by Will Self
'Bloody right I do. It's … it's like a blueprint, Dave, that book, it's … it's got everything in it that ever has been and ever will be. It's a logical structure: "There is no God but God", that's the first proposition – all the rest follows logically, perfectly, including smart bombs, genetic engineering, the whole bloody lot.'
'Give over, mate! You can't, I mean – you were gonna be a doctor, a scientist, you must understand that some bloke, thousands of years ago, couldn't possibly –'
'Not some bloke, Dave. God.'
When Michelle returned to work, Dave went on a radio circuit. He thought the money would be steadier. It was, but he couldn't stand driving with one ear open to the seedy wheedle of the controller. He couldn't stand the other drivers scalping the jobs, claiming over the radio to be where they manifestly weren't, as if they're driving a fucking invisible cab. He got home more irritable than ever, snapping at the merest thing. He switched to nights – it gave him more time with the boy and less with her. Soon Dave hardly saw Michelle at all – their feet dovetailed in the bed for a couple of hours, then she fucked off into the West End where she held meetings in smoked-glass boxes . . . the bitch. Abandoning us both.
At night Dave worked the mainline stations – Victoria and Paddington mostly. The west of London felt warmer in the winter, better lit, less susceptible to the chill of deep time. The fares were frowsty under the sodium lamps. In the back of the cab they slumped against their luggage, and Dave drove them home to Wembley, Twickenham and Muswell Hill. Or else they were tourists bound for the Bonnington, the Inn on the Park or the Lancaster – gaunt people-barns, where maids flitted through the lobbies, cardboard coffins of dying blooms cradled in their arms. In the wee-wee hours he parked up at an all-night cafe in Bayswater and sat reading the next day's news, while solider citizens lay abed waiting for it to happen. His fellow night people were exiguous – they wore the faces of forgotten comedians, unfunny and unloved.
Dave took junkies to score in the All Saints Road, tarts to fuck in Mayfair, punters to bet in the Gloucester Road, surgeons to cut in Bloomsbury, sous chefs to chop in Soho. He noticed nothing, retained nothing – glad only to be driving, moving through the whispering streets, feeling the surface beneath his wheels change from smooth to rough to rougher to rutted. In the blank dawns, when Hyde Park seethed with mist, he would find himself rattling through Belgravia, a bony fag stuck in his skull, and seeing the queues of visa applicants – already at this early hour lined up outside the consulates – it occurred to him that these are the people I dropped off a few hours ago … They can't fucking stand it here any more than I can … They want out right away …
Michelle click-clacked along Wigmore Street from Oxford Circus tube. She took chilly glances at the steely instruments in the display windows of the medical supply shops. Clamps, forceps, callipers – all were tastefully arranged in front of plastic skeletons. Anatomy 92 . . . her mind was already on the job. Michelle was the new Exhibitions Executive. Maternity leave or not, the management liked her new NCT style, for she'd honed her natural air of authority. On her first day back she stood in the Ladies applying a second full coating of slap – her freckle-faced days were over. She could hear someone being noisily sick in one of the stalls. A woman emerged. She was greasily emaciated, her woollen suit was a partially sloughed hide, yet her features were oddly fresh and composed. 'You must be Michelle Brodie,' she said, joining Michelle in front of the mirror. 'I'm Gail Farber, I'll be doing the job share with you. They're all wankers here, aren't they?'
Carl – Michelle didn't like the name, it was Dave's choice. When he'd proposed it, she dropped a full mug of Nescafe on a white rug. Then she allowed it, saddling herself with this near homonym only out of a sense of overpowering guilt.
The childcare was a mess. Cath did some days, Dave others. They argued over both possession and abandonment of the baby. At work, flipping through budget forecasts, the figures blurred before Michelle's eyes, then cleared to reveal Carl howling on the floor, cold, naked and forgotten. She heaved with regret for the soft hours of counting tiny toes and patting silky skin.
Michelle didn't want her mother getting too close to the baby – Cath might suss out the secret. So eventually she succumbed to an au pair, hoping that this would impose order on the household. She did, sort of. The au pair was a plump, equable, Friesian girl called Gertrude. She was conscientious, she adored Carl, she didn't go out at night – preferring to low in the converted attic. Gertrude also spent a long time in front of the mirror, using up Michelle's concealer, which sadly, the chatelaine required for herself.
