The Book of Dave (12 page)

At first tariff on the day after his best friend had first lain with his wife, Fred took the clay bottle he had earmarked
from the brick dresser in the Funch gaff. He also took a small tank of moto oil and some twine. From a hidden nook in the
Shelter itself, he retrieved a missive he had laboriously composed. He slipped across the home field through the spectral
dawn, over the brow of the hill between the moto wallows, then down into the Wess Wud. At the Perg, he retrieved his odd craft
and hoisted it over his shoulder. He walked on through the dips and hollows of Sandi Wud, hardly conscious of his progress,
lifting his legs over the trunks of fallen trees as if they belonged to another.

On the very spit of land where he'd been betrayed, Fred Ridmun mated earthenware and wood. The bottle sat snugly in the hollow
he'd carved out of the deck. He rolled up the ragged sheet of A4 – a blank endpage torn from the Book itself – then inserted
it in the neck. He stoppered the bottle and wound the oiled twine around its neck, pulling each loop tight. Then he lashed
the bottle to the pedalo with strips of moto hide. He erected a little mast whittled from a sapling in a notch forward of
the cargo, then rigged a diminutive sail of precious London cloth.

Pulling the keel of the pedalo over the shingle, the scraping sound merging with the rattle of the waves, Fred was aware that
he was doing something that had been done before in times of distress. When, in the era of his great-great-grandparents, the
pox had carried off half the island's population, just such a vessel had been dispatched to Chil. There was every chance that
the prevailing currents would fail him, or that the little craft would become waterlogged and sink. However, if it was spotted
by a Chilman, recovered and the bottle opened, and if the message was understood, then taken on to its intended recipient,
the crude phonics Fred had scrawled could brook no misinterpretation: FLIAR ON AM. DAD SEZ EE IZ DAVE. CUM NAH PLEEZ KWIK
MISTAH GREEVS. Fred Ridmun pushed the pedalo off and sat back on his haunches. A thin smile cut through his sharp features
as the wind caught the patch of sail and the craft began to slap up and over the waves, heading due northeast. It was a providential
course – for him.

– Iss a syne orlrì, me luvs, issa bluddë syne! Iss ve édlyt uv Dave, thass fer sure. Ees pu í on, an nah ees turned í off.
An U wanna no wy?

There was a groaned chorus of whys from the other Hamsters.

– Eyel tell U wy – ees turned í off so as ee can run that fukkin fliar dahn!

She swivelled to confront her son, who, unnoticed by the others, had come among them, and now stood in their midst, his face
covered with thick, fearful sweat and dark with dreadful incomprehension.

4

The Family of Man

June 1987

'Could be the alternator,' said Kemal, patting down the pockets of his oily overalls for his cigarettes.

'Yeah, yeah,' Dave laughed, 'it's always the alternator, innit? I dunno why I'm bothering, it ain't like I'm doing nights.'

Dave was renting from Ali Baba on the half-flat for eighty quid a week, and the night driver he shared the cab with was
a fucking
animal.
Dave had given him the nickname Mister Hyde. Strictly speaking Dave didn't have to return the cab to the garage in Bethnal Green until eight, although he usually had it back an hour earlier. Early, clean and filled up – even though only the last was his responsibility. This particular evening Dr Jekyll had prevailed on Kemal to examine the headlights, which he'd noticed weren't working when he went through the Blackwall Tunnel.

Mister Hyde showed no such consideration. After the night shift the cab was always filthy: the ashtrays full, the driver's
compartment rattling with discarded soft-drink cans. One morning when he picked the cab up, Dave found a used condom glued
to the back seat by spunk and hair. Hyde was also nicking diesel, a couple of quid every fill-up. It was pathetic criminality,
because ever since
the
Big-fucking-Bang
the year before, the City Boys had been hellbent on booting the Footsie right back up again. If you got a getter, they'd double
up on the meter, maybe treble it. Dave had whole days of cream fares splurging across town. He harvested tourists as if they
were wheat and he was driving a
fucking combine 'arvester.
While Mister Hyde didn't even keep up with his rent, which was
fucking stupid … You never owe a Turk. Never.

Ali came out from a glassed-off office – a heavy man with iron-filing hair who walked on the balls of his feet. His top lip
bulged as if he had a moustache growing inside of it. 'Your man,' he said, showing Dave peg teeth,' 'e juss rang, 'e ain't
gonna be in.'

'Oh, yeah.'

'Yeah, you wan' the cab?' Ali jabbed a tripod of fingers at the old Fairway. It was a gambler's gesture: twist, fold, hit
me again.

'Um … well… yeah … why not? Ta.'

'My plezzure.' Ali stalked off again. Kemal tootled smoke and a high-pitched note. Dave realized the mechanic was giggling
– but at whom?

There were only four years between the three Rudman kids, Samantha, David and Noel. They stuck together. On summer mornings
they'd set off down the steep slope of Ossulton Way, carrying Tupperware containers of sandwiches in their dad's old army
rucksack. Sam had five bob for Tizer and crisps. In the shoe-box house they left behind them was the senseless slaughter of
a one-sided row, their father a sitting duck in the weedy pond of his hangover, their mother railing against him. In front
of the children lay the valley of the Mutton Brook, and beyond it the hills of Hampstead and Highgate rose up, a mass of shrubbery,
studded with the red-tiled roofs of detached villas.

It would take them hours to reach the Heath, dawdling along the Avenues of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, sweet with the smell
of warm tar, fresh-cut grass and clipped privet. Dave and Noel pelted each other with the orange buckshot of rowan berries
and tore satisfying slabs of bark from the silver birches. Serious Samantha – her mother's daughter – sought out the gaps
in the net curtains and scrutinized the interiors of rooms, noting three-piece suites, Sanderson's wallpaper, television cabinets
– all the aspirational durables.

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.'