The Book of Dave (28 page)
Authors: Will Self
â And what of this, this Geezer himself?
â Why, he shall go back to from where he came, or near to it. Anywhere that is suitably remote. Let my Lawyer of Chil decide
exactly where, for he must bear responsibility for this matter and take a hand in its resolution.
â A most symmetrical solution, your majesty, said the Archdriver, pressing his clove ball to his pitted old nose. Most symmetrical.
The Driver and Mister Greaves stood watching as the sick men of Chil were escorted past them up the stream to the travelodge.
The screen wrapped around Ham was dramatically riven, a blue channel sat above the shore, and to the south of this tabular
white clouds floated, rank upon rank, while to the north a bruised, magenta mass was banked up over the trees. There would
be screenwash before nightfall. The moto slaughter might have to be postponed.
â How do I find you, Reervú? Mister Greaves asked, as he stretched his stiff legs.
â Well enough, the Driver grunted.
â And your fares, how are they?
â As benighted as ever, the Driver sneered, spittle flecking his mirror. Ignorant, venal, idolatrous. They profane this place,
which should be an island of the blessed.
â What would you have me do as the representative of my Lawyer of Chil to rectify this?
â I cannot drive any further, Mister Greaves, without that I educate the lads in some way, and so detach them from their contumely
association with the filthy motos. I need a teacher, Mister Greaves, that's what I need to cut out their superstition. I need a surgeon also, I cannot be expected to attend to their spiritual health and their physical being, that much is beyond me.
â A teacher and a surgeon, eh? You don't ask for much! None save those who are most exalted â the Hack made a short bow â would
willingly exile themselves in these remote parts. Even if I were able to find you such dads, they would most likely be compromised.
â Compromised, pissed, queer, flyer â I care not, Greaves, I care not. Send me a fellow, and no matter how rebellious he be
I feel confident that I shall be able to confine his aspirations in these few clicks. Do you doubt, guv â the old crow leaned
over the Hack and bore down on him with his yellow eyes â whose will would prevail?
He paused between two streets, and the Examiner reduced him to fourteen days. He stalled at a junction during his next appearance
and was ordered to trial. The trial was one in name only. The old testimony of Mister Greaves was all that was required to
establish Symun Dévúsh's guilt. No reference was made to his current activities, no defence was allowed. The Chief Examiner
sentenced him in ancient Mokni: 2 B browkin on ve Weel. Yaw fingus crakked, yaw 4ed brandid, yaw tung cut aht, an U 2 B Xeyeled.
In the long third tariff before his sentence was to be carried out, the Geezer gathered to his chamber as many of his disciples
as could be accommodated and warned them: B bluddë cairful, U lot â ve PeeSeeO ul av U inawl. Dú nuffing, say nuffing, an
ven vay brayk me stä ahtuvit. Yet they could not obey him â they loved him too much. When the warders lugged the Wheel out
into the yard, the dads touched by the Geezer stood in the heavy screenwash and jeered them. Other warders dragged Symun out,
his feet trailing grooves in the churned-up earth. In an echo of his departure from Ham, the Guvnor refused to let him stand
or address the prisoners, for fear of his inflammatory words. In the hushed silence while the flyer was lashed to the Wheel,
the bitten-off cries of the hawkers without the Tower walls could be clearly heard: Ivers! Marmi! Ockings! Getcha Eterkins
cuss-taaard!
This time the big Wheel kept on turning, faster and faster. The Geezer's head whipped round and around, until the vessels
of his brain burst and blood flooded into all his memories. The common prisoners pointed out the details of this wheeling
with the delight of spectators at a cock fight: Lookatvat, ees swallered iz tung! The Geezer's fares fell to their knees and
wept.
It was a long kipper night in London. From door to door of the city the seeseeteevee men of the PCO moved with stealth and
efficiency. Scholars, tradesmen, craftsmen, common day labourers and a smattering of lawyers. In all, some two hundred daddies
and a handful of mummies were judged to have been tainted by the Geezer's flying. Under torture they all confessed.
They prised Symun Dévúsh's tongue from his gullet and pounded his chest to get him to breathe. Then they stretched the talking
member from its root and cut it off. As he gargled in his own blood, they broke his knuckles and all the joints of his fingers
with a punishment club. Then they branded him with the F for flyer on his forehead. Finally, as he swooned close to death,
he was taken by cab to the Isle of Dogs and bundled aboard a ferry. The vessel lay off in the London roads that night, and
in the small units of the first tariff a second exile was brought out to her by the pilot's pedalo.
