The Book of Dave (41 page)

'That's right, a book.' Dave looked around at the gloomy room, which was dominated by an enormous duct running across the
ceiling, the housing of which was covered by flaking tinfoil. A decade-old flyer hung from bashed chipboard by yellowing tape,
proclaiming DON'T DIE OF IGNORANCE. The room was somewhere deep in the basement of St Mungo's, a rundown hospital off the
Tottenham Court Road.

This wasn't his and Bohm's first session together – they'd had one up at the Halliwick in Friern Barnet, another down at King's
on Denmark Hill. Bohm told Dave that he was seeing him 'on an unofficial basis, it's very much a personal thing between me
and Zack Busner', and as the psychiatrist took a series of locum positions around the city, his patient was required to follow.
This was no hardship for Dave, who had resumed cabbing as gently as possible, only going out for a couple of hours during
the off-peak. He used his weekly sessions as a low-anxiety conduit, picking up fares along the way as he wended to the next
rendezvous with the mobile shrink.

'When I was … well, y'know, Tone, when I'd lost it,' Dave said, 'I thought there was this book inside me, this book I'd
written … but now I dunno – I dunno.'

'We've talked about your childhood,' Bohm continued, 'your relationships, your work. I like to think we've built up some trust
between us.' He smiled, and his white goatee flicked like a hairy digit. Dave smiled too – anyone with such preposterous facial
hair could hardly be malevolent. 'When Doctor, ah, Fanning, prescribed Seroxat for you in 2001 I'm sure he did what he felt
was the right thing. However, the facts are that a small minority of patients have bad reactions to the drug – psychoses even.
Your book dates from this period. If we can somehow dig it up from your unconscious and, so to speak, read it together, I
think it would resolve a lot of your issues.'

Each of these measured remarks had been ticked off by Bohm, one plump finger pulling back the others. He now held the annotated
hand aloft. 'Goodbye until next week,' he said, 'when we'll be meeting' – he consulted a fat little Filofax opened on his
hefty thigh – 'at the Bethesda in Bermondsey.'

Dig up the book. Dig it up – search for it in the scrubby desert of his own mind. On the
poxy little colour telly
in the corner of his room, Dave Rudman saw clip after clip, all featuring the same stock characters: UN Inspectors in short-sleeved
shirts and sweat-soaked jackets; Baathist apparatchiks in tan fatigues; to one side a gnarled old Bedouin in a
dirty white cloakyfing.
Behind them, on a plain of gravel that faded to a wavering horizon, stood corrugated-iron sheds and hunks of industrial equipment
– hoppers, conveyor belts, ducts – all of them streaked with rust and dust. A mechanical digger petted some sand, arid wind
plucked at the corners of the Inspectors' clipboards, riffling the computer printouts.
Hard to think of them
manufacturing anything there .
. .
Don't look like they could turn out a
bloody widget, let alone nuclear-bloody-weapons
… Yet Dave could see, in this taut confrontation, a sinister evocation of his own troubled life.
Buried inside me … all that sickening guff
…
poisonous
thoughts .
. .
got to dig it up
…

What was he doing with Phyllis? Not that they'd
actually done
anything together. A couple of cuddles on the duffed-up sofa in Dave's flat, a chaste kiss on parting – no tongues. Phyllis
wouldn't even invite him out to her place, which was
in the sticks, out by
Ongar
…
off the edge of the world …
Instead she saw him in Gospel Oak, after visits to Steve in the hospital. Or else Dave drove into town and ranked up in Bow
Street. Phyllis worked in Choufleur, a vegetarian restaurant on Russell Street, and, despite the fact that she looked
even freakier
in her voluminous smock and blue-striped apron, a mushroom-cloud hat perched on her curls, Dave couldn't help but recognize
the feeling in his chest when she came out from the back entrance to share a B & H with him by the bins as one of
affection, that's it… affection .
. .

Slowly, methodically, Phyllis invested what spare affection she had in pushing the cabbie back into the mainstream of life.
She persuaded him to contact Cohen, his ex-lawyer, and to begin to probe out the situation with Carl. She helped him to amalgamate
his debts, and by taking a new mortgage on the little flat get enough money to start repaying them. Together they wrote letters
to the County Court, asking for fresh reports, suggesting that his mental breakdown be taken into consideration. They paid
off his arrears and then appealed to the Child Support Agency for a reduction in payments. Then they picked up his paper trail,
finding anomalous things, like a bill from a Colindale printer for £9,750. It was dated December of the previous year and
had been paid. Along the bottom was stamped: RUSH JOB.

