The Book of Dave

by Will Self

  – Flyers! That's what you are – both of you. Flyers! Digging and delving where you have no business! A branded flyer and a flyer's whelp! The chellish mummies are behind this – of that I've no doubt!

  As if it were only another of the Driver's rants, with no more application to him than to any Hamster, Carl Dévúsh felt his attention first wander, then burrow deep inside of himself to that cosy mummyplace where all cares were forgotten. His dad – the Geezer – he had known this escape from the daddytime as well, of that Carl was now certain; and whatever the future might bring, he too would always have this refuge.

  12

  The Book of Dave

  October 2000

  Achilles was getting off his plinth; first one big foot then the other tore from its base with a tortured screech. He cut at the rags of mist with his short sword and brandished his shield at the Hilton Hotel. A couple of early-bird tourists who had been posing for a snap in front of the statue – male pecking with camera, female with wings neatly folded – were struck to the ground by one of Achilles's bulldozing greaves, as he clunked by them heading for Apsley House. He did not waver – he had no quarrel with them. He took no issue either with the cars he kicked as he strode across the roadway and on to the traffic island. Seven metres of bronze against two-millimetre thicknesses of steel – there was no contest; in the statue's wake smashed vehicles lay on their sides, their engines racing and groaning.

  Lit by the rising sun, fingernails of opalescent cloud scratched contrails on the sky. Achilles stood beneath Constitution Arch and beat shield with sword. With a bang, then a spatter of stony fragments, the four horses atop the arch came alive, tossing their leaden heads. The boy holding the traces struggled to control them. Peace, erect in her chariot, her robe coming off her shoulder in rigid folds, flicked the reins and the whole, mighty quadriga rose, banked sharply and came crunching down. Peace threw her laurel wreath like a frisbee, and Achilles caught it on his sword.

  The other statues on the traffic island were animating: the Iron Duke spurred down his horse, Copenhagen; the bronze figures that attended him – Guard, Dragoon, Fusilier and Highlander – wrenched themselves free from the polished granite and fell in behind their commander-in-chief. On the Royal Regiment of Artillery memorial the dead gunner rose up from under his petrified greatcoat and joined his comrades. Together they unlimbered their stone field gun. David, tall, svelte and naked, shimmied from the Machine Gun Corps memorial – sword in one hand, Bren gun in the other. These terrible figures stood apart, turning to face down Piccadilly, Knightsbridge, Grosvenor Place and Park Lane, undecided what to do now movement had been bestowed upon them. The few pedestrians who were abroad at this early hour scattered like rabbits, tearing between the trees of Green Park, discarding briefcases and umbrellas as they ran, while those drivers not violently impinged on remained oblivious, their heads clamped in their own metal tumult. The company of statues formed up, with Achilles in the van and Peace to the rear. They marched off down Constitution Hill, feet striking sparks as they clanked over the kerbs.

  All across London, as the statues came to life, they were at first bemused – then only with reluctance purposeful. Clive of India jumped from his plinth and took the stairs down to Horse Guards skipping. Lincoln at first sat down, surprised, then, struggling up from his chair in Parliament Square, crossed over to the menhir bulk of Churchill, took his arm and assisted him to walk. Earl Haig led his mount alongside Montgomery, who was preposterous in his dimpled elephantine trousers. In Knightsbridge, Shackleton and Livingstone stepped out from their niches in the Royal Geographical Society. Golden Albert squeezed between the gilded stanchions of his memorial, and those blowzy ladies Europe, Africa, Asia and America formed a stony crocodile in his train. In Waterloo Place, Scott strolled up and down the pavement, striking a few attitudes, modelling his Burberry outfit.

  In Chelsea, Thomas More stood up abruptly, his golden nose flashing; while across the river the droopy-eared Buddhas were stirring in their pagoda. Up in Highgate Cemetery the colossal head of Marx wobbled, then rolled downhill over the mounds of freshly dug graves. They were all heading for Trafalgar Square, where five-metre-high Nelson was gingerly shinnying down his own column, while Edith Cavell tripped past St Martin-in-the-Fields, her marble skirts rattling against the pedestrian barriers.

