by Will Self
When they got to Olympia and Dave pulled up on the empty rank alongside the overground station, Michelle got unsteadily out of the cab. 'Can you wait?' she asked. 'I'll leave my bag.' When Dave saw the security guard disputing with her, he decided to intervene. What must she think of me in my sweaty T-shirt with my spotty nose and mucked up, thinning hair? Michelle saw a tall, commanding figure. 'The young lady needs to pick something up from the stand she's working on,' Dave said, and to back this up Michelle produced her exhibitor's badge in its plastic sheath. 'Strictly speaking no one's allowed in, mate,' the guard said, already unlocking the door.
'We'll only be a few minutes,' Dave replied, ushering Michelle in. He darted back to lock the cab, before following on behind.
Padding along the shadowy defiles between the half-built stands, slapping the rubber treads of the stairways, their complicity grew – they were children infiltrating a school by night and the cardboard cut-outs of winsome computer salesmen were caricatures of derided teachers. On Level 5, at her clients' stand, Michelle found the ring-binders of plans and specifications where she'd left them in a steel cabinet, and Dave took them from her.
Back in the cab, he homed in unerringly on Danebury Road, using the North End Road as a flight path into the heart of Fulham. IVERS MARMA, OCKINGS, ETERKIN'S CUSTARD: the revenants of Victorian advertisements remained, haunting the pitted redbrick shopfronts. Feeling the city wheel about the cab – a widening gyre of miles and years – Dave thought, I'm never going to be this connected to anything ever again … I'm falling.
In the small hours of the following morning it dawned on Michelle that she should be able to locate that precise point where drink, drugs and anger were mixed inside her in exactly the right parts to simulate lust. It was mostly anger. The flaming thought of what devastation it would wreak on him if he were to know that within hours of leaving the Hilton she was fucking someone else heated Michelle up enough, so that when the cab finally turned into Danebury Road and jounced to a halt outside No. 43, she slid herself off the greasy seat and said, 'You couldn't help me with these, could you?'
Confessions of a bloody lucky cab driver … Dave plodded up the stairs, the binders under each arm. He knew a cabbie called Stan who liked to be stood upon. That's how he got his moniker: Stood-upon-Stan. If he got an overweight woman fare and she looked biddable, he'd strike up a conversation and eventually make the peculiar proposition: 'If you'll stand on me for a few minutes, luv – juss stand on me chest in yer stockinged feet – nuffin' kinky – I'll waive the fare.' Nothing kinky! That's fucking kinky . . . Yet according to Stan lots of them would. Apart from this oddity, although Dave had heard a few stories about the allure of the cabbie to women of a certain age, he mostly discounted them. He no more thought of trying it on with a fare than he considered picking up a black guy heading south. No offence, mate, he'd mutter to an archetypally good black man as he swept past, too many fucking nose bleeds. 'None taken,' replied Nelson Mandela, and bent back to pulverizing the York stone kerb with his prison mallet.
In the strongly perfumed interior of Michelle's flat – with its framed film posters, draped silk scarves and potted geraniums – events took a queer course. She slopped warm vodka and flat tonic into tumblers, which they then drank on a tiny rooftop terrace. They sat awkwardly on metal chairs, looking at the green belt of gardens three storeys below. Then the alcohol got her dander up again and Michelle said, 'I asked you up here to fuck me.' I never speak like this, never … 'Don't you want to?'
'Oh … well…' Oh? Well… ?! 'I dunno.' She stood and pulled him back inside. She turned and, lifting up her hair, snapped 'Zip!' Dave unzipped the suede dress and she stepped out of it. As he'd suspected she was naked underneath – but it was a flat declaration, this nudity, not a form of allure; and just as her command had imposed a marital note on this encounter between strangers, so her sudden, bare body had an accent of familiarity. She brushed his lips with the back of her freckled hand. If Dave found her sexy at all, it was because there was no intimacy between them. He wanted – while not being able to conceive of such a thing – an entire society in which women were kept this way: strange, distant screens of taut skin, on to which the most preposterous imaginings might be projected.
