Will Self - The Book of Dave

Dave and Phyl sat at the kitchen table, the notebooks in front of them on the plastic cloth. 'It's like the Knowledge,' she said. 'It's like what you've told me about when you were a Knowledge Boy — you know it's all there in your head, so you've got to call it over, don't you?' He did: he left on the right, then went into the tortuous pattern of mad DOCTRINES and madder COVENANTS. He summoned it up, the hellish DESIGN FOR LIVING he'd tried to foist on his LOST BOY. Each lunatic run across the mental metropolis was pulled out of him and coiled on the table to be picked over by the two of them, between ceaselessly refilled mugs of tea. Phyllis, in these mornings before she set out for the city, her white mask still in a pot in the bathroom, her ruddy features earnestly starred with burst blood vessels, helped Dave to recant. 'No,' she insisted, 'that's not right — you know you don't believe that, you know that's wrong. I don't care what went down between you and Michelle — you don't treat me like that, and now you've got to make things right. It doesn't matter what she did then — it's what you do now that counts.'

A new Book took shape. As Dave trudged along the laborious biro furrows, he turned up a new EPISTLE TO THE SON, which told the lad to RESPECT MEN AND WOMEN BOTH, to strive always for RESPONSIBILITY, to understand that WE MAKE OUR OWN CHOICES IN LIFE, and that BLAMING OTHERS is not an option. Children NEED BOTH THEIR MOTHERS AND THEIR FATHERS, yet if their union does not last there should be no CONFLICT, no tug of HATE. The new Book's composition was evidence of this harmoniousness, for its true author was Phyllis quite as much as Dave. And as for the KNOWLEDGE itself— the mad bigotry of the London cabbie, his aggressive loneliness, his poisonous arrogance, his fearful racism — that too, that had to go. What profiteth a man who can call over all the POINTS and RUNS, if he still does not know where he truly is? This extraordinary document took shape in the little weatherboard cottage, while outside valetudinarian bumble bees veered across the field under a hard rain of ultraviolet rays. Although their thoughts lay in a proximate future, yet the Book became inflected with a STOICISM worthy of Roman citizens hearing the barbarians at the gate, or Sumerian scribes setting down their monumental ataraxy. Between the narrow feint the new Book whispered: the ice caps may melt, the jungles shrivel, the prairies frazzle, the family of humankind may have, at best, three or four more generations before the BREAKUP, before they find themselves sundered from the MUMMY EARTH and compelled to lie down on a crunchy sofabed of a billion animal skeletons, yet there can be no EXCUSE for not trying to DO YOUR BEST and live right. Put a BRICK IN THE CISTERN, clean the ugly smear of motor oil from beneath your TRAINERS and walk away from the city. Abandon it, lose it, let it fall from your mind, for there cannot be — not now, not ever — a new London.

When they were done the two notebooks were filled and it was properly autumn. The harrows came chattering across the great field, tearing up the earth with their steely argument.

The reception area was a long, sunlit corridor on the third floor of the Forecourts of Justice. Every few paces there were deep embrasures and through their windows Carl could see the workaday traffic of the Strand, its deep gorge full of bustling folk and trotting jeejees. Beyond this the high-gabled roofs of the ancient wooden gaffs tumbled down to the tangle of jetties and walkways on the quaggy bank of the Thames.

Foglight streamed through the panes of these windows, picking out every pock and liver spot on the brief's lined sullen face. Carl was closeted with this peculiar-looking bloke in one embrasure, while, three embrasures along, Antonë and his brief — a skinny fellow with a pronounced goitre — were in deep consultation. Both briefs were imposingly attired in thick woollen tracksuits and knee-high trainers. Their cockpieces were tasselled and their formal bald wigs gave them the guise — in Carl's eyes — of granddads at the Council of Ham. This was reassuring to him — while nothing else was.

The corridor bustled with warders, seeseeteevee men, Drivers and Inspectors. From time to time a fony would didduloodoo and a brief would hustle his client towards one of the forecourts. Carl's own brief hadn't deigned to introduce himself, merely droning, Ware2, guv, before shuffling his A4s and continuing:

— I've been engaged by the Lawyer of Blunt to represent you … as part of your defence he has given me a petition of inquiry regarding your dad — he glanced at a sheet — Symun Dévúsh, is that correct? Carl nodded. Let me tell you right away, said the brief, at last regarding his client with weary eyes, that just as any stay-of-appearance has been denied in your case by the Chief Examiner, so I believe he will reject this petition. As I'm sure you have the wit to realize, objects in the mirror –

— May appear larger than they are, hurrying-up Böm supplied the end of the well-known tag. Yet what need have we of caution now? I suspect the Examiner will have proofs of our guilt aplenty and no need of magnifying them. If we show any restraint it can only be with a view to furthering the interests of the Lawyer of Blunt and his claque, and at this perilous junction I fear we have diverged from their lane.

Carl's brief spat his gum on to the crete floor but made no other response.

A fony coming right up to them didduloodooed, and they rose and were led into the forecourt. It took a while for Carl's eyes to adjust to the gloom, and then he was gripped by awe. The forecourt was a great chamber, many metres high and lit only by a few dim letrics dangling from lengths of chain. A window set high above the Examiners' bench admitted a single beam of foglight that lanced down into the inspection pit. Here, in formal array, stood the Inspectors in their brightly coloured formal robes, some quartered scarlet and white, others striped yellow and green, still more checked like Shelter drapes. Above their bald-wigged heads mounted the bench itself, tier upon tier of elaborately coffered dark wood with platforms let into it at regular intervals, so that the wigs of the Examiners who occupied them were as the whitish blooms of a pyramidal shinynut tree.

At the very apex of this was the Chief Examiner's seat, above which hung the shield of the dävidic line. This mighty escutcheon was party per cross in argent and gules, blazoned in the first quarter with the Cab of Dave, below it with the Rampant Wally, in the upper-right quarter with the Toyist Cab of the Lost Boy and below that with the Pink Chelle of Perfidy. Beneath this on a carved scroll was the Royal motto: DAVE GUYD UZ.

It was only once they had been ushered to the dock that Carl began to look around the forecourt. It was surrounded on all sides by three tiers of galleries, and within each were perhaps four or five rows of benches, all of them packed with spectators. The highest gallery to the right of the inspection pit was boxed off apart from a long, slitted grille behind which there was considerable agitation and the occasional flash of eyes. Hides, Antonë whispered, bird hides. All the luvvies will be in there, justice in New London is accorded a great spectacle. Carl was amazed to note that the queer ran a hand through his white hair and smoothed his filthy T-shirt. If justice was a spectacle, then Böm was determined to play his part to the hilt.

As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, Carl began to pick out individual faces from the mass of gawpers. They were all there — every fare he'd picked up in London had done a runner on him. The gaffer of the Trophy Room; the Lawyer of Blunt and his fony Tom; Terri, the creepy old potman from the Öld Glöb; and even the grovelling warden from Bedlam. Some of the toffs from Somerset House were there — and, although he couldn't see them, Carl didn't doubt that Missus Edjez and the Luvvie Sarona would be in the hide; nor did he imagine them to be any different from the other spectators, all of whom were noisily chewing gum, taking swigs from evian bottles and craning forward to point out this or that to their neighbours.