  Not only human figures were on the move but animals as well: packs of stone dogs and herds of bronze cattle. Guy the Gorilla knuckle-walked out of London Zoo and around the Outer Circle; the dolphins slithered from the lamp-posts along the Thames and flopped into town. Mythical creatures joined the throng closing in on Trafalgar Square: riddling sphinxes, flying griffins and even the ill-conceived Victorian dinosaurs came humping overland from Crystal Palace. The whole mad overwrought bestiary arrived ramping and romping. The Landseer lions rose up to meet them, stretched and soundlessly roared.

  Multiples of monarchs: doughty Williams, German Georges, dumpy Victorias. Presses of prime ministers, scrums of generals and colonial administrators, flying vees of viceroys, gaggles of writers and artists, cohorts of Christs – from facades and niches, plinths and pediments, crucifixes and crosses, the statues of London tore themselves free, until the whole centre of the city was a heaving hubbub of tramping bronze, clanking cast-iron, grating granite and marble. These graven images, these tin-pot gods! They had no more uniformity of purpose than they did of style, substance or scale – giant warmongers and diminutive deities, they were distorted embodiments of their creators' confused and ever-changing priorities. They didn't mean to cause any damage or distress – but they just did. They left pediments bare and cornices crumpling, domes imploded, porticos and bridges slumped, colonnades collapsed. They didn't mean to hurt the soft little people, but they were so big and hard that skins were split and skulls were crushed wherever they went.

  Standing on the steps of Nelson's column, Achilles beat sword on shield, trying to gain the statues' attention. It was pointless – these hunks could make no common cause, they knew nothing, felt nothing – only the rage of eternal sleepers robbed of their repose. Greek gods and goddesses stood about in profile; Saint Thomas à Becket writhed in his death agony; Baden-Powell scouted out the terrain. Slowly – lazily even – the statues began to fight one another. Marble clanged on iron, granite on bronze, as the maddened effigies battled with the incomprehensibility of their own sentience. What were they? Nothing. So sightlessly stared through for so very long that they had no more significance than a dustbin or a postbox – less perhaps.

  Then there was a diversion – some dumb cabbie had managed to wrestle his vehicle free from the jam on the Charing Cross Road, and now he was trying to turn around in the roadway beneath the National Gallery. He backed and filled, knocking fauns, cherubs and caryatids over like ninepins. Achilles leaped down from his vantage and strode over. He leaned down, and his disproportionately tiny cock rasped along the cab's roof, shattering the 'For Hire' sign …

  'Bash! Bash! Bash!' Something was bashing against the driver window of the Fairway. Dave Rudman came to in a flurry of anxiety to find he was parked up on Goods Way behind King's Cross Station. A big cop was knocking on the outside of the window so hard that Dave's head was bouncing off it. As he bent to hit the button, he saw a three-quarters-empty whisky bottle lying on the floor between his trainers. He hooked it out of sight beneath the seat. 'Morning,' the cop said. He was plainclothes; behind him two others were propped against a big estate car, unmarked except for the revolving blue light stuck on its roof. A steely sun was beating down on the gasometers along Battle Bridge Road. 'Funny place to be having a kip.' The cop's face was pink and also unmarked. His grin was wolfish – his full head of silvery hair as neat as the clippers that had cut it.

  'I – I, I had a late drop and … I …' Dave couldn't make any of it work for him: the sentence, the thoughts to build it and the will to power it forward. As he became more conscious, so he became more frighteningly aware of the fag ash and booze reek, his crumple
d clothes and stubbly muzzle.

  The cop laughed. 'What's your name, son?'

  'Um, Dave … Dave – '

  'Orlright, then, David, here's what you're going to do. You're going to get out of the cab, lock it up, toddle off somewhere and sleep it off. Unnerstan? This is your lucky morning, David – unnerstan?'

