by Will Self
To begin with Michelle kept the modelling a secret, convinced her mother would freak out. When, inevitably, Cath did find out, she egged her on – the money was so good for them, after always having to scrimp towards bare adequacy. Michelle liked to think that it was she who'd drawn back. Much later she would say, 'It was crap, like going out with a big latex head jammed on my own.' She disavowed such caricatured regard. The truth was less heroic: Bendicks had used her up. She wasn't that photogenic anyway – she'd had her year, 1979, and her look was fossilized within it, crushed in a layer of fashionable sediment. So she retrieved her freckles and went to College. She dressed down and got her HND in Business Studies. She had boyfriends who were musicians; their greasy hair stained the tummy of her old teddy bear, brought from home to cosify a shared flat on the Wandsworth Road. The recognition factor faded until it was merely a subliminal thing that made every tenth person who passed her by in the street – and every third who met her face to face – feel certain they'd encountered her before. It was a villagey regard, quite tolerable. Michelle depended on the approbation of her good looks more than she could ever admit – that they weren't quite good enough gnawed at her.
Michelle put on a tan suede dress, calf-length, silk-lined, low on the back, high on the breast. She slung on a cream linen jacket and slipped into high-heeled sandals. She put a tiny diamond stud in each ear lobe and, after having turned back the cuffs, a chunky ethnic bracelet on each wrist … the salesgirl said they were from Malawi, I say Malaysia. On the radio a middle-aged smoothie was braking drivetime with his soft-shoe voice. The Flying Eye was summoned up, banking high over the North Circular: 'Lorry lost its load at the Welsh Harp' – an atmospheric crackle – 'tailbacks all the way back to Staples Corner …' Michelle snatched up her bag and rasped the door to. Glancing at her watch, she saw it was Seven fifteen! I can still make it.
'It's just a bloody toy of that Prince Albert,' Dave's fare expounded; 'it's not a real football team.' Dave had picked him up underneath the glass portico of the new Lloyd's Building and the getter hadn't stopped yapping since. 'I tellya that Hoddle's a fucking mercenary. He said he'd take a pay cut to go to a good European club – now he's taking a million quid to piss off to Monaco.' The fare was leaning right forward on the seat, shifting from one plump buttock to the other as the cab cornered, yet keeping his muzzle right in the conversational trough.
'Well, y'know how it is, guv, 'oddle is a born-again, so 'e's only followin' 'is inner voice.'
'Yeah, right!' the fare snorted. 'Just like Ian Rush. God said, "Pick up three mil' to go to Juventus" and Rushy replied, "Hallelujah!"' The fare waggled outstretched fingers like a nigger minstrel.
Dave was on a run, leapfrogging from fare to fare, using their pinstriped backs to propel himself across town. The bliss of driving when the only goal was money – and money was everywhere – was still with him a year into the job. Besides, he'd long since learned that just as he had to throw away his Hs, so he had to gather up the beautiful game. Dave didn't give a shit about football any more, but his mates demanded football talk, the fares demanded it, the world – itself just a bladder in space – demanded it. Dave thought the fare was a racist cunt, but his appearances before the PCO had taught him not to rise to anything. Don't rise to it. The Examiner tells you to leave the minute you've got your bum on the seat do what he says. If he tells you you're not fit to be examined 'coz you've got a cold, say, 'Yes, sir' and leave. Never argue. Always talk football. He'd enjoyed the appearances – and done well. The Knowledge was vast – yet circumscribed. The Examiners drove to the heart of it: they asked you for a run and its points. If you got them right, the number of days before your next appearance was halved – if not you were knocked back. Dave had two fifty-sixes, six twenty-eights, four fourteens. Then he took his driving test, and got his precious badge.
Michelle saw him standing right at the back of the lobby by glass cases full of headscarves and rolexes. He was looking endearingly distracted, his face empty like when he comes. She headed for him, with each pace the air-conditioning whispering the sweat off of her. Not that he minds. I-love-every-thing-a-bout-you! he'd shouted into her neck at the climax of their last rendezvous. Now, he rose into her embrace. 'Why here?' Michelle spoke into his ear, while trapping his hand in hers and dragging it between their bellies. Her nail snagged his wedding band – he winced and they broke. 'You won't believe it,' he flustered, 'but a client of my dad's did a runner from here this morning. He's asked me to come and check the room, then settle the bill. So … well … I thought.'
