by Will Self
When they reached North End Woods Dave and Noel would run and whoop, while Sam acquired her first detached home, with a hollow oak for a kitchen and a fallen beech for a living room. Noel always wanted to play cowboys and Indians; Dave had a more unusual kind of make-believe. He saw his grandfather's cab nosing through the bracken. With its goggling headlights, bonnet muzzle and toothy bumper, it was like a cartoon beast. He waved it down, and together cab and boy cruised the hummocks and dells, picking up and dropping off imaginary passengers.
They were close, the Rudman kids, too close. They clung together on the cold margins of their parents' marriage, and when the opportunity came along both oldest and youngest fled. Sam into a career, then marriage to Howard, whom she had met, dancing to 'Chirpy-Chirpy Cheep-Cheep', at the Maccabi Youth Club in West Hampstead. She was nineteen and unashamedly, anachronistically, married him for his money.
Noel fled to Aberystwyth. The family had once had a couple of mournful B&B holidays there, and Dave supposed that his younger brother imagined staying for good would be a permanent holiday. It didn't turn out that way. Dave knew they'd all regret this falling apart, yet there was nothing he could do. The Rudmans weren't the sort to make an effort, to keep up. They weren't – in the idiom of the time – people people.
After Dave dropped out of College he did eighteen months as a driver-labourer for a builder's up in Stoke Newington. He loved the rattle-bang of the three-ton flat-bed truck as it whacked over the London potholes; he loved the peculiar groan of the dinky tipper as he deftly piloted it up a pair of planks, to offload stock bricks and clayey soil into a skip. He loved everything to do with driving – driving made him feel free. It was easy, it was simple, it was open to all. The minute you got in a vehicle and turned the ignition the world was revved up with possibilities. Which would he rather have, a driving licence or an HND? No fucking contest… So he put his application into the Public Carriage Office on Penton Street and began puttering about the cavernous city on his moped, committing its concrete gulches and York stone wadis to memory.
Annette Rudman had nothing but contempt for her father. On Sunday afternoons, when his black cab came puttering down Heath View, she behaved as if it were a loan shark arriving to collect her in lieu of the interest. Fought you'd escape, didja? Fought you'd get away from the East End, my girl? Fought you'd become a teacher and move out to the bloody sticks? No chance, my love … no chance at all … Even though Benny was nothing but friendly, his daughter would put him in his place with her Received Pronunciation and her cultivated vocabulary. She made him drink endless cups of tea – and when he asked for the toilet, directed him to the lavatory.
But little Dave loved Benny – loved his patter and his natty threads – pressed grey slacks, tweed caps with elasticated sides, zip-up suede jackets and mirror-shiny shoes. He loved the way his grandfather exuded his Knowledge, a comprehensive understanding not only of the London streets – but what went on in them as well. After thirty-odd years behind the wheel, Benny Cohen gave the distinct impression that he'd been plying for a hire for a couple of millennia. As he drove his grandson through the city, he regaled him with a steady stream of anecdotes and facts, a spiel that spilled from the corner of his mouth and blew over his shoulder braided with cigarette smoke.
As he drove down from Vallance Road to the old Globe, Dave reflected on how his grandfather had stayed on. A remnant of the Jewish ghetto in the East End, living out his days in a small flat on the inter-war LCC estate off the Bethnal Green Road. Now he was surrounded by a rising tide of Bengalis. 'Not that I mind them; they're mostly well behaved. Still, their food smells fucking awful.' Benny's food didn't smell of anything at all, the slow worm noodles and watery chicken soup he slurped down at Bloom's in Whitechapel, under an enlarged photographic mural of the old Brick Lane Market without a brown face in sight.
Benny was still alive – but only just. He stopped at home behind nets distempered with nicotine and chuffed on his oxygen mask, lifting it now and again to insinuate a Woodbine beneath his walrus moustache. Benny's left leg had been amputated below the knee, and there was talk of the right hopping along too. When Dave went to see him, his grandfather waggled the stump at him like a gesturing hand, turning it out to express bemusement, karate-chopping for finality. Prised from his cab – which, although it stank of cigarette fumes, was always beautifully clean – the old man took on the appearance of a smoked oyster on Tubby Isaacs's stall, then a soused whelk, until finally – most unkosher this – he dwindled to a pickled winkle.
