The Book of Dave (22 page)
Authors: Will Self
That morning he'd been roused by the whale song of marital farts, semiconscious leviathans calling to one another across a
glutinous ocean of duck down. 5 a.m. and fully awake ⦠Cal looked at Michelle's profile etched on the pillow beside him
by the acid light of a London dawn.
She's holding out on me, I know it. There's
something she isn't telling me â it doesn't add up. Her secret is soft â she
moulds it to evade detection. It's hidden inside her body â she's a mule
â¦
Low down on the scabrous underbelly of South London, the BMW raced from one shopping parade to the next. From OK Chicken to
Perfect Chicken, from Bootiful Chicken to Luvverly Chicken, from Royal Chicken to Chicken Imperium, from Chicken Universe to
one forlorn joint in the filthy crotch of Burgess Park that was simply dubbed 'Chicken'. Down here, where men wore nylon snoods,
the light industrial premises massed and every public, horizontal thing was planted with metal thorns, Cal felt the turbid
threat of the city, which might choose â quite impersonally â to climb into the car at the lights and suggest, at gunpoint,
that he step out.
Driscoll House, built in 1913, was Castle Dossula. Vast and foursquare, beneath its crenellations ranged scores of loopholes,
behind each a rental embrasure. Weekly rates were pegged to the emergency-housing benefit. The security door was propped
open with a pallet. Cal made inquiries at a battered plexiglas window. Then he was led along a corridor. Doors opened to either
side and faces emerged, pitted, veined and puce. Their owners were drinking fortified wine with Antabuse chasers, and the
stop-start strain on their sclerotic hearts was going to kill them stone-dead.
The string-vested seneschal stopped in front of No. 137 and unlocked it with a key from his enormous bunch. Inside were knickers
in a twist and jeans draped over a chair; a cheap candle had melted into a Formica tabletop and curled over like a limp dick.
'She wozere,' said the seneschal, "coz I 'eard 'er carryin' on wiv 'owie.'
'Howie?' Cal queried, although from other Daisy hunts he recognized the name.
'Jock geezer, piggy ring in 'is 'ooter, sells the
Issue.
Collects bottles. Drinks wiv a school dahn at ve Bullring, but 'e azza flop in Mottingham.'
Mottingham was so far out on the outskirts of the city that the Avenues the BMW swished along were damp with the sweeter showers
of the countryside beyond. At bucolic roundabouts cellophane-wrapped flowers were stacked up to mark the site of fatal collisions.
The makeshift shrines were garlanded with plastic gewgaws and papered with scrawled cards; so the prosaic, the accidental,
was factored into a Divine Plan for London.
At the address the seneschal had given him Cal found two black teenagers smoking weed and watching a video of a nightmare
on another street. A tenner elicited a further address, where ' 'owie an' 'is bird' had gone to score. At this location â a
plyboard warren of bedsits in a venerable Victorian villa â the finder's fee was upped to twenty quid. Finally, at 3.30 a.m.,
Cal ran her to ground, dry-heaving under a rhododendron bush in the gardens of a derelict pub. The huaraches he'd brought
her back from Mexico lay discarded near by. In the silence between his daughter's spasms Cal could hear a nightjar churring,
although he thought it was a scooter accelerating along the A20. When he got her into the car, Daisy began to babble about
the environment. There was no sign of Howie.
'What's the baddest thing in the world, Dad?'
'What did ya say, Tiger?'
'Dad, what's the baddest thing in the world?' Carl stood before Dave in baby elephant pyjama trousers. His front teeth were
big white pegs in his chubby six-year-old face. 'Dad, what's the baddest thing in the world?' He repeated himself, and then,
because he was a bright kid, never confused like his father by the sheer amorphousness of everything, he supplied his own
answer: 'Is it killing yourself?'
Dave Rudman, on his knees in the North London playing field, looked south to where his son
is banged up
⦠He wept and clawed at the grass. He salaamed, head-butting the ground.
Fuck you, earth
. .
. and the blow stove in the roof of a vault full of nastiness.
I was
in their garden ⦠in their fucking garden
â¦
I buried it in their garden
⦠that mad fucking rant ⦠Why did I do it? Why? It put me eleven
fucking grand out of pocket, that's why I'm skint â that's why I can't pay
Cohen, that's why I'm mushing every fucking hour of the day â¦
'What's the baddest thing in the world, Dad?'
Dave imagined six-year-old Carl sitting cross-legged by the mess his father had made, picking up a lolly stick and dabbling
it in the mud.
'Worst,' Dave croaked aloud, 'the worst thing in the world is to kill yourself, Tiger, but not if you do it to stop yourself
killing someone else.'
In the Trophy Room of the Swiss Cottage Sports Centre â group rental £25 per hour, pick up and leave the key at main reception
the Fathers First group did laps in liquid anger, thrashing up and down the lanes, the chlorine of hatred stinging their eyes.
