There was an even more shocking piece of new construction a few paces beyond this: a huge stockade of rough-hewn crinkleleaf stakes had been hammered into the sod. Inside it the bristly backs of the island's entire moto population were ranked up. Carl counted twenty-three motos together with seventeen mopeds. The motos were restive — snorting and butting against their enclosure — yet, as was the creatures' way when afeared, they made no utterance. Alongside this vile pen there stood the stark rectangle of an elongated moto gibbet — far larger even than that which was customary for the autumn slaughter.
As the two returnees watched, a posse of Hamstermen emerged from one of the semis on the daddy side of the wall and, carefully skirting the mummies' side, made their way over to the Shelter. They carried slopping cans of green paint and were under the direction of:
— A Dryva! Carl blurted out.
However, it wasn't the Driver himself— this one was short and dumpy; his robes were cut in the London fashion, his trainers were high and his mirror dangled from a golden rod. As the work posse reached the new Shelter, it was met by more Drivers who came out from inside, together with a large gang of off-islanders — alien chavs, a posse of Chilmen, and the Lawyer of Chil's chaps. Such a swarm of dads Carl had never known to be on Ham before. It was no wonder Salli looked to be starving — they must be eating all the Hamsters' curried preserves.
Then the Hamsters' own Driver appeared. He limped from his semi leaning heavily upon a staff. Set beside the bustling incomers, he was a diminished figure — bent over, his white hair greasy and unkempt. Fred Ridmun, together with Mister Greaves, emerged from the doorway behind him, and, following the Driver towards the gibbet, Fred called out: Peet! Bert! Billi! The lads detached from the milling crowd and came over. Carl had grown up with these three, and, like him, they had suddenly reached dadhood. They carried themselves erect in a sharp jabber of knees and elbows yet from the way they also shuffled their bare feet and spat their gum juice in the dirt, it was clear that this was to be no welcome task.
Carl realized what was going to happen even before the first moto was prodded out from the pen and came waddling across to where the Guvnor, the Hack and the Driver stood. Awluvem, he groaned. Vare gonna slorta awluvem! For once speechless, Antonë gave Carl's shoulder a squeeze. Billi Brudi, who'd been guiding Lyttulmun by his jonckheeres, now kicked the beast on the back of his leading arm, so he sank down and rolled over on the ground. With no preamble Fred Ridmun unsheathed his blade — clearly, this was to be no ritual killing, no joyfully anticipated collision between men and motos. Billi did not kneel to caress the moto — nor did the Guvnor call over the slaughter run; instead he lunged down and plunged the knife in with a savage dig, as if to proclaim by action alone that this was guilty work. Lyttulmun, frightened and in pain, began to thrash about. Tyga, smelling his wallow mate's blood on the breeze, reared up from behind the dyke, and Carl had to tear himself away from the gory spectacle below so as to calm him and get him to lie down again.
When Carl resumed his place at the top of the dyke, Lyttulmun had been tied and dragged across the dusty ground to the gibbet. Here a gang of chavs were straining to winch him up. The next moto had already been selected from the pen, and, as if cowed by Lyttulmun's bellows, she lay submissively, awaiting the Guvnor's blade. One of the London Circuit Drivers came over and turned so that he could watch the abomination die in his mirror. Execrations floated over the wind-smudged wheatie field:
— Bluddë toyist beest! cried one of the blood-spattered chavs beneath the gibbet. Oo duz ee fink ee iz!
Then, quite abruptly, the focus of the action shifted. The Driver struck out with his black arm and screeched: Trap that flyer! Carl followed his quavering finger to where a squat dad had broken from the crowd by the new Shelter and was zigzagging towards the gibbet. Two or three chaps tried in vain to catch the bloke, but in their cumbersome flakjackets, with their railings drawn, they were too clumsy to arrest Gari Funch before he reached the first upright and, with the nimbleness of a true stack-jumper, clambered straight up it.
