by Will Self
The gulls were fighting over the yellowing strips of flesh that they tore from a corpse – the corpse of the Beastlyman, for it could be no other. Carl started forward screaming and striking at the gulls, and a humming vortex opened up. One oilgull poised, webbed feet on gory eye sockets, pulling a slack goo away from the corpse's exposed, mulish teeth. This, this was his dad … this tattered puppet, manipulated by a bird with a tendon in its beak. Nó U! Carl cried. Nó U Beestlimun! And Tyga hearkened to his call, letting out a bellow of motorage as he charged over the rocks scattering the gulls. He stood at Carl's side looking down and lisping: Ith not a beethlimun, ith a nithemun.
To cover up his confusion and his own grief for the Geezer he'd revered, Antonë Böm took refuge in surgical detachment. I would say that he cannot have expired much more than a tariff before we arrived, he pronounced as they shifted bricks to furnish a safe tomb for the dead dad. Then, remembering the way he had failed to recognize his Geezer, Antonë said falteringly, I'm so very sorry, Carl, so very sorry. The lad was, however, almost serene as he dropped a flag on to his dad's face. He reached a hand out to Antonë, so that they stood hand in hand as, through some spasm of dying faith, they called over the funeral run:
– Leave on left Homerton High Street, forward Urswick Road … And the point at the beginning:
– Homerton Hospital.
And the point at the end:
-Jewish Federation Cemetery.
– Djoo no wot kyld im? Carl asked as they went over to the Geezer's hovel of a gaff. Woz í wunnuv vose wankas, he said, gesturing towards Ham.
– I doubt it, Carl, Antonë replied. It is naught save the saddest happenstance. For long years now he had been here, in pain, in hunger, tormented by memories of grievous handling, and still routinely abused by those who had once embraced him. That we should have arrived too late to save him … well, even so, perhaps there was some dävine mercy in it, for our own future is so uncertain.
They found Symun Dévúsh's changingbag easily enough. The battered old moto-hide satchel was lying in his hovel on a pallet of gull feathers and rags. Carl lifted it up and heard the pitter-purling of hundreds of tiny bits of plastic. He reached inside and withdrew a strange discoid container of metal, metal mottled with the verdigris of age yet unrusted. I have seen such artefacts before, Antonë said, they are exceedingly rare. See how perfect the circle is, how skilfully milled as if by a metermaker. If you find the seam betwixt the top and bottom you may open it up. Carl did so. Peering inside, all he could see were Daveworks, a shingly mound that he combed with his hesitant fingers. nuffing, Carl said eventually, no Búk, no nuffing. His voice was as lacklustre as the box from before the MadeinChina, and for the first time Antonë heard his young companion speak with an accent of despair.
It was an odd flotilla that breasted the current towards Ham. The humans held fast to the evian skins, and with the changingbags lashed about Tyga's thick neck they positioned themselves so as to contribute their churning feet to the moto's more efficient motions. In the gathering darkness and the open water, both Antonë and Carl were gripped by the same nightmarish vision: the Driver, his face a mush of decay, rising revivified from the ground where he had been lying dead these past seven months.
The foglamp had been switched off when they at last came ashore, to discover that the current had pushed them some way along the coast to the curryings at Goff. The headlight was driving up over the woodland, illuminating every stately tree and twisted shrub. Despite this, they would be safe for now – no Hamster or moto would be abroad until first tariff. They could even risk a fire to dry their wet robes. While Antonë plied his lighter, Carl went forward with Tyga and watched with pleasure as he foraged smoothbark nuts and acorns, the motos' favourite snack.
Home – Carl was home. The old rutted lane of Stel curved up through the woodland to the Layn and the Gayt field beyond. A scant few paces and Carl would find himself standing on the southern shore at Sid's Slick by Antonë's old gaff. Home, apprehensible, recognizable, graspable home – every criss-crossing greenspike, bending sawleaf and feathery frond of brack spelled HOME as clearly as if the phonics had been inscribed upon them. For a few units, as Carl abandoned himself to the cool green embrace of the woodland, he dared to imagine that the Hamsters might greet him with open arms the following day. That they might embrace him as if he were the Lost Boy come among them.
