by Will Self
When Christmas was past Dave took the two exercise books that had lain abandoned on top of a bookcase in the snug sitting room. He put them in a Jiffy bag he'd bought at the newsagents in Chipping Ongar. He wrote a letter to accompany them on their journey to the stranger who used to be his son. Bloody odd – I know, mate … might as well hear it from me. At the end of the day – you can throw these away – or keep them … It's up to you … Don't want to lay anything on you – I quite understand … it's difficult to explain … So he didn't, only signed off: I'm sorry – truly I am … because at long last he truly was.
The daffodils stalked from the copses in January – the apple blossom burst before the end of February. Winter, outgunned, retreated before the creeping, vegetative barrage. When the clouds rolled back, the sun had the switched-on intensity of a sunlamp, its ultraviolet rays frazzling the new shoots. Towards Harlow big cock chimneys belched out smoke, and in the lanes exhaust fumes lay in swathes, like the contrails of permanently grounded aircraft.
The cab-sale money was gone, and Dave looked for an earner. Driving a minicab was only logical. He applied to a couple of local outfits, and for the first time in months switched on his mobile phone. There was a text message waiting for him that announced itself with a sterile chirrup. It was from Carl: 'Thanks 4 the lettuce.'
Dave drove Macedonians to pull potatoes and Poles to wrench onions. The unwelcome guest workers dossed down fifteen to a labourer's cottage – or even in corrugated-iron barns on the farms. They clubbed together to hire Dave, so he could take them to the supermarket, where they bought gut-rot booze. He needed little knowledge for these A-to-B runs, no gazetteer imprinted on his cerebellum, no immemorial arrogance. So Dave drove stubbly old people to daycare centres and hairy housewives to be waxed. He picked kids up from school because some mum had rolled over her 4wd, then endured their torment behind his back. He drove City getters back from the tube terminus at Epping to their peculiar gated communities – crescents of modern semis, double-glazed, red-roofed, and marooned in fifty-acre fields of oilseed rape, so bright yellow that they jaundiced the sky above.
'Support price is good,' the farmer, Fred Redmond, explained; except that to the minicab driver's ears his words sounded like 'Suppawt prys iss gúd,' because Redmond spoke an earthy Essex dialect. 'Folk are always moanin' on abaht the fucking E E Yew, but I tellya, Dave, wivaht the subsidë awl this land would be owned by wun bluddë corporation or annuva.' Not that Redmond was nostalgic about the past; he had a grown-up son who was a computer programmer in Toronto. 'And good-bluddë-luck to 'im.' Nor did he view himself as some noble steward of the native sod: 'Thass awl bollix, I've grubbedup 'edjez an' sprayed pestyside wiv the bess uv 'em.'
Even so, at first on short limps back from the pub – for Fred had a gammy leg – and then on longer stumps over fields and through woods, the farmer – seemingly inadvertently – began to instruct the ex-cabbie in the naming of the parts.
At first it was the crops – the wind-dimpled expanses of young wheat, the feathery rows of barley, the rattling stooks of alien maize. Then, as they wandered further, Fred Redmond deciphered the groves of crinkle-leafed oaks with their understorey of spiky green broom, saw-leafed nettles and ferny bracken. Before he moved out to the sticks, Dave would have been hard pressed to tell a silver birch from an ash. Now he discovered himself affectionately stroking the smooth bark of beeches and grateful for the whippy stalks of brambles, pricking him through his jeans into attention.
The pretty, yellow-gold furze flowers reminded Dave of posh, overprotected offspring, guarded by savage thorny fences. When Dave commented on this, Fred drew his attention to rampaging banks of blackthorn – 'Fukkin pest – but good fer keepin' off cattle' – before leading him down to the River Roding, a weedy rill that rived his own land, and showing him the mighty umbels of the Giant Hogweed growing on its shady banks. 'Iss tock-sick,' the farmer explained, 'weird bluddë poison – í doan bovver U when U rubbub against the stems – onlë layter when iss exposed to sunlyt.' Fred was charged with forcibly deporting these ecological migrants who'd muscled in from the Caucasus in the past quarter-century, but, as he put it: 'MAFF don't givva toss az long az the kiddies don't get 'urt. Beesyds – less I ware a fukkin space suit I get burned sumffing chronic cuttin' í dahn.' He pulled up a moleskin trouser leg to show Dave the white patches where his leathery skin had swelled with gleet, then burst.
