by Will Self
'Yeah, yeah, it is, as it 'appens.' Dave sounded unconcerned indifferent even. 'Where'd you drop 'er off, then?'
' 'ampstead. Probly gone up there to meet a girlfriend in one of them wine bars. She was right dolled up, she was – looked lovely. You're a very lucky feller … Nah, my old Vera …'
Dave was no longer listening. Sitting there, sucking on his acrid teat and staring at the hideous Gimp sipping his soup-a-cup, Dave was looking instead into the wing mirror of his mind, where all the traffic behind him now appeared much, much larger. She had every opportunity, I've worked nights for half the time we've been together … Why wouldn't she? I know I disgust her . . . After the boy I couldn't. . . I couldn't make her come … It was all. . . all slack down there … This was grotesque pleading, for he knew the truth: it wasn't that she was too big for him – he was too small for her. Michelle hadn't meant to; it was a skill she'd sucked up with her mother's formula – belittling a man until he was the size of a toy soldier, then putting him away in a box.
He dredged up the Gimp's real name. 'Where exactly in Hampstead did you drop her off then … Ted? I only ask 'coz I said I'd meet her later and …' He stopped, realizing he was giving too much away, and the Gimp was looking at him queerly, although all he said was 'Beech Row, up the top end of Heath Street, right outside a big fuck-off gaff –'
'Didduloodoo-didduloodoo.' For once Dave's mobile went off at the right time. It was no one he knew – let alone wished to speak to. He feigned importance, though, and, making his excuses, left thinking, Cunt'll be dead soon enough.
At the bottom of the hill, in Gospel Oak, where single cigarettes were sold in the corner shops and kids huffed Evostik in seeping stairwells, Michelle Brodie cohabited with the secret that Carl Rudman was not her husband's child. Yet every time Michelle went up to Hampstead to visit her wealthy lover she thought, Why tell Cal now – why does he deserve to know what I've lived with for years? For ten years Michelle's life had been a horror film shot in extreme slow motion. At his birth it was universally acknowledged that the baby was 'the spit of his old man'. Michelle's mother, Cath, said so, Gary Finch said so, Dave's sister, Samantha, said so – even Annette Rudman, when pressed on the matter, conceded that her grandchild bore its father's features. Michelle wasn't so sure: she saw her lover's face cast like a shadow over the baby's pink flesh. She covertly brought her fingers together 'snip-snip', the way that peasants warded off the evil eye. 'Snip-snip', the way Cal Devenish had gestured when she wormed away from him, across the tousled bed in the Ramada Inn in Sheffield, and asked – a little breathlessly – 'Have you gotta condom?' Her blouse lay open, exposing her eager breast – had she ever been more lovely?
'No, no,' he'd guffawed. 'I don't have a condom – I didn't come with the intention of climbing into bed with anyone. But then,' he laughed again and his eyes dissolved into lusty, winey, cokey pools, 'I didn't count on meeting anyone as beautiful as you.' He took her in his arms and kissed her, and even though his breath was, well … rank . . . she didn't mind because she supposed hers was as well. Then he broke the embrace and held up snipping fingers. 'Snip-snip. You see, I've had the snip. I know, I know …' He took a deep shuddery breath. 'I'm young for it. My wife had two very bad miscarriages before the baby and, well, we didn't think …' Michelle shushed him with her mouth. She didn't mind – she was too drunk. Sleeping with a married man was bad enough – but to discuss his feelings worse still: better to shush him up, then feed the flexing, velvety limb inside herself.
'Snip-snip'. It became their catch-sound, accompanied by the little manipulation that excised them from any responsibility. Five, ten, twenty? How many times had they met up in motorway motels, or done it on the cold mattresses of the empty, serviced flats that Cal was supposed to be managing for his property-dealing paterfamilias? 'Snip-snip'. Then came the evening at the Hilton – Cal made a fist with his little girl's nappy, punching a hole in Michelle's foamy emotions, and seven hours later Dave Rudman, the sap, crawled into it.
Throughout that autumn the new being erected its little stand inside her: Foetus '87; while Michelle, unwilling to acknowledge what was happening, went on supervising the construction of many other, far larger ones. Ideal Home, The Boat Show, The Motor Show. Up to Birmingham for Office Equipment '87 at the NEC – then back down again. Still Cal didn't call. 'Snip-snip'. She cut him out of her life. It was only when Manning, the fat Exhibitions Executive, stopped looking at her and instead began to sniff, that Michelle was forced to frame the realization I'M PREGNANT in orange, metre-high letters.
