The Book of Dave (5 page)

'That's very inner-resting.'

'I'm glad you think so, sir, and this road we're driving up, you may've noticed that it's very straight for a London road,
that's because it's the old Roman Watling Street.'

'You don't say.'
I do fucking say. I fucking know. I know it all – I
hold it all. If all of this were swamped, taken out by a huge fucking flood,
who'd be able to tell you what it was like? Not the fucking Mayor or the
Prime Minister
–
that's for sure. But me, an 'umble cabbie.

'Yes, if we were here seventeen hundred years ago, we might've seen a legion marching off to Chester, on its way up north
to duff up a bunch of blue-painted savages.'

The cab, its wipers 'eek-eeking', pulled away from the lights and scraped by the concrete barnacles of the Hilton tucked beneath
the Marylebone Flyover. It was late lunchtime on a wet December day, so the shop windows were lighting up. Dave tried to imagine
who – who he knew – might be the type to have pitched up in a room there, for no other reason but
to smoke crack with brasses from the
Bayswater Road and rape the minibar.
From some dark rank in his memory a recollection pulled away:
Superb Sid, Sid Gold … picked
'im up last year outside the old Curiosity Shop … He was looking
pretty fucking flush, pretty pleased with 'imself. Bespoke fucking whistle,
cashmere overcoat, the whole bit. He wouldn't've done me any favours if
I'd reminded 'im of the perm he used to sport at school. He became a brief,
didn't 'e, criminal fucking brief – in both senses. Gave me his card. Ponce.
Still, he's the type I'm gonna need because that Cohen cow ain't gonna
come through. If I'm gonna see the boy again, I'm gonna have to get some
dirt on that cunt Devenish. There has to be some
…
there always is
…
all you gotta do is dig.

'My oldest son would be fascinated by this stuff,' said the fare, who'd relaxed now they were trundling past Little Venice
and up through Maida Vale. 'He's a history geek … gets it from his dad, I guess.' The fare looked about him at the five-storey
Tudorbethan apartment blocks, and, as if taking comfort in their solidity, unglued his hands from the handles and at last
eased himself back in the seat.

Dave hit the intercom button – a plastic nubbin incised with a hieroglyphic head: 'Yeah, I always think of Watling Street
as a sorta time tunnel, connecting the past with the present.'
What's the point
in knowing there's a time tunnel there if you've got no one to go down it
with? Now I understand that I learned this city to hold in my mind for a
while – then lose it to my boy. Without him it's starting to disappear
like a fucking mirage.

'It must be busy for you now … before Christmas?' The fare was uncomfortable with Dave's extravagant image,
but thass alright,
he's paying to feel superior as well as be driven. Superior in knowledge,
superior in wealth, he don't need some hack to tell him he's neither.

'Yeah, busy enough, I'm out in the begging box all hours.'

'Begging box … ? Oh, I get it.'

'But come New Year town'll be dead as a doornail. We call it the kipper season.'

'I'm sorry?'

"Coz it's flat – nuffing 'appening 'til the spring.'
When the
Ideal-fucking-Home-Show hits town, more ponces than you can shake a
roll-neck at. Then the headscarf-and-sleeveless-anorak mob up for the
Flower Show, Chelsea Bridge crammed with shuttle buses and off-roaders
that've never even slid off the fuckin' gravel drive. Benny used to clear out
to Tenerife on the banana boat for the kipper season. Said he could live
out there all winter for five bob a day, come back when the trade picked
up again.

They passed Fratelli's, a glass-container bistro below the deck of the new Marriott, then the cab flipped up on to the Kilburn
High Road. The
shitty little shopping centre
at Kilburn Square teemed with
bat-eared London Irish kids exchanging benefit money for synthetic-furred
animals with glued-on eyes. Cheapo chavs … baggy fucking tracksuits
… flapping their skinny arms.
Still, Dave felt at home here – he'd reached the right circle of the city, the one where he more or less belonged. Built up
over centuries in concentric rings, like the trunk of a gargantuan tree, London districts derived their character from their
ring: Kilburn, Shepherd's Bush, Balham, Catford – all of them grown from the same barky bricks and pithy masonry.