  'Yeah-yeah …'course …' Dave struggled up, shut the window, groped for his change bag. He locked the cab under the amused eyes of the cops. Why aren't they nicking me? Probably from Vice or Drugs, going off shift and can't be arsed with the paperwork … Backlit by the sun coming up over the shoulder of Barnsbury, the three cops had adopted stylized postures: standing to attention, leaning, hands on hips. The dream still banged about in Dave's head as he limped away under their watchful eyes in the direction of York Way. The cops got back in their car and accelerated past him with a cheery wave. At once Dave doubled back towards his cab. Can't leave it there, onna yellow line … haveta move it… As if anticipating this, the cops had done a U-turn at the top of the road. 'Get away from that cab or I swear you're fucking nicked!' the big, smooth-faced cop shouted at him as the car came by, and Dave Rudman recoiled, zapped by the cattle prod of authority. He spent the next couple of hours jangling in a cafe on the Pentonville Road, waiting until he was sober enough to drive, drinking tea and watching the junkie scum swirl around the drain of the station.

  Last night he'd been OK. Granted, not perfect, but OK . . . He'd been driving, doing his thing, just another cabbie working the milling, never-ending London crowds. Now what was he? A crushed carrot lying in the gutter, a headless doll, a pissed-upon shadow of a man. Dave had gone out to work around six in the evening, intent on catching the last hour of the commuters. He thought he'd probably work until two or three in the morning, when the clubbers were all settled in – and more importantly Michelle was asleep. It was better to get home when there was no possibility of any interaction, because even the way she turned her head on the pillow could summon up Dave's rage.

  For years now their marriage had been broken down. No, not only broken down … nicked by joyriders, ridden into the ground, then torched by the side of the road. It was the burnt-out shell of a relationship: the foam rubber of comfort fused by angry fire into the crushed bodywork of hearth, home and child. When, when did we last have a kind word for each other? When've we had a tender moment? Now that Carl had stopped climbing into their bed for a morning cuddle, they didn't even have this touching by proxy. Riding her would be like getting on a bicycle made from bones … Or my sister… Or my mother… Her face – so familiar, so fucking strange …

  A few years before they had tried stratagems to make the marriage work. They'd gone away for a weekend at a hotel, leaving the boy with Michelle's mother. But once Michelle had had her spa treatments and they'd eaten stodge in the chintzy dining room, they were left even more profoundly alone together in their room, the four-poster bed corpsing them with its stagy insinuation. Michelle read property adverts in Country Life. Dave smoked at the window, blowing brown fog into white muslin curtains. They went home early and in silence. They picked up Carl from the flat on Streatham Hill and were grateful for his unceasing eight-year-old twitter, birdsong in their rotten garden.

  Dave gave his wife flowers, because that's what you did … wasn't it … when you wanted to speak but couldn't find words? He bought them from roadside stalls, great sprays of lilies and spiky carnation pompoms, proxy Michelles that he laid tenderly on the back shelf of the cab. When he presented them to her, though, they didn't say anything much, only 'Flowers' – a flat, declarative statement of stamens, petals and stalks. Mostly she didn't even bother to arrange them, simply dumped the whole expensive stook in whichever vessel came to hand, a bucket or a waste-paper bin.

  It had been easy not to take holidays together: she wanted to go abroad, he was desperate to remain within the orbit of London. Carl grew up with his parents overlapping rather than conjoined. One was always arriving when the other was leaving. They would spend a few hours – or at most days – together, before parting. Since, like all children, Carl had no accurate information on the manner in which other families ordered these things, he had mostly taken this way of life for granted. He was numb anyway – with a deep, dull fear. He didn't ask questions.

  No shared holidays and no shared friends. His mother took Carl to meet her girlfriends, their husbands and children. He was an accessory of hers, rather than part of a family. This he sensed, while collecting acorns in suburban gardens, or hunched inside on rainy days watching videos, playing with a favourite toy, while the tipsy hilarity of adults sitting around a messy table washed over him.

  His father, by contrast, made a little manikin of Carl. Out in the cab, there were bottles of Coke while Dave drank with Gary Finch and other geezers. There were trips to Carl's sad old doting grandparents in East Finchley – or to the football. But Carl intuited that his father wasn't bothered with the games they attended. He got the tickets through fellow cabbies who were season-ticket holders, then sat in the stand while Carl screamed, looking off into the glittery drapes of rain picked out by the floodlights. Peering up at his dad's face, Carl thought that it was like the advertisements painted on the pitch – only to be viewed obliquely and from a long way off. Up close Dave's features were distorting, becoming more and more unfamiliar.

