The Book of Dave

by Will Self

  'No.' Bernal was patient; her colleague was showing his age. The breakup of his second marriage, the suicide of Dr Mukti, his young protege at St Mungo's – all of it had taken its toll. Looking at Busner's snowy cap of wayward hair and his deeply creased, amphibian features, Jane Bernal could see that he was shooting fast down the senescent rapids. 'It's a revelatory text.'

  'Did God tell him to write it – or gods?'

  'No, just the one god – except he isn't called that.'

  'What's he called, then?' Busner turned from the window and smiled at Jane. She saw she had his attention; as ever her oblique way of introducing a case had drawn him in. 'Dave.'

  'No,' Zack laughed. 'Not the patient – the god.'

  'Dave, Dave too. Dave – the patient that is – is a taxi driver, and Dave – the god that is – has revealed this text to him. Do you know what the Knowledge is?'

  'The Knowledge?'

  'It's the encyclopaedic grasp on London streets that a licensed cab driver has to have.'

  'So is that it?' Busner plodded to his desk and immured himself behind a pile of buff folders. 'Is that the revelation?'

  'In part. My patient, Dave Rudman, says that the 320 routes that make up the Knowledge are a plan for a future London. Between them and the points of interest at each starting point and destination they make a comprehensive verbal map of the city.'

  'A city of god … or Dave.'

  'That's right, a city of Dave, New London.'

  'Where is this text?' Busner asked. 'Can I have a look at it?'

  'Well.' Jane Bernal drew a chair up to the desk and sat down. 'I don't believe this man literally transcribed his delusion, I believe he committed it to his memory. As you may be aware, brain scans have confirmed that the posterior hippocampus in London cabbies can be considerably enlarged – that's where the book is buried, and there's more to it than just his Knowledge, there's a set of doctrines and covenants as well.'

  'That sounds familiar.'

  'It is: it's the title of one of the Mormon holy books.'

  'Is he a Mormon, then?'

  'No, I don't think he's anything much,' Jane sighed, 'except a very ill man.'

  'So what are Dave's doctrines and covenants?' As Bernal succumbed to melancholy, Busner became increasingly jolly – nothing pleased him more than a complex delusional apparatus.

  'Oh, you know, the usual stuff, how the community should live righteously, the rules for marriage, birth, death, procreation. It's a bundle of proscriptions and injunctions that seem to be derived from the working life of London cabbies, a cock-eyed grasp on a melange of fundamentalism, but mostly from Rudman's own vindictive misogynism.'

  'Vindictive?'

  'He's separated from his wife, there's a court order restraining him from seeing his fourteen-year-old son. He's been mixed up with one of those militant fathers' groups. It's all very … distressing.'

  'Hmm, I see, and his family – does he have any?'

  'There are elderly parents living in East Finchley. I've interviewed the mother: she's long since withdrawn from him emotionally, seems traumatized. There's a brother in and out of hospital up in Wales, drug psychosis.'

  'The father?'

  'Alcoholic.'

  'I see.' Busner picked up the Arawak head and began throwing it up in the air and catching it, as if it were an ethnic tennis ball. 'Of course, in the good old days we could have blamed the parents, but now we can go searching for pills to fit the pathology, or a pathology that fits the pills – there are pills, I presume?' Bernal consulted her file. 'Oh, yes, GP called Fanning. Usual story, began him on Seroxat, Rudman had a psychotic episode, Fanning gave him Carbamazepine to buffer it and Zopiclone for the insomnia. Rudman had another episode and Fanning took him off Seroxat and put him on Dutonin.'

  'Ah! Someone's been on a few little junkets to Barcelona courtesy of Big Pharma. So, we take him off all of this and see what's what. And what is what in your opinion, Jane? Schizoid? Borderline? Both?'

  'Almost certainly, but the funny thing is – well, the two funny things are – he picked me up late last year at Heathrow in his cab. I was on my way from Canada where I'd been visiting … my friend. I thought he was ill at the time, although I couldn't imagine how he was managing to drive a cab if he was schizoid. And then there's his delusion, it's complex, it's durable, but, if you set it to one side, Rudman is altogether lucid. I only got him sectioned because he tried to beat up Raj. He says the book is addressed to his son, that Dave – his god, that is – told him to write it for his son. I think he'd benefit – if you're amenable – from some chats with you.'

