The Book of Dave (30 page)

Watching Dave tenderly lift her son and bear him away to his cot, Michelle felt that while she could never love her husband,
she could at least tolerate him …
and that's enough, isn't it?

Beside Benny Cohen's bed there was a bowl of curving, penile bananas.
Mister Loverman
… And Dave's great-aunt, who used to be a plain Rachel but was now
Gladys. Weird to change your name at
all but to change it to Gladys, that's fucking loony.
She wore a thick overcoat and sagging stockings. Her feet were huge in basketball boots, her fleshy nose twitched in the gloom
of the ward, dowsing for misery. 'Oh, David, David!' She collapsed on his leather chest. Dave felt bones and smelled mothballs.
She's two steps from being
a bag lady.
He remembered her dismally neat maisonette in Leytonstone, the pathetic little drawers in her shoddy kitchen units, each one
full to the brim with neatly folded brown-paper bags. She had eight cats. 'Your grandfather's going to cross over soon, David,
cross over the Jordan.' …
Which Jordan?
He was looking at her shoes.
Michael? Which holy rollers was it she's mixed up in?

He thought back to his wedding. Aunt Gladys had brought Benny over in a minicab from the East End. At the reception, held
up West in a poncey restaurant none of them had liked, Aunt Gladys had buttonholed the guests, forcing on them leaflets headed
'Jews for Jesus'. Dave overheard her telling Dave Quinn, 'It's alright to follow the Redeemer even if you are one of the Chosen
People, even if you've been bar mitzvahed. Don't believe the blood libel, my child, for we can all atone for His Sacrifice,
we can all be anointed with his chrism and his love.' Dave was touched when Quinn – whom he always thought of as basically
a moral-free zone – patted Gladys's shaky hand and said, 'Thank you, missus, I'll make sure I give it a good read.' Then tucked
the leaflet away in his suit pocket.

A nurse bustled into the ward and advanced to the nubbin of life on the bed. First she checked the silvery nipple of her watch,
then she adjusted the spigots that were attached to Benny's tubes. He stirred – his head was nut brown, wrinkled as a walnut.
It looked as if it had been parboiled, coated in tar, then impaled on a cigarette. 'Shmeiss ponce,' Benny croaked.

'You what, Granddad?' But that was all – the old man's eyes were shut again.

Dave turned away. Outside the filmy window was a bit of Hackney Marsh, seagulls scrummed above a rugby pitch. Gladys joined
him. 'I bin talkin' to 'im, readin' to 'im.' She withdrew a purple-bound volume from her coat; a golden angel blowing a stylized
golden trumpet was embossed on its cover.

'You still with … with …' Dave couldn't bear to say it. '… that lot?'

'I'm fifty-five years of age,' Gladys lied, 'an' at long last after all me searching I've come 'ome to the true Church. I
know now that Jews fer Jesus, well, it was justa way in, so to speak. Now I've made me choice, I'm a Saint, I eggsept the
Doctrines and the Covenants.'

'A Saint?' Dave queried.

'A member of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, what you gentiles call the Mormons.'

'Bloody hell!' Dave expostulated and then again, 'Bloody hell!'

'There's no need to blaspheme, David, no need at all. P'raps if you'd had Christ Jesus in your life, fings wouldn't've got
to this pass.'

'Whaddya mean by that?' Dave glared into Gladys's mad blue eyes. 'What's my mum been saying?'

'Only that … well … it isn't my place.' Gladys folded pious hands on her – book and held it in front of her belly.

'No, go on, it is your place, obviously.'

'Well, only that you and your 'Chelle ain't that happy – and I know it can't be good in the cabs eever what wiv this resesshun
an' that…'

Dave drove back across town to Gospel Oak. He clonked through Dalston, past the burnt-out hulk of the Four Aces.
What was that
black geezer's name? Went in the nick there with a shooter – blew his
fucking head off… Least Benny's dying in a private cubicle thing. With
curtains … curtains, cubicles … shmeiss ponce .
. .
thass it! The steam
baths – that's what Benny was on about … the Porchester out west,
that's where him an' his mates used to hang out
…
playing cards,
snarfin' cheese sarnies and bowls of jelly and custard
…
Fat men .
. .
all
with gold jewellery … rings … ID bracelets . .
.
they all smoked too
…
King Edward cigars … pipes, fags
…
I remember the shmeiss ponce …
little fellow … Lewis Levy, who bilked his turn with the shmeiss. I'm too
'ot – that's what he whined, I'm gonna 'ave a seizure . .
.
The others'd
watch him scarper through the steam room, then when he'd gone they'd
dump on 'im …fucking runt, fucking shmo, fucking chancer, dodgy little
cunt, shmeiss ponce!

The cabbies used their ire to withstand the steam's sting as they rubbed away the filth of the job, the city pigment drilled
into their skins like a tattoo of the
A-Z. They talked, bloody hell how they talked
… There was one mate of Benny's, Roy Voss – he knew it all, how many
hansoms and growlers there used to be, when they got rid of 'em
…
sold
'em off for firewood … he knew all the kinds of cabs there's been on the
roads … never grew tired of recounting bits of cabbing lore, it was like
…
I dunno … it was like the cabbing was some sorta secret government
or sumffing running the whole bloody country … Benny and the others
used to take the piss.

When Dave Rudman got home that night wanting food and sympathy, Michelle announced that she was going out and so was the au
pair. 'I'm meeting up with Sandra, we're going to see Pavarotti.'

'What, she got tickets?'

'No, course not. We're gonna have a few drinks and watch him on that screen thingy in Covent Garden. You don't mind, do you?
It's not as if you're making that much at the moment, so I – '

'So you what? What?!' Dave tousled his son's hair with an angry hand, then stalked up the little stairs. Over the next hour,
as Michelle got ready, the argument flared and guttered.

They did good rowing, Dave and Michelle. When she was pregnant with Carl he'd hit her, once. Her body had always assailed
him with ambivalence – he wanted to possess it and yet he was also repelled. Her marbled belly, her engorged breasts – it
shamed him the way they tipped him into revulsion. After the blow had been struck Michelle waited patiently, until he was
maudlin and self-piteous, then hit him back, much harder. 'You never,' she'd screamed, 'ever lay a finger on me again or I'll
fucking have you …' Her red hair fizzed round her freckled face. '… I'll have you put away!'

On this particular evening they argued about who did what in the house. 'You never change a lightbulb.' 'So, you never stack
the dishwasher.' It was really an argument about money, so they moved on to 'You never pay a bill.' 'I can't, I can't! So
what if you do clear more than me – you do fuck-all for your money, I graft!' Still, the arguments about money – pressing
as they were, with the overdraft screaming red and the living expenses rising inexorably – were really arguments about sex,
so they argued about that instead. The arguments about sex cut to the bone of their already lean self-regard, they couldn't
even be had aloud – they were too threatening to Dave and Michelle's self-assembled world. So the sex arguments were soundless
howls.
I hate your clumsy cock and your slobbery mouth
…
Your pathetic wobbly belly makes me sick
… .
Why can't you be
even a little tender to me
…
?

I've had so many better, happier lovers than you
… .
The au-fucking-pair
would have me in a sec! Maybe that's the way it should be – me and
Gertie and the boy. She looks after him and gives me the occasional
fucking gobble – which is more than you're ever bloody up for .
. .
You!
You know nothing about women … nothing at all … You pant and
grunt
…
You're a pig – not a man …

After Michelle had gone, Dave bathed Carl and immersed the child in his own tantrum. 'I wen' swimmin',' his son said.

'What?' Dave snapped.

'I wen' swimmin' … swimmin', swimmin' … swimmin' Carl swivelled round in the soapy water, as his humped back capsized
blue boats and yellow ducks. 'I swimmin' – swimmin'!' A wave broke over the side of the bath and soaked Dave's trainers, then
swamped the floor. 'Stop it!' he shouted, but the little boy went on chanting, 'Lookitme I swimmin', I swimmin'!' Until Dave
lashed out and left three livid fingerprints on Carl's shoulder blade.
One … Two … Three
… There was silence for three beats, the child awed by the cataclysm of adult rage, then, 'Waaaa!' It was the first time
Dave had hit the boy – it wasn't to be the last.

'I'm sorry, Boysie, I'm sorry,' he whimpered, pressing his brutish face into the good smell of skin and soap.

In the morning Dave could hardly rise, he was so mired in shame. He shook as he made Carl eggy soldiers and watched the child
bayonet his face with them. Carl didn't bear a grudge – but it wasn't his forgiveness Dave needed. 'Wouldja phone in for me,
love?' Michelle croaked when Dave brought her a cup of tea. 'Say I'm sick. I've gotta dreadful pain in my neck.'

'You are sick,' Dave stated flatly – then he asked, 'Did 'e do it, then?'

'You what, love?'

'Did he do it, Pavarotti, did he do Nessun whatsit, y'know, the World Cup song?'

'Oh … oh yeah, yeah, he did, as an encore.'

Sleep no more .
. . Dave took Carl to nursery, went for a full English and a dump and a read of the paper, then picked him up again. He'd
decided to take the victim swimming at a pool down at the Elephant and Castle, which had flumes and a wave machine. It was
the right kind of penance. Dave hated public pools, hated their atmosphere of institutional rot and medicalized exercise,
their chemical reek and plugholes clotted with the hairs of the multitude. He slung the cab down through Euston and along
the wide trench of Gower Street.
Bloody peculiar
… He looked in the mirror at his passenger, whose car seat was strapped into the back of the cab.
But when he's with me it's like I'm drifting again .
. .
It's like I thought
the job would be .
. .
just driving, just drifting through town .
. .
no
worries . .
.

Carl paddled in between green, frog-shaped floats, his orange water-wings pinioning him to the surface. His father circled
him like a remorseful yet sportive shark, closing in with an outstretched arm to sweep the child into hilarity. 'I swimmin',
Daddy … I swimmin' … Lookitme!' Dave persuaded the surly lifeguard to switch on the wave machine. Chlorine combers
boiled up in the deep end and came hissing towards them. Carl bobbed, squealing with delight. The waves broke on the tiled
foreshore under a prismatic neon sun. His father rose and sank, troubled by an uncomfortable intimation. The agitated water
was cupped in a stony outcrop of the two-thousand-year-old city: London, a porous slab of rock through which a million rivulets
percolated – sewers, conduits, entombed rivers. High up in the brick escarpments and masonry pinnacles, basins, baths and
toilets slopped. The fern-fringed plunge pools in health spas, the Jacuzzis of the rich bubbling beside Millionaire's Row,
the reservoirs in the Lea Valley, the O-ring itself – a mighty orbital motorway of fluid coursing beneath the tarmac plain.
With each automated surge Dave felt the future seething, the present boiling, the past churning.

When Dave got back to the cab and strapped Carl in, he found a message from Gary Finch on his pager …
stupid little doo-da, only
got it 'cause 'chelle was pregnant . .
. and when he called him the tubby man was in some distress. 'Come over east, willya, Tufty, I need to 'ave a chat. I'm plotted
up wiv Big End in the Globe.'

Michelle's period had come that morning, and dumping the used applicator in the bin, and the wrapping in the toilet bowl,
she wondered whether all her ill feeling had given birth to this papery curl. 'Are you going out working, love?' He was still
love – but it was a love that would dissolve with the next Alka-Seltzer.