Gari Funch gained the cross beam and stood upright on it, one foot on each side of the rope from which the dying Lyttulmun hung. Chavs, chaps and Chilmen came running up and made a circle of upturned faces. B4 U kil annuva 1, Gari roared, yaw gonna aff 2 kil me furs! The Drivers and Hamstermen had joined the audience, the former with their backs turned, the latter with their heads bowed. Wivaht ve motos, Gari continued, his fat lips blubbery with emotion, vare aynt no Am ennëwä, so U may az wel tayk me aht inall! Cummon U fukkas — bringiton!
Ees rí, Carl said to Antonë, thass wot ve Dryva wonz, wivaht ve motos vares no Am, an ve PeeSeeO doan wan no Am atall. Carl gathered himself together and stood up on the top of the dyke, fully exposing himself. He took in the whole deranged panorama below: the trapped motos now snorting and lowing in their pen, the saddened Hamsters gathered beneath the gibbet, the steely agents of the PCO. He felt a hatch inside his mind slide open and at long last he heard over the intercom the crackling, unearthly voice of Dave:
— All you have done, the Supreme Driver intoned, all your dad ever did, was to speed the destruction of your beloved island. Be that as it may — you must not blame yourself, my son, for that destruction would have come anyway, sooner or later. You have seen New London! You have witnessed the mighty currents of change that course through its smoky gaffs and muddy alleyways. The Public Carriage Office has no need of motos — nor of the truth. They require only the Book and the Wheel, the Drivers and the Inspectors, the King and his servile lawyers!
The oracular Arpee fell silent — the intercom clicked off. The crowd surrounding the gibbet had caught sight of Carl. At first one or two of the Hamstermen gestured and cried out, then more and more — Drivers, chaps, chavs and Chilmen — turned from Funch to confront this strange apparition. Hearkening to the acclamation, from the bethan gaffs on the near side of the wall, hidden in their cloakyfings, came the mummies of Ham, cowed and terrified. Carl took a deep breath. He needed no intercom to tell him this: that if it hadn't been Dave who so blighted the world, it would've been some other god — Jeebus or Joey or Ali — with his own savage edicts. The only recrimination that Carl allowed himself was to mourn this foolish quest for a dad he'd never known — when right at hand there had always been a bloke who was prepared to be a true father to him. He held out his hand and helped Antonë Böm to stand upright.
— U — U — he struggled to say.
— Eye no, Eye no, Böm replied in comforting Mokni. Eye no.
— U, Uve awlways bin a dad 2 me, Tonë, nah cummon, me öl mayt.
The steady easterly had pushed the cloud up in a massy white bank above the Ferbiddun Zön, so that all of Ham was revealed, a green foetus floating in its amniotic lagoon. It was in bigwatt splendour that the three ill-assorted figures — the slim young dad, the portly queer and the shambling moto — made their way down to the manor and whatever fate awaited them.
16. Made in China: October 2003
Dave Rudman didn't go into town much — and when he did, he took the tube. He walked the six miles from Chipping Ongar to Epping, then got on the train. In mid morning, on a weekday, the tube was the emptiest of places. The ex-cabbie sat alone on the snazzy seats; the rubberized floor at his feet was scattered with flakes of discarded newsprint — the dandruff of current affairs.
With a slappety-clack the train accelerated through sprawling housing estates and satellite towns cluttered with toyist developments — hair-dryer civic centres and filing-tray multi-storey car parks. Slowly at first, then with more and more crashes and bashes, until it reached a crescendo of steel squealing upon steel and threw itself beneath Mile End. The tunnel was at first just cut-and-cover, so that plashes of daylight fell on the soot-blackened walls and worming high-tension cables. Then the train buried still deeper into the scabrous crust of the city — through bloody orange, shitty brown and black bile, down to the London clay. At Bank, Dave took the escalator up to ground level and emerged, a blinking fieldmouse, into the stony kernel of it all. He discovered himself under the pediment of the old Stock Exchange, with getters and secretaries coursing past, greenish flickers on the grey-glass screens of the buildings. Above him an energetic statue of General Smuts struck out for Holborn …