The Book of Dave (8 page)

Down at the Terminal 2 rank passengers were being expelled by the sliding doors, sucked out of the warm nowhere and into the
wet, cold here of wintertime London. Shuttle buses grunted like great pigs; armed police strutted, submachine-gun necklaces
on their Kevlar decolletage. In front of Dave travellers mashed their over-stuffed cases into a cab, while the driver ignored
them.
When
I was a butter boy, I'd've been out on the road, bouncing like a puppy …
Can I help you? Let me slot this in here, I'll be careful, we can put that
one up front
.
.
.
Not now, oh no.

Finally it was Dave's turn. He checked his watch: he'd been at Heathrow for an hour and three quarters.
City getter would've made
a grand in that time, that fucking brief of mine would've scalped half
that, and I've got nothing to show for it … Still, at least we're into the
third tariff band.
His passenger shook herself free from the damp queue and stepped towards the cab; Dave handed his docket to the dispatcher,
who said, 'North London, mate, Belsize Park, good for you?' Dave grunted, 'Not bad.' And the cab rocked a little as the woman
got in; she only had a single, wheeled flight bag, the handle of which she'd already deftly stowed. 'Where to, love?' Dave
asked, and she answered, 'England's Lane, please, just off Haverstock Hill?' Like so many fares she was querying his competence,
wanting Dave's reassurance that he knew exactly where this was, but he didn't bother to give it, only put the cab in gear
and grumbled off out of the terminal.

Thrumming back through the airport tunnel, Dave looked in the rearview mirror. The fare was a stringy brunette in her late
forties, thick dark hair scraped back over sallow flesh,
bony as a fucking
skull.
When she turned to look at the scale model of Concorde, Dave saw the tendons in her thin neck, exposed by the open neck of
her blouse. She wore no make-up and a series of distinct grooves ran down her long top lip. The pashmina with the embroidered
hem, the naked fingers that played with it, the bifocals on a chain, the myopic eyes blinking in the gloom: all said to Dave
spinnie or
lezzer, one or other,
and either way not an object of desire – not that he had any available; nor one of pity – not that he had any of this either.
He took out his slunk of Mansize and crunched the dried snot in his pitted nose.

The cab paused at the traffic lights under the M4 flyover, then accelerated up the slip road. Dr Jane Bernal slid her tired
frame to the side of the seat and leant against the rain-dappled window. After the paranoia of the flight and the bucketing
descent into Heathrow, even this chilly vibration was a comfort. Could it be mere culture shock
or is London dirtier, darker, sadder and madder than when I left
it? I thought Carla was a screamingly tedious hostess, and the Brunswick
Opera Festival worse than dull. Yet, now I'm home, Canada suddenly
looks beautiful to me, the frozen lake, the Bold tartans of the opera goers'
jackets, their bright cheeks, their flaxen hair .
. .
The minute I cleared
immigration and saw the drivers lined up by the rail like undertakers I
wanted to be back there. Back, if necessary, with Carla, squirming my
way out of her serpentine grasp. She promised
…
she promised we could
have a great time anyway, even if I wanted to keep things platonic. But
she wouldn't let me alone for a second. Not a bloody second.

Still, at least Carla had been importuning in an immaculate split-level house surrounded by clean, crisp snow. There had been
glasses of good wine on the glossy white rug in front of the circular, bronze fireplace.
Everything clean and untainted. As I walked from the
terminal to the cab rank, I stepped on sticky gum and there was spit
everywhere. The people's faces were so closed up
…
so angry. Now this
cab driver, all I can see of him in the mirror is a pair of bloodshot eyes.
He's exhausted, his hands shake even though they're clamped to the wheel
. .
.Is he drunk? Withdrawing from drink or drugs – or worse? He mutters
to himself, his voice is peculiar
…
breathless – almost squeaking. He
aspirates flat swear words, cunts and fucks, mixed in with what? Is it
religious stuff– talk of a book, a prophet? He's going to turn to me and
say he has special telepathy or a divine hot line
–
but how could a
schizophrenic drive a London cab? He's too old for a flamboyant psychotic
breakdown, surely?