  'Oh, yes, yes, I think I'd enjoy that – give me the notes. And Jane' – she turned back from the door to see Busner ferreting among the papers on his desk – 'you haven't got a paperclip on you?'

  Busner did enjoy his chats with Dave Rudman. He enjoyed the first one so much that when Dave's 72-hour section was over, Busner persuaded him to remain at Heath Hospital on a voluntary committal. 'It's highly unorthodox,' he confided to the patient – whom from the outset he'd found a most congenial fellow. 'We don't usually have a bed here for anyone that actually wants one, but my, ah, advanced years mean that the Trust allows me a certain, ah … leeway.' This was true: Busner's leeway included a number of intriguing patients who were tucked into odd corners of the eighth floor, like the woman who thought she was growing snakes from her scalp, and for whom Busner arranged a monthly perm at his own expense.

  'How does the Book say the family should be organized?' Busner asked Dave, as they sat in his messy office with its Beuys bas-reliefs and vast collection of – mostly fake – antiquities: cuneiform seals and miniature stelae, Acheulian hand axes and jade, Toltec torture knives.

  'Erm, well, it's like this.' Rudman searched inside himself for the Book: it was still there, he'd held it all. 'Men and women should live entirely separately. No mixing. Half the week the kids stay with the dads, the other half with the mums.'

  'So there is no family as such?'

  'No, no, I s'pose not.'

  'What happens when the dads are working – they do work, don't they? Who looks after the kids then?'

  'Um … girls, older girls. Girls who haven't got kids of their own yet, they're like y'know, au pairs.'

  'And the older boys?'

  'They, they're boning up on the Knowledge, learning the runs and the points.'

  'That's men's work, is it?'

  'Oh, yeah, you can't be doing with women drivers now, can you?' Dave laughed, and Busner made a note. Schizophrenics seldom laughed when recounting their delusions.

  During the two months he was at Heath Hospital Dave Rudman occupied an ambiguous position. He was allowed on and off the ward, and also stayed the odd night at his flat, which was only half a mile away. He displayed – even Jane Bernal had to acknowledge – a great sensitivity towards his fellow patients, whose discordant manias, plunging depressions and flamboyant acting up were quite different from his own madness, which seemed almost measured by comparison. The lengthy withdrawal from the antidepressants left the cabbie sleepless and floundering. Plying his weary body, he sought out the fares on the ward. Leave on right my bed, right aisle, forward door to main corridor, left patients' kitchenette.

  Rudman made the patients' kitchenette into his shelter and stood there at all hours, doling out hot sweet tea to bulimics with bandaged wrists and crack criminals who'd broken into their own psyches, stolen everything worth having and left only coiled turds on the carpet of their own consciousness. Dave guided these unfortunates back to their beds; he helped their twitching fingers with the big brushes and poster-paint pots during the weekly art-therapy sessions. He assisted the old Alzheimer's patients to the toilet and stood in the stinky lobby while they did their solitary business.

  Then there was Phyllis. Phyllis with her tumultuous head of black, curly hair, so high and wide it threatened to fall off her head. Phyllis, with her weird, white pancake make-up and her flowing dresses, which she ran up h
erself from garish African fabrics. Phyllis, who through accident and inclination had fallen through the middle-class safety net into a series of unfortunate, even abusive liaisons. Phyllis, who'd pulled herself together, trained as a chef, and now supported both herself and her father-forsaken son. Phyllis, who came stumping on to the ward with her plump wrists nearly severed by the handles of many plastic bags. Bags full of bananas, newspapers, fruit-juice cartons and books, which she bore to the bedside of her son, Steve, who was full grown now and suicidal. Phyllis and Dave struck up a …

  'Friendship – you're implying there's more to it than that?' Zack Busner, Jane Bernal, two junior registrars and the ward's psychiatric social worker were gathered for a case meeting.

  'I don't know,'Jane continued. 'I shouldn't think there's anything sexual between them – how could there be? He's told me he's impotent – and I believe him. But there's a definite intimacy – and he's very attentive to the son.'