The rain had died away to a cellulite pucker of drizzle on the brown puddles, and there was an oily gloss on everything. The
wipers 'eeked' to a standstill. Dave tried to make the lights at Willesden Lane and failed. He pulled up short in the yellow
net of lines thrown across the junction and applied the handbrake with its wooden stair creak. The Kilburn State Ballroom
leaned over them, posters peeling away from its
diarrhoea tiling. Fucking Taigs, dumb
Paddies, with their hurdy-gurdy show bands and their leaky-eyed,
pissed-up, violent lovelessness, worshipping a sexless cow with her chest
hacked open.
The fare was looking through the speckled windows at the old navvies, flannel trews lashed round Guinness bellies, who came
tottering out of Paddy Power's shredding their slips and chucking them in the air so they created localized snowfalls, off-white
Christmases of loss.

'We call this County Kilburn,' Dave said, and, when the fare looked uncomprehending, he enlarged, 'because a lot of the Irish
live here.'

'Oh … sure … OK.'

'Lovely people.'
I wouldn't be here at all if it weren't for you, my
son. No pick-ups and precious few drop-offs either. Who wants some son
of the sod blowing Bushmills chunks on the upholstery while he blabs
about his poor old mammy? Not me. Still, I ought to go and see my poor
old mammy, she worries about Carl. It's on the way back into town, I
could even look in at the Five Bells and have a drink
…
No, make me
fuzzy with the pills
…
Fucking bejazus! What if the PCO pulled me in
for a medical?

Dave didn't want to see his poor old mammy anyway. Didn't want to see her sitting in the worn-out armchair by the window,
scrupulously marking her pupils' projects even though it was the start of a two-week holiday or, worse, diligently preparing
for a child-centred Christmas that the central grandchild wouldn't be attending. Folding paper serviettes decorated with prancing
reindeer, checking cracker availability, climbing up the tiny aluminium stepladder to get the box of decorations down from
the equally tiny loft.
Mum never liked Michelle – hated her, more like. Funny, when I feel
Mum's hatred I stop hating 'chelle.
They would sit there, over mugs of instant coffee in the kitchen, listening to the old man snooze next door in front of the
racing: 'They're on the home straight now, past the last furlong marker … and it's Tenderfoot, Tenderfoot… all the
way from Little Darling …' The unspoken lay on the tablecloth between mother and son, among blue Tupperware, the
Hendon Advertiser
and a pile of dog-eared exercise books.

If Dave offered his mother the opportunity, she'd vouchsafe some of her ailments – the hot flushes, the sweats, the cramps
and pains …
She's in her mid sixties, but it's like she's still on the fucking
blob!
He deliberately framed the most disgusting thoughts – hating mummies was what he excelled at, and this – he dimly comprehended
– was because
I'm such a fucking mummy's boy …

The cab trundled under the railway bridge at Brondesbury and began to strain up Shoot Up Hill.
Pile of shit, rip-off on wheels. That's
the trouble with cabs – they're all fucking ringers, they're all pretending
to be cabs but none of them are the real thing. Benny's old FX4 was so
underpowered it could hardly make it up the ramp from the Euston rank.
He told me he once had to ask some fatties to climb out and walk 'til he
made it to the level. This Fairway is bearable, so why would I lay out
thirty grand for a TX? For a bigger windscreen so I can see more of this
bollocks? A wheelchair ramp so I can pick up spazzes? I'd be in hock to
the finance company and having to work still bloody harder to keep those
fat fuckers in time-share villas in fucking Marbella
…

'I must say, cabbie,' said the fare, 'the reputation of these vehicles doesn't do them justice, they are most exceptionally
comfortable.'
Comfortable for who? You try getting your porky trotters down under this
dash, it's like putting your legs in a coffin, mate, a vibrating bloody coffin.
It fits tighter than a ridged dick in a ribbed condom. I swear, I've got out
of this thing at the end of a day's work and fallen straight fucking over.
'I'm glad you're enjoying the ride, sir, we like to say that this is the finest custom-built taxi in the world. Its unique
twenty-five-foot turning circle makes it ideal for London's crowded streets, and helps to ensure that the licensed trade stays
in business.'
I'd give it
up tomorrow and drive a fucking Renault Espace for Addison Lee if it
wasn't for the ghost of old Benny urging me on, and my own dumb pride.

