The Book of Dave (39 page)

'Did God tell him to write it – or gods?'

'No, just the one god – except he isn't called that.'

'What's he called, then?' Busner turned from the window and smiled at Jane. She saw she had his attention; as ever her oblique
way of introducing a case had drawn him in. 'Dave.'

'No,' Zack laughed. 'Not the patient – the god.'

'Dave, Dave too. Dave – the patient that is – is a taxi driver, and Dave – the god that is – has revealed this text to him.
Do you know what the Knowledge is?'

'The Knowledge?'

'It's the encyclopaedic grasp on London streets that a licensed cab driver has to have.'

'So is that it?' Busner plodded to his desk and immured himself behind a pile of buff folders. 'Is that the revelation?'

'In part. My patient, Dave Rudman, says that the 320 routes that make up the Knowledge are a plan for a future London. Between
them and the points of interest at each starting point and destination they make a comprehensive verbal map of the city.'

'A city of god … or Dave.'

'That's right, a city of Dave, New London.'

'Where is this text?' Busner asked. 'Can I have a look at it?'

'Well.' Jane Bernal drew a chair up to the desk and sat down. 'I don't believe this man literally transcribed his delusion,
I believe he committed it to his memory. As you may be aware, brain scans have confirmed that the posterior hippocampus in
London cabbies can be considerably enlarged – that's where the book is buried, and there's more to it than just his Knowledge,
there's a set of doctrines and covenants as well.'

'That sounds familiar.'

'It is: it's the title of one of the Mormon holy books.'

'Is he a Mormon, then?'

'No, I don't think he's anything much,' Jane sighed, 'except a very ill man.'

'So what are Dave's doctrines and covenants?' As Bernal succumbed to melancholy, Busner became increasingly jolly – nothing
pleased him more than a complex delusional apparatus.

'Oh, you know, the usual stuff, how the community should live righteously, the rules for marriage, birth, death, procreation.
It's a bundle of proscriptions and injunctions that seem to be derived from the working life of London cabbies, a cock-eyed
grasp on a melange of fundamentalism, but mostly from Rudman's own vindictive misogynism.'

'Vindictive?'

'He's separated from his wife, there's a court order restraining him from seeing his fourteen-year-old son. He's been mixed
up with one of those militant fathers' groups. It's all very … distressing.'

'Hmm, I see, and his family – does he have any?'

'There are elderly parents living in East Finchley. I've interviewed the mother: she's long since withdrawn from him emotionally,
seems traumatized. There's a brother in and out of hospital up in Wales, drug psychosis.'

'The father?'

'Alcoholic.'

'I see.' Busner picked up the Arawak head and began throwing it up in the air and catching it, as if it were an ethnic tennis
ball. 'Of course, in the good old days we could have blamed the parents, but now we can go searching for pills to fit the
pathology, or a pathology that fits the pills – there are pills, I presume?' Bernal consulted her file. 'Oh, yes, GP called
Fanning. Usual story, began him on Seroxat, Rudman had a psychotic episode, Fanning gave him Carbamazepine to buffer it and
Zopiclone for the insomnia. Rudman had another episode and Fanning took him off Seroxat and put him on Dutonin.'

'Ah! Someone's been on a few little junkets to Barcelona courtesy of Big Pharma. So, we take him off all of this and see what's
what. And what is what in your opinion, Jane? Schizoid? Borderline? Both?'

'Almost certainly, but the funny thing is – well, the two funny things are – he picked me up late last year at Heathrow in
his cab. I was on my way from Canada where I'd been visiting … my friend. I thought he was ill at the time, although I
couldn't imagine how he was managing to drive a cab if he was schizoid. And then there's his delusion, it's complex, it's
durable, but, if you set it to one side, Rudman is altogether lucid. I only got him sectioned because he tried to beat up
Raj. He says the book is addressed to his son, that Dave – his god, that is – told him to write it for his son. I think he'd
benefit – if you're amenable – from some chats with you.'

'Oh, yes, yes, I think I'd enjoy that – give me the notes. And Jane' – she turned back from the door to see Busner ferreting
among the papers on his desk – 'you haven't got a paperclip on you?'

'How does the Book say the family should be organized?' Busner asked Dave, as they sat in his messy office with its Beuys
bas-reliefs and vast collection of – mostly fake – antiquities: cuneiform seals and miniature stelae, Acheulian hand axes
and jade, Toltec torture knives.

'Erm, well, it's like this.' Rudman searched inside himself for the Book: it was still there, he'd held it all. 'Men and women
should live entirely separately. No mixing. Half the week the kids stay with the dads, the other half with the mums.'

'So there is no family as such?'

'No, no, I s'pose not.'

'What happens when the dads are working – they do work, don't they? Who looks after the kids then?'

'Um … girls, older girls. Girls who haven't got kids of their own yet, they're like y'know, au pairs.'

'And the older boys?'