  'To Steve?' the social worker put in.

  'Yeah,' one of the junior registrars chimed up. 'He spends hours sitting with him, talking to him about' – she wrinkled her nose with amused disbelief – 'cabbing.'

  'Cabbing?' Busner saw nothing funny in this. 'Well, why wouldn't he, he is a cabbie after all – as well as a prophet.'

  Jane Bernal came back in. 'Phyllis Vance is also helping him sort out his living problems – debts, work and so forth. She asked me to write to the Public Carriage Office on his behalf. He's trying to find out whether he can return to work.'

  'Has anyone else been helping him?' Busner asked. 'His family, friends?'

  The social worker consulted her notes. 'There was a Gary Finch who came to see him a couple of times,' she said. 'He's looking after Rudman's cab. His sister came once, very uptight woman, not at all sympathetic – other than that no one. His mother never came back after the initial interview.'

  'So this Phyllis …' Busner ruminated. 'It looks like she's a …'

  Good thing. Best thing that's happened to me in years . . . Not that I fancy her … none of that … Even Steve, Phyllis's son, felt like a good thing. Dave couldn't understand it, but when he saw the young man for the first time, slumped on his bed in the men's ward, his daft dreadlocks brushing his knees, the first five inches of his boxer shorts bagging above the waistband of his trousers like a fucking nappy, he felt a strange rush of guilt and sympathy. Jane Bernal had been talking to Dave about stereotypic patterns of thought. . .fear. . . racism … woman hating . . . She thought it would be a good idea if he had better ideas … Cognitive Behavioural Therapy she called it.

  Dave tried out a better idea. 'Orlright, mate?' he said, advancing on the supine figure. 'My name's Dave – I'm like the geezer factor on the ward. I'm a cabbie by trade, see, so I've the knowledge of the gaff, you wanna tea or sumfing, I could show yer ve day room an' vat…' Cockney clambered into his mouth alongside nerves – because the lad was looking at him with zombie eyes. Dave havered, then sat down on the bed by him. 'What's the matter, son?' he asked.

  The matter with Steve was depression so fundamental and so complete that it melted his muscles and coated his mind in a tarmac of despair. Steve threw himself out of windows and beneath the wheels of cars. He hacked at himself with craft knives, he upended paracetamol bottles. His stomach had been pumped more often than he'd filled it. If the revolving door through which he entered Heath Hospital had been attached to a generator, Steve could have provided enough power for his own ECT.

  When Phyllis saw that this man, who would be, were he not confined in his tracksuit to the treadmill of the ward, a typical bloody bigot, was making an effort with her mixed-race son, she took an interest in him. Over cake at the Hampstead Tearooms his story crumbled out: the cabbing, Carl, Michelle, Cal, Cohen the lawyer, the CSA, CAFCASS, the PCO, the cabbing – always the cabbing. 'Well, if that's what's bothering you so much,' she said, 'the cab, well, we better try to sort it out.' And she smiled with her tiny red bow of a mouth.

  Fucker had parked the Fairway up on Agincourt Road a month before – then done nothing more. When Dave saw how filthy it was, the tyres near flat, one wiper bent up like a broken arm, he wept. But Phyllis only rolled up the sleeves of her daft dress and helped him wash the vehicle until it shone in the citrus autumn sunlight, as much as any black thing could. In the flat, with its airless stew of stale smells and its litter of Final Demands, Phyllis kept her sleeves rolled up and her rubber gloves on. Dave went for rubbish bags and bleach from the shop on the corner. At the end of a stiff afternoon's work the cleared table was neatly tiled with the terrifying letterheads: Mendel & Partners, Transform Services, Transport for London, Halifax Building Society, etcetera, etcetera. Dave Rudman sat down on the bed – which had been made for the first time since the day after he moved in nearly three years before – and wept. Phyllis made no move to comfort him beyond saying, quite calmly, 'We better try to sort this out inall, David – it's time you moved on.'

  There had been no word of Dave Rudman for six months. No late-night calls leaving threatening messages on Michelle's mobile. No playing at kidnapping – Carl picked up, then dropped off on the borders of Dave's forbidden zone. No contact. If Michelle had hoped that with Dave offstage she and Cal would fall into each other's arms with a pretty duet, she was sadly mistaken. Cal pursued his mad, junky daughter, he ran around after his mad, exploitative television shows. He had no time for her. When he was at Beech House he mostly played computer games with Carl.

