The Book of Dave

by Will Self

  So far as I'm concerned the way they treat their women is the best thing going for those fuckers … keep those bints in line, I say … you take my ex, she's only gone and slapped a fucking restraining order on me, now that'd never 'appen in Kabul, I'd have 'er trussed up in one of them black cloaky things before she could say CSA … 'I couldn't agree with you more. Very sad business.' 'Coz they should go a bit bloody further – take the kids off a them – no kids, no bloody power over us . . .

  Past the Odeon, with its egg-box roof, the cab squealed to a halt at some lights and the meter – which had been ticking away with generous increments – slowed to a trickle of pence. After fifteen years of cabbing Dave Rudman was so finely attuned to the meter that he could minutely calibrate it with his own outgoings. At the beginning of each day a spreadsheet popped up behind his heavy eyelids, and as he drove, picking up and dropping off, ranking up and driving again – so the figures were instantly calculated to inform him whether he was ahead or behind, if he could pay for his diesel, his insurance, his cab repayments, his food, his fags, his booze, his prescriptions, his child support and his divorce lawyer. At 8 p.m., when the second tariff band comes in, the figures alter accordingly; at 10 p.m., when the third starts, they change again. But they all oughta be the bloody same: 6 to 2, 2 to 10, 10 to 6. That way, you know what you're getting – punters inall. In the future the tariffs will be equal, oh, yeah. Time, distance and money – the three dimensions of Dave Rudman's universe. Up above it all was the Flying Eye, Russ Kane trying to make a joke out of a fucking lorry what's shed its load at the Robin Hood Roundabout…

  Dave Rudman hardly ever used to go into the dozen or so cabbies' shelters that were still scattered about Central London. However, nowadays he was so skint he needed the cheap and greasy fuel the old biddies who ran them pumped out. They were weird little structures, the shelters, like antediluvian cricket pavilions of green wood, which the city had grown up around. Inside, the cabbies sat jawing and noshing at a table covered with a plastic cloth. So many cabbies, their faces dissipated by the life like those of prematurely aged peasants, worn out by their bigoted credo. Dave didn't want to talk about the lost boy, but last week, in the shelter in Grosvenor Gardens, when some pillock of a cabbie, seeing Dave's face, horsey with depression, stupidly asked what was eating him, Dave spilled. Then the other cabbie quipped: 'A woman is like a hurricane: when they pitch up they're wet and wild, and when they bugger off they take your house and your car.'

  Michelle hadn't only taken Dave's house; she'd got a bigger, flasher one. She'd even got a new daddy for Dave's boy – and how fucking sick is that? As for this Cohen cow who was milking Dave, she must 'ave a fucking meter in her desk drawer and every time I bell her she pops it on and it goes up and up, fifty quid at a time, a wunner for a letter. Then there's the brief she gets to stand up on his hind legs in the judge's chambers for a grand a pop – but I bet she gets a kick-back, though. Cow. Lawyers – they're all scum.

  As the cab crawled up the Edgware Road, the fare looked bemused by the shiny pavements thronged by Arabs. Arabs sitting behind the plate-glass windows of Maroush supping fruit juices and smoking shishas, Arabs stopping at kiosks to buy their newspapers full of squashed-fly print. Their women flapped along behind them, tagged and bagged, but under their chadors they're tricked out like fucking tarts in silk undies, they are. It gives 'em a big turn-on … And my ex, with her little job up in Hampstead, wrapping up thongs in fucking tissue paper… She's just the same … They're all the same . . . 'Where to in Mill Hill exactly, guv?'

  'Oh … sure … OK …' The fare did some uncrumpling. 'It's right next to somewhere called Wills Grove, but it doesn't have a name of its own, it's like a lane.'

  'I know it.'

  'You know it?'

  'I know it – it's by the school.'

  'That's right. I'm going to see a man who works at the National Research Institute – it's business – that's why I'm here. I work for CalBioTech – you may have heard of us. We're one of the organizations developing human genome patents …' When Dave didn't respond, the fare continued on another tack: 'I must say, I'm very impressed by how well you know London. Very impressed. In Denver, where I live, you can't get a driver who knows downtown let alone the 'burbs.'