'Annuva fing,' Redmond continued as they trudged on through the meadows, the dew of late morning soaking them to the crotch while blackbirds gorged in the hawthorn, 'iss served me well, the 'ogweed, iss lyke a letric fence – keeps folk offa my piggery.' Not that there were many folk to be seen. It never stopped impinging on Dave that, despite the squawk of televisions from behind leylandii and the ever-present roar of Japanese engines, once he stepped from the road there it was, the land, undulant and encompassing, with shimmery poplars shading the river beds and damp alders trailing their limp, phallic catkins.
Dave took to walking across to Redmond's piggery so he could commune with the pinky-tan beasts that grubbed in the dust or slumbered in their iron humpies. Looking at them from behind a taut, ticking strand of volts, he would allow himself to see, what? Some humanity in their eyes, sunk deep in their fleshy snouts – some delicacy too in their arched legs and high-heeled trotters. They would come snuffling up to him, and even though he knew he shouldn't – that such sentiments were inapposite for the bacon of the near future – he found himself addressing them with the baby names he'd once bestowed on Carl: 'Little Man' and 'Champ', 'Runty' and 'Tiger'. When he turned away the hogs ambled off, back to their muddy wallows.
As the summer days stretched out, Phyllis registered the change in Dave's state of mind. Letting him get over it had, she thought, been the right approach. He began to shave regularly, bought her bottles of the sweet German wine she liked and brought her bunches of wild flowers back from his rambles. One night in July they made love for the first time in three months; then spent, the two of them lying like beached porpoises on the salty mattress, she dared to murmur, 'It was prob'ly better that way for him.'
'Better in what way?' He nuzzled up to her, a hand fanning over the broken blood vessels that gathered, like tributaries, in the sunken valley at the small of her back. 'Better' – she hunkered up and pulled a pillow underneath her breasts – 'before those Turks caught up with him – the heavy mob that was after him for the cab debt.' She feared she'd said too much, because Dave rolled away from her and reached for his cigarettes on the bedside table. 'Them?' He spat fresh smoke and a rare gob of cabbie nous. 'They wouldn't've done much to him, duffed 'im up a bit maybe – broke 'is nose. They want their money same as everyone else – dead blokes ain't great earners.'
Was Phyllis too old for it? The thought had occurred to Dave when they started sleeping together, and she waved away the condoms with their ludicrous packaging of a chastely smiling youthful duo. She didn't say she was on the pill, only that it wasn't necessary. She still has her period, though … it was irregular, that much he noticed – now that he was noticing things again, things outside of himself. Best not push it … Not that there was time they were out of time – more that I gotta … accept what's happened … I'm gonna be one of those blokes what doesn't have kids – not ever. He couldn't forbear from connecting this realization with his behaviour towards Carl. It's payback time … even though he couldn't understand who he'd borrowed from. There was no cosmic fucking loanshark that he believed in. Not like Aunt Gladys squeaking across the Mormon basketball court in her sneakers … Devenish an' his ill-gotten dosh … Michelle even with 'er creams an' slap … They're all worshipping sumffing … like those fucking nutters totalling themselves in Bagdad … It's only that they want a heaven here, on earth.
At the back of the moat that half circled the old castle mound, a meadow unfolded and reached along to a little kids playground tucked in the far corner of a cricket pitch. Sitting on a bench sacred to the memory of a former Redmond, Da
ve Rudman meditatively stroked the bare ground left behind by his botched hair transplant. Dense thickets of furze and brambles extended along the edges of the field, and from these rabbits came hesitantly hip-hopping – first ones and twos, then, when this advance guard detected no danger, threes and fours. A brace of crows staggered to the ground near by, and the rabbits retreated. A bird scarer half a mile away went off with a flat 'bang', and the crows limped aloft. The rabbits came sniffing back. In the lolloping, furtive boogie of the animals, their ear-flick and paw scratch, Dave divined soft answers to the hard questions that assailed him.
After watching the rabbits for ten minutes or so, as the sun tugged up to its zenith, Dave noticed a sinister focus to their botheration – a glistening scrap on the turf that had also attracted a twister of flies. Strolling over from the bench, he found the broken necklace of vertebrae on its offal display cushion; other trinkets – the skull with semiprecious eyes, the ribcage like a gory tiara – lay a few paces off, surrounded by the parched shot of rabbit droppings. Don't push it. . . Let her come to you . . . She's 'ad enough drama in her life.
