by Will Self
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.
He screamed and clawed at his own flesh. Heedless of the blisterweed, he charged straight into the lagoon and plunged his head beneath the water. You touch you – me touch never! he cried. Effi screamed as well and covered her face with her cloakyfing, yet Böm was torn between horror and hilarity; for it had dawned on him that the Driver was not merely careful – as any Driver must be – to avoid contact with a mummy, but terrified to the point of revulsion. The black crow was now dipping his head in a frenzy, the seawater flowing in glaucous cords from his beard and hair.
Eventually, while Effi faded into the woodland, Böm carefully negotiated the blisterweed, waded into the shallows and assisted the Driver back to the shore. The incident was never spoken of again, and this became part of the compact between them: the Driver confined himself still more to the Shelter, to leading the dads and lads in the calling over, to his interference in their Council; while Böm was free to wander the island and commune with the Hamsterwomen.
Effi Dévúsh had borne the brunt of the community's displeasure after the Geezer was deposed. Her grandson, Carl, was the last infant she had been allowed to anoint. Although she still acted as knee woman, as she grew older her skills – which had only ever been rudimentary – became unequal to the task. Apprenticed surgeon or not, of their own accord the Hamsterwomen would never have let Böm be present at a birth. It was he who heard Bella Funch's cries when her baby was being born breech. He ran full tilt into the mummies' gaff where she lay. Eye can elp! he cried. Bleev me, pleez, Eye no wot 2 dú! He did – he eased, coaxed, manipulated and finally yanked the bloody mite into the world. Then he stitched Bella up with
neat loops of moto sinew, before applying a poultice of curried Sphagnum. She survived – and so did the baby.
It took Böm several more years to gain the mummies' trust, and when he did, he mostly regretted it, for it made a torture garden of his imagined Arcadia. When Böm had arrived, he'd thought the island an idyllic place, for, despite its minatory Driver, Ham was far enough from London for the grip of the PCO to be slack. He understood now that the palisade of blisterweed that guarded the little island wreathed the minds of the Hamsters as well. Böm had seen the bruises and welts on the mummies, their scratched faces and wrists twisted into floppy uselessness. No dad or lad ever spoke of such things – it was as if they could not even recognize that it was they who had done them.
Even so, as the full truth began to come out in dribs and drabs – little gushes of pained recollection – it was only as he had sadly suspected. The beatings and rapes, the dads queuing up to take young opares just changed over, the casual clouts and blows – the dark, mummy-hating underbelly of Dävinanity that Antonë Böm could now recall in the whimpers of his own mummy, as she lay on her sofabed, recúperaytin – as she put it – after another visit from Antonë's own dad.
The secret Knowledge of the Hamsterwomen, which had withstood the Driver's dismal reign by sinking beneath the current of their lives, ran deep within Caff Ridmun. She remembered the time of the Geezer, and lest she ever forget she had only to look into Carl's restless eyes to recall that day at the curryings, the questing hand, the fingertips' progress from mole to mole.
So Caff poured all the love she had into Carl. She snuck into the woods and found him out with Gorj. Lifting the little boy down from the moto's neck, she would then spend whole tariffs with him, walking and talking, reminding him of who the mummies were – that they were not mere chavs, leased to them by Dave in order to do the daddies' bidding, but feeling, hurting fares. Caff told Carl he should never forget his own mummy when the motorage came upon him, and the daddies urged him on, and the young opares cowered in the byres.
When Carl was seven, the summer when Changeover became irrevocable, and for half of every blob he would have to be with the daddies, Caff told him the truth concerning his real dad. Ee woz a grayt dad, she said to the boy, ee spoak wiv Dave an Dave toal im 2 stop alluv vis malarkë, vis mummityme an daddityme, vis Chaynjova. U muss nevah ferget í, nevah. Ear tayk vese. She gave him a necklace of Daveworks that he could hang beneath his T-shirt, special talismans to remind him of the unity of mummies and daddies, before their painful division by the PCO.
Antonë Böm was permitted by the Driver only to teach the very phonic of the Book to the lads of Ham. There were five of them in the school the year that Carl changed over and became old enough to join. Lessons were held in the Shelter during the first tariff. After that the lads had to vacate the small wooden shack so that the dads could do their own calling over. Instruction was by rote: Böm called over the run and the points from the Book, then the lads repeated it in unison. Böm would announce a run he had selected at random: List Four, Run Fifty-Four. Leave by forward Kenton Road, left Cassland Road, right Wick Road, right East Cross Route slip, forward East Cross Route. Then the little Hamsters would mangle it into Mokni: Leev bì forrud Kentun Röd, leff Kasslan Röd, rì Wyc Rod … and so on, until the run was completed. Then it was the points: Burberry Factory, 29 Chatham Place, WE9 … Bubbery Faktri, twennynyn Chá-um Playce, dubbulU ee nyn …
For the first two years that Carl sat at Böm's feet there was only this, monotonous repetition. Then, when Carl's younger stepbrothers joined the class, Böm split them all into two groups. Henceforth the little ones were quizzed on their Knowledge, while Carl and his mates were taught its application. Böm had A2ZS, drawn up by the PCO, which showed New London in all its growing magnificence.