The year whimpered to its end. One day Dave Rudman was by the lights at the top of Lower Regent Street. Limos stretched out
beside the Fairway while buses bent around it. First Dave stared at a man holding a sign for a GIANT GOLF SALE. Then he looked
at a souvenir stall flogging miniature cabs with Union Jack decals, figurines of tit-headed coppers and tiny red model phone
boxes …
toyist crap.
Finally, he peered up through the windscreen of the Fairway at the huge electronic signboards covering the buildings of Piccadilly
Circus. One showed the Circus itself – the teeming crowds, the enmeshed traffic. Then, without warning, water began to flood
between the buildings, a tidal bore that came surging along the rivers of light. Dave was shocked – what could this apocalyptic
vision be selling? Then the flooded concourse wavered, fragmented and was replaced by a slogan: DASANI MINERAL WATER, A NEW WAVE is COMING.

'Excuse me? Excuse me?' The fare was an elderly priest and he wanted to go to Mill Hill. 'St Joseph's College, d'you know
it?' Dave did. Who could miss it, with its strange painted bust of Thomas More out front, flesh tones as realistic as those
of a
showroom dummy?
The fare was ill disposed to chat – and that suited Dave fine. He drove up the long, straight thoroughfare from Marble Arch.
Then, as the cab passed through Kilburn and Cricklewood, then over the North Circular to Colindale, it began to come back
to him. Dropping off the fare at the College, he made change in a cursory fashion, unconcerned by the nugatory tip. Dave drove
along the Ridgeway to the Institute and, parking up, retraced his footsteps of the previous year.

I used to come up here all the time
…
all the time
…
strange to forget
it …
He looked across the dark valley towards Hampstead.
Yeah
… came here to look over there .
. .
over there where he was
…
where
he is …
Dave found himself on his knees, the damp earth blotting into his jeans. Then it returned to him.

Phyllis took the call on the payphone that was between the kitchen and the toilets. She'd never got the hang of mobiles. 'Phyl,'
he said, sounding out of breath, shocked, 'it's Dave.'

'Alright, Dave, you sound like something bad's happened.'

'Well … well, it has … but a while back … Phyllis– Phyl, I've found it … I've found the book … It's not-not
in me, Phyl – it's in the ground, a real bloody book, buried. Fucking buried.'

11

The Forbidden Zone

Kipper 522 AD

When he saw one come lumbering through the woodland towards him, he took off his eyeglasses and walked swiftly, circumventing
its blurred bulk. To touch one of the grotesque anomalies would have caused him such intense revulsion that he feared he would
vomit up his curry, should the motos, not sensing his disquiet, cluster about to give him a nuzzle; food, like as not, both
cooked in and flavoured with their own oil.

Antonë Böm did become accustomed to the motos in time – and accustomed also to the oddities of the remote community to which
he had been exiled. In coming to love Ham and the Hamsters, Böm was, in part, reconciled to that bit of himself that had been
isolated during the Changeovers of his own childhood.

As a kid Tonë Böm had run and jumped and played with the others. His dad was a mechanic at the bus garage in Stockwell, responsible
for the jeejees that drew the lumbering vehicles through the London streets. Surrounding the dads' block where Böm senior
lived were the market gardens of Clapham, which provided London with its fruit and vegetables. Tonë's mum, San, lived in a
mummies' block on Brixton Hill, and on Changeover day he'd join the lines of children winding through the orchards back to
their dads' gaffs. The older kids carried the little ones when they tired and comforted them when they cried – for in London
Changeover came early. When he was small, Tonë, like the rest, soon forgot mummy stuff and his mummyself after the Changeover.
Yet as he grew older the consciousness of the different lad he was with his other parent stayed with him, shadowing his mind
like a waking dream.

Böm spoke of this to his mates – but they either gave him very odd looks or suggested, in no uncertain terms, that he should
speak to a Driver. While only in their early teens, these lads already had eyes for the opares, and they were keen to become
dads in their own right. This prospect did not enthuse Tone at all. He realized he must be queer.

Antonë Böm grew into a plump, shambling young man, quick of eye although slow of speech. His amiable doughy features bore
the impress of the pox – which was in nowise unusual for a modern Londoner. He guarded his quizzical, inner eye fiercely,
for always he saw the mummies' world in terms of the daddies', the daddies' in terms of the mummies'. He knew that many others
did as well; he could detect it behind their closed faces. Yet they had no way to speak of such things, for they were all
– dads, mums and queers alike – bound into the immemorial Wheel of Dävinanity, which, with its rituals and precepts, circumscribed
their conduct and governed their inmost thoughts from when they arose at first tariff until they lay down as the foglamp dipped.

