The Book of Dave

For Luther

and with thanks to

Harry Harris and Nick Papadimitriou

Contents

2 Trapping a Flyer: December 2001

3 The Geezer: SEP 509-10 AD

4 The Family of Man: June 1987

5 The Exile: OCT 523 AD

6 The Skip Tracer: April 2002

7 Broken on the Wheel 510-13 AD

8 The Shmeiss Ponce: September 1992

9 The Lawyer of Chil: Kipper 523-4 AD

10 The Riddle: August 2002

11 The Forbidden Zöne: Kipper 522 AD

12 The Book of Dave: October 2000

13 New London: MAR 524 AD

14 Getting Out from Behind the Wheel: February 2003

15 The Moto Slaughter: JUN 524 AD

16 Made in China: October 2003

The Hack's Party

JUN 523 AD
¹

The real island was quite as vivified as any toyist vision, the southeast-facing undulation of land audibly hummed. Bees,
drugged by the heat, lay down in the flowers, ants reclined on beds of leaf mould, flying rats gave a liquid coo-burble – then stoppered up. To the south a few gulls soared above the denser greenery of the Ferbiddun Zön.

The little kids who'd left the manor with Carl had run on ahead, up the slope towards the Layn, the Avenue of trees that formed
the spine of Ham. These thick-trunked, stunted crinkleleafs bordered the cultivated land with a dark, shimmering froth. Carl
saw brown legs, tan T-shirts and mops of curly hair flashing among the trunks as the young Hamsters scattered into the woodland.
Reedy whoops of joy reached Carl's ears, and he wished he could go with them into Norfend, galumphing through the undergrowth,
sloshing into the boggy hollows to flush out the motos, then herd them towards their wallows.

Up from the manor in a line behind Carl came the older lads – those between ten and fourteen years old – whose graft it was
to oversee the motos' wallowing, before assigning the beasts their day's toil. Despite everything, Carl remained the acknowledged
gaffer of this group, and, as he swerved off the path along one of the linchets dividing the rips, the other eight followed
suit, so that the whole party were walking abreast, following the bands of wheatie as they rolled up the rise.

Carl remembered how this ground had been in buddout, each rip mounded with a mixture of moto dung, seaweed, birdshit and roof
straw. The motos had deftly laid their own fresh dung, but the other ingredients had to be dug from the byres, scraped from
the rocks and gathered from the shore by the older girls and opares. Next the mummies laboriously dragged truckle after truckle
of the mixture up from the manor, before spreading and digging it into the earth with their mattocks. There were no wheels
on Ham – save for symbols of them – and therefore no cars or vans either, so the Hamsterwomen tilled the long rips themselves – a team of six yoked to the island's sole plough, with its heavy irony share. Now the ripening wheatie stood as high as his
knees, and it looked as if it would be a good crop this year – not that Carl would necessarily be there to see the mummies
grind it under the autumn foglamp, their bare breasts nuzzling the hot stone of their querns as they bent sweatily to the
graft.

– Ware2, guv, said Billi Brudi, catching Carl's eye as they reached the linchet bordering the next rip and together stepped
over it.

– 2 Nu Lundun, Carl replied.

– Ware2, guv, Sam Brudi chipped in – and his brother Billi chimed up:

– 2 Nu Lundun.

Then Gari Edduns uttered the salutation, and Peet Bulluk made the response – and so it went along the line. Between them the
nine lads represented all the six families of Ham, the Brudis, Funches, Edduns, Bulluks, Ridmuns and Dévúshes. Good, solid
Ingish names – all from the Book, all established on Ham from time out of mind, as rooted as smoothbark and crinkleleaf.

At the top of the slope the land formed a sharp ridge, which fell away in narrow terraces to the waters of Hel Bä. On a knoll
on the far side of the water stood one of the five old round towers the Hamsters called giants' gaffs, foglight flashing from
its chipped wall. Carl's companions, having reached the edge of the home field, followed the dyke up to the Layn, then walked
south along it for three hundred paces, to where a stand of pines guarded the moto wallows. Carl parted from the group and
took one of the terraces that curled round the bay to the foot of the tower. Here, in the crete rubble, a few dwarfish apple
trees had taken root. He found a level flag and sat down.

