The Book of Dave

by Will Self

  The irony of such a large house being paid for by the loss of so many other smaller ones was not dwelled on – for there were still more queries, dangling like his own, blond forelock over the Skip Tracer's head. His ex-wife was interviewed and her testimony was damning as to the Skip Tracer's shady financial dealings and his flirtation with the extreme right wing. The former Mrs Higginbottom stopped short of the nosebag, although she did suggest that 'Barry has … issues he'd rather not look at. Issues of dependency.' Nevertheless, despite his fickleness when it came to the practicalities of childcare, she supported his right to see their daughter, while maintaining that 'his … behaviour in the past means I don't have a lot of confidence … in his motives'.

  'Why'd she marry the bloke, then?' Phyllis observed tartly. She was sitting in the humpbacked armchair that had become 'hers' and sewing a name tape into a pair of Steve's boxers. Dave grunted – and Phyllis gave him a sharp look. 'You know him, don't you? It isn't only your mate Gary who's mixed up in this, is it?' Dave conceded that he had met Higginbottom at a Fathers First meeting, while neglecting to mention that he'd also consulted him in a professional capacity – let alone that he still owed him.

  Dave had finally made his mind up – he was finished. It was over. There had been one or two false starts – the Fairway left by the road temporarily abandoned – but he'd always crawled back. He'd argued his way round the two police cautions on his record when his badge was up for renewal, and he hadn't declared his medical record – so he held on to the job quite as doggedly as it hung on to him. The cab grasped him in its steel fist – and beyond that extended the muscle-bound arm of his Knowledge, its tendons flexing through the city streets. What would he be if he walked away from it for ever? At my age, with no other training … no qualifications. He saw himself in mid morning on a quiet residential pavement, a poor, bald fucker delivering leaflets for an Indian takeaway at one-fifty an hour … The squeal of a gate in need of oiling resolved itself into the squeal of brakes, and Dave found himself turning into the Roman Road. I'm doing it… I'm fucking doing it.

  In the lumpy lane beside Ali Baba's garage he found a handful of cabbies waiting their turn to pick up or drop off vehicles. Getting out to join them, Dave, for the first time in years, examined the Fairway, comparing it with the newer TXs parked either side. The poor old wagon, with its chrome trim and narrow waist, looked out of date, like an old Hansom or something. A foxy-faced fellow whom Dave vaguely recognized came towards him waving a copy of the Sun in one hand and a kebab in the other. 'Orlright, Tufty,' he said. 'This is your mate, innit?' He showed Dave the open spread: on one side, with greasy fingerprints on her roasted thighs, was 'Naughty-gal Nikki from Norwich', while on the other there was a grainy black-and-white photo of Gary Finch dressed as Henry VIII. 'Thass Fucker, innit?' reiterated the foxy man, and Dave owned that it was. 'What's 'e doing up there, then?' More finger marks smudged the balustrade Fucker was poised on. 'Thass the Royal Courts, ain't it?' put in a second cabbie who had a fleshy nose clefted like an arse.

  'It's a protest,' Dave said wearily. 'They dress up as historical figures to protest about fathers' rights.'

  'But Enery ve Aytf! 'E didn't eggzackerly myndaht fer iz kids, did 'e!'

  'I think the point is' – Dave had reverted to type, speaking his mother's hard-won, didactic English – 'that Henry desperately wanted a son – that he was prepared to go to any lengths to get one. Look at the other blokes with him, they're all dressed as other famous men. He's Prince Albert, that one's Churchill. I think the sort of dads these men were is … well, besides the point. They put on these costumes when they climb up on public buildings, cranes, anywhere high up that'll get them attention, and it works, doesn't it?'

  'I fink they're two stops short of Dagenham, mate,' said the foxy-faced cabbie, and his mate cackled. 'Yeah, fucking barking!'

  Dave had little inclination to defend Fucker – anyway, he was saved by the diddle and doo of his phone. It was Dr Bernal at Heath Hospital. 'The test results are through,' she said without preamble – they both knew what she was talking about. 'Would you like to come up here to discuss them with me?'

  'No, that's alright, thanks for sorting it out, Dr Bernal – but you can give it to me straight, I'm ready.'

  She sighed. 'Well, they confirm what your ex-wife and her, um, partner have been saying. Dave – Carl … he isn't your son – not biologically, that is – he's … he's Devenish's.'

  Dave removed the phone from his ear and stared at it. It lay in his big, damp palm like an artificial pearl. The teeny voice of Jane Bernal cried to him, 'Dave – Dave? Are you alright?'

