Will Self - The Book of Dave

Fukk ve SeeEssA! Fukk ve SeeEssA! the angry dads chanted. Some held aloft effigies of mummies lashed to long poles. The cloakyfings of these dummies bulged in a peculiar and obscene fashion as they were thrust up and down. The mob propelled all before them — and Carl and Antonë found themselves in the front row of the spectators, who, trapped between ranks of dads and Drivers, ranged about the arch. The sweatbox had been drawn up to the pale-pink cliff, and a pair of warders roughly extricated a mummy from the inside. She screamed and tried to claw her way back in to where three children could be seen, weeping and beseeching. The warders were having none of this and dragged her up a ramp on to the top of the arch, then over to where a barbecue was erected amid a pile of faggots.

Fukk ve SeeEssA! Fukk ve SeeEssA! The dads sank the poles bearing the effigies in the dusty ground and linked arms. Two hefty chavs in the livery of the PCO stepped forward into the square. One bore an immense drum on his back, which the other beat upon. The defeaning reports of the drum reverberated from the crete frontage of the Odeon, and the crowd began to fall silent, save for a few urchins who were climbing about on the scaffold. A Driver stepped forward, while behind him a fony unrolled an A4, and once he had it in his mirror the Driver began to read in a deep, stentorian voice that was clearly audible to the whole assembly:

— That you, Sharún Lees, on three separate occasions, did wilfully retain your three kiddies and keep them concealed from their lawful dad; for this heinous malefaction, a profaning of the Book and the Wheel and of Dave Himself, you have been sentenced in the Children and Families Advisory and Support Services Forecourt to be burned and the noxious exhaust of your chellish body piped into your kiddies. Let it be marked, no Changeover –

— No lyf! the crowd bayed.

— No Breakup.

— No Nolidj!

— No Knowledge.

— No Nu Lundun! No Nú Lundun! No Nú Lundun!

Mercifully, the mummy had fainted dead away as the sentence was read. In the sweatbox the kiddies threw themselves against the bars. Another driver stepped forward and began to pour glistening moto oil over the mummy, the barbecue and the faggots. A third came afterwards with a lighter. There was a moment's stillness — then 'Fumf!' The mummy was a writhing, pulsing, fat-spitting firework. Fonies pushed forward a funnel-shaped contrivance attached to a bellows and positioned it so as to suck up the noxious exhaust. It was conducted through a pipe and into the sweatbox, the irony shutters of which were slammed against the whey faces of the children and bolted by attendant Drivers.

'Fumf! Fumf! Fumf!' All through the crowd the dads had set their sinister effigies alight. The cloakyfings went up in a flash, revealing that beneath them were bundles of live cats, tied by their necks to the poles. Their fur fizzed and flashed; they yowled in torment. The dads began their chanting once more: Fukk ve SeeEssA! Fukk ve SeeEssA! Fukk ve SeeEssA! Fukk ve SeeEssA! Carl could not conceive of a more horrific scene, as the pall of meaty smoke rose up over the square in poisonous billows, and the mob eddied and moaned with evil exaltation. A thick musk of excitation emanated from the close-packed bodies around him. The mummy was still writhing — although tongues of white flame were shooting from her eye sockets and mouth. Carl shut his own eyes and resolved not to open them until they could escape this hell on earth.

Then he involuntarily opened them — because he'd received a sharp dig in the nape of his neck. Hanging in his visual field was another pair of eyes — bloodshot, indifferent, very fatigued and framed by the mirror that was dangling right in front of his face. Carl turned to his companion. Antonë also had a mirror positioned before his face and behind him stood a Driver with a drawn blade. The crowd had fallen back on all sides, and a third Driver bearing a badge that showed the Wheel superimposed on the Tower stepped up and unfurled an A4. He began reading in a bored voice:

— Carl Dévúsh and Antonë Böm, I arrest you both in the name of the PCO on charges of bilking, flying and treason. You will accompany us to the Tower.

