The Book of Dave (46 page)
Authors: Will Self
'You'd better come in,' Cal Devenish said. 'I'd better,' Michelle replied. Heavy gold cufflinks dangled from the cuffs of
his thick white linen shirt. Cal had bought Beech House because there was money sloshing around in his account. Dead dad's
money â and income from
Blackie,
his kids' TV programme about a depressed puppy, which had been sold to over three hundred networks worldwide. Cal didn't know
what to do with the house that the money he didn't know what to do with had bought. In the tall rooms the plaster mouldings
were wire-brushed, the wallpaper stripped away. It was a palimpsest, this house, the past rubbed up out of the surface of
the present. There were a few things scattered on the original floorboards: phone directories, a phone, a standard lamp. They
pretended she was an estate agent and he a sexy potential buyer, then they made love, in the hall, on the paint-spattered
parquet.
When Carl was six he'd spend whole mornings diligently tying things up, looping string from the banisters to a chair leg,
to a door handle, then propelling toy soldiers along these flimsy pulleys. In his ticking hovel Carl's father began tying
events together in his fervid mind, linking all those half-recalled moments when his wife had avoided his eyes even more than
usual, got undressed in the bathroom and slid, fully nightgowned, into bed. Dave pulled tight the granny knots that bound
this change of plan â 'I got a call from Sandra and decided to go out with her after all, Mum didn't mind sitting' â to a
new outfit she'd worn only a week before: 'It was in the sales â¦' 'What fucking sales?' he said out loud. 'What fucking
sales do they have in October?'
Dave Rudman wheeled the cab past the National Gallery and headed north up the Charing Cross Road. Plastic horses plunged from
the facade of the Hippodrome, cycle rickshaws were cluttering up the junction at Cambridge Circus.
Rickshaws ⦠rickshaws! What
is this, fucking Delhi! Soon they'll be burning bloody corpses on the Albert
Embankment.
Dave was no longer in hock to guilt â he redeemed his shabby pledge for still more anger. All those hateful digs and savage
barges, the slaps, the pinches, palming her face off like a freckled rugby ball â he was absolved of all responsibility for
any of it, because
she's been ripping me off⦠taking them off.
. .
sick
â¦
I can see her face hot and sweaty
â¦
Plunging some other bloke's dick in
her mouth â¦
He had to stop the cab in Harrington Square and retch out of the half-opened door.
Forward Southampton Road ⦠Right Fleet Road
â¦
Forward South
End Road
⦠It had been a headachey autumn day, the sun hammering its rays into crushed lager cans, embedding these glittering fragments
in the city's terrazzo. Now, as the Heath yawned to the right of the cab and Dave saw clouds boiling over Highgate Hill, he
had a moment of clarity:
I don't have t'do this ⦠the marriage has
been over for bloody years â¦
Only infantilism kept him driving on, an angry little boy whose legs weren't long enough for him to reach the brake pedal.
Left Heath Street
â¦
left Beech Row
â¦
Points at the
end: the Friends' Meeting House, New End school, the Horse and Groom,
my wife fucking another man â¦
This was the
fuck-off gaff,
double fronted, two flights of stairs doubling back on themselves to reach a grand front door. He took the stairs six at a
time. He looked up to the heavens â cloudy Michelles writhed there, tier upon tier of them. Who was he? Who was this man?
For the last decade, every time he looked at his son, Dave Rudman had felt this uncanny jolt â the impact of an unseen object
on an unfunny bone. Who was this man? He raised the solid brass question mark and brought it down. 'Bang! Bang! Bang!' In
the Family Court the judge beat the fragile bond to bloody mush with his gavel.
They'd been sleeping. She was lying on top of him. His legs were raised, his hands quietly cradled her buttocks. With each
'Bang!' he shlupped out of her, they came awake, parted with a jarring of hipbones, rolled away from each other. 'Jesus Christ!'
Michelle cried. 'What the fuck can that be?' But she knew already.
When Cal swung the door open, Dave Rudman looked like an ape man, his arms dangling, his brow bulging. They stared at each
other with mounting comprehension. Dave recognized this face, smudged with sleep; it was closely related to one he knew only
too well. Over Cal Devenish's bare shoulder Dave could see Michelle doing a thing that in marriage was so workaday â picking
up her underwear.
He drove to the old Globe, he got drunk. He drove drunk back to King's Cross and bought a bottle. A whore tried to toss him
off in the back of the cab. He finished the bottle, he slept. He woke â and all over the city the plinths, pediments, columns
and niches were quite empty; the Family of Man had fled. When Dave got back to the house it was mid morning. Carl was at school
and the only evidence of Michelle was a hairbrush strung with long auburn hairs and a pair of high-topped leather boots. They
were empty, broken at the ankle.
Big End had married a white girl from Sidcup, and together they'd bought a house in Petts Wood. He hadn't been mucking about,
Big End, he had his own joinery business now. The girl was a beautician. Petts Wood, on the leafy southeast borders of London,
was as green and quiet as a cemetery. Big End imported some of his kids and threw raucous barbecues that drove his neighbours
crazy.
