Will Self - The Book of Dave

This effusion led, quite naturally, to a request by the Lawyer for news of Luvvie Joolee and her sojourn on Ham. So it was that they passed the remaining units of that tariff until the lampon with Antonë and Carl telling tales of the remote island demesne.

With none of them having had any repose, the Lawyer nonetheless proposed that they sally forth once more before the second tariff. I would speak with you concerning your speculative philosophy, he averred to Böm. The doubts you have expressed concerning the origins of the Book engage me powerfully, and I warrant the drive to Hampstead will be a most satisfying backdrop to our discourse. Furthermore — and here, for the first time, Carl apprehended a shadow of anxiety pass across the Lawyer's bony countenance — we will be in the manner of sitting ducks if we remain within doors and the PCO comes a-knocking.

All was as before: the Taffy on the roof rack, the glossy jeejees straining in the shafts, the long black limmo pressing the mob into the gutter. They drove up the Finchley Road and by the time they had passed the Swizz Cottage they were in the sticks. Carl was thrilled to see open field strips and woodlands for the first time in blobs, while up ahead the burbs rose, wave after wave of hewer, streaked purple, lavender and blue, gently steaming under the bigwatt foglamp of buddout. Ringnecks dipped and rose through the shreds of mist while gulls circled overhead. The characteristic London reek — which had filled the lad's nostrils for so long he had become unaware of it — had abated.

How can we conceive of this scene in the time of Dave? the Lawyer mused. Why, in contradiction of the Knowledge itself, we see that these roads out of London are not straight but winding up and over steep hills and down into deep defiles. And where is the great mass of brick and crete that the Book describes? How can it be that here in London itself it has gone so entirely, while in so many other places in the kingdom there are the remains of many ancient gaffs? The Drivers charged with the Book's interpretation cite the MadeinChina — yet they swaddle themselves in ambiguities when it comes to the question of whether this deluge preceded or followed the Age of Dave.

The Lawyer of Blunt would have continued with these flying speculations were it not that the limmo had now gained a spur of burbland and was jolting along a flagged highway towards Beech House itself. As they drew closer, Carl saw a high facade topped with a triangular pediment, twelve-paned windows, irony fencing and two staircases curving up to a grand door on the first storey. Crowds were milling on the beaten earth in front of the dävine semi: Drivers and Inspectors, mendicant stalkers, pilgrims who had struggled on foot up from the city below, and even a handful of outrageous mushers who flapped about in the hewer crying out broken orisons to the Lost Boy. At the very eye of this hurly-burly stood a row of wooden booths, and as the Taffy reined in the jeejees, leaped down and the travellers stepped out, Carl saw that these were tenanted by still more Drivers and that the pilgrims who mobbed them — lawds, luvvies, commoners, even a few chavs — were all sore afflicted.

One after another they presented themselves to the Drivers in the booths, placing before their mirrors a crippled leg, a scrofulous neck, an arm purulent with the discharge of a carbuncle. The Driver called over a run and a few points, sprinkled the diseased or damaged member with a few drops of dävine evian, palmed the supplicant the tinfoil badge, then held out his hand for some dosh. Eyeing the scene critically the Lawyer of Blunt muttered: Such peculation defiles our faith more than any grander exactions of the PCO or even the King. Then, as they worked their way towards Beech House, he wisely remained silent, save for saluting the indulgence sellers: Where to, guv? Where to, guv? Where to …

While the common pilgrims had to queue to enter the shrine, the Lawyer and his companions were ushered straight in by an obsequious fony. Beech House was bare and unprepossessing, the chambers stark and without any adornment. In the harsh foglight that streamed through the uncurtained windows, every scuff that tens of thousands of trainers had left on the boards could be seen. At the centre of each room was an eerie tableau of life-sized figures. One showed Dave in his cab; a second, Dave, Chelle and the Lost Boy at the Breakup; a third, Dave burying the Book. The effigies were wax and obviously of considerable antiquity, for they were clad in worn and tatty garments, and their features disfigured by the heat of summer and the chill of kipper. In one of the tableaux the Lost Boy's nose was missing, and the effigy of Chelle had been so assailed with stones and brickbats that one leg had come away from the body and dangled in its sagging hose.