Michelle felt a trickle of desire descend her inner thigh as the lift urged them up. The bell tinged for the eleventh floor, and he dragged her out. The carpet shushed their feet as they staggered, pawing at each other, past a maid unloading haircare from a steel cart. The key fob clattered against the door as he fiddled for the lock, then they fell into its cigar-stunk interior. A corridor led them down to a harsh light box. The drapes had been pulled open and the sun setting over the jungly canopy of Hyde Park shone directly in on a scene of animal debauchery. Dogs and ducks have been fighting in here was Michelle's first thought, for there were bloody claw marks on the white sheet, and a pillow had been slashed open . . . fighting over chocolate … because there were hundreds of tinfoil scraps strewn on the carpet … to the death, because there was an evil atmosphere in the room – not only cigars had been extinguished in here but hope as well.
'Guy's a druggie,' he said. 'I didn't think it'd be this bad, though, sorry.' He slumped against a stark armoire, on top of which empty spirits miniatures played chess.
'It's OK, don't worry, it doesn't bother me.' To show how little it bothered her she took his hand and used it to pull up the back of her suede dress. He peered through the red mist of her hair at the rear view of her in an opposing full-length mirror. 'Come on.' Michelle's tongue licked the pulse in his neck. 'Come on …' Her hand, groping at his hip, felt a wad of stuff and he recoiled, his hand going to his pocket to half withdraw a rolled-up nappy. 'Jesus,' he softly exclaimed, 'oh, Jesus … I … I …' He shrank away from her. 'I can't, Michelle.'
'Whaddya mean?' You know what he means, you stupid cow.
'I can't.' His shaky hands had lost their magic, while the nappy poking from his pocket was the ear of a rabbit conjured up by conscience. For three seconds Michelle teetered between self-righteousness and self-pity, before falling to the right, into the briny.
Come on, you Spu-urs! Come on, you Yids! Dave had sunk into a memory of White Hart Lane, where little Dave and big Benny bawled with the mob, urging on the Tottenham players, who spun, dipped and slid on the viridescent stage … Yids shouting 'Yids' – you gotta hand it to us – getting in the dig before the yocks did. 'Anywhere here – no, there!' The fare cut in on Dave's reverie. They were bumbling up Hill Street in Mayfair, swarthy types in lilac shirts were debouching from townhouses stamped with brass plates. Jet-set pikeys who live in gaffs so stuffed with glass-topped furniture they look like fucking department stores. 'Here?' Dave slotted the Fairway in between two Daimlers.
'It'll do.' The fare had become all business again … Obviously I wasn't quite chummy enough for him.
'Seven-eighty, guv.' The fare handed over a tenner, and there was a moment during which Dave's long face looked at him, a graven image before which it was customary to lay quantifiable offerings. Then at last: 'Keep the change, cabbie.'
Michelle hadn't even noticed the doormen on her way in, borne as she was on hot draughts of desire. Now that she was clammy and unpleasantly weak at the knees they loomed in the plate glass, stripping her of her Hilton get-up, exposing the naked girl from Streatham. One of them was going to click his fingers, say, 'Weren't you the girl in that ad' or worse 'What you been up to, girl, no slappers allowed in 'ere, I'm gonna call the old Bill. Steve, grab this one!' Instead the doorman only opened the door with a white-gloved hand and said, 'Do you require a cab, miss?'
Dave had been scanning the Standard on the rank outside
the Hilton for about five minutes before the waver-upper in the gold-frogged frockcoat did his bit. What'll it be, some Yank div wanting a diesel trot along Rotten Row? But it was a young woman perhaps a year or two younger than himself, a beautiful young woman if you like the freckled Irish type and I can't say I do. She wore a tan suede dress, tight at the breast, flared from the thigh. She carried a linen jacket slung over one arm and a handbag that matched the dress. Her flaming hair crackled on her bare shoulders. She isn't wearing a bra. The waver-upper had the door of the cab open, and she shoved herself inside. Dave took in her pale face, her vacant eyes, her bit-upon lip. She's 'ad a blow. When he asked her, 'Where to?' she didn't reply for several seconds, and he had to say it again and louder. 'Where to, luv?'
