Will Self - The Book of Dave

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.

We have a peculiar posting for you, Antonë Böm, said the Inspector who examined him. There is a remote part of the kingdom where there is a requirement for your particular skills. We do not think you will be able to make any trouble there. He stamped the molten wax on the exile order with the wheel of his signet ring and called to the warders: Take him down to Canary Wharf; he sails at first light for my Lawyer of Chil's Bouncy Castle at Wyc.

For the first five years of his exile Antonë Böm paid no more attention to Carl Dévúsh than he did to any of the little Hamsters. They were not his concern. Changeover came late on Ham, and the smaller children moved casually between the mummies' and daddies' gaffs — almost experiencing shared parenting. Even after the Changeover, the older kids still remained vitally connected to both parents through the interposition of the motos. Try as the Driver might to stamp out this promiscuity, he was unable. Seeing chellish superstition and toyist practices wherever he looked, the Driver lived in constant fear of his alien surroundings, a condition he sought to hide from his fares by remaining for the most part confined to the Shelter and his own semi. Out of his sight, and that of the dävine dads, the old ways still continued on Ham.

Nevertheless, from the moment the keel of the Hack's pedalo ground into the shingle of the island and the adipose queer stepped ashore, the Driver moved to ensure his own supremacy. Böm was responsible for teaching the older lads and for tending to injured or sick Hamsters. The Driver had no illusions about his teacher-cum-surgeon — he cordially despised him. This antipathy was fully reciprocated, and, despite the great deal they had in common, the two outsiders had no more commerce with each other than was strictly necessary. The Driver impressed upon him that so long as Böm made the required appearances at the Shelter to call over the runs and points, and so long as he did not taint his instruction with flying, he would be left alone.

Alone in his tiny semi, which had been built by the Hack's chaps using locally quarried brick, to the same pattern as many of the poorer dwellings found elsewhere in King Dave's dominion. The sharp corners were difficult to seal against the curry spray that beset the island's southern shore during buddout and autumn. The roof joists were of poorly seasoned wood that warped. The slate tiles cracked, then fell off; and, having been brought from off the island by Mister Greaves, they were impossible to replace. So while the Hamsters' ancient dwellings remained solid and weatherproof, hunkering down into the green turf, the incomers suffered damp and draughts in the kipper, and the infestations of bugs and chafers in summer.

Böm's semi was tucked at the end of Sid's Slick. This inlet was beyond the headland where the Driver's own semi and the Shelter stood, and immediately beneath the shrub-choked slopes of the Gayt. Who exactly Sid had been it was difficult to discover. Some of the Hamsters claimed that he'd lived within the past few generations, and that the name referred to the fact that he'd fallen into the muddy stream bed and broken his leg. Others, however, told the teacher that Sid was born of a giant and a moto; and that he was a curious chimera who had once wallowed here in the muddy shallows of the lagoon. Whichever the case, the tale of Sid's Slick was but one among a great host of them. Every boulder, copse and crete outcropping on Ham had its own story to divulge. The island was a tapestry of naming, worked over again and again by the thousands of generations who had trod its leafy lanes and grassy paths. Antonë Böm, with his inquiring mind, set himself to map the foetus-shaped island, from the long groynes that projected from the northeastern shores of the Gayt, to the hidden coves and gull-haunted strands beneath the Ferbiddun Zön to the south.

Böm had little experience of rural Ing beyond the burbs of London. Nevertheless, like all visitors to Ham, he felt the otherworldliness of the island. There were no other mammals besides the motos and the occasional rat infestation. There were no bambis, no bugsbunnies, no tree rats — no mice even. Land birds were infrequent, migratory visitors, and the gulls kept to their roosts at the far ends of the island, only occasionally swooping down on to the home fields. With the woodlands managed assiduously by the motos, the field rips carefully manicured by the Hamsters themselves, and even the shrubbery pressed back into neat banks, the gently undulating landscape had the aspect of a stage in a playhouse. Set here and there on the smooth-cropped sward and the mossy floor of the woodland, the humans and their lisping kine became hieratic figures in a tableaux of a gentler, simpler era before King David's dynasty and the inexorable rise of the PCO.

In those first years of exile Böm set himself to compile a description of Ham; he included its flora, fauna and topography, as well as the customs, language and beliefs of its inhabitants. This he set down in the bound notebooks he had brought with him from London. Each night he scratched long into the third tariff by the dim lectric, his biro casting a wavering shadow on the roughly rendered walls of his little semi. It was, thus, to begin with an isolated life — yet he did not find it so. For he was already accustomed to being alone with his secret mummyself.

Being recognized as queer, Böm was free to take his meals with either the mummies or the daddies and was not required to observe the Breakup strictly. Nevertheless, for some time he was circumspect in his intercourse with the Hamsterwomen, until an incident that occurred in the buddout of his third year on Ham brought home to him that excessive caution was unnecessary.

He was out walking with old Effi Dévúsh. Together they strolled through the wind-tossed boughs of Kenwud and along the spit to the feature known as the Mutha's grave. Here they stood, staring out through the dead heads of the blisterweed, towards the islet, a perfect little tumulus capped by an ingrown copse of pines. Their flat clusters of needles were angled away from the spray in a series of bafflers, their trunks twisted into a strangulated knot. Even at this early season the underbrush was dense. Shil B cummin rahnd ve mahntin ven she cums, Effie rapped. Shil B cummin rahnd ve mahntin ven she cums. Shil B cummin rahnd ve mahntin, cummin rahnd ve mahntin, cummin rahnd ve mahntin ven she cums. Böm was surreptitiously noting down this old rap of the Mutha. The emaciated rapper and her podgy amanuensis were so lost in the haunting air, the sough of the breeze and the vista of heaving waves marching into the distance that they failed to hear the Driver coming up behind them. He spoke — his words sharp and hectoring — and, as Effi whirled to confront him, a lock of her lank, white hair caught the Driver in the face.