On the two afternoons when Dave looked after Carl he took the baby up on to the Heath. Dave put him in a sling under his bomber jacket, so that all he could see of Carl were metal teeth gnashing those alien features. Whenever he changed Carl, Dave was shocked anew by his skinny shanks … I was a chubby baby, Mum said, Noel and Sam were too … These legs … I don't like them. Yet he still loved the boy – he knew he did. He figured they'd recognize each other in time.
The legs extended and the sling was exchanged for a pushchair; so Dave perambulated, calling over to his unrecognizable son … Leave on right Parliament Hill, comply path down to Highgate Ponds, left Highgate Ponds, forward . . . On the green ridge of the Hampstead massif, where oak and beech screened off the encompassing city, Dave could relax, and hear the swelling chord connecting him to his child. It was enough. On those evenings he talked civilly to his mother-in-law, had a drink ready for his wife when she came home from work. He bathed the baby, and foot-pumped him in his bouncy chair until he was asleep.
Watching Dave tenderly lift her son and bear him away to his cot, Michelle felt that while she could never love her husband, she could at least tolerate him … and that's enough, isn't it?
At last Dave got a fare, and better still he was heading northeast from Liverpool Street to Hackney. Dave dropped him off at Mare Street, then drove down to see his granddad. He parked up and headed up through the clattery core of Homerton Hospital. Rust seeped from metal window frames, there were sweet wrappers on the stairs, and furtive smokers in bathrobes were blowing their lung rot out of the fire doors. Mister Loverman, Shabba! Always makes me think about sex, this gaff, fuck my way out of death, only natural, innit. A dirty pearl of cotton wool lay on a nacreous tile.
Beside Benny Cohen's bed there was a bowl of curving, penile bananas. Mister Loverman … And Dave's great-aunt, who used to be a plain Rachel but was now Gladys. Weird to change your name at all but to change it to Gladys, that's fucking loony. She wore a thick overcoat and sagging stockings. Her feet were huge in basketball boots, her fleshy nose twitched in the gloom of the ward, dowsing for misery. 'Oh, David, David!' She collapsed on his leather chest. Dave felt bones and smelled mothballs. She's two steps from being a bag lady. He remembered her dismally neat maisonette in Leytonstone, the pathetic little drawers in her shoddy kitchen units, each one full to the brim with neatly folded brown-paper bags. She had eight cats. 'Your grandfather's going to cross over soon, David, cross over the Jordan.' … Which Jordan? He was looking at her shoes. Michael? Which holy rollers was it she's mixed up in?
He thought back to his wedding. Aunt Gladys had brought Benny over in a minicab from the East End. At the reception, held up West in a poncey restaurant none of them had liked, Aunt Gladys had buttonholed the guests, forcing on them leaflets headed 'Jews for Jesus'. Dave overheard her telling Dave Quinn, 'It's alright to follow the Redeemer even if you are one of the Chosen People, even if you've been bar mitzvahed. Don't believe the blood libel, my child, for we can all atone for His Sacrifice, we can all be anointed with his chrism and his love.' Dave was touched when Quinn – whom he always thought of as basically a moral-free zone – patted Gladys's shaky hand and said, 'Thank you, missus, I'll make sure I give it a good read.' Then tucked the leaflet away in his suit pocket.
A nurse bustled into the ward and advanced to the nubbin of life on the bed. First she checked the silvery nipple
of her watch, then she adjusted the spigots that were attached to Benny's tubes. He stirred – his head was nut brown, wrinkled as a walnut. It looked as if it had been parboiled, coated in tar, then impaled on a cigarette. 'Shmeiss ponce,' Benny croaked.
'You what, Granddad?' But that was all – the old man's eyes were shut again.
Dave turned away. Outside the filmy window was a bit of Hackney Marsh, seagulls scrummed above a rugby pitch. Gladys joined him. 'I bin talkin' to 'im, readin' to 'im.' She withdrew a purple-bound volume from her coat; a golden angel blowing a stylized golden trumpet was embossed on its cover.
'You still with … with …' Dave couldn't bear to say it. '… that lot?'
'I'm fifty-five years of age,' Gladys lied, 'an' at long last after all me searching I've come 'ome to the true Church. I know now that Jews fer Jesus, well, it was justa way in, so to speak. Now I've made me choice, I'm a Saint, I eggsept the Doctrines and the Covenants.'
'A Saint?' Dave queried.
'A member of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints, what you gentiles call the Mormons.'
'Bloody hell!' Dave expostulated and then again, 'Bloody hell!'
