foglamp dipped.
From when he was very young, Böm displayed the memory and the fixity of mind needed to become a Driver. His mum wanted him to – so did his dad. At nineteen he applied to the PCO and was accepted. Much of a Driver's apprenticeship consisted of calling over in the taxi schools, under the watchful mirrors of fiercely disciplinarian Examiners. The Knowledge Boys also patrolled the streets in their scarlet waterproof robes. They went out in all weathers to memorize such parts of the city as had already been built, and to consult with those Inspectors who were marking out the dävine plan for the next district of New London to be erected.
It was an exciting time to be a Knowledge Boy abroad in the city. Those structures deemed by the PCO to be most integral to New London – and which had been inaugurated at the accession of the King's dad, Dave II, almost forty years before – were now nearing completion. The great stations of King's Cross, Charing Cross, Victoria and Waterloo. The Hilton Hotel and the Houses of Parliament. The Shelters of St Paul's and Westminster Abbey. The NatWest Tower, the Lloyd's Building, the Gherkin and the very Wheel itself – mighty edifices that together expressed the full temporal compass of the dävine revelation.
However, in his second year of doing the Knowledge, when his appearances had been scheduled, Böm had a crisis. It was not one of faith – he still heard Dave over the intercom, albeit indistinctly. It was rather the PCO and the dogma it promulgated from which he detached. He looked at his fellow Knowledge Boys and saw in them only chellish vanity and the desire to exert power. He felt his mummyself recoiling from the brutal inequalities of London life; which meant that while the lawyers, the guildsmen and the Inspectorate lived a life of opulence and ease, there were beggars starving in the streets of Covent Garden.
Böm abandoned the PCO and for a time apprenticed himself to a surgeon in Old Street, who practised at the sign of the Twisted Spine. He providentially discovered that his clumsiness deserted him when it came to the furious, bloody business of the operations. The more agitated the patients became – as their limbs were bound with cloth strips and the surgeon's mate sharpened his knives and saws – the calmer Tonë was. His gaffer said he had the makings of a great surgeon in his own right, but Böm was discouraged by the palpable lack of success their ministrations had. Even a simple operation – such as removing a stone, or amputating a septic finger – would leave three out of four patients dead within tariffs.
Böm left the surgeon and joined the City of London School as an assistant teacher. He found some solace in his contact with lads whose natures were not, as yet, entirely set in the dävist orthodoxy. All this time he continued to live in a young queers' dormitory, keeping himself alo
of from their whoring, betting and boozing. He tried also to ignore their rowdy persecution of the Jocks, the Taffies and the Micks – whichever minorities, in short, they could attack sure in the support of the PCO. It was a coarse and uncongenial environment for a young man with an inquiring mind; however, without a patron Böm had no means of escaping it. The best he might hope for would be to use his position as a means of seeking employ in a lawyerly household.
It was at the school that Böm came into contact with the teachings of the Geezer. Another assistant, queer like himself, had a brother who was imprisoned in the Tower, and from this unlikely source came the message Antonë had, without knowing it, been waiting for ever since his last Changeover: the confirmation that he was not alone.
The flyers met in a tiny room above the Whyte Bair boozer off Broadwick Street. The landlawd thought they were a group of literary blokes engaged in the compilation of a volume of dävine raps extolling the unearthly beauty and unutterable pathos of the Lost Boy. In truth, they earnestly studied the words of the Geezer, smuggled out from the gaol on scraps of A4, while endeavouring to contact mummies who might be susceptible to this new faith, which preached the dissolution of the Breakup and direct communication with Dave himself.
For two years their little cab met together to call over the tantalizing fragments of the new Book, to speak of their troubles, to relay their successes and commiserate in their failures to find other potential recusants. None of them ever believed it would last, for the PCO had informants in every place of work, every gaff, every takeaway and boozer. It was only a matter of time. When the seeseeteevee men came to his dormitory in the dead of night, Antonë Böm knew they were there for him. The only surprise was the lightness with which he was punished. He was held in solitary confinement in the Tower a few blobs. Then he was branded on the thigh, rather than on the brow, with the 'F' for flyer. Finally, he was sent forth from the city more as a traveller than as an exile.