Their sex was conducted right there on the living-room floor, assisted by cushions grabbed from chairs and the sofa. Through her haze Michelle was pleased that Dave wasn't repellent, although since it wasn't him who she was fucking, but the other she was fucking over, it hardly mattered. With him there was no need to worry about any uncalled-for embryo – he's had the 'snip-snip' – and so for vital moments, as she gagged on the cabbie's shoulder, Michelle forgot who it was who was bearing down on her. As for Dave, he muttered, 'You on the pill, luv?', took her silence for acquiescence, then approached Michelle as he would call over a run: leave on left tit, comply throat, comply mouth, left shoulder, right hip, forward cunt … The junctions of her body were well signed, and his Knowledge was sufficient to hold her.
Yet in the friction of their final lunge there was an anticipation of more than arrival. Their jerking bodies prefigured the bondage of shackled partners. They both sensed this and struggled to avoid it – backpedalling into the present. Dave came in desperation … while the mere cessation of bucking was Michelle's end.
Rising groggily from the carpet, eluding his helping hands, Michelle staggered down the three stairs to the bathroom and locked herself in with a desperate 'click'. Crouching in the bath, carpet-burned bottom cooled by the enamel, she shook her ginger head with disgust as she sluiced Rudman out of her. 'Are you alright in there … Michelle?' At least he knows my name … She tried to smile ruefully into the mirror over the sink, but her reflection only looked ashamed. Bitterly ashamed: – and worried No condom … no fucking protection. When Dave left, he gave her a cab receipt with his phone number scrawled across it. That night, in bed, he marvelled at her musk still strong on his belly and balls. He never expected her to call … she thinks she's well out of my league . . . and for seven months she didn't.
Dave Rudman was sharing a semi-detached house with two mates that year. It was near the Metal Box Company building in Palmers Green. They were all cabbies who'd got to know each other doing the Knowledge. It forged a bond – this open university of bitumen. They did tutorials in dingy bedsits or else the painfully tidy front rooms of their parents' houses – calling over the points and the runs for night after night. Fear of getting any police record kept them mostly sober. Dave Quinn, Phil Eddings, Tufty Rudman, Gary 'Fucker' Finch. Musketeers on mopeds – that's how they thought of themselves. And when they weren't out doing the Knowledge, they worked together for a dodgy contract-cleaning outfit run by Quinn's Uncle Gerry, which operated out of Barking.
They cleaned hospitals, care homes and offices – or rather they didn't. Dave Quinn showed them the fiddle on their first night: 'See this.' He'd climbed up on a ladder and was pointing at a dingy patch on the off-white wall near the ceiling. 'Thass a tester, that is, yer leave a little bit of the wall uncleaned to show the 'ole floor's been done, right? Except' – he scampered down the aluminium ladder, snapped it shut, hung it on his shoulder, picked up a bucket slopping dirty water, and with the others in his wake, ran up the stairs to the next floor – 'that's not 'ow we do it 'ere.' He yanked the ladder open and, still carrying the bucket, ascended. 'You got yer little bit of card, see, like a stencil, right.' He held this up to the wall. 'Then you dobs a sloosh of yer dirty water on it, an' Bob's yer fuckin' uncle, a tester!' He cackled his maniacal laugh, a pocket version of his Irish uncle, his full lips twisting into cupidity.
Dave didn't like it – this dirtying of a tiny patch instead of cleaning a broad expanse – but he got used to it, it was a liberty but not a diabolical one. They were little guys, weren't they? Dave and his mates – and little guys had to take what they could. Uncle Gerry knew the score, the environmental services managers he gave kickbacks to knew the score. Everyone knew the score … except for the bori
ng straight-goers. Besides, Dave liked the all-night-shift poker games they played in the empty offices. The hundreds of desks, personalized with a photo cube or a jokey sign – 'THE BOSS IS IN … YOUR FACE' – now depersonalized entirely, swivel chairs pushed back, papers abandoned, calculators cast aside, their daytime inhabitants tucked up in bed, in the sticks.
Walking the echoing corridors, creeping down the emergency stairs to check on the security guard, then finally hitting the streets as dawn silvered the glassy peaks of the city; this, Dave had imagined, was the topsy-turvy world he'd inhabit when he got his badge. I'll choose my own hours and my own patch … I'll be free of the hamster wheel these desk jockeys swivel in, free of the need to kowtow to some finger fucking, expense-account-padding wanker, in from his carport in the sticks, who finks 'e's Robert-fucking-Maxwell 'coz 'e drives a company bloody Ford Sierra. And if he felt a little wonky when he got on his Honda later that morning, he could always neck a wrap of whizz and let the two-stroke of his young heart yank him forward.
