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Will Self

The Book of Dave

For Luther

and with thanks to

Harry Harris and Nick Papadimitriou

I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she

absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding

sheet and her worms to fill in the graves, and her grass to cover it

pitifully up, adding flowers — as an unknown hand added them to

the grave of Nero.

Edward Thomas, The South Country

~ ~ ~

The Book of Dave

1.  The Hack's Party: JUN 523 AD

Carl Dévúsh, spindle-shanked, bleach-blond, lampburnt, twelve years old, kicked up buff puffs of sand with his bare feet as he scampered along the path from the manor. Although it was still early in the first tariff, the foglamp had already bored through the cloud and boiled the dew off the island. As he gained height and looked back over his shoulder, Carl saw first the homely notch of Manna Bä, then the shrub-choked slopes of the Gayt rising up beyond it. The sea mist had retreated offshore, where it hovered, a white-grey bank merging with the blue screen above. Wot if Eye woz up vair, Carl thought, up vair lyke ve Flyin I? He put himself in this lofty perspective and saw Ham, floating like a water beetle, thrusting out angled legs of grey stone deep into the placid waters of its ultramarine lagoon. The waters intensified the beetle island's myriad greens: its golden wheatie crop, its purple, blue and mauve flowering buddy spike, its yellowy banks of pricklebush and its feathery stands of fireweed.

The whole lustrous shell was picked out by a palisade of blisterweed, the lacy umbels of which trimmed the entire shoreline.

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.