In the old Globe Mrs Hedges the landlady was berating two of Dave's mates, Fucker Finch and Norbert Davis. 'I'm not bein' funny,' said the withered Chow of a woman, 'but the trouble wiv you lot is that you all 'ad a crack at 'er an' none of yer is prepared to take the consequences, see.' Thick slap was plastered on her pouched cheeks, wind-chime earrings dragged deep slits in her earlobes. Dave sidled up to the bar. On the optic were bottles of Martell, Archers, and Jack Daniel's. On beer mats stood an outsized wine glass full of promotional lighters and a cubic ice bucket advertising Gordon's Gin. 'Usual, luv?' asked Mrs Hedges. Dave grunted affirmatively and she threw her weight on the pump so hard her bingo wings flapped. Fucker said, 'Orlright, then, geezer,' and he and Norbert rolled their eyes at him. Norbert – who was known as Big End, on account of the ridiculousness of his given name and by reason of racial stereotyping – said, 'My round, Tufty,' his deep voice shouting through the wall of his chest.
Mrs Hedges resumed, 'Believe you me, there's four blokes 'as come in the pub an' she's slept wiv all of 'em once. I told 'er old man "she wuz not 'erself", but 'e don' lissen, 'e went absolutely fucking ballistic, 'e cut 'er up an' that – which is a bit ironical seein' as she does it to 'erself anyways!' Mrs Hedges fell silent, then relayed Dave's pint to him, a brown torch with a creamy flame. 'Cheers,' Dave said, and the other two grunted affirmatively. Behind the bar lay a drift of Quavers packets, crisp notation rustling in silence. Big End's fluorescent jacket – he was a site chippie – lay on a nearby banquette like a crumpled drunk. 'I woz absolutely ragarsed last night,' Big End said, 'fucking mullered.'
'No kiddin',' Dave responded, bitter-mouthed.
'Wossup wiv you, Tufty?' Fucker put in. 'You're a bit down in the mouf.'
Tufty was Dave's cabbing nickname. It referred both to the unsmarmable sprig of hair at the back of his broad neck, and a cartoon squirrel that had fronted a 1960s road-safety campaign. Gary Finch – aka Fucker – was a cabbie as well; he and Dave had done the Knowledge at the same time, then they'd been butter boys together, wangling nights with cabs fronted by Gorgeous George at Nationwide Taxi Garages. 'Mister Hyde 'as pulled a stroke,' Dave explained. ' 'E's not in tonight, so Ali said I could 'ave the cab.'
'Result, no?' Fucker wiped a smear of lager from his full lips; with his curly mop, fat tummy and stubby legs, he was like a stationary bowling ball in the alley of the bar.
'Yeah, s'pose, still, I was looking forward to hoisting a few with you, an' then – '
'On to Browns, then a club, then a shebeen, then before I know it I'm rolling in at five in the fucking morning and the boiler's giving it this.' Fucker made an emu glove puppet of his hand and pecked at his own neck and head.
'Nick-nick.' Dave felt for him, but he thought also of Gary's wife, as rotund as her husband and with an extra ball stuffed up her jumper, due to fall out in a few weeks. Dave knew Debbie – and he knew Gary's mum and dad as well. They'd been a bit of a surrogate family for him. Dave wondered at the way things were panning out – the young couple had fallen out with both their families. Instead of cheeky cockney consanguinity, the mother-to-be was isolated in their flat in Edmonton, while Gary, well … Fucker by name …
'As soon as she fell pregnant,' Mrs Hedges coincidentally resumed, ' 'e done 'is nut an' cut 'er up again – she 'ad t'go fer a tonic from the doctor.' Big End tutted sympathetically. What am I doing here? Dave said to himself with Received Pronunciation, as Mrs Hedges's Hs fell at the floor by
his feet and Ts stopped up his companions' throats. This isn't me, it's an act … because Dave hadn't dropped his Hs – he'd flung them away from himself, ninja stars that stuck quivering in the smoky bacon Victorian woodwork. There's no going back now, no three-point turn out of here. All that Knowledge, the city crumpled up in my head … He could envision it, the streets superimposed on the whorls of his cerebellum and I'm holding on to it. He downed the last of his pint and thudded the glass on to the bar. He snatched up his keys and swivelled to leave, his badge – which he wore on a leather thong around his neck – swinging into Fucker. 'Oi!' The tubby little man howled, clutched his mop of curls and fell against the bar. Dave, shocked, made to grab him before he fell, whereupon Finch reared up laughing, 'Adjoo there, mate! Adjoo there!' When he saw how shocked Dave was, he stopped and asked, 'You fucking off already?'