It was the first time she had stalled, been checked in her determination to make her life hers and hers alone. This feeling of warm yet tense swelling, the teary identification with everything small and vulnerable, was part of a double incubation: Michelle was giving birth to a secret – and abortion was out of the question. Her childhood had, she felt, been banal, her youth exposed and obvious – now her womanhood would be mysterious.
So Michelle savoured the brutal incomprehension of friends and colleagues. Her girlfriends, exasperated by her refusal to tell them anything – let alone all – included her out. Michelle didn't care – she even revelled in her mother's anger. On Sunday evenings she burrowed down to Brixton on the filthy tube, then was winched up to Streatham on a still filthier bus. Past the ice rink, where those black girls rapped me on the head with their rings … Fucking Irish … I cried in the bogs . . . My tutu ruffed up … Blood in my hair … Michelle could find comfort even in the stony silence of a chicken tea. Ron at the lager, Cath fretting at the cuffs of her cardie with chipped nails, pressing a damp serviette against her eye with the heel of her hand … Serves her bloody right … Disgrace, so feared, turned out to be … a relief. Nothing else bad could ever happen to Michelle. The horse had bolted into the stable. There in the pins-and-needles darkness its little hooves drummed on the taut walls of its stall. Where was this jealous God – this vengeful God? Who could he be? A cabbie who knew about statues and came too quick? A man whose face Michelle couldn't even remember.
Cheryl McArdle, the Personnel Director of LM & Q Associates, Exhibition Organizers, kneaded the prominent mole on her broad cheek; her brown sausage curls tumbled on to her padded shoulders. 'I've secured you six months on three quarters of your salary, will that be enough?' Michelle said, 'Thank you.' Cheryl pointed at the old communion ring that Michelle had got enlarged and now wore on the appropriate finger. 'Nice touch,' she said.
Michelle didn't like this lie. Looking back, years later, as Cal Devenish's features – his low brow and tight, otter ears – swam to the surface of her son's developing face, she realized it was biblical – the one lie had begotten the next. But at the time she thought, I don't like to deceive my employers … He has a right to know … It's his child too. She found herself calling the number scrawled on the taxi receipt. Dave wasn't in, but the guy who answered didn't mind giving her the address. Palmers Green – it was ridiculously distant, a trek so long that in making it Michelle felt the city parch into desert. When the cabbie opened the door, half naked, she nearly laughed – almost puked. His thin hair was tousled and through it she saw the exact pattern of his coming baldness. 'I didn't think,' she said. 'I didn't want…' Out of such hesitations whole lives can be stopped in their tracks 'You have a right…' She smoothed the contours of the hillock beneath her sheepskin coat and a sloppy grin spread across his face. What did he imagine? That I'm a plum fare, sweet as a nut? 'You'd better come in,' Dave said.
'You'd better come in,' Cal Devenish said. 'I'd better,' Michelle replied. Heavy gold cufflinks dangled from the cuffs of his thick white linen shirt. Cal had bought Beech House because there was money sloshing around in his account. Dead dad's money – and income from Blackie, his kids' TV programme about a depressed puppy, which had been sold to over three hundred networks worldwide. Cal didn't know what to do with the house that the money he didn't know what to do with had bought. In the tall rooms the plaster mouldings were wire-brushed, the w
allpaper stripped away. It was a palimpsest, this house, the past rubbed up out of the surface of the present. There were a few things scattered on the original floorboards: phone directories, a phone, a standard lamp. They pretended she was an estate agent and he a sexy potential buyer, then they made love, in the hall, on the paint-spattered parquet.
When Carl was six he'd spend whole mornings diligently tying things up, looping string from the banisters to a chair leg, to a door handle, then propelling toy soldiers along these flimsy pulleys. In his ticking hovel Carl's father began tying events together in his fervid mind, linking all those half-recalled moments when his wife had avoided his eyes even more than usual, got undressed in the bathroom and slid, fully nightgowned, into bed. Dave pulled tight the granny knots that bound this change of plan – 'I got a call from Sandra and decided to go out with her after all, Mum didn't mind sitting' – to a new outfit she'd worn only a week before: 'It was in the sales …' 'What fucking sales?' he said out loud. 'What fucking sales do they have in October?'