This queer was unmolested and unchained. He had with him a capacious changingbag and to ward off the kipper cold he wore a
heavy, bubbery cloakyfing with an oilskin cape over its shoulders. Soon after he'd come aboard, the gaffer interviewed him
in his cabin: Mì awdas R onlë 2 tayk U sarf 2 Wyc, ware U R 2 B landid. Eye no nuffing uv oo U R aw wot U av dun, mayt, so
folla ve rools uv mì ferrë an Eyel giv U no aggro. But fukkabaht an Eyel av U, unnerstood? Antonë Böm nodded his head slowly
while tugging his prematurely white beard. He assumed others must have suffered far worse fates that long night, and â while
not comprehending the cause of it â appreciated his light escape.
For the remainder of that kipper Böm remained at the Bouncy Castle of Wyc. He tutored a few of the Hack's children who were
in residence, and he treated the maladies of both chavs and bondsmen as well as he was able. He knew nothing of the prisoner
who languished in the dungeon beneath his feet. When buddout came, a pedalo set out from Wyc. It was a light, fast craft,
pedalled by the closest and most trustworthy retainers of the Lawyer. It carried a sole passenger and set course for the last
finger of land that pointed from the uninhabited island of Barn towards Ham.
Three months later, when the days were stretching to meet the summer solstice, another far larger pedalo headed south. This
vessel belonged to Mister Greaves, the Hack of Ham, and was crewed by his dads. It set course first for the Hack's semi at
Stanmaw, where trade goods were to be loaded, together with the sick fares of the Shelter. For Ham was its ultimate destination,
and on the narrow thwart set in the prow there hunched a plump figure, his spectacles flashing in the switched-on foglamp.
The new teacher and surgeon for the Hamsters that the Driver had requested was on his way at last.
September 1992
The fare was lolling by the Bank of England. The dirty building, with its grooved walls and milled balustrades, was a big
copper coin tossed down in the City. He beckoned lazily with an upraised finger, summoning the waiter, and Dave slewed the
cab to a halt behind a van disgorging toilet paper. The fare â tall, officer class, sandy-haired, three-pieced â lounged over
the road. While he slid into the back, Dave listened to the City itself. Could he hear the aftermath of the awful carnage
of the day before? The final gargle as the dregs of fifteen billion pounds were sucked out of its dealing rooms? The sweat
and moan of shirt-sleeved, plastic piano players pounding out the blues of ruin? No, there was only the hum of everyday urban
vacuity.
'Where to, guv?'
'City of London School, d'you know it?' In the rearview mirror the sandy man's moist face belied his dry manner.
'No problem.'
'Not that⦠um, I'm not⦠I'm picking up my sons there, then we'll double back to Liverpool Street, yah?'
'No problem.' The sandy man blotted himself out with the
Standard ⦠Would've pegged 'im as a total getter, but p'raps he's come
down a few pegs â¦
Dave almost felt like telling the sandy man how bad things were for the trade.
I can't make the bloody payments, mate,
can't make 'em. I've the mortgage on top of that⦠living whatsits â¦
the cab costs more than just the loan as well, there's your servicing, your
diesel, your bits an' bobs, I'll tell you, some days I'd do better staying at
home, least I'd know how much I was down then. We're next in the
bloody food chain, mate, that's a fact â you lot push the wrong button,
sell short instead of long or whatever, an' it's us lot who catch it.
When they got down to Queen Victoria Street the sandy man left his fat briefcase in the back â a repository of trust. He took
Dave's time â lounging off along one of the walkways leading into the school, which was tied up to the Embankment like a redbrick
cruiser.
Domine dirige nos â¦
There was time enough for Dave to read the nameplate on its immobile hull. Time enough for Dave to buff up his resentments
and see them shine.
The Fairway no longer shone. When Dave first bought the cab, he lavished his attention on it, laving it, waxing it, shammy-leathering
it personally in an autosexual frenzy. It was â he thought â a cool, dark reflection of the man he was. Now it was agony to
stroke and rub the black flanks of the thing he'd come to hate, so he took it into the garage where one of Ali Baba's lads
gave it a loveless seeing-to.
At the beginning of the year the cabbie had been clearing a minimum of seven hundred pounds every week.
A flat fucking
neves, no joke, mate, double-bloody-bubble fer Sundays â¦
Then BCCI collapsed.
Gang of fucking coke heads, it never looked like a bank to me
anyway, I remember ferrying those dodgy wallahs to their gaff on the
Cromwell Road, all smirk an'no bloody tips
⦠And the unemployment figures cranked up to three million.
No matter, the Tories were still
back in come April, rotten bunch, half of them shtupping their secretaries,
the other half on the take â¦
Then in June Lloyd's lost two billion.