'There's no need to blaspheme, David, no need at all. P'raps if you'd had Christ Jesus in your life, fings wouldn't've got to this pass.'
'Whaddya mean by that?' Dave glared into Gladys's mad blue eyes. 'What's my mum been saying?'
'Only that … well … it isn't my place.' Gladys folded pious hands on her – book and held it in front of her belly.
'No, go on, it is your place, obviously.'
'Well, only that you and your 'Chelle ain't that happy – and I know it can't be good in the cabs eever what wiv this resesshun an' that…'
Dave drove back across town to Gospel Oak. He clonked through Dalston, past the burnt-out hulk of the Four Aces. What was that black geezer's name? Went in the nick there with a shooter – blew his fucking head off… Least Benny's dying in a private cubicle thing. With curtains … curtains, cubicles … shmeiss ponce . . . thass it! The steam baths – that's what Benny was on about … the Porchester out west, that's where him an' his mates used to hang out … playing cards, snarfin' cheese sarnies and bowls of jelly and custard … Fat men . . . all with gold jewellery … rings … ID bracelets . . . they all smoked too … King Edward cigars … pipes, fags … I remember the shmeiss ponce … little fellow … Lewis Levy, who bilked his turn with the shmeiss. I'm too 'ot – that's what he whined, I'm gonna 'ave a seizure . . . The others'd watch him scarper through the steam room, then when he'd gone they'd dump on 'im …fucking runt, fucking shmo, fucking chancer, dodgy little cunt, shmeiss ponce!
The cabbies used their ire to withstand the steam's sting as they rubbed away the filth of the job, the city pigment drilled into their skins like a tattoo of the A-Z. They talked, bloody hell how they talked … There was one mate of Benny's, Roy Voss – he knew it all, how many hansoms and growlers there used to be, when they got rid of 'em … sold 'em off for firewood … he knew all the kinds of cabs there's been on the roads … never grew tired of recounting bits of cabbing lore, it was like … I dunno … it was like the cabbing was some sorta secret government or sumffing running the whole bloody country … Benny and the others used to take the piss.
When Dave Rudman got home that night wanting food and sympathy, Michelle announced that she was going out and so was the au pair. 'I'm meeting up with Sandra, we're going to see Pavarotti.'
'What, she got tickets?'
'No, course not. We're gonna have a few drinks and watch him on that screen thingy in Covent Garden. You don't mind, do you? It's not as if you're making that much at the moment, so I – '
'So you what? What?!' Dave tousled his son's hair with an angry hand, then stalked up the little stairs. Over the next hour, as Michelle got ready, the argument flared and guttered.
They did good rowing, Dave and Michelle. When she was pregnant with Carl he'd hit her, once. Her body had always assailed him with ambivalence – he wanted to possess it and yet he was also repelled. Her marbled belly, her engorged breasts – it shamed him the way they tipped him into revulsion. After the blow had been struck Michelle waited patiently, until he was maudlin and self-piteous, then hit him back, much harder. 'You never,' she'd screamed, 'ever lay a finger on me again or I'll fucking have you …' Her red hair fizzed round her freckled face. '… I'll have you put away!'
On this particular evening they argued about who did what in the house. 'You never change a lightbulb.' 'So, you never stack the dishwasher.' It was really an argument about money, so they moved on to 'You never pay a bill.' 'I can't, I can't! So what if you do clear more than me – you do fuck-all for your money, I graft!' Still, the arguments about money – pressing as they were, with the overdraft screaming red and the living expenses rising inexorably – were really arguments about sex, so they argued about that instead. The arguments about sex cut to the bone of their already lean self-regard, they couldn't even be had aloud – they were too threatening to Dave and Michelle's self-assembled world. So the sex arguments were soundless howls. I hate your clumsy cock and your slobbery mouth … Your pathetic wobbly belly makes me sick … . Why can't you be even a little tender to me … ?
I've had so many better, happier lovers than you … . The au-fucking-pair would have me in a sec! Maybe that's the way it should be – me and Gertie and the boy. She looks after him and gives me the occasional fucking gobble – which is more than you're ever bloody up for . . . You! You know nothing about women … nothing at all … You pant and grunt… You're a pig – not a man …
After Michelle had gone, Dave bathed Carl and immersed the child in his own tantrum. 'I wen' swimmin',' his son said.
'What?' Dave snapped.
