The Book of Dave (45 page)

No shared holidays and no shared friends. His mother took Carl to meet her girlfriends, their husbands and children. He was
an accessory of hers, rather than part of a family. This he sensed, while collecting acorns in suburban gardens, or hunched
inside on rainy days watching videos, playing with a favourite toy, while the tipsy hilarity of adults sitting around a messy
table washed over him.

His father, by contrast, made a little manikin of Carl. Out in the cab, there were bottles of Coke while Dave drank with Gary
Finch and other geezers. There were trips to Carl's sad old doting grandparents in East Finchley – or to the football. But
Carl intuited that his father wasn't bothered with the games they attended. He got the tickets through fellow cabbies who
were season-ticket holders, then sat in the stand while Carl screamed, looking off into the glittery drapes of rain picked
out by the floodlights. Peering up at his dad's face, Carl thought that it was like the advertisements painted on the pitch
– only to be viewed obliquely and from a long way off. Up close Dave's features were distorting, becoming more and more unfamiliar.

In Gospel Oak, Carl carved out his own territory: first the estates at the back of their house, then the adventure playground
on Parliament Hill, and eventually the Heath itself. He also learned to be the friend who's always asked back to tea, polite,
self-effacing, the child these other parents thought they wished they had, not understanding that he was lost, elusive, living
on a fantasy island remote from the rest of the world.

The house – which had seemed spacious for a young family – was too small for ill-feeling. Mild irritation could tenant a whole
storey. From their bedroom – which was above the kitchen – Dave could hear if Michelle angrily opened the fridge, or even
if cheese was frigidly unwrapped. When they rowed they used up the whole house. Screams filled the attic, shouts crammed the
living room. Carl at first cowered – then fled. Once he'd gone they said dreadful things. Dave's anger was a secret nuclear
programme. For years, in that dark place where his mother indulged him and his father neglected him, warped technicians had
slaved to condense his vapoury unlovability, then compress it into a glowing core of hatred. Michelle had her own radioactive
secret – fuse them together and you had almost unlimited destructive power.

For the first few years after the rows began Dave stored up huge reserves of rage, then hours or days later he would dump
them on Carl. Dave hit the child in secret – a sly clip, an underhand slap delivered with perfect, insane timing, precisely
beyond the eye line of its mother. The anger sparked in him, and hand or foot spasmed. The child howled with incomprehension,
and the remorse – oh! it was so powerful, like a drug, a moral drug that made Dave behave better for weeks. Perhaps that was
why Dave hit the son he loved – in order to discipline himself.

Then one day Carl's primary teacher snagged Dave in the playground and drew his attention to a thick welt on the boy's thin
neck. 'I'm not saying anything,' she said when she'd heard out Dave's feeble explanation – but truly she was saying everything.

The rows got worse – far worse. They were hallucinogenic, leaving both of them out of body, watching swirling patterns of
mad, red and black hate. The commonplace accusations of inadequacy were no longer enough. Her face pale and pulpy except for
when it was sweaty and livid – Michelle said the unsayable: 'He isn't your child anyway! He isn't.' And the silence that ensued
hummed – they became aware of the ticking of the electricity meter, a motorbike snarling down Southampton Road. 'You what?'
Dave said very quietly. 'Come again?' But Michelle, unable to believe she'd said it at all, crossed her thin arms, her characteristic
posture: holding everything in check. She kept on believing she hadn't said it, so that when Dave barged her, his hip ramming
her against the kitchen unit – she found it easy to believe this hadn't happened either.