The humans picked at the greasy takeaway the Guvnor of the Fairway had slung at them, while Tyga, gorged on his native fodder, fell asleep. His huge body curled up to provide a living windbreak for their little encampment. The flames from the fire shot up into the screen as the driftwood burned with vivid licks of green and blue flame. Repose did not come readily for Carl and Antonë – yet the chitchat flowed easily enough between them. So they ranged in speech back and forth, from Ham, to Chil, to London, then to Ham once more, recalling the sights they had seen and the adventures they had had. In this dark time the queer and the stripling found themselves most completely engrafted, until at last, with only a few units to go before Dave switched on the foglamp, they slumbered.
Acting with entire accord, the two blokes urged the moto on into the deep undergrowth of the Gayt. They had awoken late and scrambled to break camp and quit the curryings before the Hamsterwomen were abroad gathering kale and samphire. It had been agreed that Antonë and Tyga would hide up in the Gayt while Carl – with his more intimate knowledge of the island – went forth to discover how things stood in the tiny commonwealth. Beyond that they had no other plan, or at least none that either was prepared to confide to the other, for Antonë also had fantasies of confronting the Hamstermen with their deception and how poorly they had used Symun Dévúsh.
Broad, flat moto hands and feet displaced clods of earth and clumps of brick that rolled down the ravelin. Slowly yet unerringly Tyga discovered a gap in the dyke and pushed a path deep into the crackling rhodie boughs. After a couple of hundred paces they discovered a tiny clearing in the undergrowth, and here Carl bade Tyga lie down. The moto didn't want to – he was agitated, he kept lumbering in a tight turning circle, his broad flanks sweeping the two humans into the bushes.
– Doan go, doan go, he implored Carl, Eyeth fwytunned, Eyeth fwytunned.
Carl tried to soothe him:
– Iss onle 4 a lyttul wyl, juss so Eye can fynd aht woss wot.
Yet it wasn't until Antonë closed in on the moto, took his huge head in his arms and stroked Tyga's agitated wattles that the beast could be quietened:
– I'll cuddle you until Carl gets back, I'll get you a snack. You'll see, we'll have a great time. Turning to Carl, he continued:
– Don't worry about him, I'm sure he'll settle down as soon as you've gone.
Carl decided to make for the point where the Layn debouched into the moto wallows. As he tramped through the dense scrub of Turnas Wud, then the dells and clearings of Norfend, an uncanny sensation gathered in the small of his back. After Nimar, after London, after the burbs and the forests he had seen on their trek across Chil, these, the playing grounds of his boyhood, were eerily still. There was no rat-scuttle, bunny-hop or tree-rat-scratch. No flying rats coo-burbled in the crinkleleafs. He took his smart trainers off the better to feel his homeland – yet even beneath bare feet the bark chips and leaf fall felt desiccated and lifeless.
Then it struck him – by this time in the tariff the motos should be filling the woods with their deep lowing, the reedy cries of their young mushers and infant charges piercing the leafy canopy. The crackling thud of flanged moto feet and the mechanical rasping of moto molars was so integral to Ham that without it, it was as if the very life force had been stilled. Carl shuddered, even though every tree and bough was familiar to him, yet this was no more Ham than the painted hoardings of Stepney Green were the proud buildings of New London foretold in the Book.
Lost in this reverie, Carl nearly tumbled over a figure that was bowed down between two mossy smoothbarks, grovelling in the earth with a matt
ock. It started up and ran – he couldn't tell if it was mummy or daddy, so swathed was it in a cloakyfing. Before he had time to consider what he was doing, Carl found himself running in hot pursuit, smashing through brack and sawleaf. The figure was making for the Layn – soon they would be exposed to whatever watchers there were down below in the manor. Carl put on a spurt and the pelting wraith tripped on a root and fell headlong into a boggy slough. Fell, sprawled and twisted so that the cloakyfing was torn away from the freckled face of:
– Salli! Salli! Carl cried, Ware2, luv? Ware2?
She didn't answer his salutation – only glared up at him, her pale eyes brimming with the dull hatred of a toyist beast.
Carl stared at Salli. Her cheeks were hollow, her neck scrawny, there was a film over her frightened eyes. The cloakyfing was wound round her emaciated body like a shroud on a living skeleton. The Beastlyman swam up again in Carl's fevered fancy – was this a vision? Were he and Salli in the breaker's yard already, was she about to rise up and hail Dave? The cloakyfing was wound so tightly, Carl hadn't seen such a cover-up even with the London mummies. He bent down to offer her his open hand, and she spat in his face:
– Wanka! she cried, then, Fukkin wanka!