The Palmers Green gaff was a parody of domesticity: T-shirts in the sink, ashtrays in the fridge, the pot plants weedy specimens of Cannabis sativa. The lads worked different shifts and rarely collided at a social hour – if they did mayhem ensued. One would rustle up girls, another drugs, a third booze. The partying was frenetic and loud, neighbours despaired – the garden made their eyes sore. They came round to complain and were met by Phil Eddings, whose suede head and skull face were enough to terrify anyone. On one much recounted occasion, the neighbour visited an apparition: Big End, who'd let some giggly girls, high on mushrooms, anoint him with their foundation. He came to the front door looking like Baron Samedi, his happy face masked with Caucasian flesh tones, his big naked torso sweaty and black.
Towards Christmas of that year the partying died down. The lads were cramming in as many shifts as they could; Dave Quinn and Tufty Rudman had switched to renting full-flat so they could mush whenever they wanted. Ever since Black Monday in October, it'd got a lot tougher to get the getters. Quartering the Square Mile – up Lothbury, down Houndsditch – Dave Rudman wondered Where 'av all the little chancers in their striped blazers got to? Still, Christmas Day and New Year's Eve should double up their money. The plan was to put enough doubloons in the war chest so they could take off in January. Just like Benny and his mob used to … Las Palmas … shtupping grateful golf widows.
Poor Fucker was working as hard – but every penny he made went into soft furnishings and white goods, kandy-striped kiddy klothes and presents. 'Fer me fuckin' bird. I tell you lot,' he told them over a spliff sucked down in front of the news, lithe Palestinian boys lobbing rocks at Uzi-toting Israelis, asymmetrical warfare among the Semites, 'don't fucking go there, keep your rain hat on 'cept when she's on the blob. That's bin my bloody downfall.' He laughed bitterly. Women, eh … they're like beautiful flowers … luring you in, then once you've dumped your pollen before you know it they're fat old boilers with fucking 'taches. Still – a kid's a cute thing … Dave tiptoed into a nursery and began playing with his secret mummyness. I'd call my little chap Champ …
Fucker had borrowed the money from Mann & Overton in the Holloway Road to get his own cab. To make the payments he had been forced to suffer the indignity of a full Evening Standard livery job. 'Makes me eyes funny looking at it,' he moaned, and the other lads, standing on the kerb, squinting at the newsprint plastered all over the new vehicle, laughed until they felt sick. 'Your sherbert looks like sumfing you got from the chip shop,' Phil Eddings quipped. 'Yeah, and you're the fucking wally!' Dave Rudman added.
One afternoon in December, Dave ranked up at King's Cross and went for a tea in the grimy booking hall. The place still stank with all the evil fumes of the fire the previous month, when thirty punters had been incinerated on the tube escalator. The night it happened, Dave had been at Victoria when the radio began to spit out the news in sizzling horror gobs. The cabbies got out of their vehicles and huddled together, shifting from one foot to the other, as if sensing the Hades beneath their feet. Now, standing under the barrel ceiling of this other terminus, looking at the junky scum and Jock chancers fresh off the InterCity, Dave felt sudden and unaccustomed depression: a premonitory sadness that took him back to the cab, back to Palmers Green and into his daytime bed.
When the bell woke him from his couvade, hours later, Dave wanted to ignore it. He had a cookie of sputum lodged in his throat … gotta pack in the fags. He felt like he was skiving off school … It might be an inspector from the PCO, or Ali from the garage come to check out why I'm not on the fucking road … So he pulled his jeans and T-shirt back on and tramped down the narrow stairs. When he swung the door open, there she was, her beautiful mouth pulled hard down at one side, as if sneering at her own good looks. Michelle was seven months pregnant, and there was no question in his mind of not letting her in.
They were married four weeks later, in a registry office on Burnt Oak Broadway. The cab was tricked out for the wedding in frills and bows. Gary Finch drove while Dave and Michelle sat in the back. They were both being taken for a ride.