The city the Book described was a perfect circle nineteen clicks across. Every street and most of the significant buildings had been ordained by Dave. Since the Book's discovery by the founding dad of the House of Dave, in the London burb known as Hampstead, court Drivers had laboured to interpret its dävine plan for the city. As each run was deciphered by these phonicists, so it was laid out. Once surveyed, the principal points were built and occupied, many by the Drivers themselves. In these newly founded Knowledge schools the learned queers debated and refined their understanding of the Book, thus ensuring that yet more buildings might be erected.
There were those sceptics who maintained that New London was not only incomplete but quite wrong. That its winding, muddy lanes and narrow, cluttered alleys bore no more relation to the city of Dave than a child's drawing to what it depicts. Worse, that the buildings themselves were mean travesties, unfit to bear the names of the mighty edifices Dave had inscribed on the irony plates of the Book. Still more critical voices noted how it was that as the PCO had grown and grown over the centuries, London – and beyond it Ing – became increasingly burdened by a religious bureaucracy the sole industry of which was its own perpetuation. However, these voices were stifled by the Doctrines and Covenants of the Book: the exactions of the Breakup and the Changeover, which kept the Inglanders riven inside, and so unable to conceive of any purpose beyond the fulfilment of Dave's prophecies.
Besides, who could gainsay the phenomenal growth and burgeoning prosperity of London, and beyond it of all Ing? In the centuries since the discovery of the Book, the vision it presented of a heavenly world of marvels that might be built here, on earth, had acted as a fruitful stimulus to the Inglanders, allowing them to resurrect the glories of past civilizations with apparent ease, and thus outstrip the haphazard advances of other nations. The Jocks, the Taffies, even the Swizz confederacy far across the sea – all remained mired in barbarism, while in Ing the people were subject to the rule of law. Now, when Inglish privateers encountered the longpedalos of the Nords or the ferries of the Franks on the high seas, the foreigners hove to and made tribute. Could there be any doubt that the dävidic line was dävinely ordained to rule Ing – and beyond it the known world?
The Driver of Ham and many others thought not. These zealots tended to a far stricter and more literal reading of the Book; for them its description of New London was of a city that stood outside time and was never to be built by mere chellish daddies. They pointed to the topographical dissimilarity between the London of King Dave and the New London of the Knowledge. They muttered also about the excesses of the court, where Changeover and Breakup were poorly observed – mummies and daddies openly consorting with one another in the pleasure gardens of Green Park and St James's. They spoke through the intercom and asked Dave for a new wave of Dävinanity to sweep across the land. As yet, these fundamentalist Davists had made no open breach with the PCO; instead they sought the remoter regions of the King's realm for their missionary work, places where their rigour and zeal had much toyism to contend with.
None of this had troubled Carl Dévúsh, a young lad marooned at the outermost periphery of the dominion; until, that is, Antonë Böm began his more speculative instruction. The lads had committed to memory the Knowledge, the Letter to the Lost Boy and the Doctrines and Covenants. Nevertheless, the complete Holding of the Knowledge required a fare to be not merely conversant in all elements of the Book but capable of interrelating them. This necessitated the so-called Hypotheticals – rhetorical replies to questions that called upon fares to conceive of what Dave Himself would do in a given situation.
Antonë Böm excelled in the posing of Hypotheticals. He would stand by the ceremonial urn at the end of the Shelter and sling them out to the lads seated at the Driver's table: You're driving up Park Lane and you see a prospective fare struggling over the crash barrier. What do you do? What do you think? Name the points, tell me the run? There would be a surly silence, interrupted only by the irritating noise of scrubby hands scratching tousled heads. Then, invariably, it would be Carl Dévúsh who answered: Sloo ve cab ovah 2 ve rì an syd an C if eel mayk í, guv.
Böm, his wet eyes magnified by his eyeglasses, would bl
ink at Carl. His plump hands would go to his tank and tap it. He'd rock on his heels, a buzzing noise coming from his plump lips. Who, he wondered, was this lad with the merry blue eyes and why was his peasant mind so acute? When the Driver came to shoo the teacher and his class out of the Shelter, it seemed only natural for Böm and Carl to find themselves proceeding apart from the rest. Natural too for Carl to go to the dads and suggest tasks that would take him and the teacher roving over the island. Slowly, in the course of these rambles, the queer and his pupil found each other out – discovering that they shared the same inquisitive bent, the same mummyness sealed away in their male breasts.
It was early autumn, and the Hack's party had been gone from Ham for two months. The booze and fags they'd brought had been used up. The daddies and mummies were working hard, preparing for the kipper. This year there were four motos to be slaughtered, and the Hack had brought many bales of woolly for the mummies to spin. Soon the screenwash and the demister would come, the leaves would whirl down from the trees, and the Hamsters, confined to their gaffs, would turn in on themselves. It was then, in the dark months, when time lay heavy on their idle, lustful hands, that the worst depredations of the daddies occurred, the beatings and roastings, the rapes and the circlefucks.
Böm preferred to have his curry in the old Bulluk house, where the boilers gathered. One night he looked up from his pannikin to see Caff Ridmun and Effi Dévúsh sitting beside him. He blinked back the tears that always gathered in his eyes when he was in the Hamsters' smoky gaffs and peered at them.
– W-wot iz í, mummies? he stammered, sensing that they had something important to divulge.