  In Gospel Oak, Carl carved out his own territory: first the estates at the back of their house, then the adventure playground on Parliament Hill, and eventually the Heath itself. He also learned to be the friend who's always asked back to tea, polite, self-effacing, the child these other parents thought they wished they had, not understanding that he was lost, elusive, living on a fantasy island remote from the rest of the world.

  The house – which had seemed spacious for a young family – was too small for ill-feeling. Mild irritation could tenant a whole storey. From their bedroom – which was above the kitchen – Dave could hear if Michelle angrily opened the fridge, or even if cheese was frigidly unwrapped. When they rowed they used up the whole house. Screams filled the attic, shouts crammed the living room. Carl at first cowered – then fled. Once he'd gone they said dreadful things. Dave's anger was a secret nuclear programme. For years, in that dark place where his mother indulged him and his father neglected him, warped technicians had slaved to condense his vapoury unlovability, then compress it into a glowing core of hatred. Michelle had her own radioactive secret – fuse them together and you had almost unlimited destructive power.

  For the first few years after the rows began Dave stored up huge reserves of rage, then hours or days later he would dump them on Carl. Dave hit the child in secret – a sly clip, an underhand slap delivered with perfect, insane timing, precisely beyond the eye line of its mother. The anger sparked in him, and hand or foot spasmed. The child howled with incomprehension, and the remorse – oh! it was so powerful, like a drug, a moral drug that made Dave behave better for weeks. Perhaps that was why Dave hit the son he loved – in order to discipline himself.

  Then one day Carl's primary teacher snagged Dave in the playground and drew his attention to a thick welt on the boy's thin neck. 'I'm not saying anything,' she said when she'd heard out Dave's feeble explanation – but truly she was saying everything.

  The rows got worse – far worse. They were hallucinogenic, leaving both of them out of body, watching swirling patterns of mad, red and black hate. The commonplace accusations of inadequacy were no longer enough. Her face pale and pulpy except for when it was sweaty and livid – Michelle said the unsayable: 'He isn't your child anyway! He isn't.' And the silence that ensued hummed – they became aware of the ticking of the electricity meter, a motorbike snarling down Southampton Road. 'You what?' Dave said very quietly. 'Come again?' But Michelle, unable to believe she'd said it at all, crossed her thin arms, her characteristic posture: holding everything in check. She kept on believing she hadn't said it, so that when Dave barged her, his hip ramming her against the kitchen unit – she fo
und it easy to believe this hadn't happened either.

  The afternoon before dawn found him on the Goods Way, Dave had picked up a pol with a camera-friendly tie on the South Lambeth Road and dropped him at St Stephen's Gate. Finding himself in Pimlico, he parked the Fairway in Page Street and stalked, like a black pawn, between the chequerboard facades of the estate to the Regency Cafe. The Regency wasn't a cabbies' caff – but they did come in. There was a bijoux rank round the corner on Horseferry Road. On this particular evening the Gimp was in there – an older bloke Dave remembered from when Benny was still alive. He wasn't one of the steam-bath crowd, but Dave had seen him a few times in the Warwick Avenue shelter. Benny had always said that the Gimp was 'A wrong un, a sly fucker, I've 'eard tell 'e's a tout.' The Gimp had to be seventy-five … if 'e's a day . . . but he looked alright. Jeans were pulled up tight over a pot belly; he sported a leather jacket and tinted designer glasses.

  He called across the cafe, 'Orlright, Tufty, it is you, son, isn't it, Benny's lad?'

  Dave admitted that it was.

  'Cummova and join me,' the Gimp said. 'Go-orn, park yer arse.'

  He was dabbling his tea, then bringing tiny spoonfuls of it to his sagging old lips … dis-gus-ting … 'Funny thing is,' said the Gimp, poking the teaspoon at Dave, 'I 'ad yer old lady in the cab s'afternoon – leastways I fink it was 'er.'

  'Oowdjoo even know it was 'er?' Dave dismissed him with a wave of his smoky hand, but the Gimp was not to be deterred: 'I'm good wiv faces, see, and your granddad once showed me a snap of your wedding. Dead proud, 'e was. An' she's a looker, ain't – she hard to miss wiv that carrot top.' He is a tout. . . good with faces my arse … 'Picked her up on Southampton Road in Gospel Oak – your manor, is it?'