The Book of Dave

by Will Self

  'Yeah,' Dave drawled, 'specially if their wipers ain't working.' The fare laughed gratefully – the cockney chitchat made it possible for him to let go of his nerves, get back in character.

  Toyist Heathrow, a confusion of up-ended Rotadexes and fax-machine terminals. The cab pulled up to the drop-off at Terminal 3. The fare got out and stood in the damp sodium night of jet screech and taxi mutter adjusting his suit and overcoat, getting out his wallet. He gave a tenner's tip; Dave thanked him, then said, 'Receipt?' And when the fare took it and thanked him in turn, Dave went on, 'Giss yer card, mate.'

  'What?'

  'Give us your business card: the radio circuit I'm on are doing a raffle-type thingy for our customers. If your card gets drawn you get two hundred quid's worth of free travel in the new year.' The fare dug his card out and passed it over. Dave thanked him, wished him a merry Christmas and flicked the shift into drive. ' 'Course I'm not on the fucking radio circuit, am I, haven't been for years, I'd rather be a straightforward musher than bother with that malarkey. He looked at the card: the lettering meant nothing to him – CB & EFN INVESTMENT STRATEGIES, STEPHEN BRICE, CEO EUROPE – but he was one step closer to nailing Devenish now, pulling him off of Michelle with his wet dick gleaming in the dark, rolling the wanker over and grinding a boot into his fucking smug face.

  Dave drove back out through the long, fume-filled tunnel under the runway, pulled round the roundabout and up on to the peripheral road, where there were hotels so large other hotels could have checked into them. He turned into the cul-de-sac that ran behind the police station to the taxi feeder parks. He pulled into the first one and parked up; it was a quarter full – not at all heavy for a mid evening in late December. Doug Sherry's, the taxi drivers' cafe, looked cheery enough, if you think any joint full of these mugs can be cheery. The windows and eaves were draped with tinsel, and when he'd locked up the cab and strolled into the lobby, there was a Christmas tree propped by the bins full of the drivers' free rags: Taxi, Call Sign, London Taxi Times and HALT. Tacked to the bare brick wall was a laminated poster showing a cheeky chappy cabbie's grinning mug. '233 Sexual Assaults and 45 Rapes' the caption read, 'So What's He Got to Laugh About?'

  Dave took his place in the queue for the serving counters and checked out his peers. Fat, thick, racist, ugly, rotten wankers. In their dumb fucking zip-up jackets carrying their stupid little change bags, giving it this, giving it that, and saying fuck all. Dave didn't like many cabbies at all, but he reserved his special derision for the estimated half of London licensed taxi drivers who did nothing else but work the airport. With their stupid bloody gang names . . . The Quality Street Gang, the Lavender Hill Mob … and their stupider nicknames … The Farmer, Gentleman Jim, Last Chancer, Musher Freddy … Sitting out here ranked up for half their fucking lives, tootling up West with a fare, then putting their lights out and tootling back again. Too bloody scared to ply for hire like a real cabbie, too fucking fond of their fishing and their golf, their cards and their sweepstakes. Fancy themselves part of some stupid elite, following the 'cabbies' code', when half of them are faces on the fiddle, putting foil over their computer discs before they go into the feeder park to bilk a few quid, or going down on to the terminals to steal fares, pretending they're picking someone up on the radio if they get pulled. Makes me sick.

  And always had, which is why Dave avoided the airport as much as he could. This evening he was bilked by a fucking pork chop that looked succulent under the bright lights of the servery, but, once he'd borne it over to one of the blue melamine tables, turned out to be dry and solid. Meat to murder with. He wouldn't have minded plunging it like an ice axe into the red neck of the cabbie who stood feet away, leaning his elbows on a table, sticking his fat arse in the air and slamming down dominoes with Caribbean vigour. He might have done, if the back hadn't turned to reveal a face he knew: 'Wot you doin' aht 'ere ven, Tufty?' the other cabbie asked and Dave grunted, 'nuffing, I 'appens to trap a flyer.' Yeah, a flyer, a fucking 'eretic … some scumbag who's lost his faith in London.