He knelt down beside her to show he was no threat, and she cowered, then spat at him again.
– Doan tuch me! she said cowering, Eyem a boylar nah!
– A boylar? Carl was incredulous. Waddya meen? Owzat?
– Lyke Eye say – Eyem a boylar, aniss yaw fukkin fawlt. U fink yaw awl davyn but U aynt – iss mummies wot mayd U juss lyke we mayd vat fukkin kweer – wurs lukk!
Misunderstanding her ire, Carl began a halting explanation as to why he and Antonë had left the island. He told Salli of their hardships on the way to London and what they had discovered there, then, as he told of his dead dad on the rocks of Nimar, Carl became more and more agitated – he so needed her to comprehend the shifting sands of belief that quaked beneath them, yet the only potent image he could call upon was one at the very core of Dävinanity.
– I-iss … iss lyke viss, Salli, he stammered. Ewe C Eyem lyke ve Loss Boy – ewe C wot Eye meen? Ve Loss Boy –
U! U aynt no Loss Boy! She spat again. Ure a wanka juss lyke enni uwa dad – juss lyke ve dads wot nokked me up.
– Wen?! Wen diddí appen!? Mummy shame and daddy jealousy curdled in his hammering chest.
– O ajez ago, she laughed bitterly, B4 U leff Am. Eye dunno oo í woz, if thass yaw nex kwestchun – coz sew menne ovem ad a krakkat me – up ve kunt, up ve garri, U no owí
– Stop! Carl shouted. Stop i! Then, groping for some new fact to dispel this sickening image, he asked, An ve baybee, wot appened 2 í?
– Ded, offcaws, stoan fukkin ded – an me, Eye aint got no fukkin woom no maw neevah. Vair woz no neewoman coz yaw nan woz ded inall, an U, U took Tone wiv U wen U went, diddun U!
Salli Brudi was wailing by now and clawing at her hollow cheeks. Carl reached for her – and once more she recoiled.
Wossup wiv U! she snarled. U go motoraj aw sumffing? U wanna ava krakkat me inall? Wel go on, ven. She tore at her cloakyfing, tore frantically until she ripped it apart to expose a breast lying slack on her corrugated ribcage. Go on! Fukkin av me! Fukkin av me!
Carl – appalled and repelled – shuffled backwards, rose, turned tail and ran away through the woods, plunging into dense patches of pricklebush and whippystalk. He ran along the margin of the Gayt field, then crashed on, tripping over crete rubble and brick piles, ripping the flesh from his knees and elbows. It wasn't until he'd floundered into the deepest portion of the Zön, where the ancient tumuli brooded beneath their bushy covering, that he collapsed to the ground. A crow, disturbed from its roost in an old crinkleleaf throttled by ivy, cawed once and, leisurely whipping the hot air with its oily wings, lifted into the screen. Carl registered neither this nor any other phenomena – he was lost. Lost in tears, lost in grief for Salli, for himself and for Ham.
Carl's robe was tattered and bloodied when he finally found his way back to Antonë and Tyga. He lay on the ground and babbled. Antonë gave him a shot of jack, then, after Tyga had thoroughly licked Carl's wounds, the one-time surgeon dressed them with poultices of selfheal. It wasn't until the third tariff was well advanced that the young dad had recovered himself enough to recount what had happened. Böm meditatively stroked the bum of his chin where his goatee used to be until he had heard everything, then he said:
– What is the matter here? Did Salli speak of the Driver or of the other Hamsters?
– Nah, Carl replied, she sed nuffing, but Eye tellya, maytë, iss bad wotevah í iz. Vey gotta awl B banged up in ve manna . . . Vey gotta B.
They spent a fitful night in the clearing, Tyga rousing up many times and waking the two equally nervy humans. At lampon they took stock. Both were in agreement – there was nothing for it, they would have to see what was going down on their manor. After a few miserable spoonfuls of oatie and another slug of jack, they coaxed Tyga up and began their laborious progress; avoiding the easy tracks and keeping to the woodland, they worked their way round to where the dyke dividing the Gayt from the home field joined the Layn.