  Dave Rudman had been to New York once, dragged there resisting by his ex-wife, a drogue behind her jet. The human ant heap was bad enough – but worse was the disorientation. Even with the grid system, I didn't know the runs, I didn't know the points … I was fucking ignorant… I'll happily let America alone, mate, 'coz my Knowledge is all here. There are plenty of fucking thickos right here I don't need to go across the pond and learn your lot. Not that I'm even bothering with these ones, I've done it now, I've said my piece, an' I'll tell you what the real knowledge is fer nuffing! Women and their fucking wiles, kids and how the loss of them can drive a man fucking mad, money and how the getting of it breaks your bloody back! The obsolete Apricot computer sat in the garage of his parents' house on Heath View. It squatted there on an old steamer trunk, beside two of his father's defunct one-armed bandits, their innards exposed, once glossy oranges and lemons waxed by the twilight. In a rare moment of clarity – an oblique glance through the quarterlight of his mind – Dave Rudman remembered the long shifts in his Gospel Oak flat. The tapping and the transcribing, the laying down of His Law. Then his eyes tracked back to the misty windscreen, and the figure hunched over the keyboard hadn't been him at all – only some other monk or monkey.

  'Well, we aim to please, sir. Most London cabbies see themselves as ambassadors for the city, part driver, part tour guide.' Dave slowed the cab before the junction with Sussex Gardens, allowing a Hispanic woman wearing a fur-trimmed denim jacket to shepherd her great shelf of bosom across the road. He sensed the fare's approbation like a sunlamp on his bald spot. 'Now to the right here, sir, almost all the property between here and Baker Street is owned by the Portman family; not a lot of people realize how much of London is concentrated in the hands of a very few, very rich people.'

  'That's very inner-resting.'

  'I'm glad you think so, sir, and this road we're driving up, you may've noticed that it's very straight for a London road, that's because it's the old Roman Watling Street.'

  'You don't say.' I do fucking say. I fucking know. I know it all – I hold it all. If all of this were swamped, taken out by a huge fucking flood, who'd be able to tell you what it was like? Not the fucking Mayor or the Prime Minister – that's for sure. But me, an 'umble cabbie.

  'Yes, if we were here seventeen hundred years ago, we might've seen a legion marching off to Chester, on its way up north to duff up a bunch of blue-painted savages.'

  The cab, its wipers 'eek-eeking', pulled away from the lights and scraped by the concrete barnacles of the Hilton tucked beneath the Marylebone Flyover. It was late lunchtime on a wet December day, so the shop windows were lighting up. Dave tried to imagine who – who he knew – might be the type to have pitched up in a room there, for no other reason but to smoke crack with brasses from the Bayswater Road and rape the minibar. From some dark rank in his memory a recollection pulled away: Superb Sid, Sid Gold … picked 'im up last year outside the old Curiosity Shop … He was looking pretty fucking flush, pretty pleased with 'imself. Bespoke fucking whistle, cashmere overcoat, the whole bit. He wouldn't've done me any favours if I'd reminded 'im of the perm he used to sport at school. He became a brief, didn't 'e, criminal fucking brief – in both senses. Gave me his card. Ponce. Still, he's the type I'm gonna need because that Cohen cow ain't gonna come through. If I'm gonna see the boy again, I'm gonna have to get some dirt on that cunt Devenish. There has to be some … there always is … all you gotta do is dig.

  'My oldest son would be fascinated by this stuff,' said the fare, who'd relaxed now they were trundling past Little Venice and up through Maida Vale. 'He's a history geek … gets it from his dad, I guess.' The fare looked about him at the five-storey Tudorbethan apartment blocks, and, as if taking
comfort in their solidity, unglued his hands from the handles and at last eased himself back in the seat.

  Dave hit the intercom button – a plastic nubbin incised with a hieroglyphic head: 'Yeah, I always think of Watling Street as a sorta time tunnel, connecting the past with the present.' What's the point in knowing there's a time tunnel there if you've got no one to go down it with? Now I understand that I learned this city to hold in my mind for a while – then lose it to my boy. Without him it's starting to disappear like a fucking mirage.

  'It must be busy for you now … before Christmas?' The fare was uncomfortable with Dave's extravagant image, but thass alright, he's paying to feel superior as well as be driven. Superior in knowledge, superior in wealth, he don't need some hack to tell him he's neither.

  'Yeah, busy enough, I'm out in the begging box all hours.'

  'Begging box … ? Oh, I get it.'

  'But come New Year town'll be dead as a doornail. We call it the kipper season.'

  'I'm sorry?'

  "Coz it's flat – nuffing 'appening 'til the spring.' When the Ideal-fucking-Home-Show hits town, more ponces than you can shake a roll-neck at. Then the headscarf-and-sleeveless-anorak mob up for the Flower Show, Chelsea Bridge crammed with shuttle buses and off-roaders that've never even slid off the fuckin' gravel drive. Benny used to clear out to Tenerife on the banana boat for the kipper season. Said he could live out there all winter for five bob a day, come back when the trade picked up again.