'I wen' swimmin' … swimmin', swimmin' … swimmin' Carl swivelled round in the soapy water, as his humped back capsized blue boats and yellow ducks. 'I swimmin' – swimmin'!' A wave broke over the side of the bath and soaked Dave's trainers, then swamped the floor. 'Stop it!' he shouted, but the little boy went on chanting, 'Lookitme I swimmin', I swimmin'!' Until Dave lashed out and left three livid fingerprints on Carl's shoulder blade. One … Two … Three … There was silence for three beats, the child awed by the cataclysm of adult rage, then, 'Waaaa!' It was the first time Dave had hit the boy – it wasn't to be the last.
'I'm sorry, Boysie, I'm sorry,' he whimpered, pressing his brutish face into the good smell of skin and soap.
In the morning Dave could hardly rise, he was so mired in shame. He shook as he made Carl eggy soldiers and watched the child bayonet his face with them. Carl didn't bear a grudge – but it wasn't his forgiveness Dave needed. 'Wouldja phone in for me, love?' Michelle croaked when Dave brought her a cup of tea. 'Say I'm sick. I've gotta dreadful pain in my neck.'
'You are sick,' Dave stated flatly – then he asked, 'Did 'e do it, then?'
'You what, love?'
'Did he do it, Pavarotti, did he do Nessun whatsit, y'know, the World Cup song?'
'Oh … oh yeah, yeah, he did, as an encore.'
Sleep no more . . . Dave took Carl to nursery, went for a full English and a dump and a read of the paper, then picked him up again. He'd decided to take the victim swimming at a pool down at the Elephant and Castle, which had flumes and a wave machine. It was the right kind of penance. Dave hated public pools, hated their atmosphere of institutional rot and medicalized exercise, their chemical reek and plugholes clotted with the hairs of the multitude. He slung the cab down through Euston and along the wide trench of Gower Street. Bloody peculiar … He looked in the mirror at his passenger, whose car seat was strapped into the back of the cab. But when he's with me it's like I'm drifting again . . . It's like I thought the job would be . . . just driving, just drifting through town . . . no worries . . .
Carl paddled in between green, frog-shaped floats, his orange water-wings pinioning him to the surface. His father circled him like a remorseful yet sportive shark, closing in with an outstretched arm to sweep the child into
hilarity. 'I swimmin', Daddy … I swimmin' … Lookitme!' Dave persuaded the surly lifeguard to switch on the wave machine. Chlorine combers boiled up in the deep end and came hissing towards them. Carl bobbed, squealing with delight. The waves broke on the tiled foreshore under a prismatic neon sun. His father rose and sank, troubled by an uncomfortable intimation. The agitated water was cupped in a stony outcrop of the two-thousand-year-old city: London, a porous slab of rock through which a million rivulets percolated – sewers, conduits, entombed rivers. High up in the brick escarpments and masonry pinnacles, basins, baths and toilets slopped. The fern-fringed plunge pools in health spas, the Jacuzzis of the rich bubbling beside Millionaire's Row, the reservoirs in the Lea Valley, the O-ring itself – a mighty orbital motorway of fluid coursing beneath the tarmac plain. With each automated surge Dave felt the future seething, the present boiling, the past churning.
When Dave got back to the cab and strapped Carl in, he found a message from Gary Finch on his pager … stupid little doo-da, only got it 'cause 'chelle was pregnant . . . and when he called him the tubby man was in some distress. 'Come over east, willya, Tufty, I need to 'ave a chat. I'm plotted up wiv Big End in the Globe.'
Michelle's period had come that morning, and dumping the used applicator in the bin, and the wrapping in the toilet bowl, she wondered whether all her ill feeling had given birth to this papery curl. 'Are you going out working, love?' He was still love – but it was a love that would dissolve with the next Alka-Seltzer.
'Yeah, yeah, but first I'm going over east to have a bite with Gary and Big End.'
'What?'
'You heard.'
'I didn't mean … it's just that… just that – '
'Mum! Mum! MumMumMumMumMum –' Carl was tugging his mother's sleeve and his need was insistent – now and for ever, need without end. Dave left. I know what she means … I hardly see any of 'em any more … my mates … my friends … That's what it does … being … being … Unhappily married. What could they do? To confide in anyone was to invite a dangerous sympathy: 'Oh, yes, isn't he/she awful, I've always thought that, you should leave him/her …' and so the miserably bound remain lashed together on their island of desertion while friendships cruise away. Yet even unhappiness can be a kind of intimacy.
