The Book of Dave (16 page)
Authors: Will Self
Confessions of a bloody lucky cab driver
⦠Dave plodded up the stairs, the binders under each arm. He knew a cabbie called Stan who liked to be stood upon.
That's how he got his moniker: Stood-upon-
Stan.
If he got an overweight woman fare and she looked biddable, he'd strike up a conversation and eventually make the peculiar
proposition: 'If you'll stand on me for a few minutes, luv â juss stand on me chest in yer stockinged feet â nuffin' kinky
â I'll waive the fare.'
Nothing kinky! That's fucking kinky .
. . Yet according to Stan lots of them would. Apart from this oddity, although Dave had heard a few stories about the allure
of the cabbie to women of a certain age, he mostly discounted them. He no more thought of trying it on with a fare than he
considered picking up a black guy heading south.
No offence, mate,
he'd mutter to an archetypally good black man as he swept past,
too many fucking nose bleeds. 'None taken,'
replied Nelson Mandela, and bent back to pulverizing the York stone kerb with his prison mallet.
In the strongly perfumed interior of Michelle's flat â with its framed film posters, draped silk scarves and potted geraniums â events took a queer course. She slopped warm vodka and flat tonic into tumblers, which they then drank on a tiny rooftop terrace.
They sat awkwardly on metal chairs, looking at the green belt of gardens three storeys below. Then the alcohol got her dander
up again and Michelle said, 'I asked you up here to fuck me.'
I never
speak like this, never
⦠'Don't you want to?'
'Oh ⦠wellâ¦'
Oh? Well⦠?!
'I dunno.' She stood and pulled him back inside. She turned and, lifting up her hair, snapped 'Zip!' Dave unzipped the suede
dress and she stepped out of it. As he'd suspected she was naked underneath â but it was a flat declaration, this nudity,
not a form of allure; and just as her command had imposed a marital note on this encounter between strangers, so her sudden,
bare body had an accent of familiarity. She brushed his lips with the back of her freckled hand. If Dave found her sexy at
all, it was because there was no intimacy between them. He wanted â while not being able to conceive of such a thing â an entire
society in which women were kept this way: strange, distant screens of taut skin, on to which the most preposterous imaginings
might be projected.
Their sex was conducted right there on the living-room floor, assisted by cushions grabbed from chairs and the sofa. Through
her haze Michelle was pleased that Dave wasn't repellent, although since it wasn't him who she was fucking, but the other
she was fucking over, it hardly mattered. With
him
there was no need to worry about any uncalled-for embryo â
he's had the 'snip-snip' â
and so for vital moments, as she gagged on the cabbie's shoulder, Michelle forgot who it was who was bearing down on her.
As for Dave, he muttered, 'You on the pill, luv?', took her silence for acquiescence, then approached Michelle as he would
call over a run:
leave on left tit, comply throat, comply mouth, left shoulder, right
hip, forward cunt
⦠The junctions of her body were well signed, and his Knowledge was sufficient to hold her.
Yet in the friction of their final lunge there was an anticipation of more than arrival. Their jerking bodies prefigured the
bondage of shackled partners. They both sensed this and struggled to avoid it â backpedalling into the present. Dave came
in desperation ⦠while the mere cessation of bucking was Michelle's end.
Rising groggily from the carpet, eluding his helping hands, Michelle staggered down the three stairs to the bathroom and locked
herself in with a desperate 'click'. Crouching in the bath, carpet-burned bottom cooled by the enamel, she shook her ginger
head with disgust as she sluiced Rudman out of her. 'Are you alright in there ⦠Michelle?'
At least he knows my name
⦠She tried to smile ruefully into the mirror over the sink, but her reflection only looked ashamed. Bitterly ashamed:
â and worried
No condom
â¦
no
fucking protection.
When Dave left, he gave her a cab receipt with his phone number scrawled across it. That night, in bed, he marvelled at her
musk still strong on his belly and balls. He never expected her to call â¦
she thinks she's well out of my league . .
. and for seven months she didn't.
Dave Rudman was sharing a semi-detached house with two mates that year. It was near the Metal Box Company building in Palmers
Green. They were all cabbies who'd got to know each other doing the Knowledge. It forged a bond â this open university of
bitumen. They did tutorials in dingy bedsits or else the painfully tidy front rooms of their parents' houses â calling over
the points and the runs for night after night. Fear of getting any police record kept them mostly sober. Dave Quinn, Phil
Eddings, Tufty Rudman, Gary 'Fucker' Finch. Musketeers on mopeds â that's how they thought of themselves. And when they weren't
out doing the Knowledge, they worked together for a dodgy contract-cleaning outfit run by Quinn's Uncle Gerry, which operated
out of Barking.
They cleaned hospitals, care homes and offices â or rather they didn't. Dave Quinn showed them the fiddle on their first night:
'See this.' He'd climbed up on a ladder and was pointing at a dingy patch on the off-white wall near the ceiling. 'Thass a
tester, that is, yer leave a little bit of the wall uncleaned to show the 'ole floor's been done, right? Except' â he scampered
down the aluminium ladder, snapped it shut, hung it on his shoulder, picked up a bucket slopping dirty water, and with the
others in his wake, ran up the stairs to the next floor â 'that's not 'ow we do it 'ere.' He yanked the ladder open and, still
carrying the bucket, ascended. 'You got yer little bit of card, see, like a stencil, right.' He held this up to the wall.
'Then you dobs a sloosh of yer dirty water on it, an' Bob's yer fuckin' uncle, a tester!' He cackled his maniacal laugh, a
pocket version of his Irish uncle, his full lips twisting into cupidity.