'I'm gonna fucking kill her!' bellowed Billy O'Neil. He was standing in spotless Timberlands, his manicured fists were clenched,
the sweat stood out on his tousled brow. 'Calm down, Billy,' Keith Greaves said, 'please calm down.' Billy couldn't hear him â nor
could the other premier-division dads. They watched, appalled and yet entranced, as the big man was manipulated by the dextrous
fist of rage. Rage that pulled on the strings threaded through all their lives, so they poked their own little fists into
others' faces, kicked their feet into kidneys, and slammed car doors so hard the glass disintegrated into
'ackney
diamonds.
Dave Rudman's face was in his hands; his fingers sought out the shameful scars of his failed hair transplant. 'Calm down,
Billy,' Keith said again â while Dave began to cry.
Carl understood that it was part of the whole expensive package. Along with Cal Devenish came Beech House, the Range Rover Vogue, the Tuscan
holidays and of course the
poncey fucking school
Privilege sucked â he longed for his dad. Longed for Dave, who took him out in the cab and showed him parts of the city Wormwood
Scrubs, Lea Bridge, the Honor Oak Reservoir â which the
'ampstead wankers
would never see. In the past three years, as he'd seen Dave less and less, so Carl's idea of his father had come unstuck,
detaching itself from both any foundation in the past and the increasingly disturbing reality of the man.
In Carl's view, Dave was a knight of the open road. He knew the city and he knew its people. Dave was as at home up West in
a fancy restaurant as he was in Muratori's, the cabbies' King's Cross cafe. Everyone knew him â cops, bartenders, fellow cabbies,
waver-uppers â knew him and respected him. 'Orlright, Tufty!' they sang out as the Fairway squealed to a halt and chip and
block got out. So on the fateful day, last October, when Carl came out of the elaborate wrought-iron gates of his new school
and there was his dad, hunched down at the wheel of the cab, unshaven, white gunk at the corners of his peeling lips, oily
patches under his burnt-out eyes, it was a dreadful shock. 'Cummear, son,' Dave growled, 'cummear.'
Carl's first instinct was to run. Boys in his class had already spotted the odd apparition: a London taxi cab parked in Frognal
at four in the afternoon. Not dropping off or picking up, poised five feet from the kerb, but deep in the gutter. Worse still,
the Fairway â which, in the days when his father had pride, had never carried any kind of advertising â now sported Supersides.
The driver-side one showed a blonde in her bra and knickers tearing a strip from her own inner thigh; below it was the double-entendre
PAINLESSLY OFF, PLEASURABLY ON. Puerile eyes sucked this up.
Why's he cummear? Why
â¦
?
Carl was torn between anxiety for his father, who he knew wasn't allowed within half a mile of Beech House, and anger that
he was shaming him in front of the other boys. He hurried over, wrenched open the back door of the cab, slung his school bag
in, leaped in after it and called to his father, 'Drive on, cabbie!'
Dave went along with him, saying, 'Where to, guv?' Flustered, Carl replied, 'Savernake Road.' Which was round the corner from
Dave's flat. Carl thought they'd go and have a cup of tea together, or kick a ball around on Parliament Fields for half an
hour, but his dad was too mad. He drove â
leave on left Frognal. Left Arkwright
Road. Right Fitzjohn's Avenue â
and ranted: 'Fucking this and fucking that, fucking coons and fucking Yids, fucking young slappers and fucking old boilers.'
It was as if, by impersonating a fare, Carl had exposed himself to the deepest, darkest, most atavistic stream of cabbie consciousness.
Too shocked to say anything, Carl sat as his dad's voice crackled over the intercom. At the junction with Roderick Road the
cab pulled over. Dave opened the back door and said, 'Op aht, sun.' Carl came forward but before he could say anything, Dave
cried, 'No charge on this one!' And roared away.
Carl lay for a long time on the slope of damp grass that stretched up to Parliament Hill. He didn't care about his poncey
striped uniform â or anything else. He couldn't cry, but his belly was tight with misery. When at last he'd risen and begun
his tramp back through the dusk, the Heath itself was his confidante. He'd reached consciousness on this peculiar island,
a couple of square miles of woodland and meadow set down in the lagoon of the city. He wavered from copse to tumulus, from
felled old elm to crunchy bracken patch, making his way up to the sandy crossroads, where a single Victorian lamp standard
stood, its homely glow illuminating the dark holly hedge that marked the entrance to Kenwood. In touching this roughened trunk
and clutching that mossy bole, the lad connected with his past. Kite-flying on blustery days, the kamikaze nylon aircraft
diving for the ground; family picnics among the house-high tangle of dead trees felled by the Great Storm of '87; and in the
dead of winter, hurling ice chunks across the frozen surface of Highgate Pond, his woolly paws burning with cold fire.
In the sickening disparity between the affectionate enclosure of his early childhood and the loveless thicket of the present,
Carl saw the person he would henceforth be: a young man expelled from Arcadia, an exile, driven out and forced to live on
the fringes of society, his only bible a collection of arcana derived from a distant past, a time of loyal chaps and gaudy
royalty. Shouldering his school bag, Carl slithered down the hill past the little reservoir and rejoined the path that led
up to Well Walk. It was mummy time once more. His clothes were filthy, Michelle would be frantic with worry, he was late for
supper at Beech House.