  They passed Fratelli's, a glass-container bistro below the deck of the new Marriott, then the cab flipped up on to the Kilburn High Road. The shitty little shopping centre at Kilburn Square teemed with bat-eared London Irish kids exchanging benefit money for synthetic-furred animals with glued-on eyes. Cheapo chavs … baggy fucking tracksuits … flapping their skinny arms. Still, Dave felt at home here – he'd reached the right circle of the city, the one where he more or less belonged. Built up over centuries in concentric rings, like the trunk of a gargantuan tree, London districts derived their character from their ring: Kilburn, Shepherd's Bush, Balham, Catford – all of them grown from the same barky bricks and pithy masonry.

  The rain had died away to a cellulite pucker of drizzle on the brown puddles, and there was an oily gloss on everything. The wipers 'eeked' to a standstill. Dave tried to make the lights at Willesden Lane and failed. He pulled up short in the yellow net of lines thrown across the junction and applied the handbrake with its wooden stair creak. The Kilburn State Ballroom leaned over them, posters peeling away from its diarrhoea tiling. Fucking Taigs, dumb Paddies, with their hurdy-gurdy show bands and their leaky-eyed, pissed-up, violent lovelessness, worshipping a sexless cow with her chest hacked open. The fare was looking through the speckled windows at the old navvies, flannel trews lashed round Guinness bellies, who came tottering out of Paddy Power's shredding their slips and chucking them in the air so they created localized snowfalls, off-white Christmases of loss.

  'We call this County Kilburn,' Dave said, and, when the fare looked uncomprehending, he enlarged, 'because a lot of the Irish live here.'

  'Oh … sure … OK.'

  'Lovely people.' I wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for you, my son. No pick-ups and precious few drop-offs either. Who wants some son of the sod blowing Bushmills chunks on the upholstery while he blabs about his poor old mammy? Not me. Still, I ought to go and see my poor old mammy, she worries about Carl. It's on the way back into town, I could even look in at the Five Bells and have a drink … No, make me fuzzy with the pills … Fucking bejazus! What if the PCO pulled me in for a medical?

  Dave didn't want to see his poor old mammy anyway. Didn't want to see her sitting in the worn-out armchair by the window, scrupulously marking her pupils' projects even though it was the start of a two-week holiday or, worse, diligently preparing for a child-centred Christmas that the central grandchild wouldn't be attending. Folding paper serviettes decorated with prancing reindeer, checking cracker availability, climbing up the tiny aluminium stepladder to get the box of decorations down from the equally tiny loft. Mum never liked Michelle – hated her, more like. Funny, when I feel Mum's hatred I stop hating 'chelle. They would sit there, over mugs of instant coffee in the kitchen, listening to the old man snooze next door in front of the racing: 'They're on the home straight now, past the last furlong marker … and it's Tenderfoot, Tenderfoot… all the way from Little Darling …' The unspoken lay on the tablecloth between mother and son, among blue Tupperware, the Hendon Advertiser and a pile of dog-eared exercise books.

  If Dave offered his mother the opportunity, she'd vouchsafe some of her ailments – the hot flushes, the sweats, the cramps and pains … She's in her mid sixties, but it's like she's still on the fucking blob! He deliberately framed the most disgusting thoughts – hating mummies was what he excelled at, and this – he dimly comprehended – was because I'm such a fucking mummy's boy …

  The cab trundled under the railway bridge at Brondesbury and began to strain up Shoot Up Hill. Pile of shit, rip-off on wheels. That's the trouble with cabs – they're all fucking ringers, they're all pretending to be cabs but none of them are the real thing. Benny's old FX4 was so underpowered it could hardly make it up the ramp from the Euston rank. He told me he once had to ask some fatties to climb out and walk 'til he made it to the level. This Fairway is bearable, so why would I lay out thirty grand for a TX? For a bigger windscreen so I can see more of this bollocks? A wheelchair ramp so I can pick up spazzes? I'd be in hock to the finance company and having to work still bloody harder to keep those fat fuckers in time-share villas in fucking Marbella …

  'I must say, cabbie,' said the fare, 'the reputation of these vehicles doesn't do them justice, they are most exceptionally comfortable.' Comfortable for who? You try getting your porky trotters down under this dash, it's like putting your legs in a coffin, mate, a vibrating bloody coffin. It fits tighter than a ridged dick in a ribbed condom. I swear, I've got out of this thing at the end of a day's work and fallen straight fucking over. 'I'm glad you're enjoying the ride, sir, we like to say that this is the finest custom-built taxi in the world. Its unique twenty-five-foot turning circle makes it ideal for London's crowded streets, and helps to ensure that the licensed trade stays in business.' I'd give it up tomorrow and drive a fucking Renault Espace for Addison Lee if it wasn't for the ghost of old Benny urging me on, and my own dumb pride.