Granted they were a bunch of dumb toffs â only too happy to take
unlimited liability before the shit hit the propellor, but they weren't just
Names to me, mate â they were fares .
. . Then only last month the stock market
goes fucking tits-up.
Five billion off shares in a morning and the big bull needed
a fucking Bic round its chops â too late, it's
gone an' turned into a bear â¦
Then
Paddies all over the fucking shop
in their fertilizer dump trucks. Bomb upside the NatWest Tower, Bomb
in fucking Victoria Street â I blame ⦠my wife â¦
All of this is only braggadocio, confessed to the windscreen of the cab as if there were still a fare sitting on the tip seat,
ear inclined to the sliding window. When it winds down, Dave is left with his diminished self: a big little balding man who's
afraid to look at his own sparse brow in the rearview mirror ⦠RE-CREATE YOUR HAIRLINE ⦠DEVELOPED IN JAPAN â
but why? I've never seen a bald
Jap â¦
NEW GENERATIONS STRAND-BY-STRAND REFUSION WITH TECHNO-FUSE CAN RE-CREATE YOUR HAIRLINE AND PROVIDE A TOTALLY NATURAL-LOOKING HEALTHY HEAD OF HAIR. TECHNO-FUSE IS INTEGRATED WITH YOUR SCALP AND THE PROCEDURE CAN BE PERFORMED OVER A PERIOD OF TIME, INVOLVES NO SURGERY AND NO ONE NEED EVER KNOW ⦠CALL WIGMORE TRICHOLOGICAL CLINIC NOW. NOW!
The copywriter's medicalese has become Rudman's own private thoughts, a pabulum to chew over: Good News about hair loss.
Perhaps if I did it, she'd fancy me
⦠Because it's all about him, the way Michelle turns away in the bed they still, mysteriously, share and edges to the
extreme far side of the mattress, where she rolls herself into a chaste belt of duck down.
The meter went on ticking.
Christ, I'm tired ⦠The little runt
was four now, yet it was taking a long time to recover from being woken in the early hours of the morning. When Dave had been
doing nights, he'd come in, then drift off, only to be yanked up again by a cry from the slumbrous woodlands. Dave had fought
his way through whippy boughs of fatigue to where Carl trampled and snuffled in his cot. Dave had felt stunned as night after
night snapped in two or three pieces.
This,
he had realized,
is how soldiers
feel in combat. .
. It was then that the ordinary heroism of parenthood struck Dave hard in his selfish face. It was striking him still:
They
oughta give you a fucking medal ⦠Maclaren buggies lined up by the
Cenotaph, spunk-drunk mummies slumped over their handles, bums up
to be taken again.
The Prime Minister steps forward â a martial insurance clerk in his steel helmet hair â and pins decorations shaped like feeding
bottles, teat-on-teat.
The Sandy Man's lads were two versions of himself: one lanky, stretched on the rack of adolescence, a stipple of happy pimples
on his outsized jaw; the other compact, chubby even, a lush blond fringe in his mooncalf eyes. The Sandy Man said, 'On to
Liverpool Street, then, cabbie,' and Dave replied, 'No problem,' because he desperately wanted there to be NO PROBLEM.
In the City, if
there's one street knocked out by roadworks, then you're edging round
for fucking hours . .
.
Leave on right Queen Victoria Street, forward
Threadneedle Street, left Bishopsgate . .
. Dave was convinced this was a mid-week dad: the Sandy Man was too eager to ask questions about new teachers and forms, to
pick up on the quick rhythms of lives irretrievably lost for him, the paradiddle of young hearts.
How
does it feel,
Dave wanted to ask him,
to be like a nonce, dragging these
kids off to yourpervy cottage in the sticks For One Night Only?
Liverpool Street was a
massive bollix
of renovation and construction. The Victorian facade was being torn off, a new one of silky granite slipped on. Inside, a
transept of baguette stalls and knicker booths was being laid across the end of the platforms.
In the old
Victoria Station there were whole wheeling flocks of scabby pigeons,
everything was smoky and sooty, iron pillars shooting up into dingy glass
ceiling⦠Dad used to take me down to the Cartoon Cinema ⦠Left me
in there while he went into the hotel next door for a few shorts .
. .
To get to the set-down Dave had to wrestle the cab down temporary passageways of scaffolding and tarpaulin, humping over rubber
sills. The Sandy Man had his twenty out long before they'd stopped. He folded it into a strip that he twined between his clever
fingers, then poked the origami earnings at Dave.
Funny the way
people handle money, playing with it, touching it up ⦠wouldn't do it
with any other thing â¦
'Ain't you got anything smaller, guv?'