Fortunately mist had blown in off the lagoon during the night. Even so, as they crept along behind the dyke, they were painfully aware that only its earthen bulk separated them from the full glare of publicity. Carl urged Tyga to keep his belly pressed to the ground, while he and Antonë also went on all fours. It took them many units to reach the point of closest proximity to the manor. Then, with a final soothing caress of Tyga's jonckheeres, Carl instructed the moto to lie still in a furrow, while he and Antonë scrambled up the bank and peeked over.
The scene below impressed itself on Carl Dévúsh with nightmarish immediacy. The Hamsters' manor was gone. Gone like it had never been there before – every brick, flag, rope and thatch bundle of the ancient structures had been removed, leaving behind only seven pod-shaped depressions in the turf to show where the gaffs had once hunkered down. Some hundred paces away, lined up across the little headland that interrupted the smooth curve of Manna Ba, there was a new manor: ten sharp-cornered, four-square semis with gabled roofs. Their bottom halves were of the reddest brick, their tops rendered in white plaster between black beams. Bëfan semis, Carl gasped, Ees mayd em bild bëfan semis. The bëthan semis were laid out in two straight lines of five, divided not by the merry twinkle of running evian but by a severe brick wall that rose up taller than two dads.
It wasn't only bëthan semis that the Hamsters had been building – nor their old gaffs they'd been demolishing. With a shock Böm saw that his own little semi at Sid's Slick was gone – as was the old Shelter. In their stead was a new place of calling over, impossibly large and commanding for this isolate place. It was perhaps thirty paces long and three storeys high. It stood very near the shore, and beside its raw, unpainted sides the stands of blisterweed looked as small as burgerparsley.
There was an even more shocking piece of new construction a few paces beyond this: a huge stockade of rough-hewn crinkleleaf stakes had been hammered into the sod. Inside it the bristly backs of the island's entire moto population were ranked up. Carl counted twenty-three motos together with seventeen mopeds. The motos were restive – snorting and butting against their enclosure – yet, as was the creatures' way when afeared, they made no utterance. Alongside this vile pen there stood the stark rectangle of an elongated moto gibbet – far larger even than that which was customary for the autumn slaughter.
As the two returnees watched, a posse of Hamstermen emerged from one of the semis on the daddy side of the wall and, carefully skirting the mummies' side, made their way over to the Shelter. They carried slopping cans of green paint and were under the direction of:
– A Dryva! Carl blurted out.
However, it wasn't the Driver himself– this one was short and dumpy; his robes were cut in the London fashion, his trainers were high and his mirror dangled from a golden rod. As the work posse reached the ne
w Shelter, it was met by more Drivers who came out from inside, together with a large gang of off-islanders – alien chavs, a posse of Chilmen, and the Lawyer of Chil's chaps. Such a swarm of dads Carl had never known to be on Ham before. It was no wonder Salli looked to be starving – they must be eating all the Hamsters' curried preserves.
Then the Hamsters' own Driver appeared. He limped from his semi leaning heavily upon a staff. Set beside the bustling incomers, he was a diminished figure – bent over, his white hair greasy and unkempt. Fred Ridmun, together with Mister Greaves, emerged from the doorway behind him, and, following the Driver towards the gibbet, Fred called out: Peet! Bert! Billi! The lads detached from the milling crowd and came over. Carl had grown up with these three, and, like him, they had suddenly reached dadhood. They carried themselves erect in a sharp jabber of knees and elbows yet from the way they also shuffled their bare feet and spat their gum juice in the dirt, it was clear that this was to be no welcome task.
Carl realized what was going to happen even before the first moto was prodded out from the pen and came waddling across to where the Guvnor, the Hack and the Driver stood. Awluvem, he groaned. Vare gonna slorta awluvem! For once speechless, Antonë gave Carl's shoulder a squeeze. Billi Brudi, who'd been guiding Lyttulmun by his jonckheeres, now kicked the beast on the back of his leading arm, so he sank down and rolled over on the ground. With no preamble Fred Ridmun unsheathed his blade – clearly, this was to be no ritual killing, no joyfully anticipated collision between men and motos. Billi did not kneel to caress the moto – nor did the Guvnor call over the slaughter run; instead he lunged down and plunged the knife in with a savage dig, as if to proclaim by action alone that this was guilty work. Lyttulmun, frightened and in pain, began to thrash about. Tyga, smelling his wallow mate's blood on the breeze, reared up from behind the dyke, and Carl had to tear himself away from the gory spectacle below so as to calm him and get him to lie down again.