From when he was very young, Böm displayed the memory and the fixity of mind needed to become a Driver. His mum wanted him
to – so did his dad. At nineteen he applied to the PCO and was accepted. Much of a Driver's apprenticeship consisted of calling
over in the taxi schools, under the watchful mirrors of fiercely disciplinarian Examiners. The Knowledge Boys also patrolled
the streets in their scarlet waterproof robes. They went out in all weathers to memorize such parts of the city as had already
been built, and to consult with those Inspectors who were marking out the dävine plan for the next district of New London
to be erected.

It was an exciting time to be a Knowledge Boy abroad in the city. Those structures deemed by the PCO to be most integral to
New London – and which had been inaugurated at the accession of the King's dad, Dave II, almost forty years before – were
now nearing completion. The great stations of King's Cross, Charing Cross, Victoria and Waterloo. The Hilton Hotel and the
Houses of Parliament. The Shelters of St Paul's and Westminster Abbey. The NatWest Tower, the Lloyd's Building, the Gherkin
and the very Wheel itself – mighty edifices that together expressed the full temporal compass of the dävine revelation.

However, in his second year of doing the Knowledge, when his appearances had been scheduled, Böm had a crisis. It was not
one of faith – he still heard Dave over the intercom, albeit indistinctly. It was rather the PCO and the dogma it promulgated
from which he detached. He looked at his fellow Knowledge Boys and saw in them only chellish vanity and the desire to exert
power. He felt his mummyself recoiling from the brutal inequalities of London life; which meant that while the lawyers, the
guildsmen and the Inspectorate lived a life of opulence and ease, there were beggars starving in the streets of Covent Garden.

Böm abandoned the PCO and for a time apprenticed himself to a surgeon in Old Street, who practised at the sign of the Twisted
Spine. He providentially discovered that his clumsiness deserted him when it came to the furious, bloody business of the operations.
The more agitated the patients became – as their limbs were bound with cloth strips and the surgeon's mate sharpened his knives
and saws – the calmer Tonë was. His gaffer said he had the makings of a great surgeon in his own right, but Böm was discouraged
by the palpable lack of success their ministrations had. Even a simple operation – such as removing a stone, or amputating
a septic finger – would leave three out of four patients dead within tariffs.

Böm left the surgeon and joined the City of London School as an assistant teacher. He found some solace in his contact with
lads whose natures were not, as yet, entirely set in the dävist orthodoxy. All this time he continued to live in a young queers'
dormitory, keeping himself aloof from their whoring, betting and boozing. He tried also to ignore their rowdy persecution
of the Jocks, the Taffies and the Micks – whichever minorities, in short, they could attack sure in the support of the PCO.
It was a coarse and uncongenial environment for a young man with an inquiring mind; however, without a patron Böm had no means
of escaping it. The best he might hope for would be to use his position as a means of seeking employ in a lawyerly household.

It was at the school that Böm came into contact with the teachings of the Geezer. Another assistant, queer like himself, had
a brother who was imprisoned in the Tower, and from this unlikely source came the message Antonë had, without knowing it,
been waiting for ever since his last Changeover: the confirmation that he was not alone.

The flyers met in a tiny room above the Whyte Bair boozer off Broadwick Street. The landlawd thought they were a group of
literary blokes engaged in the compilation of a volume of dävine raps extolling the unearthly beauty and unutterable pathos
of the Lost Boy. In truth, they earnestly studied the words of the Geezer, smuggled out from the gaol on scraps of A4, while
endeavouring to contact mummies who might be susceptible to this new faith, which preached the dissolution of the Breakup
and direct communication with Dave himself.

For two years their little cab met together to call over the tantalizing fragments of the new Book, to speak of their troubles,
to relay their successes and commiserate in their failures to find other potential recusants. None of them ever believed it
would last, for the PCO had informants in every place of work, every gaff, every takeaway and boozer. It was only a matter
of time. When the seeseeteevee men came to his dormitory in the dead of night, Antonë Böm knew they were there for him. The
only surprise was the lightness with which he was punished. He was held in solitary confinement in the Tower a few blobs.
Then he was branded on the thigh, rather than on the brow, with the 'F' for flyer. Finally, he was sent forth from the city
more as a traveller than as an exile.

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.

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.