  Dave's eyes wavered over to the wood-panelled wall that was hung with photographs of dead cabbies: 'Sid Greenglass, always early, now he's late, 1935-1986', 'Chancer Ross with the one that didn't get away, 1944-1998' (this one featured a rod, a reel and two fishy faces), 'The Maida Vale Marauder, Terry Groves, 1941-1997'. Their lives seemed shorter than average, fifties and sixties mostly. It could have been the selection that was made when the new cafe was built and the photos transferred over from General Roy's – but Dave doubted it. Cabbing was always an unhealthy occupation, sitting on the shuddering seat, all the dreadful humours gathering in your belly and legs as the stress flowed in through ears and eyes and hands on the steering wheel. Piles – that's what you get from all that sitting … piles … that's why they're such arseholes. Cabbies aren't anything much anyway – they think they're professionals, but they aren't. They're mostly ex-something else, ex-coppers, ex-army, ex-crims, ex-bloody-boxers – and then they end up here on the wall at the airport, ex fucking everything.

  A screen was wedged high up in the corner of the dining area showing the lane movements in the second feeder park. This was bigger than the one outside the cafe, thirty lanes wide, each one with thirty-odd cabs lined up in it. When a driver had inched his way through both these cattle pens a screen told him which terminal he was to go down to. On a good day it could take a couple of hours, on a slow one a lot longer. Then there was no guarantee you'd get a fare into the middle of London; you might just get a transit passenger, marooned for the night, who wanted to go to the Holiday Inn at the end of the motorway spur. Or worse still because at least with a run under five miles you didn't have to rank up again – you'd get a full load of Southall grannies, saris flying, all with bundles of shmatte from Pakkiland, all needing your capable assistance, who'd scrape the poor old Fairway up and down the speed bumps to No. 47, Acacia Avenue, then pay the meter and not a bloody penny more. Two hours waiting, twenty minutes driving, twenty minutes portering and all for eight bloody quid, you're better off flipping Big Macs.

  Dave abandoned the pork chop long before he had to pull over to the second feeder park. Better to sit in the darkness of the cab polluted with air freshener, tangy with diesel and rank with old cigarette smoke – than bear the hateful company of his own kind. The cab – he'd spent half his adult life in it. It's not juss a motor – it's almost fucking human … He thought pointedly and with great fervour of the sleeping pills by his bed and the bottle of Scotch alongside them. He rasped his stubble with a quick-bitten thumb. When his turn came, it was a relief: he drove across the road, divvied up his ticket and joined the next metal anaconda worming its way towards the money prey. Eventually he got to the front and the screen flashed up 'No. 47304, Terminal 2'.

  Down at the Terminal 2 rank passengers were being expelled by the sliding doors, sucked out of the warm nowhere and into the wet, cold here of wintertime London. Shuttle buses grunted like great pigs; armed police strutted, submachine-gun necklaces on their Kevlar decolletage. In front of Dave travellers mashed their over-stuffed cases into a cab, while the driver ignored them. When I was a butter boy, I'd've been out on the road, bouncing like a puppy … Can I help you? Let me slot this in here, I'll be careful, we can put that one up front. . . Not now, oh no.

  Finally it was Dave's turn. He checked his watch: he'd been at Heathrow for an hour and three quarters. City getter would've made a grand in that time, that fucking brief of mine would've scalped half that, and I've got nothing to show for it … Still, at least we're into the third tariff band. His passenger shook herself free from the damp queue and stepped towards the cab; Dave handed his docket to the dispatcher, who said, 'North London, mate, Belsize Park, good for you?' Dave grunted, 'Not bad.' And the cab rocked a little as the woman got in; she only had a single, wheeled flight bag, the handle of which she'd already deftly stowed. 'Where to, love?' Dave asked, and she answered, 'England's Lane, please, just off Haverstock Hill?' Like so many fares she
was querying his competence, wanting Dave's reassurance that he knew exactly where this was, but he didn't bother to give it, only put the cab in gear and grumbled off out of the terminal.

  Thrumming back through the airport tunnel, Dave looked in the rearview mirror. The fare was a stringy brunette in her late forties, thick dark hair scraped back over sallow flesh, bony as a fucking skull. When she turned to look at the scale model of Concorde, Dave saw the tendons in her thin neck, exposed by the open neck of her blouse. She wore no make-up and a series of distinct grooves ran down her long top lip. The pashmina with the embroidered hem, the naked fingers that played with it, the bifocals on a chain, the myopic eyes blinking in the gloom: all said to Dave spinnie or lezzer, one or other, and either way not an object of desire – not that he had any available; nor one of pity – not that he had any of this either. He took out his slunk of Mansize and crunched the dried snot in his pitted nose.

