The Book of Dave (54 page)

'It's a protest,' Dave said wearily. 'They dress up as historical figures to protest about fathers' rights.'

'But Enery ve Aytf! 'E didn't eggzackerly myndaht fer iz kids, did 'e!'

'I think the point is' – Dave had reverted to type, speaking his mother's hard-won, didactic English – 'that Henry desperately
wanted a son – that he was prepared to go to any lengths to get one. Look at the other blokes with him, they're all dressed
as other famous men. He's Prince Albert, that one's Churchill. I think the sort of dads these men were is … well, besides
the point. They put on these costumes when they climb up on public buildings, cranes, anywhere high up that'll get them attention,
and it works, doesn't it?'

'I fink they're two stops short of Dagenham, mate,' said the foxy-faced cabbie, and his mate cackled. 'Yeah, fucking barking!'

Dave had little inclination to defend Fucker – anyway, he was saved by the diddle and doo of his phone. It was Dr Bernal at
Heath Hospital. 'The test results are through,' she said without preamble – they both knew what she was talking about. 'Would
you like to come up here to discuss them with me?'

'No, that's alright, thanks for sorting it out, Dr Bernal – but you can give it to me straight, I'm ready.'

She sighed. 'Well, they confirm what your ex-wife and her, um, partner have been saying. Dave – Carl … he isn't your son
– not biologically, that is – he's … he's Devenish's.'

Dave removed the phone from his ear and stared at it. It lay in his big, damp palm like an artificial pearl. The teeny voice
of Jane Bernal cried to him, 'Dave – Dave? Are you alright?'

He put it to his ear again. 'Yeah, yeah, I'm fine – to be honest I was expecting this. Listen, I can't talk now, I'm tied
up, I'll call you later.' He squeezed the phoney spot.

Ali Baba himself was long gone – back to Famagusta to play out his days on a plastic card table, downing shots of raki and
gambling away his London wad. Ali's eldest son, Mohammed, had taken over the business. He was a mercurial figure, phases of
'roids, slappers
and raves,
interspersed with regular attendance at the Finsbury Park Mosque, and a grim-faced determination to bring about a worldwide
uprising of the
umma.
For the last year or so he seemed to have quietened down: he'd dropped the –hammed, and it was plain Mo who stepped forward
to meet Dave, scrunging Swarfega between his oily knuckles. Behind him, in the Stygian interior of the arch, Kemal's wrinkled
lower half hung from the chassis of a brand new TX2. A radio warped R & B round the brick cavern.

With age and responsibility Mo was starting to resemble his old man: he had the same iron-filing hair and waddling gait. 'Wossup,
Tufty?' he asked. 'You can't be wantin' anuvver service, you 'ad the wagon in 'ere a couple uv mumfs ago, an' even ven there
woz only a few 'undred more on the clock than wot there woz the time before.'

'No.' Dave spoke in his new plain and considered fashion. 'I want to sell the cab.' He held out the keys. 'I'll take what
you can give me if you want it for the fleet' – Mo's eyes widened – 'or, if you can find a private buyer, you can take whatever
percentage you like.' He dropped the keys into Mo's sticky green palm and without waiting for an answer turned on his heel.
From beneath the TX2 there came a resounding chuckle – but Mo called after him, 'I'm not surprised, Tufty – you needing the
dosh an' that. To be honest there's been a couple of the chaps over this way looking for you. I didn't say nuffing, but they
was Turks, Tufty. Turks, and they looked like the heavy mob.' Dave wasn't listening – he was gone, past the other cabbies,
out the end of the alley and into the traffic on Vallance Road, which was coagulating into a scabrous rush hour.

It was a Friday, and the metal exodus was angry and fearful. Flabby arms let crumpled burger wrappers fall from the wound-down
windows of cars; a miasma of exhaust fumes hung over the rooftops. The only fresh things Dave could see as he slapped from
slab to slab were dog turds. He'd been walking for about an hour when it happened. He found himself by a duck pond that cratered
a strip of park, its surface coated with algae as thick and green as emulsion. There were hulking nineteenth-century villas
to one side, a primary school and an uglification of 1980s flats to the other. He hadn't been making any conscious effort
to lose himself – the idea was ridiculous – and yet he had. He didn't know where he was.

A young woman came limping towards him. She wore a bright blue puffa jacket and her brown ringlets lay hopelessly on her pitted
cheeks. She had the broken nails and scuffed trainers of poverty. 'Excuse me, love,' Dave began, 'but you wouldn't happen
to know …' then he tailed off, because she was looking at him with eyes bruised by utter disorientation. Her dry lips
parted and she said, 'Pliz? Pliz?'
She doesn't know where she is .
. .
She hasn't got a
fucking clue.
. .
She looks like she's been brought here from Massy-fucking-donia
smacked out in a van
…
Kept locked up in a gaff near here for
months getting fucked stupid . .
.
Fucked up the cunt –fucked up the Gary
.
. .
She don't know where she is – she don't even know what city she's
in …
'Don't worry, love,' he said, 'you don't worry.'