Initially the fony, like his Bedlam counterpart, was disposed to offer a commentary; however, the Lawyer of Blunt soon disabused him of this requirement, and so it was in silence that they at last descended to the inner sanctum of the shrine, down a corkscrewing staircase that bore into the very earth. The fony sparked a letric and by its faint wattage they saw weeping brickwork and the white tendrils of deep, questing roots. The fony could not forbear from affecting a tone of great reverence and informing them that:

— Viss, yer reervús, iz ware íall Bgan 2 fouzand yeers ago, wen Dave berried ve Búk. Eer í lay til ve Kings great-great-granddad — but an umble woolly bloke on ve burbz — duggí up.

Carl looked and all he saw was a yok-flagged pit. It had no resonance, no atmosphere of sanctity. Its revelation was only in its emptiness — a void on to which any idea or belief might be superimposed.

When they were once more without, the Lawyer took the opportunity to point out to his young companion the biggest points of the distant city: the NatWest Tower, the Lloyd's Building; No. 1 Canada Square; the Gherkin and the vast complex of the PCO itself — the dreaded Tower. It squatted by the river, its high walls forming a rough rectangle with a sentinel tower at each corner. In the centre rose the white keep, and from its roof flew the banner of the PCO. Even from twenty clicks away the Tower emanated overbearing power, its flint walls glinting with embedded broken glass and coils of razor wire. Carl looked up to the screen, hoping to see a harbinger of the dävine, but there was only a single gull, its wings flexing in the airy currents, swinging back and forth as if it were suspended from a wire.

They drove back to London in contemplative silence, and the Lawyer of Blunt let them out at Marble Arch; for while he had to go about the town canvassing signatures for Böm's brief and arranging for its deposition at the Lawd Chancellor's Department, it was decided that the other two would take a turn in the Royal hunting park. Dave f-forfend, the Lawyer stammered, b-but should our plans go awry you may soon find yourselves in close confinement.

As the Taffy cabbie whipped up the jeejees and the limmo pulled away in the direction of Selfridges, Böm realized they had made a bad mistake. The noise in the square was loud and mounting, while from the Edgware Road came the sound of chanting. He looked up and saw that the roofs of the buildings were thronged with seeseeteevee men. The chanting grew closer. It was the same horde who had been terrorizing the mummies and opares in Westminster the day before, and now there were far more of them — perhaps as many as two or three hundred dads. As before, they were tightly packed and marching at a run. Their uniform black T-shirts, their high-topped white trainers, their gnashing teeth — it all gave them the aspect of a many-legged, many-headed beast intent on some monstrous and predatory act.

They were preceded by twenty or so mounted Drivers and a platoon of chaps with shooters at the ready. As they came into the square some fanned out to stop the traffic, while another posse escorted a sweatbox towards the Arch itself. O my Dave! Antonë exclaimed. It's an execution, we don't want to get mixed up in this. It was, however, too late for them to escape, for along with the dads and Drivers came the London mob in all its perversity: lawds, bondsmen, tradesdads and chavs. Carl saw the most gussied-up dandies cavorting alongside the filthiest slubberdegullions. From the Queers' Quarter came blokes who looked like Antonë, plump, digit beards, soft hands in their belts. There were opares and mummies mixed up in the ruck, with the ubiquitous urchins darting here and there, snatching at cockpieces, cutting at purses. A great proportion of the crowd were mullered, for the landlawds of the city's numerous boozers, not content with plying their wares to the mob as it processed from the Tower to Marble Arch, had seen fit to join it. There were many little vans bumping along with barrels resting on them from which chasers could be bought for a penny. The stench of jack was overpowering.