The Book of Dave (29 page)

The done thing for an eager dad was to hearken to the New Arrival. In the event there wasn't room for Dave in the tangle of
tubes and the jive of trained hands. Michelle's face was blanched with fatigue, flattened by agony, all her features wrenched
to one side, like those of a
skate or a turbot.
She was that remote from him, Dave thought, deep under the womanly sea. When, at the crucial moment, he did head down to where
scratchy brown paper towels were spread ready, he found the gash and the gush – then these other features twisting to confront
him. Fucker Finch had said, 'Iss uncanny, yeah, but you'll recognize 'em from the off. Thass what iss bin like wiv awluv mine.
I fought "Oh, so iss
you
issit…"' But Dave didn't recognize this miraculous, shiny fruit at all; it had fallen from a strange tree.

To be fair, Dave Rudman didn't have any paradigm for the birth of a child. He tried to talk to his father in the final fetid
days when Michelle's bump pushed him from the house. 'I was at Tadcaster the day you were born,' Paul remarked, dabbing transcriptase
on his pint glass with his wet bottom lip.

'Why?' Dave was nonplussed. 'Did you have some slots up there?'

'No, don't be daft, there was a good card that day, your mother wouldn't've wanted me within a mile of the hospital – she
didn't for Sam or Noel neither. I phoned, checked everything was shipshape, then I scooped a monkey on the last two. Reverse
forecast – you were a lucky little chap when it come to the gee-gees.'

Fathers – they were always absent, while houses – they endure. Put upon by plaster, MDF and emulsion; ground down by sanders
and drills; fiddled with by plumbers and electricians – they come through it all that much more robust. Like so many others,
Dave and Michelle had placed their faith in a house: it would be their repository of trust and belief. Dave did his bit and
his rewards were fettuccine and salmon bakes, the occasional glass of white wine, a limp hand job on a Saturday morning.

Yet the strange thing was that the more Dave painted, hammered and wired, the more the finished thing was hers – all hers.
Michelle had the capacity to psychically invest laminated surfaces, tiles and even the very tiny screws that pinioned towel
rings to kitchen units. When she was at home, she was in the house, in every part of it, while he always felt like a lodger.

Strolling up to the ironmonger's at Southend Green, intent on track lighting, Dave noticed an Indian takeaway. The sign over
the open door read: PIZZA WORLD AND CURRY WORLD – TWO WORLDS IN ONE. Peering inside, he was taken aback – Faisal, with whom
he'd been at school in Woodside Park, was bustling about behind the counter. The nerdy boy who'd set out to become a doctor
was sporting collar-length hair, thick sideburns and stained Kameeze. He was sowing the raw dough with rough-cut red peppers
and whistling.

They hadn't been friends, and Faisal was wary. Dave was surprised to see him running this ghee shop – and said so. Hadn't
he wanted to be a doctor? The other man muttered about family. Death. Duties. After that, whenever it got too tense at home,
or the cloacal intensity of it drove him out – mother, mother-in-law, baby, three big hands competing to wipe one small bottom
– Dave snuck to Two Worlds, where, on a wonky round table strewn with yellowing tabloids, he ate whatever Faisal set before
him. Slowly the two men relaxed into a friendship – an unfocused closeness, as if they were sitting side by side on a riverbank
and fishing as a pretext for intimacy.

Dave assumed his new friend was as godless as himself, yet within days of beginning to patronize Two Worlds, he found Faisal
on his knees between the two chiller cabinets, making obeisance towards the Holloway Road. Given the glacial pace of male
confidence, it took another two years for Dave to discover that Faisal was not simply on nodding terms with the Koran, but
a highly advanced believer in the literal truth of the ancient text. As Dave munched his way through Desert Storm, the proprietor
of Two Worlds enlightened him as to the totality of his own submission: it was all in the Koran, right down to diagrams of
the microcircuitry in each and every warhead. 'You don't really believe that, do you?' Dave twitted him.