On the Chiswick flyover, Jane Bernal, despite herself, fastened her seatbelt. She did it as unobtrusively as possible, pulling
the strap gently, terrified it might snag, or that the crazed cabbie would swivel round, taking his eyes off the road, and
berate her for her lack of faith.
Crazy indeed, to've flown across the Atlantic, the whole
cabin still humming with anxiety after the Twin Towers, each locked in
his or her own miserable fears of being one of the holy martyrs' Chosen
Ones, and to now find myself more frightened on the ground.
But as the cab shimmied on into the wet city, Dr Bernal allowed her professional detachment to come to the fore.
He's ill,
she thought as he turned off at Chiswick Lane and worked his way through Shepherd's Bush to the A40.
He's ill and he doesn't even know it.

She'd seen men like this – and they were almost always men in her consulting room at Heath Hospital: punctilious managers
who couldn't comprehend why it was that they had to check the cooker five hundred times in succession; big-fisted brawlers
who assumed foetal positions on the floor; fiery entrepreneurs doused by overwhelming uncertainty. Men of this stripe went
mad the same way that they got cancers or arteriosclerosis: blindly, ignorantly, the absent fathers of their own, growing
maladies – 'I'm just a little short of breath', 'They're only very quiet voices' – until the skin of their denial was stretched
so taut it ripped apart.

She tried to strike up a conversation with the cabbie as they turned up Lisson Grove. 'Have you got any special plans for
the holiday?'

'Very low-key, love, dead quiet, me and my old people, maybe my sister and her lot,' he began plausibly enough, then trailed
off into 'I'll haveta slaughter the fucking meter … Can't afford it … Serve it up to that fucking cunt of a lawyer,'
under his laboured breath.

Jane tried again as they belted past the zoo. 'Will you be working much?'

'Maybe,' he sighed. 'I might go out if I can be bothered,' running down into 'If you go into the forbidden zone and start
diggin' abaht … well… what can you expect?'

As the cab chuffed up Primrose Hill, its headlights and foglamps carving a tunnel through the darkness, Jane decided she ought
to do more. The man was driving a runaway train – and the points were welded up ahead.
My own Christmas, well, not so bad. On the
day I'll go out to Hertfordshire and see Mother. Amazing, her resilience,
her good humour. My God! It would be vaguely insulting if it weren't
such a relief, only she could ingratiate herself with the staff in that dreadful
home, charm them into caring for her, giving her treats, petting her. For
the rest, silence or good music, not much food, a lot of solitude. Walks on
the Heath, the time to think while others … well, often fall apart. Not
so bad, not so bad at all. Being queer and self-sufficient is the best present
at this season.

The cab gargled round the bend by the Washington pub and into England's Lane. 'Which one, love?' he snapped.

'Up here on the left, please, driver, by that shop, Dolce Vita.' Jane summoned herself, grasped the handle of the bag, backed
out of the door pulling it after her. On the pavement she sorted through her purse and put three cashpoint-ironed twenties
together with one of her cards.
Best be straightforward, the only approach that ever
works.
'Here's a little extra,' she said, crumpling the bundle into his waiting palm, 'and also my card – don't be put off by the
title, I think I might be able to help you.'

'Ta, love.' He didn't even look at it. 'Receipt?'

'No, thank you' – he made to drive away – 'and merry Christmas, driver.' But the cab was ten yards off already, hidden by
a net curtain of drizzle and moving with the heavy inertia of a bad dream.