'Soho,' she replied, sounding desperate. Dave fingered the meter and drove – which was what he did best.
Michelle sat stiffly on the sweaty yet dusty upholstery. The insides of black cabs had a peculiar ambience of extreme enclosure. This – they seemed to say – is the real interior of London; your sick office buildings, stuffy houses – even your deep-bore tube tunnels – are mere lean-tos, open to the elements. It's only when you're in one of us that you're utterly contained. The cab's thumping engine pounded the shocked Michelle deep inside herself to where her mother, Cath, betrayed for the twentieth time by feckless, freckled Dermot Brodie, sobbed and sorted through the tokens of her girlhood, yellowing communion cards and postcards from Lourdes. Cath Brodie keened and plucked at her British Home Stores cardigan, as if intent on exposing her own wounded heart, so as to let it fall, beating, on to the leatherette pouffe where the lost trick of her innocence was fanned out.
No matter that somehow she got over it and, when Dermot was finally gone, made a life for herself complete with boyfriends like Ron, Cath still hugged her betrayal, loving it more than anything or anyone else. To be Cath's only child was to be her closest ally, her Siamese fucking-twin. They were tied to the same stake, consumed by the same fiery male lust. The only way to escape this awful complicity was for Michelle to practise … secrecy … that's what I called it … They were only little lies … white ones. I'm going out with Janey – when it was Avril; I'm staying at Paula's – when it was Sharon. All kids lie to their parents at that age – but I lied more. But if I hadn't've lied I wouldn't've had any life of my own at all! She'd've dragged me down with her. I had to … I had to. But if she knew I'd been seeing a married man she wouldn't know what to do first – kill me or kill herself. Michelle's fabricators went to work in the cab and speedily erected a plausible mockup of the flat on Streatham High Road, its sharp-cornered rooms and stippled walls, its fussy matriarch presiding from the suite over the TV, the coffee table, the cabinet full of dolls in national dress – all of which stank of ammonia. Dolly daughters who couldn't do wrong if they tried . . . whose knickers can't be removed because they're sewn on.
Dave sensed the bruised silence at the back of his neck, but he drove on, feeding the wheel through his large hands as they orbited Berkeley Square. He glanced in the rearview a couple of times, but the fare wasn't actually crying. If she'd been crying, he would have reached for a tissue from the box he kept underneath the dash and offered it to her, saying lightheartedly all part of the service. Yet she didn't cry, only sat, white-faced and desperate.
The traffic was easing as the curtains went up at the Lyric on Shaftesbury Avenue, the Comedy Theatre on Panton Street and the Garrick on Charing Cross Road, where provincial audiences began merrily to consider … when did you last see your trousers? Dave dropped the fare outside Gossips in Dean Street and said, 'A little early for dancing, isn't it, luv?' Luv was on a par with guv, both tip-getters, both evoking a happier age of honest amity and sturdy deference; yet for once he meant it, the fare looked so luvlorn.
'I'm meeting some mates in the wine bar,' she mumbled, as if giving an alibi along with her fiver. 'Keep the change.'
'You sure?'
'Sure.' She teetered on the heel of her sandal, recovered herself and was gone into the glass-fronted wine box, which welcomed her with a gush of chatter. Dave didn't put the 'For Hire' sign on. I'll eat now, then work when the theatre's out. He drove over to the little yard behind Gerrard Street – a tarmac cranny that only those with the Knowledge knew was there at all – parked up and strolled round to the Celestial Empire, his change bag banging his thigh with a 'cash-cash' sound.
Three glasses of house white and Michelle was tipsy enough to tell her friends what had happened; four glasses and she felt drunk enough to regret having done so. All of them judged her in their different ways, all of them lapped up her shame and misery like a catholicon that cured them of their own. Not that any of them said anything mean – they soothed, patted and combed the victim's hair with their sympathetic bicker, while from concealed speakers George Michael politely implored, 'I want your sex …'
Sandra, who filed her nails to a point out of boredom and sensibly wore brown skirts that camouflaged her wide hips against the null terrain of London. Bubbly, blonde Betty, whose electric-blue chenille top hid red, self-inflicted wounds. Pale and interesting Jane, who stood in Shepherd's Bush, propping up a domestic fantasy: the pretence that her husband Rick went out to work, when he stole her purse and went out to score. Sandra judged Michelle with the prerogative of a first officer, for whom her captain's decisions are always foolhardy. Betty felt that her follies were permitted by reason of her vulnerability, whereas Michelle – who was tough and self-reliant – should know better. Jane was quite straightforwardly contemptuous: her husband might be a lying abuser, faithful only because he was impotent, but he was a husband and, importantly, he was hers.