The crowd, its anarchic hysteria instantly transformed into fearful conformity, drew back to allow a wide gangway, and down this Carl and Antonë were hustled in the direction of Park Lane.

In the sparkling-wine light police tape festooned the traffic lights and the crash barriers — the bunting of a criminally enormous party. A police car, its blue light revolving, siren squawking suppressed whoops, shepherded people along the roadway like a game little terrier. A volute of cloud twisted across the sky, and the cold bit into Dave's neck. He saw the already discarded placards that littered the verge and the scores, then hundreds of demonstrators. Individually they were aimless, yet the whole throng moved with collective determination over the churned-up sand of Rotten Row and towards Speakers' Corner.

Phyllis looked as eccentric as ever, wrapped up in a woollen coat sewn from crocheted panels of scarlet, green and yellow. Her mad curls escaped from beneath the ear flaps of a Laplander's hat, her Dolly hands were tucked into matching mittens. She took his cold hand in her woolly pad and squeezed it. 'The turn-out,' she said excitedly, 'it's huge. I knew — but I never thought — so many people.' Dave saw gloomy old pranksters in harlequin tights, Socialist Worker clones in donkey jackets and Doc Martens, laughing crocodiles of British Asian girls down from their northern redoubts, their Muslim Association of Great Britain placards held at jaunty angles. Between these factions, stolidly tramping, in their pastel anoraks and buff fleeces, was a great mass of ordinary punters, who, even to Dave's jaundiced eye, seemed secure in the knowledge that by their sheer weight of numbers they could prevent the bombers from taking off and Stop the War!

Through a scraggy barrier of trees and over the balding grass with every yard they gained the compression of bodies grew greater. 'Palace-stein! Palace-stein! Palace-stein!' I'm not racial, Dave admonished himself — yet their fanaticism smelled alien, a dangerous spice, saffron and suicide. A head taller than the crowd, he was borne forward on an undulating carpet of scalps, entire acres of hair combed over by the teeth of the breeze. Up ahead the scene was Babylonian: flags and banners waved, obelisks of speakers loomed on a stage, only the yowl of feedback stopped the subsidence of this era into the last.

All masses — no matter how pacific — contain within their sumps many thousands of litres of adrenalin the motor oil of rage. Dave Rudman felt this potential conflagration slopping about them as he and Phyl were driven forward to the steady, four-stroke beat of a massive Lembeg drum. Then they were trapped against a barrier fence. Through its wide mesh police snappers in blue-checked baseball caps probed their telephoto lenses. A line of stewards sporting fluorescent tabards bearing the legend IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, THE MOST COMPASSIONATE, THE MOST MERCIFUL struggled to keep back the demonstrators, who barked, 'Who let the dogs out?!' before yelping their own reply, 'Bush! Bush!'

Dave felt himself detaching, lifting up into the now lustreless sky where surveillance helicopters chattered and swooped. He felt for Phyllis's mitten — a soft anchor — to ground him, but it was gone. She was gone. He began frantically scanning thousands of faces. Izzat'er? Izzat? Izzat? The rant started inside his pock-marked face. Fucking lefties … dumb cunts … middle-class tossers … 'Who let the dogs out?! Bush! Bush!' They don't even know where they fucking are … Pakkies down from Bradford … The fucking stewards couldn't find their way to Tottenham Court Road … He began shouldering his way back through the whippy limbs of this human scrub, still looking for Phyl but understanding that it was pointless. When he reached a clearing where three whey-faced kiddies were drinking cans of Mecca-Cola in a shieling of milk crates, he had a moment of clarity. They weren't having sex yet, but we're like a married couple … at ease in ways both profoundly irritating and comforting; we aren't having sex, although he couldn't have said which of them was resisting the slide into that damp pit of guttural obfuscation; we aren't having sex — nevertheless he'd agreed to come along on this idiotic march because … I love her.