Dave didn't like it â this dirtying of a tiny patch instead of cleaning a broad expanse â but he got used to it, it was a
liberty
but
not a diabolical one.
They were little guys, weren't they? Dave and his mates â and little guys had to take what they could. Uncle Gerry knew the
score, the environmental services managers he gave kickbacks to knew the score. Everyone knew the score â¦
except
for the boring straight-goers.
Besides, Dave liked the all-night-shift poker games they played in the empty offices. The hundreds of desks, personalized
with a photo cube or a jokey sign â 'THE BOSS IS IN ⦠YOUR FACE' â now depersonalized entirely, swivel chairs pushed back,
papers abandoned, calculators cast aside, their daytime inhabitants tucked up in bed,
in the sticks.
Walking the echoing corridors, creeping down the emergency stairs to check on the security guard, then finally hitting the
streets as dawn silvered the glassy peaks of the city; this, Dave had imagined, was the topsy-turvy world he'd inhabit when
he got his badge.
I'll choose my own hours and my own patch
â¦
I'll be free of the
hamster wheel these desk jockeys swivel in, free of the need to kowtow to
some finger fucking, expense-account-padding wanker, in from his carport
in the sticks, who finks 'e's Robert-fucking-Maxwell 'coz 'e drives a
company bloody Ford Sierra.
And if he felt a little wonky when he got on his Honda later that morning, he could always neck a wrap of whizz and let the
two-stroke of his young heart yank him forward.
The Palmers Green gaff was a parody of domesticity: T-shirts in the sink, ashtrays in the fridge, the pot plants weedy specimens
of
Cannabis sativa.
The lads worked different shifts and rarely collided at a social hour â if they did mayhem ensued. One would rustle up girls,
another drugs, a third booze. The partying was frenetic and loud, neighbours despaired â the garden made their eyes sore.
They came round to complain and were met by Phil Eddings, whose suede head and skull face were enough to terrify anyone. On
one much recounted occasion, the neighbour visited an apparition: Big End, who'd let some giggly girls, high on mushrooms,
anoint him with their foundation. He came to the front door looking like Baron Samedi, his happy face masked with Caucasian
flesh tones, his big naked torso sweaty and black.
Towards Christmas of that year the partying died down. The lads were cramming in as many shifts as they could; Dave Quinn
and Tufty Rudman had switched to renting full-flat so they could mush whenever they wanted. Ever since Black Monday in October,
it'd got a lot tougher to get the getters. Quartering the Square Mile â up Lothbury, down Houndsditch â Dave Rudman wondered
Where 'av all the little chancers in their striped blazers got to?
Still, Christmas Day and New Year's Eve should double up their money. The plan was to put enough doubloons in the war chest
so they could take off in January.
Just like Benny and his mob used to ⦠Las
Palmas ⦠shtupping grateful golf widows.
Poor Fucker
was working as hard â but every penny he made went into soft furnishings and white goods, kandy-striped kiddy klothes and
presents. 'Fer me fuckin' bird. I tell you lot,' he told them over a spliff sucked down in front of the news, lithe Palestinian
boys lobbing rocks at Uzi-toting Israelis, asymmetrical warfare among the Semites, 'don't fucking go there, keep your rain
hat on 'cept when she's on the blob. That's bin my bloody downfall.' He laughed bitterly.
Women, eh
â¦
they're like beautiful flowers
â¦
luring
you in, then once you've dumped your pollen before you know it they're
fat old boilers with fucking 'taches. Still â a kid's a cute thing â¦
Dave tiptoed into a nursery and began playing with his secret mummyness.
I'd call my little chap Champ â¦
Fucker had borrowed the money from Mann & Overton in the Holloway Road to get his own cab. To make the payments he had been
forced to suffer the indignity of a full
Evening Standard
livery job. 'Makes me eyes funny looking at it,' he moaned, and the other lads, standing on the kerb, squinting at the newsprint
plastered all over the new vehicle, laughed until they felt sick. 'Your sherbert looks like sumfing you got from the chip
shop,' Phil Eddings quipped. 'Yeah, and you're the fucking wally!' Dave Rudman added.
One afternoon in December, Dave ranked up at King's Cross and went for a tea in the grimy booking hall. The place still stank
with all the evil fumes of the fire the previous month, when thirty punters had been incinerated on the tube escalator. The
night it happened, Dave had been at Victoria when the radio began to spit out the news in sizzling horror gobs. The cabbies
got out of their vehicles and huddled together, shifting from one foot to the other, as if sensing the Hades beneath their
feet. Now, standing under the barrel ceiling of this other terminus, looking at the
junky scum and
Jock chancers fresh off the InterCity,
Dave felt sudden and unaccustomed depression: a premonitory sadness that took him back to the cab, back to Palmers Green and
into his daytime bed.
When the bell woke him from his couvade, hours later, Dave wanted to ignore it. He had a cookie of sputum lodged in his throat
â¦
gotta pack in the fags.
He felt like he was skiving off school â¦
It might be an inspector from the PCO, or Ali from the garage come to
check out why I'm not on the fucking road
⦠So he pulled his jeans and T-shirt back on and tramped down the narrow stairs. When he swung the door open, there she
was, her beautiful mouth pulled hard down at one side, as if sneering at her own good looks. Michelle was seven months pregnant,
and there was no question in his mind of not letting her in.
They were married four weeks later, in a registry office on Burnt Oak Broadway. The cab was tricked out for the wedding in
frills and bows. Gary Finch drove while Dave and Michelle sat in the back. They were both being taken for a ride.