The cab growled over the brow of Shoot Up Hill and on along Cricklewood Broadway. This was another ring of the city. Outside
the grocer's there were stacks of plantains and boxes of sweet potatoes under flapping plastic – garish, alien vegetables
infesting the lacklustre suburb. Outside the pound shops West Africans flicked amber worry beads and peered at displays of
washing-up brushes. A big pub hove into view, the Crown, engraved glass, double bow windows, free-standing sign. It looked
impressive,
but
it's only been made over to look like what it once was. Inside are fifteen
kinds of piss on electronic tap, a video jukebox and a bunch of slappers
giving the come-on to farting salesmen full of refried cheer.

'And what's this county called, then?' the fare asked.

'County yourself bloody lucky you don't live here, sir,' Dave said, then laughed to show he wasn't serious.
Not that I'm racial or
anything, it's only that if I'm perfectly honest, at the end of this particular
bloody awful day, I can't stand the fucking shvartzers .
. .
Can't stand
their tight, furry curls, their chocolate skin, their blubbery lips .
. .
their
dreadful fucking driving …
Shvartzers. Hard to think of Big End, whom Dave had known since he was a teenager, as a shvartzer.
But it's better to say shvartzer than coon or nigger, innit? Afro-Caribbean's
plain stupid, 'coz they aren't all that. If Benny were still alive he'd be
amazed to see black, black cabbies, fucking blown away. Black, black
cabbies and diesel dykes inall. Not that there are anything like as many
blacks as there were Jews – thank fucking God. Benny said that in the
sixties most cabbies were Jewish. What the fuck's 'appened to 'em?
Disappeared to Emerson Park, Redbridge and fucking Stanmore, living
out their days behind double glazing, under the watchful eyes of lawyer
daughters and doctor sons. Hung up their ski jackets and fur boots, quit
the patch leaving only their bloody shtoopid shlang behind 'em.

The cab bundled on past bed shops and a new Matalan, before finally ridding itself of the endless parade of commerce and entering
authentic suburbia, the great shrubbery of three-bedroom, inter-war semis that defined London more than any mere black cab
or Big Ben ever could. The road fell away towards the North Circular, splitting into three tongues, one poking through the
arch of a still higher flyover, while the two others lolled down to the ground. The VDU facades of PC World and Computer Warehouse
glared at each other across six lanes. The cab passed between them, then was aloft, buffeted by wind, spattered by grit, slapped
by waste paper. To the east seagulls soared above the sea-greenery of Hampstead.
Like a kid's snowstorm toy, the little cab shaken up.
Dave remembered
the little kid crying, huge pink finger marks on his naked
bum.
And what he had whimpered:
Not hurting Dad … not hurting
… as he confused the pain and the action that had caused it.

Dave had been driving for so many years he hardly ever thought about the actual graft of turning the wheel – except for when
he did, and then it was a torment.
When Carl was little and I felt like
this, I'd find a call box and pull over. I was working nights. 'Do you want
to speak to Daddy? Daddy's on the phone?'
The sound of two-year-old breathing rasping the mouthpiece, then his voice, piping yet oddly distinct:

'Daddy?'

'Hiyah, Runty, how's it going, mate?'

'Mummy, issa ghost.'

The ghost drove on up the Broadway past the uglified slab of the Connaught Business Centre and on through Colindale, turning
right down Colindale Avenue by the Newspaper Library, where ageing amateur genealogists sifted the dusty old doings of their
ancestors between their arthritic fingers. The copper roof of the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill shone
in a single faint beam from the setting sun. 'That's NIMR, isn't it?' said the fare, but Dave didn't hear him, he was aiming
for it, tacking the cab this way and that: under the MI at Bunns Lane, then up Flower Lane to Mill Hill Circus. He wasn't
using any knowledge to get to his destination – simply a homing instinct.
Now it's Carl that's the
ghost . .
. First they stopped meeting in the flesh, then the phone calls got shorter and shorter, a few muffled phrases: 'Yeah, Dad,
alright, yeah,' a few muffled phrases that eventually deteriorated into text messages: 'Eye not CU … Eye 8 B4 … Eye
luv U 2 …' A staccato script of letters and digits beamed from an alternative world. Then they ceased communicating altogether
and began to liaise in dreams or nightmares.