Dave Rudman wheeled the cab past the National Gallery and headed north up the Charing Cross Road. Plastic horses plunged from the facade of the Hippodrome, cycle rickshaws were cluttering up the junction at Cambridge Circus. Rickshaws … rickshaws! What is this, fucking Delhi! Soon they'll be burning bloody corpses on the Albert Embankment. Dave was no longer in hock to guilt – he redeemed his shabby pledge for still more anger. All those hateful digs and savage barges, the slaps, the pinches, palming her face off like a freckled rugby ball – he was absolved of all responsibility for any of it, because she's been ripping me off… taking them off. . . sick … I can see her face hot and sweaty … Plunging some other bloke's dick in her mouth … He had to stop the cab in Harrington Square and retch out of the half-opened door.
Forward Southampton Road … Right Fleet Road … Forward South End Road … It had been a headachey autumn day, the sun hammering its rays into crushed lager cans, embedding these glittering fragments in the city's terrazzo. Now, as the Heath yawned to the right of the cab and Dave saw clouds boiling over Highgate Hill, he had a moment of clarity: I don't have t'do this … the marriage has been over for bloody years … Only infantilism kept him driving on, an angry little boy whose legs weren't long enough for him to reach the brake pedal. Left Heath Street… left Beech Row … Points at the end: the Friends' Meeting House, New End school, the Horse and Groom, my wife fucking another man … This was the fuck-off gaff, double fronted, two flights of stairs doubling back on themselves to reach a grand front door. He took the stairs six at a time. He looked up to the heavens – cloudy Michelles writhed there, tier upon tier of them. Who was he? Who was this man? For the last decade, every time he looked at his son, Dave Rudman had felt this uncanny jolt – the impact of an unseen object on an unfunny bone. Who was this man? He raised the solid brass question mark and brought it down. 'Bang! Bang! Bang!' In the Family Court the judge beat the fragile bond to bloody mush with his gavel.
They'd been sleeping. She was lying on top of him. His legs were raised, his hands quietly cradled her buttocks. With each 'Bang!' he shlupped out of her, they came awake, parted with a jarring of hipbones, rolled away from each other. 'Jesus Christ!' Michelle cried. 'What the fuck can that be?' But she knew already.
When Cal swung the door open, Dave Rudman looked like an ape man, his arms dangling, his brow bulging. They stared at each other with mounting comprehension. Dave recognized this face, smudged with sleep; it was closely related to one he knew only too well. Over Cal Devenish's bare shoulder Dave could see Michelle doing a thing that in marriage was so workaday – picking up her underwear.
He drove to the old Globe, he got drunk. He drove drunk back to King's Cross and bought a bottle. A whore tried to toss him off in the back of the cab. He finished the bottle, he slept. He woke – and all over the city the plinths, pediments, columns and niches were quite empty; the Family of Man had fled. When Dave got back to the house it was mid morning. Carl was at school and the only evidence of Michelle was a hairbrush strung with long auburn hairs and a pair of high-topped leather boots. They were empty, broken at the ankle.
Big End had married a white girl from Sidcup, and together they'd bought a house in Petts Wood. He hadn't been mucking about, Big End, he had his own joinery business now. The girl was a beautician. Petts Wood, on the leafy southeast borders of London, was as green and quiet as a cemetery. Big End imported some of his kids and threw raucous barbecues that drove his neighbours crazy.
Dave Rudman lay in a spare bedroom stacked with boxes full of moody beauty products: dirty cleansers, hidden concealers, bent foundation creams. He wept and blamed the break-up of his marriage on his baldness. He remembered the oddest week of his life, holed up in a hotel near the Gare Saint-Lazare. He'd cocked up all the arrangements and had to take the Metro out to La Defense every morning for his treatments. In this futuristic city he had Revolutionary Trichofuse. They bored little holes in his scalp and planted tussocks of hair harvested from his groin. The hotel was a smelly warren, and there were tarts bringing back punters at all hours – mostly Japanese. Every night Dave sat staring into the fag-packet-sized mirror for hours at his freshly harrowed pate. He prayed that this would make the difference; after all, he could hardly blame Michelle for not running her fingers through his hair if there was none.