A shadow fell across the dead rabbit and Dave looked up to find Fred Redmond standing there with a shotgun broken over his bare arm. 'You … did you?' Dave didn't want to sound like a townie bleeding heart. 'Nah.' Redmond was offhand. 'Cooduv bin a fox – feral cá eevun. Eyem nó in ve abbit uv dissembowlin em. Still,' he continued, guiding Dave to the far side of the field with his free arm, 'vare a bluddë menniss, vay ar, lookí ve way awl viss bank eer iz riddulled wiv vare burrös – vayl av ve ole pitch subsydin if we doan keep em dahn. U shúd cumaht lampin wiv me wun nyt – gimme an and.'
Dave wasn't keen on the idea at all. But Phyllis said, 'Why don't you? It's the company he's after – since his wife died he's been on his own a lot. Besides, he's been a good neighbour to me and Steve over the years – not like some of the others round here. He's come over and done bits and bobs in the cottage – it'd be good if we could do something for him in return.'
They waited for a moonless, overcast night. Fred had an old car foglamp mounted on the back of his pick-up. 'Awl U gotta do iz aim ve beem an Eyel andul ve shoota.' They lurched along green lanes and rutted farm tracks. Fred swerved the pick-up off the road into areas of heath, where the fire-frazzled stumps of furze bushes stuck up in defensive palisades. They stopped, got out, went round and clambered up. Dazzled by the spotlight, Dave looked away into the bruised pink flesh of after-images, blinked a few times, then saw the rabbits, mute and curious, come nosing into the killing cone.
It bothered him much less than he thought it would. It helped that Fred handled the weapon with studious, unflashy movements: aiming, firing, breaking, ejecting, reloading – a piece worker on a cat-food production line. The rabbits' eyes shone in the big wattage, the gun reported, the dust and cordite smoke cleared to reveal another brown bump. They packed it in close to three in the morning; the back of the pick-up was lumpy with little corpses. 'What'll you do with 'em?' Dave asked, hoping for utilitarian news, rabbit stew canned and exported to starving Africans. 'Lanfil,' Fred snapped. 'Up bì Arlo.'
'U shúd C ve playce,' he resumed half an hour later when they were back at the cottage and companionably gulping sweetly burning Jack Daniels. 'Iss lyke ve surfiss uv ve moon, Uje pyls uv rubbish, Uje mobs uv gulls cummin from ve C. Eye tellya, Dave,' Fred said, relighting his mouse turd of a roll-up and blowing a thin thread of smoke into the tassels of the lampshade, 'Eye sumtyms fink iss awl gon arsy-versy, yernowoteyemeen? Ve C az cumminta ve lan – ve lan az gon aht 2 C.'
The past has become our future and in the future lie all our yesterdays … Was it a stale aphorism freshly baked, or an ancient pop song dimly recalled? Dave could not have said.
They went out often after that – the old farmer, the reddish-brown hide on his neck creviced like sun-baked mud; and the ex-cabbie, potbelly and arm wattles melting off him in the sweat of their night-time exertions. Another unlikely duo – a dad in search of a lad, a lad wandering fields hazy blue with memories. Fred acquired his own tea mug at the cottage, his own chair and cap hook. They would sit up well past dawn – not exactly getting drunk, although certainly not staying sober. Phyllis didn't mind, Dave came to her in the dewy period before she arose to go to the city. Came to her lean and lovelorn, gently athletic.
One night in mid August they came back from the lamping and got fucking lashed. Dave was relieved Fred didn't become maudlin, only tight-lipped, little dribs of sadness escaping with his fag smoke. Yet they both exposed their mummy selves that night, Fred regretting the lack of understanding he had shown to his son: 'Eye wannid im on ve lan – vares bin Ridmuns eerabaht fer sentries,' while Dave regretted everything – and nothing – all at once, for surely it's only a tosser who says he regrets nothing at all – it means he remembers nothing … be-because to remember is to regret.
Too pissed to drive, Fred tottered off about six in the morning. Dave came out to see him on his way. The old farmer's boots left crushed swathes in the unmown grass, each with its own scattering of mashed flower heads – dandelions, buttercups and daisies – twisted like wreaths. Fred forgot his shotgun, which was leaned up against the bellying plaster by the front door – as commonplace as an umbrella. Seeing it when she came down at seven, Phyl went back upstairs and gently shook Dave awake. 'Fred's left his gun in the house,' she said. 'Do make sure he comes over and gets it, we don't want any bother.' Dave grunted, 'Yeah, yeah, no bother, love, I'll get on it.' She felt his cheek against hers – as pocky as a newly surfaced road. She inhaled his shitty whisky breath and tousled his sweaty tonsure. He flumped back into the bed – she turned, went downstairs and drank a cup of rosehip tea standing at the draining board. She fetched her handbag, looked at the shotgun once more, then shut the door carefully, listening for the latch to fall. She set off across the fields, on her way to catch the bus from Chipping Ongar to Epping.