  Michelle's only consolation was the casual hand she saw Cal rest on his putative stepson's shoulder when Carl had pulled off a particularly deft bit of thumb work. The loser in all this, she was forced to conclude, is me. She looked from dad to lad and the awful realization dawned in her that to figure out this emotional algebra, she would have to assign a value to X, the secret that had sustained her through years of fucking brutality … abuse even.

  In Vigo Street Mitchell Blair was as dapper in striped shirtsleeves as he had been that April in full fig. He tapped his unnaturally small teeth with his gold propelling pencil. 'This, well … business … well…' Michelle was pleased that the diminutive smoothie was lost for words. 'I fail to understand … look…' Finally he put together a sentence. 'If you want to proceed along this new Avenue you will have to get a DNA test.'

  'DNA from who?' she said blankly.

  'From whom … yes,' he laughed again, 'good question. Well, your son, of course, and then either will do, either of them.'

  When she returned to Beech House, remorse seized Michelle, and she called her ex-mother-in-law. Annette Rudman's voice came shuffling towards her down distempered corridors of institutional contempt. 'How is Carl?' she asked without nicety. 'We haven't seen him for over a year now … it's not right.'

  'I … I know Mrs … Annette … It's not what I want, but you know … Dave – '

  'Dave's in hospital, Michelle.'

  'In hospital?'

  'On a psychiatric ward.'

  When she tried to hang up after the call, the receiver hit the side of the cradle and fell, bouncing on its spiralling cord, rapping the inlaid phone table. Michelle thought how everyday life was made up of a series of small botched actions, which, although instantly forgotten, nonetheless ruined everything, making it clumsy, paltry and worthless.

  The day before Dave Rudman was due to go back to his flat for good, Zack Busner summoned him to his office. Dave found the elderly shrink playing with what looked like a children's toy, a series of brightly coloured plastic tiles that he was arranging and rearranging on a little tray. 'Ever seen one of these before?' Busner asked.

  'Can't say I have.' Dave absent-mindedly patted his shirt pocket for cigarette packet and lighter.

  'Smoke if you want,' Busner said; 'I approve. Here – here's an ashtray.' He pushed a lump of unglazed clay that had been dumped on him by a grateful obsessive across the desk. 'It's a little thing called the Riddle I put together in the early seventies, absurd really' – Busner clacked the tiles some more –
'but in its day there were thousands sold, people used them to try to look into their own obscure mental processes. You rearrange the tiles into a pattern that you find pleasing or resonant – then consult this' – he took a booklet from a drawer – 'to find out what's going on in your unconscious. Here – here' – the Riddle followed the blob into Dave's hand – 'take it, take it, you might find it useful – I've got a whole self-storage unit in Acton full of them. I only press it on you,' Busner said, tilting back in his chair and peering at Dave over the top of his glasses, 'because you strike me as someone who could do with a great deal more of looking into himself.'

  'Maybe,' Dave acknowledged.

  'We never quite got to the bottom of what was behind your … collapse, did we?'

  'No, I s'pose not.'

  'The Book, still in here, is it?' Busner tapped his own soaring forehead.

  'Oh, yes,' Dave said, looking sheepish, 'but I don't think it's what I thought it was, if you see what I mean.' He sat forward. 'I think it's just, well, just the Knowledge, nothing else. I think all that other malarkey was me falling … falling apart.'

  'Hmm, well. Good. Tell me, has Dr Bernal arranged for you to see a psychiatrist?'

  'Oh, yes … yes, she has.' Dave stubbed the blob and took an appointment card from his pocket. 'Some bloke called Boom, is it?'

  'Ah,' Busner smiled. 'No, not Boom, Bohm, Tony Bohm. Yes, I think you and he will get along splendidly.'

  Gary Finch called Dave at the flat on Agincourt Road. 'Sprung, then, are you, sprung?'

  'I've been discharged, yes.'

  'No one need ever, y'know – know.'

  'What're you on about?'

  'The stigwotsit, the stiggymarta.'