For a few weeks after he got back to London the transplant looked credible. Michelle didn't begrudge him either the time or the money – she understood the naked thrust of vanity, an ambition located in the body alone, a frantic urge for skin to get on, hair to rise to the very top. Then overnight it happened: Dave went to bed still convinced the transplant was a goer and woke up to find that his forehead was a domed groin – he had pubic hair touching his eyebrows. He had to pay out five times as much to get the crinkle-cut hair removed as he'd paid to have it inserted. They filled in the depressions as best they could. He took to wearing a baseball cap.
Now Dave took his hatred out on himself, learning in the muffled little room to quietly bludgeon his head with his fist. 'Bash! Bash! Bash!' The Fairway sat neglected in the road outside, an empty plinth deserted by its statue. Dave still drove every day because he had to, but now he didn't merely neglect the Fairway, he abused it, giving it the sly digs and casual kicks formerly reserved for his family, until the cab's bodywork was dimpled by his animosity.
Only once during the whole protracted disembowelling of their marriage did Dave talk to Michelle about what had happened up in Hampstead. It was April 2001. They were sitting in a sunlit corridor of the Family Division Court at Somerset House. Dust lay heavier than justice on the parquet. Dave was with Rebecca Cohen and the barrister she'd subcontracted to do the talking. Cohen had dyed, caramel hair and a black Jaeger suit. The barrister's striped shirt was escaping from the waistband of his trousers, his yellowing briefs were escaping from their mauve ribbons. He had the florid, old-young face of a man who has witnessed many bad things – none of which has happened to him. Three embrasures along Michelle, tidy as ever, sat with her tag team: Fischbein, a killer newt, and a woman barrister whose downy face glowed. The barristers shuttled between the window seats; their aim was to cut a deal that could be presented to the judge in her chambers. 'It'll save a lot of money,' Cohen said, 'believe me.' The house was chopped up, the maintenance stacked, the child bundled – everything was going in Michelle's favour. She couldn't understand it – why, when he'd caught her in the act, was Dave passively acquiescing to this quickie divorce on the grounds of his bad behaviour?
The barristers were squaring off, trading bits of the Rudmans' lives, when Dave nipped past them and sat down beside her. 'You, him …' He was breathless from the tiny sprint; Cohen flapped behind him. Fischbein said, 'You mustn't approach my client directly,' but Michelle waved him away. When they were let alone, Dave said, 'One thing, tell me one thing – and don't fucking lie. D'you love him? Are you going to take Carl and move in with him? That's all I want to know.' Michelle said, 'I d o n ' t
… I can't say … I'm sorry, David – truly I am.' While what Dave heard her say was It was nothing, it meant nothing … It's over. His guilt did the dubbing.
He moved into the flat on Agincourt Road. He thought something iffy must have been going on with the previous tenant, because the gaff reeked of baby oil, and talcum powder puffed from every square inch of the fitted shag carpet. Every other weekend Dave borrowed a vacuum cleaner from old Mrs Prentice who lived beneath him in a nylon housecoat. Glad of the human contact, she also offered him a box full of polishes and sprays. By the time he went to pick Carl up from his school, the gloomy little flat was spick and span, the Arsenal duvet pancake flat on the boy's bed, the video cassettes a neat little office block.
It was Carl's first year at secondary school, and he begged his father not to come near the place. Dave couldn't keep away. The school backed on to the branch line that ran beside Parliament Hill. Beneath its wonky weathervane and crap campanile the older pupils clustered at the gates. They wore Burberry baseball caps and white, nylon-furred parkas. The mouths of these inner-city Inuits spat consonants hard and sharp as teeth, while the girls' adobe skins suggested they'd been renting Mexico by the half-hour. Yet they seemed entirely sure of themselves, while Dave skulked, and when Carl reluctantly detached himself from his peers, they skulked away together.
Runty… Boysie . . .Champ… Tiger… These babyish nicknames were no longer applicable to the rootless stripling who flopped along by Dave's side. After the first couple of weekends they spent together, Dave was disabused of the idea that he knew intuitively what to do with the lad. If he didn't put together an exhaustive programme they were thrown back on each other's company – and Dave hadn't a clue what to say to Carl. Already he detected an awful adolescent surliness in him – isolated words roamed aimlessly in the lad's down-turned mouth. Was this payback for those livid marks? Whatever Dave uttered sounded tinny and insincere; he was reduced to the role of chirpy cockney cabbie. They had to talk fucking football. And go for endless kick-abouts. Belatedly Dave understood why the gulf between him and his own father had been unbridgeable.