'Sorry â but no.' The Sandy Man took his change and the three of them disappeared into the clatter of the station.
Fucking wanker-little
tossers .
. . He'd forgotten to tip. Once Dave ranked up, he had a long wait for another fare in the diesel-stinking darkness. He
recognized a few faces looming in nearby windows from infrequent trips to cab shelters, or snaffled lunches at the Cafe Europa
in King's Cross but no one he wanted to talk to.
They'd only wanta moan some
â¦
Moan-fucking-moan .
. . Magic Tree air fresheners dangled from their rearview mirrors.
All these big blokes, lost in a tiny bloody forestâ¦
Dave thought of Benny, his granddad.
I really oughta go and see him.
CLARINS AT HARVEY NICHOLS pulls Michelle up short. SKINCARE CENTRE. FACE, BUST, BODY AND SUN. TRAINED THERAPISTS.
Yeah,
right â¦
Five stormy years of marriage have given her a piratical internal monologue; she stands on the tilting deck of her consciousness
wielding a tongue like a cutlass.
Trained bloody slags is more
like it. In from Bromley and Selhurst, Traceys and Shawns without an
idea in their tiny minds except Darren's cock and she-said he-said
⦠DETOXIFYING FACIAL AND HAND TREATMENT.
Still, I have to admit
that sounds good.
Michelle stopped scanning the
Standard
to look at the scumbled junction of Kentish Town Road and Leighton Road: the neo-Gothic horror of the Assembly Rooms pub,
and a daft pavilion with glass roof and cast-iron stanchions beneath which dossers lolled like filthy pashas. Carl was slumped
beside her eyeing an apricot. 'C'mon, love,' Michelle said, 'it's nice, it's like a sweetie.' The four-year-old bit into it
with frank dubiety, his pretty, freckled features â hers really â screwed up in distaste. 'Iss gusting,' he said and spat.
REFRESHING CUP OF HERBAL TEA.
If I don't get out of this shit â¦
She levered the sticky yellow blob off Carl's T-shirt and popped it in her own mouth â¦
I'm gonna do something stupid.
DELICIOUS FRUIT COCKTAIL.
In the two and a half days a week Michelle looked after her son she tried to make sure Carl had a balanced diet â plenty of
fruit, no fizzy drinks, green vegetables, brown bread. She had kept abreast of debates about immunization. She had campaigned
for the right nursery-school place. It was ironic that now it wasn't quite so bad between her and Dave she felt like leaving
more than ever.
When we were first married, it was alright. I was touched ⦠by him
â¦
They bought the house on Kingsford Street in Gospel Oak. At National Childbirth Trust classes, held by a woman called Sarona
in her endless living room up on the heights of Hampstead, Michelle didn't only learn how to breathe, she found out how to
be a different woman.
Dave couldn't partner me, he was working all hours
⦠But Sarona did.
She had perfect style . .
.
beautiful deportmentâ¦
black trousers, hammered silver jewellery .
. .
nothing vulgar
â¦
wispy
shawls
â¦
that very aquiline Persian nose
â¦
I didn't even know what
aquiline meant before that
â¦
When I went back to work again I had
'it', at last, a
â¦
seriousness
â¦
a poise
â¦
having a kid helped ⦠I
was grateful to Dave for-for the whole set-up. It doesn't mean they don't
put you down or stare at your tits, but once you're a mum their moves
are
â¦
slower, more obvious, sadder.
The 214 bus shushed to a halt and caught by surprise she dragged Carl on board and paid the fare, snagged the child and collapsed
into a seat as the bus thrummed on up Highgate Road. The funfair motion made the little boy laugh, and she cupped his cheek.
'You're gorgeous,' Michelle said. 'My gorgeous â my Gorj.' But then, looking down, Michelle saw that her floral-print skirt
had ridden up over the miserable spectacle of razor nicks and stubble on the same leg. GLAMOROUS EVENING MAKE-UP.
It didn't seem to me
â¦
I thought I'd suffered enough
â¦
I could never
stand Dave's ham-fisted touch unless I was drunk . .
.
and when ⦠I
â¦
It
â¦
He
â¦
He'd always said he'd had ⦠the snip ⦠reasonable
doubt, isn't that what lawyers call it? I should've told him ⦠Dave â¦
told them both ⦠but I'd made a commitment, hadn't I? Besides
he
was
off his fucking rocker by then, booze, charley, Godnosewot .
. .
what
would've been the point? Four completely unhappy people instead of two?
BEAUTY FLASH BALM FOR EVENING'S ENJOYMENT.