  He put it to his ear again. 'Yeah, yeah, I'm fine – to be honest I was expecting this. Listen, I can't talk now, I'm tied up, I'll call you later.' He squeezed the phoney spot.

  Ali Baba himself was long gone – back to Famagusta to play out his days on a plastic card table, downing shots of raki and gambling away his London wad. Ali's eldest son, Mohammed, had taken over the business. He was a mercurial figure, phases of 'roids, slappers and raves, interspersed with regular attendance at the Finsbury Park Mosque, and a grim-faced determination to bring about a worldwide uprising of the umma. For the last year or so he seemed to have quietened down: he'd dropped the –hammed, and it was plain Mo who stepped forward to meet Dave, scrunging Swarfega between his oily knuckles. Behind him, in the Stygian interior of the arch, Kemal's wrinkled lower half hung from the chassis of a brand new TX2. A radio warped R & B round the brick cavern.

  With age and responsibility Mo was starting to resemble his old man: he had the same iron-filing hair and waddling gait. 'Wossup, Tufty?' he asked. 'You can't be wantin' anuvver service, you 'ad the wagon in 'ere a couple uv mumfs ago, an' even ven there woz only a few 'undred more on the clock than wot there woz the time before.'

  'No.' Dave spoke in his new plain and considered fashion. 'I want to sell the cab.' He held out the keys. 'I'll take what you can give me if you want it for the fleet' – Mo's eyes widened – 'or, if you can find a private buyer, you can take whatever percentage you like.' He dropped the keys into Mo's sticky green palm and without waiting for an answer turned on his heel. From beneath the TX2 there came a resounding chuckle – but Mo called after him, 'I'm not surprised, Tufty – you needing the dosh an' that. To be honest there's been a couple of the chaps over this way looking for you. I didn't say nuffing, but they was Turks, Tufty. Turks, and they looked like the heavy mob.' Dave wasn't listening – he was gone, past the other cabbies, out the end of the alley and into the traffic on Vallance Road, which was coagulating into a scabrous rush hour.

  He wandered aimlessly out of town, trudging up through Hackney and London Fields. At the junction of Mare Street and Dalston Lane a ragged company worked the stalled traffic: Romany women in full skirts patterned with tiny bits of mirror wielded squeegees, while their drugged babies lay by a gutted phone booth; a Big Issue seller, crying his wares, had the hollow cheeks and lank hair of a prophet – of his own doom; and, preposterously, there was also a fresh-faced chugger, who tried to get the charitable cases thronging the pavements to give their incapacity benefit away. Dave held it all – he knew it all, he moved on into Clapton.

  It was a Friday, and the metal exodus was angry and fearful. Flabby arms let crumpled burger wrappers fall from the wound-down windows of cars; a miasma of exhaust fumes hung over the rooftops. The only fresh things Dave could see as he slapped from slab to slab were dog turds. He'd been walking for about an hour when it happened. He found himself by a duck pond that cratered a strip of park, its surface coated with algae as thick and green as emulsion. There were hulking nineteenth-century villas to one side, a primary school and an uglification of 1980s flats to the other. He hadn't been making any conscious effort to lose himself – the idea was ridiculous – and yet he had. He didn't know where he was.

  A young woman came limping towards him. She wore a bright blue puffa jacket and her brown ringlets lay hopelessly on her pitted cheeks. She had the
broken nails and scuffed trainers of poverty. 'Excuse me, love,' Dave began, 'but you wouldn't happen to know …' then he tailed off, because she was looking at him with eyes bruised by utter disorientation. Her dry lips parted and she said, 'Pliz? Pliz?' She doesn't know where she is . . . She hasn't got a fucking clue. . . She looks like she's been brought here from Massy-fucking-donia smacked out in a van … Kept locked up in a gaff near here for months getting fucked stupid . . . Fucked up the cunt –fucked up the Gary . . . She don't know where she is – she don't even know what city she's in … 'Don't worry, love,' he said, 'you don't worry.'

  He left her and stumbled down through a new development: tall, narrow townhouses ranged round courtyards choked with cars. There was a kosher deli open and outside it Frummer kids were gathered licking ice lollies. As Dave limped by, they stared at him, their pale blue eyes, velvet skullcaps and corkscrew payess giving them the look of earnest spaniels. Next he found himself on a towpath beside a sluggish reach of brown water.