He left her and stumbled down through a new development: tall, narrow townhouses ranged round courtyards choked with cars.
There was a kosher deli open and outside it Frummer kids were gathered licking ice lollies. As Dave limped by, they stared
at him, their pale blue eyes, velvet skullcaps and corkscrew payess giving them the look of earnest spaniels. Next he found
himself on a towpath beside a sluggish reach of brown water.

He was losing it – whole chunks of the city were falling out of him. Kenton and Kingsbury, Kingston and Knightsbridge. He
didn't know the name of this canal, or any other, only that it was oozing south, so he turned in the opposite direction and
walked north. North past the grassy ramparts of reservoirs guarded by palisades of Giant Hogweed, north, past the tumbledown
shacks of shedonists, who'd pitched up on this toxic Limpopo in their bashed barges and cashiered dredgers. He skirted industrial
estates where metal tortured itself and ducked under the echoic stages of elevated roadways. He traversed pancake-flat parks
where adolescents mooched on mountain bikes, their thin faces lost in the shadows of their hoodies. They moved slowly, so
very slowly, their feet only just maintaining purchase on the very outer edge of the pedals.

Towards evening Dave found himself mounting a hill. Up he went through saw-leafed patches of nettles and the whippy stalks
of brambles, while Stanmore and Streatham dropped from the back of his hot head to lie gently steaming on the crushed grass
behind. He was disembowelled – he was losing it; and as he lost it the crushed plastic bottle of his soul expanded with sudden
cracks and pops.

At the crown of the hill the shrubbery gave way to cool shady groves of silver birch and alder. In the middle of a clearing
there was a concrete trig' point. Dave turned back to see the city he had lost spreading to the far hills of the south in
brick peak after tarmac trough, blood-orange under the dying sun. In the foreground tall towers stood up to the ochre sky,
while to the southeast close-stacked blocks were already subsumed to an electric glare. In the mid distance a river streaked
silver and beside it a mighty wheel revolved so slowly.

Dave knew none of it – his Knowledge was gone. The city was a nameless conurbation, its street and shop signs, its plaques
and placards, plucked then torn away by a tsunami of meltwater that dashed up the estuary. He saw this as clearly as he'd
ever seen anything in his life. The screen had been removed from his eyes, the mirror cast away, and he was privileged with
a second sight into deep time. The great wave came on, thrusting before it a scurf of beakers, stirrers, spigots, tubes, toy
soldiers, disposable razors, computer-disc cases, pill bottles, swizzle sticks, tongue depressors, hypodermic syringes, tin-can
webbing, pallet tape, clips, clasps, brackets, plugs, bungs, stoppers, toothbrushes, dentures, Evian bottles, film canisters,
widgets, detergent bottles, disposable lighters, poseable figurines of superheros, cutlery, hubcaps, knick-knacks, mountings,
hair grips, combs, earphones, Tupperware containers, streetlight protectors – and a myriad other bits of moulded plastic,
which minutes later washed up against the hills of Hampstead, Highgate, Harrow and Epping, forming salt-bleached reefs, which
would remain there for centuries, the lunar pull of the new lagoon freeing spiny fragments to bob into the cockle-picking
hands of
know-nothing carrot-crunchers
who would scrutinize them and be filled with great awe by the notion that anything ever had – or ever would be again – Made
in China.

Dave turned and wandered away into the woodland, dipping down into damp hollows where midges swirled, then rising up over
root-buttressed ridges overarched by the gnarled limbs of oaks that sawed at the thickening night.

When the ex-driver crossed over the M25 and walked down into Epping, darkness had fallen. White flashes from the exposed rails
of the tube station imprinted after-images of the privet-lined paths he trudged along. A public-address system barked 'This
is the Central Line service for all stations to West Ruislip', but it meant nothing to Dave. On he went, over humped fields
of alien maize, up to another wood of smooth-barked beech where pipistrelles stroked his remaining hair. Some trees had been
pollarded, and outlined against the bruised night sky they resembled the knobkerries of giants sunk in the beaten earth.

Coppices stirred, then rattled, as Dave mounted a footbridge over the MII. Out in the middle he stopped and peered down at
the streaming traffic, car after van after lorry, their headlights drilling the murk. The windscreens were blank until they
shot beneath the parapet, then, momentarily, the drivers' faces were revealed: jaws bunched, eyes white-rimmed with exhaustion.
Dave understood now that they would always be pinioned in this moment, while he was free to swim in the entire current of
fluvial time.

The moon rose over the coxcomb of a wood, and it looked like a headlight cratered with flyspecks. He reached Phyllis's cottage
beyond Chipping Ongar after midnight. He was as ignorant as a baby, and accordingly she gathered him to her breast.

'Location,' Dave explained. 'His house – his statue on the Embankment.'

'Um, quite so – did you say you'd walked here?' Bohm was amazed.

'Yeah, it's all up with me, Tonë – the cabbing, that is. I thought it meant, well, everything – it was who I was, but now
– '