Excerpt of The Book of Dave by Will Self
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I
The Hack’s Party
JUN 523 AD*
* Dating is from the purported discovery of the Book of Dave.
Carl De´vu´sh, 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 Ba¨, 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 buddyspike, 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 Zo¨n.
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.
Carl remembered how this ground had been in buddout, each
rip mounded with a mixture of moto dung, seaweed, birdshit and
roof straw. The motos had deftly laid their own fresh dung, but the
other ingredients had to be dug from the byres, scraped from the
rocks and gathered from the shore by the older girls and opares.
Next the mummies laboriously dragged truckle after truckle of the
mixture up from the manor, before spreading and digging it into
the earth with their mattocks. There were no wheels on Ham –
save for symbols of them – and therefore no cars or vans either, so
the Hamsterwomen tilled the long rips themselves – a team of six
yoked to the island’s sole plough, with its heavy irony share. Now
the ripening wheatie stood as high as his knees, and it looked as if it would be
a good crop this year – not that Carl would necessarily
be there to see the mummies grind it under the autumn foglamp,
their bare breasts nuzzling the hot stone of their querns as they
bent sweatily to the graft.
– Ware, guv, said Billi Brudi, catching Carl’s eye as they reached
the linchet bordering the next rip and together stepped over it.
Excerpted from The Book of Dave
by Will Self Copyright © 2006 by Will Self. Excerpted by
permission of Bloomsbury Press (USA). All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