  He was losing it – whole chunks of the city were falling out of him. Kenton and Kingsbury, Kingston and Knightsbridge. He didn't know the name of this canal, or any other, only that it was oozing south, so he turned in the opposite direction and walked north. North past the grassy ramparts of reservoirs guarded by palisades of Giant Hogweed, north, past the tumbledown shacks of shedonists, who'd pitched up on this toxic Limpopo in their bashed barges and cashiered dredgers. He skirted industrial estates where metal tortured itself and ducked under the echoic stages of elevated roadways. He traversed pancake-flat parks where adolescents mooched on mountain bikes, their thin faces lost in the shadows of their hoodies. They moved slowly, so very slowly, their feet only just maintaining purchase on the very outer edge of the pedals.

  Towards evening Dave found himself mounting a hill. Up he went through saw-leafed patches of nettles and the whippy stalks of brambles, while Stanmore and Streatham dropped from the back of his hot head to lie gently steaming on the crushed grass behind. He was disembowelled – he was losing it; and as he lost it the crushed plastic bottle of his soul expanded with sudden cracks and pops.

  At the crown of the hill the shrubbery gave way to cool shady groves of silver birch and alder. In the middle of a clearing there was a concrete trig' point. Dave turned back to see the city he had lost spreading to the far hills of the south in brick peak after tarmac trough, blood-orange under the dying sun. In the foreground tall towers stood up to the ochre sky, while to the southeast close-stacked blocks were already subsumed to an electric glare. In the mid distance a river streaked silver and beside it a mighty wheel revolved so slowly.

  Dave knew none of it – his Knowledge was gone. The city was a nameless conurbation, its street and shop signs, its plaques and placards, plucked then torn away by a tsunami of meltwater that dashed up the estuary. He saw this as clearly as he'd ever seen anything in his life. The screen had been removed from his eyes, the mirror cast away, and he was privileged with a second sight into deep time. The great wave came on, thrusting before it a scurf of beakers, stirrers, spigots, tubes, toy soldiers, disposable razors, computer-disc cases, pill bottles, swizzle sticks, tongue depressors, hypodermic syringes, tin-can webbing, pallet tape, clips, clasps, brackets, plugs, bungs, stoppers, toothbrushes, dentures, Evian bottles, film canisters, widgets, detergent bottles, disposable lighters, poseable figurines of superheros, cutlery, hubcaps, knick-knacks, mountings, hair grips, combs, earphones, Tupperware containers, streetlight protectors – and a myriad other bits of moulded plastic, which minutes later washed up against the hills of Hampstead, Highgate, Harrow and Epping, forming salt-bleached reefs, which would remain there for centuries, the lunar pull of the new lagoon freeing spiny fragments to bob into the cockle-picking hands of know-nothing carrot-crunchers who would scrutinize them and be filled with great awe by the notion that anything ever had – or ever would be again – Made in China.

  Dave turned and wandered away into the woodland, dipping down into damp hollows where midges swirled, then rising up over root-buttressed ridges overarched by the gnarled limbs of oaks that sawed at the thickening night.

  When the ex-driver crossed over the M25 and walked down into Epping, darkness had fallen. White flashes from the exposed rails of the tube station imprinted after-images of the privet-lined paths he trudged along. A public-address system barked 'This is the Central Line service for all stations to West Ruislip', but it meant nothing to Dave. On he went, over humped fields of alien maize, up to another wood of smooth-barked beech where pipistrelles stroked his remaining hair. Some trees had been pollarded, and outlined against the bruised night sky they resembled the knobkerries of giants sunk in the beaten earth.

  Coppices stirred, then rattled, as Dave mounted a footbridge over the MII. Out in the middle he stopped and peered down at the streaming traffic, car after van after lorry, their headlights drilling the murk. The windscreens were blank until they shot beneath the parapet, then, momentarily, the drivers' faces were revealed: jaws bunched, eyes white-rimmed with exhaustion. Dave understood now that they would always be pinioned in this moment, while he was free to swim in the entire current of fluvial time.

  The moon rose over the coxcomb of a wood, and it looked like a headlight cratered with flyspecks. He reached Phyllis's cottage beyond Chipping Ongar after midnight. He was as ignorant as a baby, and accordingly she gathered him to her breast.

  Dave Rudman met up with Anthony Bohm in the boardroom of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. It was a featureless white box, buried on a subterranean level. Steel-framed windows gave on to the bottom of an atrium, where stripy stones propped up dildo cactuses. Bohm sat, his goatee dowsing his regulation psychotherapist's Cornish-pasty shoes. Dave had walked from Sloane Square – Bohm had been tied up on Albert Bridge for hours. A Fighting Father was suspended from one of the cast-iron towers. 'Dressed as Thomas More,' Bohm laughed – an unendearing neigh. 'But why, when he was little more than a domestic tyrant?'