'They, they're boning up on the Knowledge, learning the runs and the points.'

'That's men's work, is it?'

'Oh, yeah, you can't be doing with women drivers now, can you?' Dave laughed, and Busner made a note. Schizophrenics seldom
laughed when recounting their delusions.

Rudman made the patients' kitchenette into his shelter and stood there at all hours, doling out hot sweet tea to bulimics
with bandaged wrists and crack criminals who'd broken into their own psyches, stolen everything worth having and left only
coiled turds on the carpet of their own consciousness. Dave guided these unfortunates back to their beds; he helped their
twitching fingers with the big brushes and poster-paint pots during the weekly art-therapy sessions. He assisted the old Alzheimer's
patients to the toilet and stood in the stinky lobby while they did their solitary business.

Then there was Phyllis. Phyllis with her tumultuous head of black, curly hair, so high and wide it threatened to fall off
her head. Phyllis, with her weird, white pancake make-up and her flowing dresses, which she ran up herself from garish African
fabrics. Phyllis, who through accident and inclination had fallen through the middle-class safety net into a series of unfortunate,
even abusive liaisons. Phyllis, who'd pulled herself together, trained as a chef, and now supported both herself and her father-forsaken
son. Phyllis, who came stumping on to the ward with her plump wrists nearly severed by the handles of many plastic bags. Bags
full of bananas, newspapers, fruit-juice cartons and books, which she bore to the bedside of her son, Steve, who was full
grown now and suicidal. Phyllis and Dave struck up a …

'Friendship – you're implying there's more to it than that?' Zack Busner, Jane Bernal, two junior registrars and the ward's
psychiatric social worker were gathered for a case meeting.

'I don't know,'Jane continued. 'I shouldn't think there's anything sexual between them – how could there be? He's told me
he's impotent – and I believe him. But there's a definite intimacy – and he's very attentive to the son.'

'To Steve?' the social worker put in.

'Yeah,' one of the junior registrars chimed up. 'He spends hours sitting with him, talking to him about' – she wrinkled her
nose with amused disbelief – 'cabbing.'

'Cabbing?' Busner saw nothing funny in this. 'Well, why wouldn't he, he is a cabbie after all – as well as a prophet.'

Jane Bernal came back
in.
'Phyllis Vance is also helping him sort out his living problems – debts, work and so forth. She asked me to write to the Public
Carriage Office on his behalf. He's trying to find out whether he can return to work.'

'Has anyone else been helping him?' Busner asked. 'His family, friends?'

The social worker consulted her notes. 'There was a Gary Finch who came to see him a couple of times,' she said. 'He's looking
after Rudman's cab. His sister came once, very uptight woman, not at all sympathetic – other than that no one. His mother
never came back after the initial interview.'

'So this Phyllis …' Busner ruminated. 'It looks like she's a …'

Good thing. Best thing that's happened to me in years .
. .
Not that I
fancy her … none of that
… Even Steve, Phyllis's son, felt like
a
good thing.
Dave couldn't understand it, but when he saw the young man for the first time, slumped on his bed in the men's ward, his
daft dreadlocks
brushing his knees, the first five inches of his boxer shorts bagging above the waistband of his trousers
like a fucking
nappy,
he felt a strange rush of guilt and sympathy. Jane Bernal had been talking to Dave about
stereotypic patterns of thought
. .
.fear.
. .
racism … woman hating .
. . She thought it would be a good idea if he had
better ideas …
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy she called it.

Dave tried out a better idea. 'Orlright, mate?' he said, advancing on the supine figure. 'My name's Dave – I'm like the geezer
factor on the ward. I'm a cabbie by trade, see, so I've the knowledge of the gaff, you wanna tea or sumfing, I could show
yer ve day room an' vat…' Cockney clambered into his mouth alongside nerves – because the lad was looking at him with
zombie eyes.
Dave havered, then sat down on the bed by him. 'What's the matter, son?' he asked.

The matter with Steve was depression so fundamental and so complete that it melted his muscles and coated his mind in a tarmac
of despair. Steve threw himself out of windows and beneath the wheels of cars. He hacked at himself with craft knives, he
upended paracetamol bottles. His stomach had been pumped more often than he'd filled it. If the revolving door through which
he entered Heath Hospital had been attached to a generator, Steve could have provided enough power for his own ECT.

When Phyllis saw that this man, who would be, were he not confined in his tracksuit to the treadmill of the ward,
a typical bloody
bigot,
was making an effort with her mixed-race son, she took an interest in him. Over cake at the Hampstead Tearooms his story crumbled
out: the cabbing, Carl, Michelle, Cal, Cohen the lawyer, the CSA, CAFCASS, the PCO, the cabbing – always the cabbing. 'Well,
if that's what's bothering you so much,' she said, 'the cab, well, we better try to sort it out.' And she smiled with her
tiny red bow of a mouth.