'Bloody right I do. It's … it's like a blueprint, Dave, that book, it's … it's got everything in it that ever has
been and ever will be. It's a logical structure: "There is no God but God", that's the first proposition – all the rest follows
logically, perfectly, including smart bombs, genetic engineering, the whole bloody lot.'

'Give over, mate! You can't, I mean – you were gonna be a doctor, a scientist, you must understand that some bloke, thousands
of years ago, couldn't possibly –'

'Not some bloke, Dave. God.'

At night Dave worked the mainline stations – Victoria and Paddington mostly. The west of London felt warmer in the winter,
better lit, less susceptible to the chill of deep time. The fares were frowsty under the sodium lamps. In the back of the
cab they slumped against their luggage, and Dave drove them home to Wembley, Twickenham and Muswell Hill. Or else they were
tourists bound for the Bonnington, the Inn on the Park or the Lancaster – gaunt people-barns, where maids flitted through
the lobbies, cardboard coffins of dying blooms cradled in their arms. In the wee-wee hours he parked up at an all-night cafe
in Bayswater and sat reading the next day's news, while solider citizens lay abed waiting for it to happen. His fellow night
people were exiguous – they wore the faces of forgotten comedians, unfunny and unloved.

Dave took junkies to score in the All Saints Road, tarts to fuck in Mayfair, punters to bet in the Gloucester Road, surgeons
to cut in Bloomsbury, sous chefs to chop in Soho. He noticed nothing, retained nothing – glad only to be driving, moving through
the whispering streets, feeling the surface beneath his wheels change from smooth to rough to rougher to rutted. In the blank
dawns, when Hyde Park seethed with mist, he would find himself rattling through Belgravia, a bony fag stuck in his skull,
and seeing the queues of visa applicants – already at this early hour lined up outside the consulates – it occurred to him
that
these are the people I dropped
off a few hours ago … They can't fucking stand it here any more than
I can … They want out right away …

Carl – Michelle didn't like the name, it was Dave's choice. When he'd proposed it, she dropped a full mug of Nescafe on a
white rug. Then she allowed it, saddling herself with this near homonym only out of a sense of overpowering guilt.

The childcare was a mess. Cath did some days, Dave others. They argued over both possession and abandonment of the baby. At
work, flipping through budget forecasts, the figures blurred before Michelle's eyes, then cleared to reveal Carl howling on
the floor, cold, naked and forgotten. She heaved with regret for the soft hours of counting tiny toes and patting silky skin.

Michelle didn't want her mother getting too close to the baby – Cath might suss out the secret. So eventually she succumbed
to an au pair, hoping that this would impose order on the household. She did, sort of. The au pair was a plump, equable, Friesian
girl called Gertrude. She was conscientious, she adored Carl, she didn't go out at night – preferring to low in the converted
attic. Gertrude also spent a long time in front of the mirror, using up Michelle's concealer, which sadly, the chatelaine
required for herself.

On the two afternoons when Dave looked after Carl he took the baby up on to the Heath. Dave put him in a sling under his bomber
jacket, so that all he could see of Carl were metal teeth gnashing those alien features. Whenever he changed Carl, Dave was
shocked anew by his skinny shanks …
I was a chubby baby, Mum said, Noel
and Sam were too … These legs
…
I don't like them.
Yet he still loved the boy – he knew he did. He figured they'd recognize each other in time.

The legs extended and the sling was exchanged for a pushchair; so Dave perambulated, calling over to his unrecognizable son
…
Leave on right Parliament Hill, comply path down to Highgate Ponds,
left Highgate Ponds, forward .
. . On the green ridge of the Hampstead massif, where oak and beech screened off the encompassing city, Dave could relax,
and hear the swelling chord connecting him to his child. It was enough. On those evenings he talked civilly to his mother-in-law,
had a drink ready for his wife when she came home from work. He bathed the baby, and foot-pumped him in his bouncy chair until
he was asleep.