Dave Rudman looked at the card half an hour later. After he'd parked the cab up in Agincourt Road, Gospel Oak. After he'd
clamped on the steering lock and taken out the radio. After he'd unlocked the door and pushed the chewed-up pile of loan offers
and credit-card teasers across the sad mat. After he'd padded up the bare stairs and into the barer bedroom. After he'd dumped
his coin holder and his cash bag on the table by the window and stripped to his rancid pants. After he'd swigged from the
bottle, swallowed the pills and slumped across the unmade bed. He looked at it in the glow from the street lamp and read DR
JANE BERNAL, FRCPSYCH, CONSULTANT, PSYCHIATRY DEPARTMENT, HEATH HOSPITAL. He contemplated the oblong of pasteboard for long
seconds, then he shredded it deliberately with his sore fingers, a tatter of quick and cuticle. Then he threw the wad towards
the radiator and heard it disintegrate with his hurting ears, each little piece falling to the dusty carpet. Then he twisted
and fell across the bed, and, raising one hand above his head, slowly and methodically began to bludgeon it into the pillows,
as if it were a peg and his fist an unfeeling mallet.

3

The Geezer

SEP 509-10 AD

Am iz shaypd lyke a feetus, she intoned, coz í iz 1. According to Effi, Ham was the aborted child of the Mutha, an ancient
warrior queen of the giants, who leaped from island to island across the archipelago of Ing, pursued by her treacherous enemies.
Fearing herself about to be caught, the Mutha sucked seawater into her vagina as an abortifacient, then squatted in the Great
Lagoon and voided herself of Ham. When her pursuers saw the foetus, they were terrified, because it was an abomination – part
moto and part human – and so they fled. The Mutha stayed and revived the corpse of her child, revived it so successfully that
it grew and grew until it became an island. And on this island a second race of smaller giants sprang up, who, over years,
then decades and finally centuries, gradually separated themselves into the two species of men and motos. Í woz so slo, Effi
said, vat vares awlways a bí uv moto inna Amster, anna bí uv Amster inna moto. Together they cultivated Ham, establishing
the fields for wheatie and the orchards for fruit, the woodlands for moto foraging and the saltings for samphire. These giants
were prodigious climbers – for at that time there were many more stacks in the Great Lagoon and they were far higher. The
islanders of Ham were thus rich in seafowl and moto oil, and their home was a veritable Arcadia. The giants used brick, crete
and yok from the zones to build their castles, the five towers, which guarded the island from covetous invaders. They also
built the groynes to protect Ham's coastline from the eroding sea. They planted the blisterweed that grew along the shoreline.
An vay uzed vair bare bluddë ands 2 do í, Effi said, closing her own bony fist and shaking it in front of the little boy's
wondering eyes. Vay wur vat bluddë strong an ard.

Sadly, with each successive generation the giants grew smaller in stature, their arts declined, and their ambitions shrank.
Where once they had been frantic rappers, spinning word pictures of great solidity and duration out of the island's mist,
now all poetry deserted them. Where once they could lift huge rocks and uproot mighty trees, now they could barely summon
the strength to cultivate their meagre fields. They became subjects of the island – rather than its lawds and luvvies. In
time the Lawyer of Chil's Hack came among them, supplanting their native mushers and replacing them with the Drivers of the
PCO, brought from London in the far north.

The mushers had been ordinary Hamsters – dads with kiddies of their own. The Drivers were queers – men who had no desire to
father children. Such a strange inclination, which, if known at all on Ham, was suppressed, made these dävines still more
alien and imposing to the simple peasants.

If little Sy was disposed to give any credence to his mother's tales, then it was only a semi-belief. For every fourth day
Changeover would come, and he'd be sent across the stream with his cousins to stop at the daddies' gaffs. Here a rigid Dävinanity
held sway: the runs and the points were ceaselessly called over whenever the dads were not at work or amusing themselves with
the opares. For little Symun – as much as for the other kids, who were not so exposed to the ancient lore – their mummies'
influence was eclipsed entirely. It was as if when they were with their daddies the kids were other people altogether, with
different natures, different likes, different fares even. Yet none more so than Symun, because, while the other kids ran to
their daddies at Changeover, he had no dad of his own. Peet Dévúsh had fallen from the Sentrul Stac to his death before his
only son was born, so Symun was the lad of all the dads, making him still more of a daddies' boy when he was under their care
and control.