  The cab growled over the brow of Shoot Up Hill and on along Cricklewood Broadway. This was another ring of the city. Outside the grocer's there were stacks of plantains and boxes of sweet potatoes under flapping plastic – garish, alien vegetables infesting the lacklustre suburb. Outside the pound shops West Africans flicked amber worry beads and peered at displays of washing-up brushes. A big pub hove into view, the Crown, engraved glass, double bow windows, free-standing sign. It looked impressive, but it's only been made over to look like what it once was. Inside are fifteen kinds of piss on electronic tap, a video jukebox and a bunch of slappers giving the come-on to farting salesmen full of refried cheer.

  'And what's this county called, then?' the fare asked.

  'County yourself bloody lucky you don't live here, sir,' Dave said, then laughed to show he wasn't serious. Not that I'm racial or anything, it's only that if I'm perfectly honest, at the end of this particular bloody awful day, I can't stand the fucking shvartzers . . . Can't stand their tight, furry curls, their chocolate skin, their blubbery lips . . . their dreadful fucking driving … Shvartzers. Hard to think of Big End, whom Dave had known since he was a teenager, as a shvartzer. But it's better to say shvartzer than coon or nigger, innit? Afro-Caribbean's plain stupid, 'coz they aren't all that. If Benny were still alive he'd be amazed to see black, black cabbies, fucking blown away. Black, black cabbies and diesel dykes inall. Not that there are anything like as many blacks as there were Jews – thank fucking God. Benny said that in the sixties most cabbies were Jewish. What the fuck's 'appened to 'em? Disappeared to Emerson Park, Redbridge and fucking
Stanmore, living out their days behind double glazing, under the watchful eyes of lawyer daughters and doctor sons. Hung up their ski jackets and fur boots, quit the patch leaving only their bloody shtoopid shlang behind 'em.

  The cab bundled on past bed shops and a new Matalan, before finally ridding itself of the endless parade of commerce and entering authentic suburbia, the great shrubbery of three-bedroom, inter-war semis that defined London more than any mere black cab or Big Ben ever could. The road fell away towards the North Circular, splitting into three tongues, one poking through the arch of a still higher flyover, while the two others lolled down to the ground. The VDU facades of PC World and Computer Warehouse glared at each other across six lanes. The cab passed between them, then was aloft, buffeted by wind, spattered by grit, slapped by waste paper. To the east seagulls soared above the sea-greenery of Hampstead. Like a kid's snowstorm toy, the little cab shaken up. Dave remembered the little kid crying, huge pink finger marks on his naked bum. And what he had whimpered: Not hurting Dad … not hurting … as he confused the pain and the action that had caused it.

  Dave had been driving for so many years he hardly ever thought about the actual graft of turning the wheel – except for when he did, and then it was a torment. When Carl was little and I felt like this, I'd find a call box and pull over. I was working nights. 'Do you want to speak to Daddy? Daddy's on the phone?' The sound of two-year-old breathing rasping the mouthpiece, then his voice, piping yet oddly distinct:

  'Daddy?'

  'Hiyah, Runty, how's it going, mate?'

  'Mummy, issa ghost.'

  The ghost drove on up the Broadway past the uglified slab of the Connaught Business Centre and on through Colindale, turning right down Colindale Avenue by the Newspaper Library, where ageing amateur genealogists sifted the dusty old doings of their ancestors between their arthritic fingers. The copper roof of the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill shone in a single faint beam from the setting sun. 'That's NIMR, isn't it?' said the fare, but Dave didn't hear him, he was aiming for it, tacking the cab this way and that: under the MI at Bunns Lane, then up Flower Lane to Mill Hill Circus. He wasn't using any knowledge to get to his destination – simply a homing instinct. Now it's Carl that's the ghost . . . First they stopped meeting in the flesh, then the phone calls got shorter and shorter, a few muffled phrases: 'Yeah, Dad, alright, yeah,' a few muffled phrases that eventually deteriorated into text messages: 'Eye not CU … Eye 8 B4 … Eye luv U 2 …' A staccato script of letters and digits beamed from an alternative world. Then they ceased communicating altogether and began to liaise in dreams or nightmares.