  The cab paused at the traffic lights under the M4 flyover, then accelerated up the slip road. Dr Jane Bernal slid her tired frame to the side of the seat and leant against the rain-dappled window. After the paranoia of the flight and the bucketing descent into Heathrow, even this chilly vibration was a comfort. Could it be mere culture shock or is London dirtier, darker, sadder and madder than when I left it? I thought Carla was a screamingly tedious hostess, and the Brunswick Opera Festival worse than dull. Yet, now I'm home, Canada suddenly looks beautiful to me, the frozen lake, the Bold tartans of the opera goers' jackets, their bright cheeks, their flaxen hair . . . The minute I cleared immigration and saw the drivers lined up by the rail like undertakers I wanted to be back there. Back, if necessary, with Carla, squirming my way out of her serpentine grasp. She promised … she promised we could have a great time anyway, even if I wanted to keep things platonic. But she wouldn't let me alone for a second. Not a bloody second.

  Still, at least Carla had been importuning in an immaculate split-level house surrounded by clean, crisp snow. There had been glasses of good wine on the glossy white rug in front of the circular, bronze fireplace. Everything clean and untainted. As I walked from the terminal to the cab rank, I stepped on sticky gum and there was spit everywhere. The people's faces were so closed up … so angry. Now this cab driver, all I can see of him in the mirror is a pair of bloodshot eyes. He's exhausted, his hands shake even though they're clamped to the wheel . . .Is he drunk? Withdrawing from drink or drugs – or worse? He mutters to himself, his voice is peculiar … breathless – almost squeaking. He aspirates flat swear words, cunts and fucks, mixed in with what? Is it religious stuff– talk of a book, a prophet? He's going to turn to me and say he has special telepathy or a divine hot line – but how could a schizophrenic drive a London cab? He's too old for a flamboyant psychotic breakdown, surely?

  On the Chiswick flyover, Jane Bernal, despite herself, fastened her seatbelt. She did it as unobtrusively as possible, pulling the strap gently, terrified it might snag, or that the crazed cabbie would swivel round, taking his eyes off the road, and berate her for her lack of faith. Crazy indeed, to've flown across the Atlantic, the whole cabin still humming with anxiety after the Twin Towers, each locked in his or her own miserable fears of being one of the holy martyrs' Chosen Ones, and to now find myself more frightened on the ground. But as the cab shimmied on into the wet city, Dr Bernal allowed her professional detachment to come to the fore. He's ill, she thought as he turned off at Chiswick Lane and worked his way through Shepherd's Bush to the A40. He's ill and he doesn't even know it.

  She'd seen men like this – and they were almost always men in her consulting room at Heath Hospital: punctilious managers who couldn't comprehend why it was that they had to check the cooker five hundred times in succession; big-fisted brawlers who assumed foetal positions on the floor; fiery entrepreneurs doused by overwhelming uncertainty. Men of this stripe went mad the same way that they got cancers or arteriosclerosis: blindly, ignorantly, the absent fathers of their own, growing maladies – 'I'm just a little short of breath', 'They're only very quiet voices' – until the skin of their denial was stretched so taut it ripped apart.

  She tried to strike up a conversation with the cabbie as they turned up Lisson Grove. 'Have you got any special plans for the holiday?'

  'Very low-key, love, dead quiet, me and my old people, maybe my sister and her lot,' he began plausibly enough, then trailed off into 'I'll haveta slaughter the fucking meter … Can't afford it … Serve it up to that fucking cunt of a lawyer,' under his laboured breath.

  Jane tried again as they belted past the zoo. 'Will you be working much?'

  'Maybe,' he sighed. 'I might go out if I can be bothered,' running down into 'If you go into the forbidden zone and start diggin' abaht … well… what can you expect?'

  As the cab chuffed up Primrose Hill, its headlights and foglamps carving a tunnel through the darkness, Jane decided she ought to do more. The man was driving a runaway train – and the points were welded up ahead. My own Christmas, well, not so bad. On the day I'll go out to Hertfordshire and see Mother. Amazing, her resilience, her good humour. My God! It would be vaguely insulting if it weren't such a relief, only she could ingratiate herself with the staff in that dreadful home, charm them into caring for her, giving her treats, petting her. For the rest, silence or good music, not much food, a lot of solitude. Walks on the Heath, the time to think while others … well, often fall apart. Not so bad, not so bad at all. Being queer and self-sufficient is the best present at this season.

  The cab gargled round the bend by the Washington pub and into England's Lane. 'Which one, love?' he snapped.