  'Location,' Dave explained. 'His house – his statue on the Embankment.'

  'Um, quite so – did you say you'd walked here?' Bohm was amazed.

  'Yeah, it's all up with me, Tonë – the cabbing, that is. I thought it meant, well, everything – it was who I was, but now – '

  'I suppose you associate it with the loss – as you see it – of Carl?'

  'That's about the size of it, mate. The Knowledge was what I had to pass on. I believed that even before I wrote that mad rant and buried it in their garden – now it seems like a load of bollocks, a load of fucking bollocks.'

  As he grew agitated the consonants flaked away from the scalp of his diction: 'Ant, I gotta – I haffta, I gotta go back there. I gotta dig it up. S'pose 'e found it? It'd fuck wiv 'is 'ed. I mean – I know it ain't likely – but what if 'e did?' Bohm refused to be drawn. If Rudman was seeking permission for this peculiar escapade, he was not in the business of granting it. He took a different tack: 'You know one of them, don't you, the Fighting Fathers?'

  'Yeah, Fucker – Gary Finch. Daft tosser – he's like a, a tool for them. 'E don't really get it – ' e does what they tell 'im to do. 'E's always the one up on the plinth, or the column or the building, with the old Bill trying to talk him down.'

  Bohm contemplated this – along with his shoe – for quite a while. Dave looked at the gilt-framed portraits on the wall; celebrated and self-important sawbones stared back at him. 'Am I right in thinking,' Bohm said eventually, 'that you see in Gary Finch's fate what might've happened – had things turned out differently – to you?'

  There were misty haloes around the streetlights, and the parked cars were blistered with raindrops. The night was subdued save for the swish of the occasional vehicle plummeting down Heath Street and the divine booming of jets holding a pattern above London. The long, low villa next to Beech House was entirely dark; its round windows goggled through wisteria lashes at the figure that came padding along the pavement. Steel rods pierced the high garden wall, Aero props were strung
with razor wire, a blue alarm light pulsed, a stylized child was obliterated by a black bar. DO NOT PLAY ON THIS SCAFFOLD the sign read. Dave Rudman decided to double back and work his way through the gardens.

  It took him over an hour. Every time a cat sneezed or a fox yelped he froze for whole minutes. He was in full possession of his faculties while creeping like a madman through exotic plantations of gunnera and black bamboo, and imported bark chips that shifted under his rubber soles. A green nylon rucksack was slung over his shoulder, in it a mattock he'd bought the day before from an army-surplus shop on the Euston Road. He was going equipped – yet not sufficiently, and he realized what he would find before he hauled over the last wall. And there it was: the York paving, glinting in the diffused light, the non-renewable hardwood decking, solid enough for a man-o'-war. Under it – deep under it – was the Book. How the fuck, Dave thought. How the fuck am I going to get it up?

  Cal Devenish stood at the French windows in the drawing room examining his own jet reflection for signs of guilt. Not long now … Papers all signed – deal all done … Share price inflated – the bunce creamed off. Business flogged – the bunce skimmed off again . . . yet he saw neither satisfaction nor shame in his face – only an intractable weariness, along with other things: a settle big enough for a cardinal to prop his fat behind on; a dormant log-effect gas fire; investment art on the silky wallpaper; and shoved up in the corners of the room the little beige boxes of the alarm system installed to protect it. Cal wondered where his son was; it made a change – he wryly conceded – to wondering where his daughter was.

  Now that the truth was free to range the burgundy carpets of Beech House, its elegant chambers resounded with the cackling of a freak who's been told a sick joke. The sympathetic hatch opened between Cal and Carl on the night they sprang Daisy from the nick had been slammed resolutely shut. Carl took to wearing River Island jackets and Burberry baseball caps as nurture wiped the floor with nature. Cal even thought the lad physically resembled the dad who'd changed his nappies and blown his nose. A long streak of fifteen-year-old, his ears stuck out like Rudman's, and like Dave he took the high dive off Hampstead and into the London lagoon. Carl stayed away from Beech House and hung out on the estate down in Gospel Oak – for this Cal was guiltily grateful, because when his new son was in residence, Carl passed on those sly digs and underhand blows he himself had received, years before, from Dave.