Although the last Driver to be dropped off on Ham had been picked up five years before Symun was born, his influence remained
strong among the dads. The most dävine among them would not talk or look at the womenfolk, and avowed that they did not even
recognize the mummies of their own kids. Had these fanatics prevailed, they would have wrapped all the mummies up in their
cloakyfings from top to toe. If the dads were to be believed – especially the two or three of them who could read – the Book
was all the understanding any Hamster needed of anything. The Book stood outside of the seasons and of the years. What Dave
had described he had also foretold, and what he had seen in his own era would come again – for it had never truly gone. Dave's
New London was all around them, trapped in the zones and the reef, a hidden yet still tangible world. Just as the roots of
the herb pilewort resembled piles and so were good for the treatment of this malady, so the Daveworks were tiny pictures
and fragmented legends of a transcendent city of Dave – Dave the Dad and Carl the Lost Boy – that had been deposited there,
by Dave, at the MadeinChina. The problem for the Hamsters was not to build a New London but only to prove themselves worthy
of realizing it by their Knowledge.

In the time of the last Driver all Daveworks had been rejected as toyist, and the practice of garlanding the gaffs, wayside
shrines, the island's pedalo – and indeed themselves – with the plastic amulets had been forbidden. The mummies – who were,
of course, denied the rituals of the Shelter – continued to believe in the ancient lore. Their Knowledge was of the Mutha,
not Chelle, and of the lost Ham, rather than the Lost Boy. Denied their kids for half of each blob, they cleaved to the motos,
and they looked to the knee woman and her anointing for their absolution.

As the years passed the less dävine of the dads allowed their faith, once more, to become softened by their temperate and
isolate home. Even the Guvnor, Dave Brudi, began to speculate on such things. In his own youth he had travelled to Chil, and
he told Symun that the giants' ruins were greater in their density here on Ham than in any other part of Ing; and, try as
he might, he could not help but give credence to the legend that this was because the Book had been found, as he put it, rì
ear on Am.

Symun Dévúsh grew to dadhood. He was a charismatic young bloke, attractive to both sexes – taller than his peers, finer boned,
more open of countenance. His fingers were quick and dextrous, his eyes blue and dancing. His light beard was golden and curly,
while the Hamsters' barnets were mostly a lank, dun brown. If there had been any reflective surface on Ham besides still water
and dull irony, Symun might have been vain; as it was, he was aware of his appeal to others, without knowing precisely what
it consisted of. Although he was popular with his posse and a good holder of the Book, there could never be any question of
Symun reaching the first cab of the Shelter. He was an orphan, his mummy the knee woman. This meant that, unlike his best
mate, Fred Ridmun, he was destined to be always a waver-upper, never the fare.

The autumn he and Fred turned fourteen, the two lads changed over for the last time and took their permanent place in the
dads' gaffs. Then a peculiar thing happened to Sy. While he was still growing up he had never thought to question any of the
kids about what they felt at Changeover – mummytime was for mummies, daddy time for daddies. He knew that, like him, they
left their mummyselves on the east bank of the stream and that even their most recent memories of cuddleup and snuggledown
were as half-remembered dreams.

Yet, when he changed over for the last time Symun Deviish took his mummyself with him – not entire but enough of it for him
to feel marked out from the other Hamstermen. Unlike Fred, Sy couldn't prevent himself from looking at the mummies and kids
when he saw them together – he even had eyes for the old boilers. Fred noticed it and teased him, saying, If U wanna lookit
byrds, vares plenny uv opares on vis syde uv ve streem. Although Sy became more circumspect, Effi noticed his gaze as well,
and when she returned it, Sy saw in turn that she knew what had happened, she understood what she had done by seeding his
fertile imagination with such potent lore. She smiled at him often and strangely. However, he couldn't detect much love in
these smiles, only fear.

