Will Self - The Book of Dave

Geddup! Stannup! the court fony cried out. The hubbub died away, and the entire assembly rose as the Chief Examiner swept through a door at the back of the forecourt. Carl was shocked by how young he was — a thick blond fringe of hair escaped from beneath his bald wig. He wore a long robe of three distinct tiers — the breast was red, the waist orange, the trailing skirts green — the panels separated by cotton ruffs. As the fony assisted him to mount the steep ladder to the top of the bench, Carl noted the Chief Examiner's smooth skin and tip-tilted nose. The forecourt was cool in contrast with the hot, dusty streets outside; yet, despite this, sweat wormed from beneath the Chief Examiner's bald wig and formed shiny patches on his exposed neck.

At last, settled on his bench, the Chief Examiner called the forecourt to order:

— Where to, guv? His voice was deep and strong — it reached to every corner despite his back being turned.

— To New London! the Examiners, Inspectors, briefs, fonies, spectators — and even the accused — all bellowed back.

With that the trial of Antonë Böm and Carl Dévúsh for the most grievous flying began.

For the first tariff Carl did his best to concentrate on what was happening; yet, by the end of the second, despite the mortal importance of the proceedings, his mind began to wander — wander back to Ham. Antonë had said this would be a toyist trial, that they were naught save plastic figures played with by the Law. In truth, Carl found it difficult to conceive of how any trial conducted in London could be anything besides toyist, given the empty rituals practised by briefs, Inspectors and Examiners. Some speeches had to be made in Arpee, others in Mokni; some depositions could only be read in the Examiners' mirrors, others might be directly perused. On frequent occasions the Inspectors and briefs were required to mount the bench and confer with one or another Examiner on matters of procedure. The Chief Examiner had a fony on hand whose express function was to mop the sweat from his bonce with a mansize; despite this it was necessary for the forecourt to rise at least three times each tariff so that he could retire and change his T-shirt. The sweat, Antonë whispered, must be lashing off him.

The first day of the trial had a carnival atmosphere; the spectators never stopped their chattering and rustling. If Carl made the mistake of meeting the gaze of someone he recognized in the galleries, they wouldn't hesitate to call out to him. With each successive day the crowd thinned out, while the smoke from the letrics grew darker and denser, for as was customary their moto oil was not changed. Soots floated down into the inspection pit, and a deepening and ominous silence welled up, as, with their audience departed, the forecourt officials began to hiss their obscurantism in sibilant legalese.

At the end of each day the accused were taken from the forecourt, chained and bundled into a sweatbox, which was then drawn with much lurching and crashing along Cheapside to the Tower. Through the barred hatch Carl saw down the narrow alleys that wound into the rookeries. Here, bowlegged Dfishunt kids played on the mucky cobbles, while fat boilers hung their laundry out in the smutty atmosphere. Squalid as the scene was, Carl still wished he might be one of their number — that he'd never grown out of the Changeover. He bitterly recalled the thrill of his first car journey in London, how the easy progress of the Lawyer of Blunt's limmo had, for a time, smoothed out his life's bumpy course.

At night, in the Tower, Carl and Antonë huddled together in the soiled straw of a stall they shared with twenty or more other prisoners. Despite the terrifying human dregs who sprawled about them, Antonë continued to exhibit a most phlegmatic disposition, and endeavoured to instruct Carl on the finer points of each day's proceedings:

— Don't listen to what the briefs or Inspectors say, he stressed, watch instead the way they move about the forecourt. The Law is the very engine of Dave's cab. Here the secular and sacred aspects of the Knowledge gear one into the other, each functionary is a part of that engine, his robe patterned so as to resemble cog, wheel and alternator. In their revolutions from inspection pit to bench is to be seen the drive shaft of the Knowledge, which extends from the Forecourts of Justice into the city, the burbs and even the sticks beyond.

The Tower was not a place that either Antonë or Carl could have survived in for long. Its population had swelled mightily in the years since Symun was held there, and the continual skirmishing on the far borders of Ing added Taffies and Scots to the burgeoning numbers of cockney crims. No matter whether they were captives or offenders, most of these dads were given only the most cursory of legal examinations before being snipped, chained and sent off in gangs to be chavs on lawyerly estates in the sticks.

On their arrival in the Tower, Antonë had expected provision to have been made for them by the Lawyer of Blunt — however, there was none. Instead their London finery was stripped from their backs in front of the laughing warders. The following morning they had to attend forecourt in the dirty T-shirts and cut-off jeans offered to them by the lowliest of their fellows. On returning late in the third tariff, they were close to despair, having failed even to wrest a pannikin of oatie from the mêlée, when a new protector made himself known. He was foxy-faced and ginger-haired; his teeth were blackened and snaggled. Terri the potman from the Öl Glöb extended his squamous hand to them.

Carl didn't know which was more shocking: that this bloke, whom he'd seen in the forecourt gallery that first tariff, was now within the Tower, or that the other inmates, who had been harassing them, fell back as Terri came forward, bowing low to him, and near pressing their faces into the dust of the yard. Seeing the state they were in, Terri went first to one of the little stalls where the wealthier prisoners snacked and bought them some takeaway. As they snaffled this down, both Antonë and Carl fired questions at the potman: How did he get here? Who was he? Why was he prepared to help them? He refused to answer, only laid a scaly finger against his sharp nose and said, Awl in gud tym. Awl in gúd tym.

The trial lasted a full blob, and each first tariff when the dipped headlight was still in the screen and the dashboard twinkled in the east out by the Emtwenny5, Carl, having no pot to piss in, would clamber up to the battlements, where the prisoners made void of their natural waste products. There was London spread out before him: the peaked roofs of its majestic Shelters, the lofty masts of the ferries moored in its docks and basins; the smoking chimneys and stilled wheelvanes; the flying rats swooping about the long knife edges of the mock terraces. Carl had eyes for none of this. Rather, he was transfixed by the cages hanging above Traitors' Gate; in them were dads convicted of treason — some had once been noble Lawyers, now they were torpid skeletons, their yellow skin stretched drum-tight over their ribs, and scraps of cloth their only robes.

Carl lifted his face up to the screen and called over, for despite every evidence of suffering he could not abandon the belief that Dave was above it all, wise and benevolent. He still hoped that when his own torment was ended, and he found himself witless from the wheeling, branded and his tongue snipped, he would rise up there, over the cloudy wipers, another Lost Boy gone for all eternity to be with his true dad.

On the fifth day, at the second tariff when the Chief Examiner was back from his sixth recess, he came to consider the admissibility of the Lawyer of Blunt's petition. Until then arguments and counter-arguments had been concerned entirely with whether it might even be presented to the forecourt. Carl's brief, advancing across the inspection pit, addressed the Chief Examiner in formal Arpee: