The Book of Dave (37 page)
Authors: Will Self
Whatever his father's anxieties Carl was having a pedestrian summer. Michelle had taken him away for a week to a white-tiled
compound on the shores of the Med. Here the boy mooched by the pool, or straddled a bulgy, inflatable beast that bobbed on
the dilute chlorine. It was the summer when he shed his baby names â or rather, Michelle stopped calling him Sweety, Honey,
Bunny or Gorgeous. She addressed him, curtly, as Carl, and when the waiters weren't looking allowed him surreptitious sips
from her fruit-choked cocktails.
When they got back to London and his mother's days were taken up, Carl ranged over the Heath or trekked down to the West End,
where he snuck into the lobbies of the smart hotels, sitting for whole afternoons unregarded on divans, filching smoked salmon
sandwiches from cast-off plates.
Sunk in his own sebaceous ooze, growing like a human weed, his head spinning when he rose too fast â Carl had no conscious
mind for mummies or daddies of any stripe or hue. With limp passivity he'd accepted that he could no longer see Dave.
What
good is that wanker to me anyway?
And yet he couldn't stop tracking every black cab he saw, checking to see if the driver's window framed that battered head
and those bat ears.
The only drama came one evening when Michelle was out at a Kenwood open-air concert â Chablis in a plastic sleeve, deli sandwiches,
music on the half-shell. The phone rang at Beech House, and Carl answered the extension upstairs. It was Saskia, Cal's ex.
It often was. Cal got on the line, and, although he'd replaced the receiver, Carl could hear him even from way upstairs, because
Cal was shouting: 'What the fuck â ! Couldn't you have â ? Where is she â ? Now â ? ' Bitten-off yelps of anguish. Without quite
understanding why he did so, the lad padded back down the carpeted sweep of stairs to hang over the banisters. When Cal came
off the phone, he started, aware of eyes at his back.
Turning, he saw
her
son with an expression on his half-Rudman face that seemed, to Cal, oddly familiar â like déjà vu incarnate. On impulse he
said, 'It's my daughter, Daisy, she's been arrested again. She's down at some police station in South London, I've got to
bail her out â d'you want to come with me?'
They rode in Cal's Beamer through the night-time city. Men stood on every street corner wearing England football shirts printed
with the number 10: fat Beckhams, thin Beckhams, young Beckhams, black Beckhams. Scores of unsuitable substitutes for a never-ending
game. It wasn't the football chitchat, the complicity of the car ride, or even the grown-up stuff at the police station that
did it. They rode over to her mother's flat with Daisy gurning in the passenger seat while Carl kept his head down in the
back. It was one short exchange as they rolled home at 1 a.m. up Haverstock Hill. 'It must be tough,' Cal said, 'your dad
being ⦠I dunno ⦠so disturbed.' And Carl said, 'It must be tough on you too â with Daisy.' That was it, a bond forged
in the maddening furnace of summertime London.
Where was Carl? Where was Dave: the cabbing was all tangled up â the city itself was ductile in the furnace, it warped and
curled, becoming overwrought. His Faredar tricked by human chaff, Dave found himself breaking rules, heading south, dropping
off
some
fucking rude boy
on the Railton Road. Then, backing into a tight space in back of Brixton Market, the chrome bumper of the Fairway kissed the
rubber bumper of a mustard Vauxhall Carlton. Dave clambered out of the cab and, more out of reflex than because he felt responsible,
went to examine the rear. No dink â no mark even. When he straightened up, he was surrounded by
bredren in their
saggy-arsed tracksuits and LA Raiders jackets, yellow gold on their fingers
and in their teeth. Mad golliwog hair â¦
Along Electric Avenue, outside the butchers', there were counters piled high with pigs' trotters. One of the men took a step
forward, his hair was shaved suede-close, he had a sock puppet's stubbly muzzle. 'Tax, mun,' he said, poking a stiff little
trotter right into Dave's chest.
'You what?' Dave was incredulous. The little man pointed at the bumper of the Carlton. 'You fe damage me moto, mun, issall
bashedup an vat. Seen.' There was a collective sucking of cheeks, 'tchuk', and a murmur of assent. 'Twenny pahnd,' said the
little man. Dave's mobile rang.
'It could be nosebag,' began the Skip Tracer, 'but there's definitely a bird.'
'You what?'
'Your man, I've 'ad that team on him an' they've come up trumps, seems 'e's aht an' abaht all the time, up west, down souf,
in and out of fucking crack houses, pubs, clubs, knocking shops, squats â there's no kind of lowlife he won't stoop for, but
'e's always picking up the same bird. Pretty thing â young enough to be his daughter.'
'Twenny pahnd,' the crash victim reiterated. He was standing right up against Dave now, his face almost resting on the bigger
man's sternum. His fellow revenue men had closed in as well â a barrier of bloodshot eyes which blocked out the entrance to
the Reliance Arcade. Over one man's velour shoulder Dave could see women sitting at little tables in the nail parlour, their
taloned hands splayed for the manicurists. He took the phone away from his ear and mouthed, 'I'm on the phone', and such was
the obeah of this that his taxers fell back, muttering 'foufou, mun' and 'raasclaat'.
'Perhaps it is his daughter,' Dave said to the Skip Tracer. 'He has got one, y'know.'
'Oh, no, no, no, that I do not think. My team saw them in a very compromising clinch, her tongue right down 'is fucking throat.
Oh, no, no, no. This changes everything, right, yes, because I don't think your ex is gonna be too happy wiv this â do you?
Might have a bit of a debt-tree mental effect on the old happy home. Gotta go, my son â sweat's lashing offa me.' It was lashing
off Dave as well.
I can feel cold drips on my ribs, what the fuck am I doing here? This
is bandit country.
It was, because, despite the solid Baptist ladies trundling bags as big as pantechnicons, and the Saturday afternoon shoppers,
no one even noticed the extortion being practised on the cabbie. 'Twenny pahnd.' The little man persisted â and Dave just
gave it to him. But once he was back in the cab and heading to safety down the Brixton Road, the humiliation welled up and
overflowed.
On the midget location where his hit show
Blackie
was being filmed, Cal Devenish accepted a cup of sparkling mineral water from one of the gofers and stood sipping it in the
shadow thrown by the catering truck.
I'm paranoid ⦠spend too much time round miniature
cameras and you're bound to think you're being watched . .
.
and yet. .
.
and yet⦠what if someone had seen that
occasion when Daisy, caught in a dizzying fugue of mania and rising up, up, up and over the rooftops of Shoreditch, had grabbed
her father's head in both hands and slammed her mad mouth into his.
I pushed her away â threw her
away from me
â¦
It was disgusting
â¦
repellent ⦠she tasted of me
⦠Yet she'd hung on to him, they'd teetered, slammed into a wheelie bin with a hollow 'boom'. Cal had been desperate to
get her out of the foul alley, into the car and away to safety, so for one minute of yawning perdition â¦
I responded, I kissed her back ⦠I felt
that bolt in her tongue with mineâ¦her hands on me
â¦
mine on herâ¦
When the clinch was finally broken she was calmed, and he could lead her to the car. Then, emerging into the flambéed sodium
of Great Eastern Street, Cal saw a back that moved away â¦
too fast.
That was all, the ordinary back hadn't done anything, it was merely that it
accelerated too fast, got away too quickly ⦠got away with it.
Even in sleep Dave Rudman couldn't escape. His mobile vibrated on the bedside table,
hungry rats' claws drumming on tree bark.
He groped and drew it down into the darkness of the undercovers, into his man reek. 'Meet me at Wagamama in Canary Wharf,'
said the Skip Tracer.
'B-but why?' Dave gagged.
'Why not?' the Skip Tracer snapped.
'It's ⦠it's Sunday.'
'Sunday? Sunday! Whaddo I care about fucking Sunday, only bloke who can't get out of his crib on a Sunday is one oozebin doing
nosebag on a Saturday night â'ave you?'
'No, 'course snot.'
'Right, see you there innanour.'
It was a flashback to the mid 1980s when the vast development was a deserted, newly built ruin. The whole of Canada Square
couldn't have had more than thirty people drifting across it. Dave ranked up at the foot of No. 1 and sauntered through the
precinct. Au Bon Pain was shuttered up â Starbucks as well. In the tiny ornamental garden a languid Somali tweezered leaves
from the lawn with a grabber, while a brushed steel fountain plashed to itself. The designer vents from the tube lines below
sent waste pages soaring like gulls up the glass sides of the HSBC building.
Dave crossed to the shopping centre on the far side, descended, then mounted a theatrical staircase into Wagamama, which was
an aircraft-carrier flight deck of an eatery. The open-plan kitchen full of hiss, steam and clatter gave on to long wooden
tables and benches laid out with the simplicity of ruled lines. Dave ignored the girl in the Mao tunic who asked him, 'Is
it just you, sir?' because the place was all but empty, and he could see the Skip Tracer sitting in the far corner by the
window that looked out over the shopping mall, a big bowl steaming in front of his pink, boyish face. 'Look at this Jap food,'
he said when Dave sat down opposite him, 'noodles, dumplings, veggie-fucking-nibbles.' He poked at it with his chopsticks.
'Issa little world in that bowl, innit just.' The Skip Tracer was wearing a heavy, three-piece, herringbone suit and a lilac
silk shirt. Beneath the table mirror-shined shoes tapped on the tiling. His queer features â the ski-jump nose, the parboiled
brows â were sharply defined by his razor-cut fringe. He was unshaven and the sweat was lashing off him, dripping down through
the steam into the bowl like rain from low cloud.
'I saw a dwarf on the way over,' the Skip Tracer said. 'I only mention it 'coz she was stacked, man. Stacked.' Dave ordered
a beer. 'Aren't you gonna eat, son?' the Skip Tracer snapped. 'You gotta eat, else people'll think you're on â '
'I don't care what people think.'
'Please yourself.' The Skip Tracer wasn't himself; he kept darting little glances away to each side of them. He dipped at
the noodles with his wooden bill, yet never raised one to his mouth. His bitten-off statements lacked their usual emphasis
â he was no longer the candour man, the sincerity daddy.
Eventually he gave a deep sigh and, mopping his brow with a yard of white cotton handkerchief, said, 'It's gone tits up, mate.
Tits up. Thought I could help you â but I can't. Devenish ⦠Devenishâ¦well, turns out it was'izdorta. Surprised â you
could've fucked me up the Gary. She's mental, mental, mentally â '