'May as well,' Dave said, addressing them all. 'I ain't gonna get a fare in 'ere am I, but if I start now I'll catch the theatre burst – might clear a wunner before midnight.'
'Well,' Big End put in, 'meet me down the club if you knock off'. As he bashed out through the door, Dave heard the fresh conversation resume behind him.
'She was pretty big by then?'
'Fucking big.'
'Is it John's?'
' 'Course it is …'
Outside in the Mile End Road, Dave unlocked the cab and stood for a moment looking west to where the buildings of the City stacked up. There were new blocks at Aldgate and down towards the Tower of London; a thicket of cranes sprouted over the old Broad Street Station, and above it all reared the black, glassy stack of the NatWest Tower. Another course of London was being laid on top of the last, millions of tons of steel, concrete, brick and stone, weighing down on the present, pressing it into the past.
While here, in the East End, magenta buddleia spears and coils of fluffy rosebay willowherb sprang from between the sheets of corrugated iron that fenced off the bombsite behind the pub. Benny had once told Dave that during the war sand had been gouged from the top of Hampstead Heath and poured into bags that were then piled in front of the hospitals and government ministries. When the ack-ack ceased and the barrage balloons were winched down, the pulverized terraces of the East End were swept up, loaded on to trucks, and dumped in the hollows and dips where the sand had been dug. Round and round it went, London's auto-cannibalism. It made Dave feel queasy to be standing suspended over such deep time, on the taut cable of a summer evening. He lowered himself into the cab and, starting the engine, felt better immediately, and better still when within seconds his Faredar peeped and he netted a commuter heading for Fenchurch Street. Go west, young man.
It was the tempo of the times – the years themselves were in a rush, the decades even, struggling to attain the next era. The matt-black chrysalis of the 1980s was splitting and, with stop-action rapidity, out came a vast moth, unfurling sticky, tinted-glass wings.
In the layer cake of Olympia – jammy carpet tiling, spongy exhibition space – Michelle Brodie struggled to keep up with her idea of who she ought to be. Almost all those who laboured to get Olympia ready for the opening of Business Computing '87 knew Michelle by sight – she was hard to miss, with her fiery plume of auburn hair and her trim figure in its neat, scarlet suit. Hurrying here, rushing there, her heels clicking and a comet tail of gaseous regard streaming behind her.
The fabricators weren't working hard enough on the stand. Michelle wasn't in charge of this – any more than she was in charge of the account overall – if it's a success Manning takes the credit, and if it bombs it'll be my fault. Manning, the Exhibitions Executive, that fat wanker with his white socks and cheap loafers, his greased-back hair and C&A suit … thinks he's God's fucking gift, had made his obligatory pass at Michelle within days of his appointment. Since he's been brought in over me, he thinks he has the right to climb on top of me. Although by the standards of the passes that had been made at Michelle – and there were many at this time – Clive Manning's was low key. His fish-belly hand lounged towards her coppery tights while he burbled of 'forward planning', then, when she flinched, it flopped away while he continued uttering banalities about 'feedback'.
What if I'd let him? Pork-pie breath on my shoulder, greasy hair in my eye, little dick digging at me down below . . . The grim vision goaded Michelle on past fabricators who were bolting steel frames and hammering together wooden partitions, speedily erecting a model city inside the cavernous exhibition hall; a new London, shiny, two-dimensional, every facade commercially artful. The workmen, scenting her perfume, turned to stare, wet tongues lolling on their yellow teeth, while women looked daggers at her, searching for chinks in her beautiful armour – the hint of a sag or a blemish.
At her clients' area Michelle talked to the foreman, a dependable Irishman, older, his wedding band emphatic on his veined hand. I remind him of his daughter or niece – he can't respect me 'cause I'm not a virgin – but he doesn't dream of fucking me. She showed him the revised drawing: the stand was to be in the shape of a giant desktop computer, with the staff answering queries through the screen. Prospects would be ushered in to look at its shiny innards. It was her idea.
Michelle's mate Sandra took the call at her desk in the Shell Centre, while forking grated carrot from a plastic container and peering myopically at the drizzly window. 'Not at lunch, San?' Michelle said.
'Issat you,' 'chelle? No, rain's come on, his nibs got me a salad. What's up?'
'I was going to call him, but I'm in a cafe with that Rachel from work and I swear she knows.' Michelle risked a glance over her shoulder: Rachel was sizing up a builder at the next table, whose flesh-coloured dust mask disfigured his neck like a goitre.
'Yeah,' Sandra laughed, 'she knows she's a scheming little cow, that's what she knows.'