The afternoon before dawn found him on the Goods Way, Dave had picked up a pol with a camera-friendly tie on the South Lambeth
Road and dropped him at St Stephen's Gate. Finding himself in Pimlico, he parked the Fairway in Page Street and stalked, like
a black pawn, between the chequerboard facades of the estate to the Regency Cafe. The Regency wasn't a cabbies' caff – but
they did come in. There was a bijoux rank round the corner on Horseferry Road. On this particular evening the Gimp was in
there – an older bloke Dave remembered from when Benny was still alive. He wasn't one of the steam-bath crowd, but Dave had
seen him a few times in the Warwick Avenue shelter. Benny had always said that the Gimp was 'A wrong un, a sly fucker, I've
'eard tell 'e's a tout.' The Gimp had to be seventy-five …
if 'e's a day . .
. but he looked alright. Jeans were pulled up tight over a pot belly; he sported a leather jacket and tinted designer glasses.

He called across the cafe, 'Orlright, Tufty, it is you, son, isn't it, Benny's lad?'

Dave admitted that it was.

'Cummova and join me,' the Gimp said. 'Go-orn, park yer arse.'

He was dabbling his tea, then bringing tiny spoonfuls of it to his sagging old lips …
dis-gus-ting
… 'Funny thing is,' said the Gimp, poking the teaspoon at Dave, 'I 'ad yer old lady in the cab s'afternoon – leastways
I fink it was 'er.'

'Oowdjoo even know it was 'er?' Dave dismissed him with a wave of his smoky hand, but the Gimp was not to be deterred: 'I'm
good wiv faces, see, and your granddad once showed me a snap of your wedding. Dead proud, 'e was. An' she's a looker, ain't –
she hard to miss wiv that carrot top.'
He is a tout.
. .
good with faces my
arse …
'Picked her up on Southampton Road in Gospel Oak – your manor, is it?'

'Yeah, yeah, it is, as it 'appens.' Dave sounded unconcerned indifferent even. 'Where'd you drop 'er off, then?'

' 'ampstead. Probly gone up there to meet a girlfriend in one of them wine bars. She was right dolled up, she was – looked lovely.
You're a very lucky feller … Nah, my old Vera …'

Dave was no longer listening. Sitting there, sucking on his acrid teat and staring at the hideous Gimp sipping his soup-a-cup,
Dave was looking instead into the wing mirror of his mind, where all the traffic behind him now appeared much, much larger.
She had every
opportunity, I've worked nights for half the time we've been together
…
Why wouldn't she? I know I disgust her .
. .
After the boy I couldn't.
. .
I couldn't make her come … It was all. .
.
all slack down there
… This was grotesque pleading, for he knew the truth: it wasn't that she was too big for him – he was too small for her.
Michelle hadn't meant to; it was a skill she'd sucked up with her mother's formula – belittling a man until he was the size
of a toy soldier, then putting him away in a box.

He dredged up the Gimp's real name. 'Where exactly in Hamp­stead did you drop her off then … Ted? I only ask 'coz I said
I'd meet her later and …' He stopped, realizing he was giving too much away, and the Gimp was looking at him queerly,
although all he said was 'Beech Row, up the top end of Heath Street, right outside a big fuck-off gaff –'

'Didduloodoo-didduloodoo.' For once Dave's mobile went off at the right time. It was no one he knew – let alone wished to
speak to. He feigned importance, though, and, making his excuses, left thinking,
Cunt'll be dead soon enough.

'No, no,' he'd guffawed. 'I don't have a condom – I didn't come with the intention of climbing into bed with anyone. But then,'
he laughed again and his eyes dissolved into lusty, winey, cokey pools, 'I didn't count on meeting anyone as beautiful as
you.' He took her in his arms and kissed her, and even though his breath was, well …
rank .
. . she didn't mind because she supposed hers was as well. Then he broke the embrace and held up snipping fingers. 'Snip-snip.
You see, I've had the snip. I know, I know …' He took a deep shuddery breath. 'I'm young for it. My wife had two very
bad miscarriages before the baby and, well, we didn't think …' Michelle shushed him with her mouth. She didn't mind –
she was too drunk. Sleeping with a married man was bad enough – but to discuss his feelings worse still: better to shush him
up, then feed the flexing, velvety limb inside herself.