As the Fairway bucketed northeast up the MII the two men inside were engaged in two different conversations. Rifak, who was driving, had his slick earpiece-and-mic combo inserted, and so was able to carry on his row with Janice while holding the rattling old cab steady in the slow lane. Mustafa, by contrast, lay almost prone on the back seat, one of his new Gucci loafers – of which he was inordinately proud – pressed against the window. Mustafa spoke in Turkish, Rifak in crumbly English. Both men were smoking, and their consonants cut like scimitars through the silky blue swags and furbelows.
'Ewer runnin abaht tahn givvinit larj!' Rifak spat. He was in thrall to this woman, who was – his colleague thought – nothing special, only another cockney whore who got her tits out in a pub on the Mile End Road every Sunday lunchtime, so she could pick up a few quid from the dissolute boozers. However, Rifak, having stuck his cock in her arse, her mouth and latterly her cunt, before slapping her about a bit, was now convinced that he possessed her more than he even possessed his wife. His wife was a similarly abused girl, flown in from Central Anatolia and confined to the hejab and a flat above an upholsterer on the Lower Clapton Road. Here she had endured two murderous pregnancies in rapid succession, stuffing her frightened face with honey cakes, while receiving the hushed sympathy of other mummies.
By contrast Mustafa's phone conversation was measured and – h e felt – subtle. Their boss, who lived behind redbrick walls in Cobham, liked to have situation reports – and Mustafa was happy to oblige. He held the razor-thin mobile so that it shaved his hairy ear, and spoke eloquently of how this account was being pursued while that one had been closed. His Knowledge was comprehensive, the entire conurbation – its grids of overpriced, semi-detached hutches, and sclerotic arteries clogged with superfluous travel agencies – resolved into sums owed and the dizzying interest rates charged on them. In Mustafa's inner eye, he saw the city laid out as a diorama, the mounting sums rising in fluorescent plumes of digits from unsuccessful beauty salons and the serviced apartments where Toyota Lexus drivers fiddled with Romanian tarts.
They pu
lled off at Junction 7 and had breakfast in the Little Chef. During his seventeen years in London Mustafa had acquired a taste for slopping up runny egg yolks and the juice of grilled tomatoes with a scoop of bread. While performing these expert manipulations, he lectured Rifak on what a fool he was making of himself. Of the job in hand there was nothing to be said. It was routine.
By the time they had paid their bill and walked out to the car park, the sun was pummelling its way through the overcast sky. Ten or twenty wasps swayed by an overflowing bin, alighting on ketchup-smeared paper to feed. The two Turks got back in the cab, drove up to the roundabout and took the A414 for Chipping Ongar. Peering through the windscreen, Mustafa still found the monochrome fields and shaved copses lush and unsettling. He regretted the two sausages, the two rashers of bacon, the two fried eggs, the two grilled tomatoes, the two axe heads of fried potato mush, the two bits of toast. His belly gurgled like a nearly empty fuel tank.
Dave Rudman was sitting at the drop-leaf table in the tiny front room of the cottage reading yesterday's paper. There was an article on the vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, rubbishing the proposals for the arty sculptures that might be poised there. The paper editorialized that this prime position should only be afforded to the image of a mighty national hero. Gary – Fucker Finch dressed as 'enry the Eighth … pigeons shitting on his doublet … Fighting Fathers banner in his bronze-bloody-hands … Dave had a biro in his hand and annotated the newspaper, scrawling in the blank linchets between rips of text and photos: EMPTY, I'VE HAD ENOUGH, TAKING THE PLUNGE.
Then he heard a cab come grunting down the lane and squeal to a halt. Can't be a mate – they'd've called …An' it's too far for a fare … The small crystalline facts he had ignored tinkled and shattered. He knew who it was even before he saw their hot cheeks pumped up with blood. It was me they were looking for all along … Looking at Ali Baba's . . . Looking at Phyl's work . . . it was them as called Mum and Dad in all… Dave was forced to conclude that I wanted this to 'appen, and, more defiantly, I was justified – why should I pay that cunt back, why? I was off my bleedin' rocker … Yet there were also his own words, echoing around the M25, all the way from the hackneyed past: You never owe a Turk. Never.