The Book of Dave by Will Self

contemplated the oblong of pasteboard for long
seconds, then he shredded it deliberately with his sore fingers, a tatter of quick and cuticle. Then he threw the wad towards
the radiator and heard it disintegrate with his hurting ears, each little piece falling to the dusty carpet. Then he twisted
and fell across the bed, and, raising one hand above his head, slowly and methodically began to bludgeon it into the pillows,
as if it were a peg and his fist an unfeeling mallet.

3
    The Geezer
    SEP 509-10 AD
    When Symun Dévúsh had been a little boy, his mummy, Effi, often came to him and took him from his moto. She led him away so
it was just the two of them, all snugglewise and cuddleup. The other mummies thought this strange – and said so – but Effi
was their knee woman and a rapper like her mummy Sharun before her. Drivers came and went while the knee woman remained, a
power to be reckoned with on the island of Ham. Effi told little Symun the old legends of Ham, from before the Breakup and
the Book that had ordained it, legends that, she maintained, went back to the MadeinChina, when the world had been created
out of the maelstrom.
    Am iz shaypd lyke a feetus, she intoned, coz í iz 1. According to Effi, Ham was the aborted child of the Mutha, an ancient
warrior queen of the giants, who leaped from island to island across the archipelago of Ing, pursued by her treacherous enemies.
Fearing herself about to be caught, the Mutha sucked seawater into her vagina as an abortifacient, then squatted in the Great
Lagoon and voided herself of Ham. When her pursuers saw the foetus, they were terrified, because it was an abomination – part
moto and part human – and so they fled. The Mutha stayed and revived the corpse of her child, revived it so successfully that
it grew and grew until it became an island. And on this island a second race of smaller giants sprang up, who, over years,
then decades and finally centuries, gradually separated themselves into the two species of men and motos. Í woz so slo, Effi
said, vat vares awlways a bí uv moto inna Amster, anna bí uv Amster inna moto. Together they cultivated Ham, establishing
the fields for wheatie and the orchards for fruit, the woodlands for moto foraging and the saltings for samphire. These giants
were prodigious climbers – for at that time there were many more stacks in the Great Lagoon and they were far higher. The
islanders of Ham were thus rich in seafowl and moto oil, and their home was a veritable Arcadia. The giants used brick, crete
and yok from the zones to build their castles, the five towers, which guarded the island from covetous invaders. They also
built the groynes to protect Ham's coastline from the eroding sea. They planted the blisterweed that grew along the shoreline.
An vay uzed vair bare bluddë ands 2 do í, Effi said, closing her own bony fist and shaking it in front of the little boy's
wondering eyes. Vay wur vat bluddë strong an ard.
    Sadly, with each successive generation the giants grew smaller in stature, their arts declined, and their ambitions shrank.
Where once they had been frantic rappers, spinning word pictures of great solidity and duration out of the island's mist,
now all poetry deserted them. Where once they could lift huge rocks and uproot mighty trees, now they could barely summon
the strength to cultivate their meagre fields. They became subjects of the island – rather than its lawds and luvvies. In
time the Lawyer of Chil's Hack came among them, supplanting their native mushers and replacing them with the Drivers of the
PCO, brought from London in the far north.
    The mushers had been ordinary Hamsters – dads with kiddies of their own. The Drivers were queers – men who had no desire to
father children. Such a strange inclination, which, if known at all on Ham, was suppressed, made these dävines still more
alien and imposing to the simple peasants.
    If little Sy was disposed to give