5
The Exile
OCT 523 AD
Luvvie Joolee Blunt lived in a two-room semi that had been built from the finest courses of London brick she could afford. Her dosh was of no use on Ham, and it was through an arrangement the Lawyer of Chil had made with Mister Greaves's predecessor that the Hamsters who were prepared to assist her were remitted in trade goods. Many a tincan and irony blade owed its presence on the island to her mournful requirements. Unable to fend for herself in any way, a distracted – and to the Hamsters' way of thinking – half-mad old boiler, she whiled her days away reading a breviary of the Book, embroidering oddments of cloth and staring out to sea. She had requested that her dwelling be erected as far from the manor as possible, and on the southern shore, so that she would not be reminded of the cruel expediency that had led to her long incarceration on Ham.
To the opares who came to cook her food, empty her slops and launder her peculiar garments – once garishly bright, now long since faded – Luvvie Joolee was not merely peculiar but incomprehensible. Her clipped Arpee, her abrupt gestures, her constant talk of a city that remained continually present to her yet was utterly unknown to them, struck them as craziness. She had allowed the stands of blisterweed to grow right up to the small yard of her dwelling, so fearful was she of the motos; and she remained within this poisonous thicket, growing older and more distracted by the year.
The Hamsters were hard pressed to say exactly how long she had resided on the island – for the concept of ordinal time was not strong in them. Carl's grandmother, Effi, had told him that she was a young mum when Luvvie Joolee landed on Ham, and they must be roughly the same age. Everyone knew why Luvvie Joolee had been exiled. She and her husband, the Lawyer of Blunt, had fallen foul of the PCO by living together, with their children, under the same roof. Their loathsome conduct was bandied about the town in decauxs and standards, until a gang of their own kinsmen took the law into their hands. They removed her to the docks and bundled her aboard a southbound ferry. For a time she was held in the Bouncy Castle at Chil, then, when her whereabouts became known to her husband, she was dispatched still further to Ham.
Effi Dévúsh also told Carl that during the early years of her exile Luvvie Joolee had appeared often in the village, ranting and raving about the injustices done to her, and trying to rouse the Hamsters in rebellion against the Lawyer of Chil. Eventually the old Hack, Mister Hurst, had made it clear to her that were she to continue, he would have no alternative but to return her to London for formal judgement. Understanding that this would mean torture, and very likely breaking upon the wheel, henceforth Luvvie Joolee withdrew into her troubled seclusion. When Antonë Böm arrived on Ham, under a cloud of a similar hue, he sought to gain her confidence. He knew members of her circle in the capital by repute, and was able to chitchat with her in the manner to which she had been accustomed. However, the highborn luvv
ie had little trust in a mere teacher and so rebuffed him.
Carl Dévúsh and Antonë Böm had been summoned to Luvvie Joolee's toxic bower by a note entrusted to an opare. They came creeping along under the bluffs of the Ferbiddun Zön, slipping and scraping over the groynes thick with seaweed and barnacles. Crabs scuttled away, while overhead was the relentless cawing of the gulls. They squeezed gingerly between the stalks of the blisterweed, which even now, browned and hollowed, still had the capacity to wound. Böm tapped diffidently on the rough-hewn door and a voice from inside rasped, Cummon in. Inside the whitewashed austerity of the little semi, the unshuttered windows, covered with stretched moto hide, admitted a pinkish light. The sharp odour of human faeces – unknown in the Hamsters' gaffs – assailed the visitors.
Siddahn, boy! the old boiler snapped, and so disoriented was Carl that it took him seconds to realize she was addressing him. Ve stoowal! she snapped again, and, casting about, he saw the one she meant and collapsed on to it. Luvvie Joolee – her short, tattered tunic exposing white arms and legs worming with purplish veins – leaned against one wall while the teach remained standing in the middle of the room. Seeing her close up for the first time, Carl was struck by how closely the Luvvie resembled the Driver: both had long, concave faces, with brows and chins sharp as the rim of a plate. The boiler's face was like a mask. She had no eyebrows, and her downy, white hair was cut to within a finger's breadth of her bumpy scalp. Thick slap was plastered on her gaunt cheeks. She wore heavy, angular earrings carved from a dark wood Carl couldn't identify – and these had dragged deep slits in her earlobes. As tall as the Driver, she looked down on both Carl and Böm, her black eyes lambent in deep sockets. To Carl she had the otherworldliness of all those who came from off the island.
