Effi Dévúsh took all the new opportunities the Geezer's reign provided to discourse with the dads. She seemed intent on vitally reconnecting them with the ancient lore. Yet towards his person and his teaching she remained aloof and even openly critical. As buddout swelled into summer the Hamsters laboured with a curious fervour. The notion that they alone were entitled to all the fruits of Ham possessed them — and some of the younger dads even spoke wildly of sinking the Hack's pedalo with bricks when he arrived for his midsummer visit. At the same time the promiscuity of the daddies and mummies became desperate and frenzied. At night the little manor was busy with flitting figures; then, when the foglamp was switched on, they stumbled back to their own gaffs. Effi stalked among them uttering prophecies of doom.
One morning, before the foglamp was on, Effi managed to catch her son as he returned from performing his necessary offices in the Shelter. Effi grabbed his arm in a nasty grip.
— Givovah, Mum! He shrugged her off, saying, Wass yaw problum?
— U bluddë R! She was breathing heavily, the taut tendons in her neck exposed by a flap of her cloakyfing. U fink Eye dunno wot vis iz awl abaht?
— Wotcher meen? The Geezer was highly aggrieved. Eye onlë dun wotchew toll me 2.
— Eye toll U! Eye toll U! Eye aint eevun spoakin 2 U 4 bluddë yeers! Nah Uve adda crakkat Caff Ridmun U gonna avta tayk ve consikwencis. U fink yul gé away wiv í coz yaw so fukkin smart, but U wont, ve Acks gonna B ear juss lyke ee iz evri summer, an awl vem uz kepp shtum R gonna fukk U ovah.
Rather than remonstrate with him further — because she knew he desired even this commerce with her — Effi flapped away to the mummies' gaffs. Symun took himself off to the Ferbiddun Zön to brood. This wild, overgrown place held no terror for him now that his revelation was complete. Symun could read the Book, so he could read the zone; all the island of Ham was legible to him. He understood its origin — and he felt certain he knew its future as well.
Ever since the day when the Geezer had preached outside the Shelter, Fred Ridmun had been preparing for this eventuality. He had made no public objection to his friend's teaching, nor did he foment discontent, yet neither was he among Symun's disciples. For blobs Fred had been engaged on a simple yet momentous job of carpentry: first chopping, then shaping, and finally whittling a seasoned smoothbark bough, so as to contrive the sturdy lines of a miniature pedalo. His task was undertaken in the tangled core of the Perg, far from the prying eyes of the other Hamsters and foraging motos.
At first tariff on the day after his best friend had first lain with his wife, Fred took the clay bottle he had earmarked from the brick dresser in the Funch gaff. He also took a small tank of moto oil and some twine. From a hidden nook in the Shelter itself, he retrieved a missive he had laboriously composed. He slipped across the home field through the spectral dawn, over the brow of the hill between the moto wallows, then down into the Wess Wud. At the Perg, he retrieved his odd craft and hoisted it over his shoulder. He walked on through the dips and hollows of Sandi Wud, hardly conscious of his progress, lifting his legs over the trunks of fallen trees as if they belonged to another.
On the very spit of land where he'd been betrayed, Fred Ridmun mated earthenware and wood. The bottle sat snugly in the hollow he'd carved out of the deck. He rolled up the ragged sheet of A4 — a blank endpage torn from the Book itself — then inserted it in the neck. He stoppered the bottle and wound the oiled twine around its neck, pulling each loop tight. Then he lashed the bottle to the pedalo with strips of moto hide. He erected a little mast whittled from a sapling in a notch forward of the cargo, then rigged a diminutive sail of precious London cloth.
Pulling the keel of the pedalo over the shingle, the scraping sound merging with the rattle of the waves, Fred was aware that he was doing something that had been done before in times of distress. When, in the era of his great-great-grandparents, the pox had carried off half the island's population, just such a vessel had been dispatched to Chil. There was every chance that the prevailing currents would fail him, or that the little craft would become waterlogged and sink. However, if it was spotted by a Chilman, recovered and the bottle opened, and if the message was understood, then taken on to its intended recipient, the crude phonics Fred had scrawled could brook no misinterpretation: FLIAR ON AM. DAD SEZ EE IZ DAVE. CUM NAH PLEEZ KWIK MISTAH GREEVS. Fred Ridmun pushed the pedalo off and sat back on his haunches. A thin smile cut through his sharp features as the wind caught the patch of sail and the craft began to slap up and over the waves, heading due northeast. It was a providential course — for him.
Two nights later the equinoctial headlight rose over the big lagoon, and it was an earthy blood-red in colour. In the far distance sheet lightning slashed across the Surre hills. The restive Hamsters gathered outside their gaffs. They soon became terrified, because, as if these portents weren't bad enough, when it was barely above the horizon the headlight began to be blotted out by a black crescent that moved slowly but inexorably across its flys peckled surface. Effi Dévúsh cried out in the crowd that huddled in the streambed, saying:
— Iss a syne orlrì, me luvs, issa bluddë syne! Iss ve édlyt uv Dave, thass fer sure. Ees pu í on, an nah ees turned í off. An U wanna no wy?
There was a groaned chorus of whys from the other Hamsters.
— Eyel tell U wy — ees turned í off so as ee can run that fukkin fliar dahn!
She swivelled to confront her son, who, unnoticed by the others, had come among them, and now stood in their midst, his face covered with thick, fearful sweat and dark with dreadful incomprehension.
4. The Family of Man: June 1987
'Orlright, put 'em on full,' Dave Rudman called to Kemal the mechanic. The headlights flared in the gloom of the railway arch. 'Orlright, orlright' — Dave was blinded for several seconds, until earthy Victorian brickwork swam back from the blood-red aureoles and artificial mauve sundogs — 'now try dipped.' The lights flared again but with less intensity. 'Full again. . and DIPPED.' Kemal turned the lights off and came out from the cab shaking his tousled head; Dave stepped towards him, his face dark with incomprehension. 'Beats me,' he said, 'if it's not the bulbs.'
'Could be the alternator,' said Kemal, patting down the pockets of his oily overalls for his cigarettes.
'Yeah, yeah,' Dave laughed, 'it's always the alternator, innit? I dunno why I'm bothering, it ain't like I'm doing nights.'
Dave was renting from Ali Baba on the half-flat for eighty quid a week, and the night driver he shared the cab with was a fucking animal. Dave had given him the nickname Mister Hyde. Strictly speaking Dave didn't have to return the cab to the garage in Bethnal Green until eight, although he usually had it back an hour earlier. Early, clean and filled up — even though only the last was his responsibility. This particular evening Dr Jekyll had prevailed on Kemal to examine the headlights, which he'd noticed weren't working when he went through the Blackwall Tunnel.