Dave Rudman lay in a spare bedroom stacked with boxes full of moody beauty products: dirty cleansers, hidden concealers, bent
foundation creams. He wept and blamed the break-up of his marriage on his baldness. He remembered the oddest week of his life,
holed up in a hotel near the Gare Saint-Lazare. He'd cocked up all the arrangements and had to take the Metro out to La Defense
every morning for his treatments. In this futuristic city he had Revolutionary Trichofuse. They bored little holes in his
scalp and planted tussocks of hair harvested from his groin. The hotel was a smelly warren, and there were tarts bringing
back punters at all hours â mostly Japanese. Every night Dave sat staring into the fag-packet-sized mirror for hours at his
freshly harrowed pate. He prayed that this would make the difference; after all, he could hardly blame Michelle for not running
her fingers through his hair if there was none.
For a few weeks after he got back to London the transplant looked credible. Michelle didn't begrudge him either the time or
the money â she understood the naked thrust of vanity, an ambition located in the body alone, a frantic urge for skin to get
on, hair to rise to the very top. Then overnight it happened: Dave went to bed still convinced the transplant was a goer and
woke up to find that his forehead was a domed groin â he had pubic hair touching his eyebrows. He had to pay out five times
as much to get the crinkle-cut hair removed as he'd paid to have it inserted. They filled in the depressions as best they
could. He took to wearing a baseball cap.
Now Dave took his hatred out on himself, learning in the muffled little room to quietly bludgeon his head with his fist. 'Bash!
Bash! Bash!' The Fairway sat neglected in the road outside, an empty plinth deserted by its statue. Dave still drove every
day because he had to, but now he didn't merely neglect the Fairway, he abused it, giving it the sly digs and casual kicks
formerly reserved for his family, until the cab's bodywork was dimpled by his animosity.
Only once during the whole protracted disembowelling of their marriage did Dave talk to Michelle about what had happened up
in Hampstead. It was April 2001. They were sitting in a sunlit corridor of the Family Division Court at Somerset House. Dust
lay heavier than justice on the parquet. Dave was with Rebecca Cohen and the barrister she'd subcontracted to do the talking.
Cohen had dyed, caramel hair and a black Jaeger suit. The barrister's striped shirt was escaping from the waistband of his
trousers, his yellowing briefs were escaping from their mauve ribbons. He had the florid, old-young face of a man who has
witnessed many bad things â none of which has happened to him. Three embrasures along Michelle, tidy as ever, sat with her tag
team: Fischbein, a killer newt, and a woman barrister whose downy face glowed. The barristers shuttled between the window
seats; their aim was to cut a deal that could be presented to the judge in her chambers. 'It'll save a lot of money,' Cohen
said, 'believe me.' The house was chopped up, the maintenance stacked, the child bundled â everything was going in Michelle's
favour. She couldn't understand it â why, when he'd caught her in the act, was Dave passively acquiescing to this quickie divorce
on the grounds of his bad behaviour?
The barristers were squaring off, trading bits of the Rudmans' lives, when Dave nipped past them and sat down beside her.
'You, him â¦' He was breathless from the tiny sprint; Cohen flapped behind him. Fischbein said, 'You mustn't approach my
client directly,' but Michelle waved him away. When they were let alone, Dave said, 'One thing, tell me one thing â and don't
fucking lie. D'you love him? Are you going to take Carl and move in with him? That's all I want to know.' Michelle said, 'I
d o n ' t ⦠I can't say ⦠I'm sorry, David â truly I am.' While what Dave heard her say was
It was nothing, it meant nothing ⦠It's over.
His guilt did the dubbing.
He moved into the flat on Agincourt Road. He thought something iffy must have been going on with the previous tenant, because
the gaff reeked of baby oil, and talcum powder puffed from every square inch of the fitted shag carpet. Every other weekend
Dave borrowed a vacuum cleaner from old Mrs Prentice who lived beneath him in a nylon housecoat. Glad of the human contact,
she also offered him a box full of polishes and sprays. By the time he went to pick Carl up from his school, the gloomy little
flat was spick and span, the Arsenal duvet pancake flat on the boy's bed, the video cassettes a neat little office block.
It was Carl's first year at secondary school, and he begged his father not to come near the place. Dave couldn't keep away.
The school backed on to the branch line that ran beside Parliament Hill. Beneath its wonky weathervane and crap campanile
the older pupils clustered at the gates. They wore Burberry baseball caps and white, nylon-furred parkas. The mouths of these
inner-city Inuits spat consonants hard and sharp as teeth, while the girls' adobe skins suggested they'd been renting Mexico
by the half-hour. Yet they seemed entirely sure of themselves, while Dave skulked, and when Carl reluctantly detached himself
from his peers, they skulked away together.
Runty⦠Boysie .
.
.Champ⦠Tigerâ¦
These babyish nicknames were no longer applicable to the rootless stripling who flopped along by Dave's side. After the first
couple of weekends they spent together, Dave was disabused of the idea that he knew intuitively what to do with the lad. If
he didn't put together an exhaustive programme they were thrown back on each other's company â and Dave hadn't a clue what
to say to Carl. Already he detected an awful adolescent surliness in him â isolated words roamed aimlessly in the lad's down-turned
mouth. Was this payback for those livid marks? Whatever Dave uttered sounded tinny and insincere; he was reduced to the role
of chirpy cockney cabbie. They had to talk
fucking football.
And go for endless kick-abouts. Belatedly Dave understood why the gulf between him and his own father had been unbridgeable.