Twigs stubbed him through his coarse T-shirt. Brown and white butterflies flip-flopped over a stand of fireweed. Bees came
doodling down from the bank of pricklebush that rose up, barring the way to the Ferbiddun Zön. Carl tracked the sticky-arsed
stopovers as they wavered down to the water's edge, where squishprims, dry-vys and heaps of other blooms grew between the
hefty, hairy stalks of the blisterweed. A stone's throw into the bay the submarine reef of seaweed and Daveworks eddied and
swirled in the sluggish swell. Carl could see the bright, red shells of the crabs that teemed on the reef, and in the muddy
shallows of the lagoon little gangs of rusty sprats flickered.

Carl leaned his head against a bar of old irony and stared at the delicate tracery of lichen that covered the crete at his
feet – living on dead, dead on deader. A low clattering buzz roused him, and, peering at one of the apple trees, he saw that
its trunk was mobbed with a dense cluster of golden flies, which spread and agitated their wings the better to suck up the
bigwatt rays of the now fully risen foglamp. To leave all this – how would it be possible – this life mummy that cuddled him
so?

Carl had been to this spot maybe two or three times with Salli Brudi – and that was forbidden. They'd get a cuff from their
daddies and a bigger clump from the Driver if they were found out. The last time she'd whipped off her cloakyfing and wound
it around her pretty ginger head like a turban. As she bent low, the neck of her T-shirt gaped open, showing her tiny titties;
yet Carl understood there was no chellish vanity in this – Salli was too young. She held a Davework in her hand: it was the
size of a baby's finger, a flat black sliver with a faint-cut mark.

– Wot chew fink, Carl, she asked him, reel aw toyist?

Carl took the Davework from her; his thumb traced the edge, once jagged but now smoothed by its millennia-long meander through
the lagoon since the MadeinChina. He looked closely at the mark for the shapes of phonics.

– C eer, Sal, he said, beckoning her closer, iss an ed, C ve eer, an vose lyns muss B … Eye dunno … sowns aw sumffing
… mebë.

– So toyist? She was disappointed.

– Toyist, deffo. He flung it decisively away from them, and it whirred like a sickseed for a few moments before falling into
the grass.

Carl started up – what was the point in such dumb imaginings? Cockslip an bumrub, nodditankijelli snuggul. Sal Brudi ul B
up ve duff soon Enuff bì wunnuvose ugli öl shitters … No, he best forget it, forget her – and get up to the wallows. Whatever
might happen in the next few days, this tariff he had graft to do, important graft.

When Carl arrived the other lads were milling between the seven conical wallows, darting among the motos to kiss and cuddle
them. Peet was guiding Boysi by his jonckheeres up the steep steps of the highest wallow.

– Ul luv í ven yer inni, Boysi, he was saying, U no U will, yeah, U no U will.

Boysi turned his big pink muzzle, and his little blue eyes, buried in their fleshfolds, twinkled with recognition. Carwl!
Carwl! the moto lowed, Carwl, wawwow wiv mee, wawwow wiv mee!

Carl let out a peal of laughter – it was impossible to stay gloomy for long when the motos were being wallowed. Boysi's dam,
Gorj, was already half submerged in the next wallow along, snorting and funnelling her lips to squirt the weedy-green water
over her wallow mates. Hands of humans and hands of motos shot above the earthen parapet, flinging screenwasher arcs of droplets
as they mucked about.

– Eye carn, Boysi, Carl cried, Eye gotta fynd Runti, iss iz turn, iss iz big dä.

– F slorwa, f slorwa! Hack cummin, Hack cummin! the beast chanted as he heaved himself up the last two steps to the top of
the wallow, then plunged in, dragging Peet with him. Other motos took up this cry:

– F slorwa, f slorwa, Hack cummin, Hack cummin!