'Snip-snip'. It became their catch-sound, accompanied by the little manipulation that excised them from any responsibility.
Five, ten, twenty? How many times had they met up in motorway motels, or done it on the cold mattresses of the empty, serviced
flats that Cal was supposed to be managing for his property-dealing paterfamilias? 'Snip-snip'. Then came the evening at the
Hilton – Cal made a fist with his little girl's nappy, punching a hole in Michelle's foamy emotions, and seven hours later Dave
Rudman, the sap, crawled into it.

Throughout that autumn the new being erected its little stand inside her: Foetus '87; while Michelle, unwilling to acknowledge
what was happening, went on supervising the construction of many other, far larger ones. Ideal Home, The Boat Show, The Motor
Show. Up to Birmingham for Office Equipment '87 at the NEC – then back down again. Still Cal didn't call. 'Snip-snip'. She cut
him out of her life. It was only when Manning, the fat Exhibitions Executive, stopped looking at her and instead began to
sniff, that Michelle was forced to frame the realization I'M PREGNANT in orange, metre-high letters.

It was the first time she had stalled, been checked in her determination to make her life hers and hers alone. This feeling
of warm yet tense swelling, the teary identification with everything small and vulnerable, was part of a double incubation:
Michelle was giving birth to a secret – and abortion was out of the question. Her childhood had, she felt, been banal, her
youth exposed and obvious – now her womanhood would be mysterious.

So Michelle savoured the brutal incomprehension of friends and colleagues. Her girlfriends, exasperated by her refusal to
tell them anything – let alone all – included her out. Michelle didn't care – she even revelled in her mother's anger. On Sunday
evenings she burrowed down to Brixton on the filthy tube, then was winched up to Streatham on a still filthier bus. Past the
ice rink, where those
black girls rapped me on the head with their rings … Fucking Irish …
I cried in the bogs .
. .
My tutu ruffed up
…
Blood in my hair
… Michelle could find comfort even in the stony silence of a chicken tea. Ron at the lager, Cath fretting at the cuffs
of her cardie with chipped nails, pressing a damp serviette against her eye with the heel of her hand …
Serves her bloody right …
Disgrace, so feared, turned out to be … a relief. Nothing else bad could ever happen to Michelle. The horse had bolted
into the stable. There in the pins-and-needles darkness its little hooves drummed on the taut walls of its stall. Where was
this jealous God – this vengeful God? Who could he be? A cabbie who knew about statues and came too quick? A man whose face
Michelle couldn't even remember.

Cheryl McArdle, the Personnel Director of LM & Q Associates, Exhibition Organizers, kneaded the prominent mole on her broad
cheek; her brown sausage curls tumbled on to her padded shoulders. 'I've secured you six months on three quarters of your
salary, will that be enough?' Michelle said, 'Thank you.' Cheryl pointed at the old communion ring that Michelle had got enlarged
and now wore on the appropriate finger. 'Nice touch,' she said.

Michelle didn't like this lie. Looking back, years later, as Cal Devenish's features – his low brow and tight, otter ears
– swam to the surface of her son's developing face, she realized it was biblical – the one lie had begotten the next. But
at the time she thought,
I
don't like to deceive my employers … He has a right to know … It's his
child too.
She found herself calling the number scrawled on the taxi receipt. Dave wasn't in, but the guy who answered didn't mind giving
her the address. Palmers Green – it was ridiculously distant, a trek so long that in making it Michelle felt the city parch
into desert. When the cabbie opened the door, half naked, she nearly laughed – almost puked. His thin hair was tousled and
through it she saw the exact pattern of his coming baldness. 'I didn't think,' she said. 'I didn't want…' Out of such
hesitations whole lives can be stopped in their tracks 'You have a right…' She smoothed the contours of the hillock beneath
her sheepskin coat and a sloppy grin spread across his face. What did he imagine?
That I'm a plum
fare, sweet as a nut?
'You'd better come in,' Dave said.