And Fred called back:

– Yeah, orlrì, but nó 2 fa.

– Eye ear yer, Symun called back, while to himself he said, Sillë gí.

He shouldered his mattock and pushed his way between two banks of pricklebush that scratched him through his shirt. It was
an overcast day in SEP and a year since Symun's Changeover. Foggy rags snagged at the soaking foliage and the screenwasher
was on. This was good weather for gathering building material, the soil loose and yielding. If they found a pile of brickwork,
beat back the undergrowth, then wedged and wielded their mattocks efficiently, the morta would crumble away and the individual
bricks tumble from the earth – Dave's bounty for the young dads of Ham.

At Council that first tariff the five young dads had asked if they could go to the edge of the Ferbiddun Zön and fetch some
brick to repair the pedalo gaff. It took most of the rest of the tariff for consensus to emerge, for each of the nine older
dads had a view, and they all had tremendous affection for the sound of their own voices. There were moto gibbets to be built,
fowling equipment to be repaired, the pedalo needed caulking – however, eventually permission was given. It mattered that
it was Fred Ridmun's idea. The whole community understood that despite Fred's youth he would be the new Guvnor once Dave Brudi
was dead, and the way the old dad retched and hawked blood that couldn't be far off. It was an important liberty for the five
to be alone together for a shift. In the next year duty would bear down still more heavily upon them. Caff Funch, old Benni's
daughter, was already knocked up by Fred – more of them would become dads soon enough. Meanwhile the older generation was
passing into the shadows. Ham, as was the way every thirty years or so, stood on the cusp.

The posse had worked hard and soon amassed sufficient brick, so Sy's desire to press further into the zone wasn't governed
by any necessity. The impulse puzzled him – he felt the place's aura as strongly as any of his companions did – perhaps even
more. He had been among the most enthusiastic of the Hamsters when the bounds of the zone had been beaten that buddout. He
had lashed at the sawleaf and fireweed with such frenzy that the granddads had muttered among themselves: Eye rekkun ees earin
Dave on iz interkom. Now, the impulse to go further in, further than he had ever ventured before, was provoked as much by
the need to be alone with his secret mummyness as by any thought of what he might find there.

Beyond the clearing in which Symun found himself the true zone began. The yellow-flowering pricklebush was the plant of the
zone margin; in the interior it ceded to glossy-leafed rhodies that clambered over the hypogean brickwork, cracking it with
their woody roots. These dense shrubs had enormous white flowers, exuding a heady aroma that kept the insects away from the
zone. In turn, there was nothing for the landfowl to eat – not that there were many of these on Ham anyway, certainly compared
to Chil or the rest of Ing. Only handfuls of toms and bobs nested on the island, together with the ubiquitous flying rats.

An occasional green ringneck whirred over Symun's head, and he could hear, higher up in the clouds, the unceasing lament of
the gulls. At ground level the zone was eerily quiet – even the voices of his mates, scant paces away, sounded muffled and
distant. The motos also found rhodies unpalatable, while in the very heart of the zone there were Utrees poisonous to them.
The granddads also claimed that the rats – which the motos kept down elsewhere on Ham – had colonies deep in the zone, vast
and labyrinthine nests from which they would emerge to gnaw to the bone any Hamster fool enough to breach taboo. Symun doubted
this – what could such rat colonies live on? There was no wheatie hereabouts, and, while gulls nested on the rocky bluffs
of the eastern shore, even massed rats were no match for aggressive oilgulls and blackwings. Besides, posses of Hamstermen
often went along these bluffs, netting prettybeaks in season; if there were rats there he would have seen them for himself.
No, the rat colonies were intended to frighten off anyone brave or foolhardy enough to penetrate too far into the zone; they
were part of the mystique of the place.