While Carl doubted any of them truly understood what the slaughter was, the motos knew it was connected with the visitors
who were due.

Even the littlest mopeds such as Chukki and Bunni were alive to what visitors brought with them. After the Hack's party arrived,
at least half the lads who mushed the motos would be sick with the pedalo fever, so the beasts would be free to cruise as
they wished, clear along the underwood to the curryings, and even into the Zönes, where they'd thieve the gulls' eggs and
stuff themselves with shrooms. Motos were soppy things, yet, sorry as they might be for their young mushers, being shot of
them was a buzz. Day by day they could be relied on to do as told: Rootaht vat rat coloni, grubbup vis unnerwood, ge shottuv
vat notweed. However, left to their own devices, they'd soon be babyishly dry-humping, which could well lead to motorage.
Then they'd run amok, trampling down the walls of their own wallows, or even crash into the Hamsters' gaffs. Each year one
or two of the friskier males would have to be gelded.

Carl stood watching as first one moto, then the next, was coaxed up and eased over into a wallow, until all seven were occupied.
The other motos waited their turn, snuffling and licking each other's buttocks and flanks. Each elevated pool of muddy water
was just broad enough to hold one of the creatures. Once in, they used their webbed feet and hands to turn in a tight circle,
ducking their little mushers.

By now the bank of sea mist had pulled still further away from the island, far enough for Carl to make out the outcropping
of the gull roost at Nimar, five clicks away at the very tip of the long spit that extended from the northern island of Barn.
It was around this promontory that the Hack's pedalo would come with its load of sick fares bound for Ham, the isle of the
Driven-by-Dave.

Carl thought about the Beastlyman, the tongueless exile who lived at Nimar. On summer days such as this, he could be seen
from the highest point of Ham, skipping among the rocks – or, rather, the gulls he disturbed could be seen, flapping aloft
and eluding his clumsy, hungry grasp. Last summer Carl had been taken for the first time on a fowling expedition over to Nimar,
and, while the other Hamstermen snared prettybeaks and grabbed oilgulls from their nests, he'd guarded the pedalo at its mooring.
It was typical that the youngest birder should be left like this, to suffer the repeated attacks of the bonkergulls, who,
determined to protect their nests, dived at Carl again and again, trying to plant their sharp beaks in his head.

None of the dads had bothered to tell Carl from whom he was guarding the pedalo, so when the Beastlyman crept up and Carl
was confronted by an emaciated figure, clad in a long filthy cloakyfing, its beard and hair matted with dirt, its hands cracked
and broken, he was totally freaked out. They'd stared at one another for a long time, with only a few feet separating them.
Oilgulls that had escaped the hands of Carl's mates screamed overhead. The Beastlyman opened his mouth and tried to give voice
as well, and Carl saw in the dark cave the red root where his tongue had once been, uselessly writhing in the gargling gale
of the dad's madness. Carl said, Ware2, guv, but the Beastlyman only flinched as if struck by the greeting, then scrabbled
round on the rocks and scrambled away.

When the dads returned to the pedalo, the corpses of many birds stuck by the neck into their tight leather belts, their beards
damp with sweat, Carl told them what – or who – he had seen.

– So Uve clokked ve Beestlimun, av U, Carl, said his stepdad, Fred. Eyem glad, yeah, coz thass wottul appen 2 U if U go on
fukkinabaht in ve Zön wiv Tonë!

Fukka Funch, never one to miss the opportunity for a crude jape, thrust his bacon schnozz in Carl's face and did a Beastlyman
shtick, gargling and spitting until Fred snapped:

– Thass Enuff!

His half-brother Bert broke in on Carl's reverie, asking:

– Djoo wan me 2 cumman ge Runti wiv U?

– Nah, nah, he stuttered, vis iss tween me an im an Dave. U an ve lads betta ge ve wallowin dun an pack ve uwers orf. Runti
– eez mì mayt. Av U Ió sed yer tartars 2 Runti? he called to the wallowing motos.