'I dunno, San, I'm bloody nervy today, it's… it's like something's gonna happen, I dunno what – just something.' Michelle's eyes flicked outside to the Hammersmith Road, where a black cab shook with mechanical ague.
'Are you meant to be seeing him?'
'Yeah, later, I don't know where, though, he'll leave me a message at home – lissen, I gotta go.'
'What?'
But Michelle had hung up. She went back to her seat opposite Rachel. The builders at the next table rose, four big bodies moving in dusty puffs. From the kerfuffle a meaty arm tossed the Sun between the two young women. 'Paper for yer, luv,' he said, giving Michelle a gappy grin. She picked it up: it was open at the horoscopes and she read: 'PISCES. It has been a long, rough and lonely road emotionally. However, with the sun in Cancer and a new moon to boot, this will be a week of amazing highs and the realization that at last your darkest days are over.' Snip-snip … He's gonna leave her … Snip-snip, he's gonna cut her out of his life … Snip-snip.
Michelle unlocked the front door and took the stairs at a run. Fiddling with her flat key on the top landing, she felt her nostrils prickling with dust – then the Yale clicked. Without bothering to shut the door, she lunged for the answer-phone. It peeped, hissed, crackled: 'chelle, it's Mum here.' As if I don't know your voice. 'I was wonderin' if you were coming by Friday . . .'so you can put me down with sly digs '… 'cause I'm going down the market an' if you are I'll get a whole chicken instead of pieces.' A thigh or two for her, a leg for Ronnie, gross. 'Anyway, love, gissa call, there's a good girl, love, Mum.' She thinks she's writing a bloody letter. 'Peep!' 'Alright, 'chelle? A load of us are going down Gossips tonight.' That's desperate. 'We'll be in the wine bar before that…' getting pissed enough to take on anything in trousers – and it's only Thursday '… so see ya there, unless you're getting shagged by wossisface, ta-ra.' I should keep my big mouth shut. Shut. 'Peep!' 'Hilton on Park Lane …' His voice!'… eight o'clock in the lobby, don't be late.' 'Peep!'
Michelle kicked off the black heels, she shrugged off the red jacket, she sloughed off the tight red skirt, she tore off the white cotton blouse. In her bra, tights and knickers, she raced into the bathroom, her head a whirl of transpor
tation schedules. I don't want to rush, it'll be sweaty on the tube, I don't want to sweat. No sweat, he doesn't want sweat – he doesn't want real, he wants a fantasy girl . . . Weird thing is … I wannabe that for him. Crouching in the bath, Michelle used the rubber Y of the shower fitment to sluice away Olympia and Manning. She pushed the heel of her hand down through her pubic hair, then gouged out her vagina with the bar of lavender soap … Dirty girl Dirty, dirty girl. On the mat, she twisted in front of the full-length mirror, checking for stubble under arms and between thighs. I wonder if Mrs Thatcher ever does this? Or Chris Evert? They must do. Michelle flipped her mane forward and vigorously stroked it with the saddle brush. A hiss of spray to stop the frizz and Michelle flipped it back. Deodorant was sprayed under arms still damp from their douche. Perfume was dabbed at ear and neck and crotch. In the bedroom she pulled multicoloured handfuls of silk and cotton scraps from her drawer, and strewed them like blossom on the counterpane of her bed. Why bother? He doesn't want this – I don't want this. He wants in – I want him in as fast as possible.
Michelle Brodie had always been a fashion victor, triumphing over each season's army of styles, colours and cloths with her own inimitable Look. Aged sixteen, trolling through Crystal Palace on her way to her Saturday job, she'd been spotted by Ben Bendicks, a photographer so famous that even Michelle had heard of him. He came at her out of the shiny fourth dimension that was folded into Vogue and Harpers. They were deep in Sarf London, deep and high up – to the south lay the North Downs, a bright, green streak on the horizon. All this airy calm was annihilated by the Yank car flung against the kerb, the man in the iridescent silk shirt and wraparound shades shouting, 'You've got it girl! You've got the Look!' She was wearing a midi-length black skirt and a white blouse. Some Look. Still, Bendicks conjured up her exhibitionism with his own. A spread-legged year followed – not that he ever laid a hand on her – as Michelle posed in front of paper flats, morphing to the rat-a-tat-tat of his shutter. The freckles on her face and hands were airbrushed out, and she learned to think of nothing so as to achieve the allure of a Zen garden. Bendicks got her on hoardings as the Face of Fermata – the designer label of that year.