  'Up here on the left, please, driver, by that shop, Dolce Vita.' Jane summoned herself, grasped the handle of the bag, backed out of the door pulling it after her. On the pavement she sorted through her purse and put three cashpoint-ironed twenties together with one of her cards. Best be straightforward, the only approach that ever works. 'Here's a little extra,' she said, crumpling the bundle into his waiting palm, 'and also my card – don't be put off by the title, I think I might be able to help you.'

  'Ta, love.' He didn't even look at it. 'Receipt?'

  'No, thank you' – he made to drive away – 'and merry Christmas, driver.' But the cab was ten yards off already, hidden by a net curtain of drizzle and moving with the heavy inertia of a bad dream.

  Dave Rudman looked at the card half an hour later. After he'd parked the cab up in Agincourt Road, Gospel Oak. After he'd clamped on the steering lock and taken out the radio. After he'd unlocked the door and pushed the chewed-up pile of loan offers and credit-card teasers across the sad mat. After he'd padded up the bare stairs and into the barer bedroom. After he'd dumped his coin holder and his cash bag on the table by the window and stripped to his rancid pants. After he'd swigged from the bottle, swallowed the pills and slumped across the unmade bed. He looked at it in the glow from the street lamp and read DR JANE BERNAL, FRCPSYCH, CONSULTANT, PSYCHIATRY DEPARTMENT, HEATH HOSPITAL. He contemplated the oblong of pasteboard for long seconds, then he shredded it deliberately with his sore fingers, a tatter of quick and cuticle. Then he threw the wad towards the radiator and heard it disintegrate with his hurting ears, each little piece falling to the dusty carpet. Then he twisted and fell across the bed, and, raising one hand above his head, slowly and methodically began to bludgeon it into the pillows, as if it were a peg and his fist an unfeeling mallet.

  3

  The Geezer

  SEP 509-10 AD

  When Symun Dévúsh had been a little boy, his mummy, Effi, often came to him and took him from his moto. She led him away so it was just the two of them, all snugglewise and cuddleup. The other mummies thought this strange – and said so – but Effi was their knee woman and a rapper like her mummy Sharun before her. Drivers came and went while the knee woman remained, a power to be reckoned with on the island of Ham. Effi told little Symun the old legends of Ham, from before the Breakup and the Book that had ordained it, legends that, she maintained, went back to the
MadeinChina, when the world had been created out of the maelstrom.

  Am iz shaypd lyke a feetus, she intoned, coz í iz 1. According to Effi, Ham was the aborted child of the Mutha, an ancient warrior queen of the giants, who leaped from island to island across the archipelago of Ing, pursued by her treacherous enemies. Fearing herself about to be caught, the Mutha sucked seawater into her vagina as an abortifacient, then squatted in the Great Lagoon and voided herself of Ham. When her pursuers saw the foetus, they were terrified, because it was an abomination – part moto and part human – and so they fled. The Mutha stayed and revived the corpse of her child, revived it so successfully that it grew and grew until it became an island. And on this island a second race of smaller giants sprang up, who, over years, then decades and finally centuries, gradually separated themselves into the two species of men and motos. Í woz so slo, Effi said, vat vares awlways a bí uv moto inna Amster, anna bí uv Amster inna moto. Together they cultivated Ham, establishing the fields for wheatie and the orchards for fruit, the woodlands for moto foraging and the saltings for samphire. These giants were prodigious climbers – for at that time there were many more stacks in the Great Lagoon and they were far higher. The islanders of Ham were thus rich in seafowl and moto oil, and their home was a veritable Arcadia. The giants used brick, crete and yok from the zones to build their castles, the five towers, which guarded the island from covetous invaders. They also built the groynes to protect Ham's coastline from the eroding sea. They planted the blisterweed that grew along the shoreline. An vay uzed vair bare bluddë ands 2 do í, Effi said, closing her own bony fist and shaking it in front of the little boy's wondering eyes. Vay wur vat bluddë strong an ard.

  Sadly, with each successive generation the giants grew smaller in stature, their arts declined, and their ambitions shrank. Where once they had been frantic rappers, spinning word pictures of great solidity and duration out of the island's mist, now all poetry deserted them. Where once they could lift huge rocks and uproot mighty trees, now they could barely summon the strength to cultivate their meagre fields. They became subjects of the island – rather than its lawds and luvvies. In time the Lawyer of Chil's Hack came among them, supplanting their native mushers and replacing them with the Drivers of the PCO, brought from London in the far north.