by Will Self
They had caught up again with the warden and his party. This hunched fony, who averted his face from all and ceaselessly grovelled, was telling the toffs: Be not too frettened or afeared, your lawdships, the fings you are about to see are all Dave's critturs juss lyke uz. He withdrew a prodigious bunch of keys from the skirt of his leather carcoat and, unlocking an irony door, ushered them in with great ceremony. From a bracket on a wall the warden took a guttering torch, and then he led them on into the darkness. In the first chamber they came to a coloured dad who was spread out on the straw. He was quite naked and of immense size. Viss fella iz an Eeefeeopp chavage, my lawds, the warden explained, brought here by ferry froo mennë lands. Eees so chavage vat Eyev putte im in fettas coz giwen arf a chanz eed rip yer éds orf! The luvvies gasped and drew back in the way the warden clearly desired. Antonë, however, only whispered in Carl's ear: Arrant nonsense. It is but a coloured chav bought in the market like any other. Granted, he is of prodigious extent, but this our 'ahem' guide has sought to exaggerate. Look closely, all the articles in his cell have been made small – the chair, the table, even the tincan – so as to enhance his stature.
So it was with all of the so-called freaks: the Hairydad, the Monkeydad, the wattled mummy, the Pyrenean Twins – in each case Antonë sought to bring these oddities within the compass of comprehensibility. An nah, the warden cried, Eyev sayvd mì bess til lars. Viss … viss fing – he was lost for words – az bin wiv uss onlë a short wyl but iss gotta B ve stranjist bluddë creetur imajinobobble. nunnuvuz can figga aht wot í iz – dad aw beeste, reel aw – he shuddered – toyist. Í az ve aspekk ov a gyant bäcön, but, az U wil C, mì nöbbul lawds an luvvies, í speeks wiv ve voys uvva –
Carl was no longer listening. He shouldered his way between the toffs, who stood honking on their clove balls, and there, behind bars, his flanks, his tank, his shoulders deeply scored with bloody welts, his jonckheeres tattered with some awful fungus, one of his eyes a bloody mess, and a disturbing nappy wrapped around his hindquarters, was Tyga.
Carl pressed his face between the bars and, weeping, cried out:
– Tyga, O paw Tyga!
The moto shuffled over to him, lisping:
– Ithat oo, Cawl? Ithat oo? Eye wanna go oam nah. Eye wanna go oam 2 Am.
At third tariff, following a mournful curry eaten alone in the sumptuous dining room of Somerset House, Antonë and Carl were back in their own chamber when they heard the sounds of a limmo arriving in the courtyard below. Shortly afterwards, and not proceeded by fony, gaffer or retinue of any sort, the Lawyer of Blunt came to them, sliding diffidently through the door. He was a smallish dad, the skin stretched tight on his close-cropped head. His cheekbones were sharp, his green eyes deeply recessed and fiercely acute. His small hands fidgeted at a bundle of signets and seals that hung on a chain from his neck. His threads were bespoke – yet hardly sumptuous. On receiving him, Antonë and Carl fell to their knees crying, Where to, guv? but he waved for them to rise, stuttering: P-please, my d-dear blokes, no such deference is required, truly – I beseech you.
While Carl sat, sunk in his own sad thoughts of Tyga and his miserable confinement, the Lawyer and the teacher spoke in hushed tones of weighty matters. From his notebook Antonë produced a brief he had been labouring on, the essence of which was a petition requesting information on the fate of Symun Dévúsh. I understand and appreciate your strategy, the Lawyer said; the CSA can prevent no lad from knowing his own dad, no more than any dad be kept from his lad. This much is sacrosanct. Such a course will alert both the King and the PCO to our intentions, yet it may well be that they would prefer to reach a private accommodation – for if we cry it abroad through standards and decauxs it could spark rebellion. To treat with those lawds and commonfolk who oppose the Breakup and the Changeover would be no less than they have done hitherto, and such pragmatism might commend itself to our purposes if it allowed for – and here he sighed deeply – the return of my poor wife from her exile, and the pardon of yourself, Antonë Böm, and your young companion.
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.
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 fa
ce 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.
14
Getting Out from Behind the Wheel
February 2003
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.