They really care, Michelle thought, looking from Sandra's spaniel waves to Betty's poodle curls. However, her belly gurgled the opposite: there was justice in their poorly concealed schadenfreude, for, while all vain, pretty young women require at least one who is less so, to offset their own allure, she'd greedily insisted on three.
In the Celestial Empire, Dave Rudman ate barbecued pork and crispy pork rice, washing it down with a pot of green tea. He wedged the Standard under the lip of his plate and read about the Public Carriage Office, who were ruthlessly failing black cabs for their annual test, picking up on such tiny infractions as under-inflated tyres and 'lacklustre' bodywork. Not been getting their kickback, the wankers.
After he'd paid, Dave strolled back round to the cab. He had no clear plan beyond working the theatre crowd for a couple of hours. It could be a doddle, hacking the cab on an evening like this. There were the right on-off rainy conditions to get nervous nellies' umbrellas up and their arms out. He was throbbing back down Shaftesbury Avenue when he saw her again – the girl from the Hilton. She wasn't exactly hailing him, but she did have an arm out to steady herself as she bent down to retrieve a lost sandal. Dave slewed the cab into the kerb and called through the offside window: 'Cab, luv?'
Michelle had decided to go home after snorting the line of cocaine in the toilet with Jane that was meant to make her go on to Gossips. She had only taken coke once before – and as soon as the powder crinkled up her face she regretted it; for it chopped her into two Michelles, idiot drunk and calculating fool, lashed together in a freckled skin bag. She felt awful, she wanted revenge on that wanker, I'll call his hippy-dippy posh wife and tell her what he's been up to while she sits at home with baby … The intensity of this shook her, so she didn't make any excuses – she just left. The walk down Dean Street didn't clear her head; it thickened it with the sight of crotchless panties on plastic dummies, stared at by City types with eager-beaver faces. I should go in that open door and up those stairs … The pimp could put a new sign under the buzzer: 'Busty redhead new on scene, likes to be abused …'
When the cab squealed to a halt beside her, she crawled into the back, grateful for respite, even though two cabs in one evening, it's insane … I can't afford it. The cocaine was making tiny little calculations for her, white beads on a sparking synaptic abacus, so that wh
en Dave said, 'Where to, luv?' Michelle replied, 'Olympia, then on to Danebury Road, it's off the Fulham Palace Road.'
Dave drove in silence and snatched occasional glances in the rearview at the fare slumped in the corner of the back seat. They trundled down Haymarket and along Pall Mall, past the mock temple of the Athenaeum, with its golden statue of Athene, poised on the pediment, dispensing wisdom to a Clubland frieze. They swerved into the Mall and bumbled under the blank white eyes of Victoria – who hefted her orb, as if about to rise and pitch it from her stubby shoulder. They roared up Constitution Hill, around Hyde Park Corner and down Knightsbridge. Quite unexpectedly Michelle spoke: 'D'you mind going that way?' She waved her hand towards Edinburgh Gate. 'I want to – I want to see the statue.'
'The one under Bowater House? The Epstein – Pan chasing the Family of Man?' Dave lapsed into his mother's pedagogic manner. Bloody 'ell, Michelle sniggered to herself, it's Fred Housego, then said: 'Er, yeah, that's the one, but I thought he was the Devil.'
'I love this statue,' Dave remarked, because they were by it, shuddering through the arch, past the oil-dark goat legs of Pan. Michelle looked up at his fig-leaf scrotum. He was pursuing the primordial couple with their kids and pets. Their hard faces were flattened against the future, the whole bronze gaggle pelting full tilt from the swamp of Belgravia towards the greying greenery of the Park.
Rolling up the South Carriage Drive … a fine brougham, milady . . . Dave imagined there was now some complicity between them – although he had no idea what in. The glass partition had been slid open, he wanted to talk about the statue, but Michelle had slumped back in the corner, her eyes vacant and her coral pink nails worrying at the neck of her dress.
