The Book of Dave

by Will Self

  Sunday evenings were the worst – the changeover. Dave couldn't bear to accompany Carl to the front door, so he left him at the mouth of the cul-de-sac; then, punched in the gut by loneliness, he hobbled back to the flat for lamb dhansak and a yanked foreskin. His life, henceforth, would be meted out in takeaway tinfoil pannikins and crispy tissues. There was no one to call – he'd made no investment in life beyond his wife and son; there were no relationships of trust or intimacy. These were interactions he'd only ever witnessed in the rounded oblong of his rearview mirror – the heartfelt confidence, the stuttered confession. These were things that fares said, and intimacy was a mysterious act fares engaged in once he'd dropped them off.

  Only Gary Finch refused to let him alone. Fucker Finch – whose long-suffering Debbie had finally given him the push, and whose magic fingers had failed to conjure up another lovely assistant. Fucker was back cabbing – his old man had scraped the money together to front up his insurance and a few months' vehicle rental. Dave ran into him at the kiosk on Chelsea Bridge, where stretch-limo drivers drank midnight teas and watched spectral trains emerge from the cavernous hulk of Battersea Power Station, then jolt their empty, yellow-lit coaches into Victoria.

  'Nah, thass the fing, Tufty,' Fucker said when he'd heard Dave's news. 'Vare slime, ain't vay, fuckin' slime, draggin' vare slimey cunts rahnd tahn – '

  'I don't want to hear it, Gary,' Dave said – but he did.

  'Nah, nah, ears a fing. I bet yaw Chelle is beginning to dick you arahnd, ain't she? Shavin off an our ere, an our vare, makin' it arder and arder fer you t'get kwality time wiv yaw boy – am I right? Caws I am. Iss depressin – thass what it is. Blokes in our situayshun are depressed – weir fuckin mizrubble. Wot av we gotta show fer all vat graft, ay? Fukkawl. I've been lookin' into it, Tufty – there's loads of us single dads out there, an' we're getting organized.'

  To shut him up Dave agreed to go to one of these meetings. Fathers First – it sounded innocuous enough. The venue was the Trophy Room at Swiss Cottage Sports Centre. It could have been any self-help group – Weight Watchers or Alcoholics Anonymous; the men who pitched up bore no obvious resemblance to one another, Dave couldn't see the single father's mark on their brows. Gary introduced him to Keith Greaves, a twitchy man whose robust shaven head and thick gold earring were at odds with his craven manner. 'Iss 'is idea,' Gary whispered. ' 'Im an' that geezer Daniel Brooke over there. They brung it from the States – but they don't eggzackerly see eye-to-eye.' The men squeaked about the lino, getting plastic cups of tea and settling themselves in plastic chairs. The meeting was called to order.

  While Keith Greaves tried to direct these troubled men towards 'some positivity – we aren't victims but nor do we seek to make victims of our ex-partners', Dave Rudman considered getting a shotgun certificate, or even just buying a fucking machete … It's in the papers all the time, on the local radio – dads topping kids they can't 'ave. What if Dad had tried to do that to me and Noel and Sam? Driven us off in his Rover to some layby up in the Chilterns or a sports field in Enfield. Stuck a hosepipe on the exhaust and fed it through the back window. Gunned the engine. Fucking foul in there in seconds. Never know how poisonous those fumes are 'til you're in them for ever. Then what? We never would've stood for it – we'd've kicked off, fought to get out, coughing, puking and punching. He could never control the three of us by himself – he was never around enough. Only way he could keep us quiet was at the Five Bells with bottles of pop, bags of crisps, endless yanks on the fucking one-arm bandits. No, he never could've managed it without a mobile . . . The mobile phone appears, an Excalibur pulled from the stone of the future, its slick screen and nodular buttons glow with a mini-neon intensity. The three kids – the boys in grey shorts, Start-rite sandals, Aertex shirts, the girl in a pleated skirt and ski-pattern cardie – are transfixed by it. Paul Rudman passes it to Samantha. 'This is a phone, darling, and Mummy wants to talk to you … I want you to tell her goodbye … I want you to tell her that I'm taking you and David and Noel away now … for ever …' No, he never could've managed it without a mobile, no bloke could, killing the kiddies and yourself– it's an opportunistic crime, innit, and technology's the open door …

  That copper who splattered his two little blonde daughters all over a semi in fucking Maidstone … The millionaire who locked his ex up in the fucking cupboard of their Surrey mansion while he did the nippers … That Pakki doctor who leaped off a fucking road bridge with his three-month-old son in his arms … Shooting sprees at barbecues in the sticks … They all juss wanted a one-to-one, didn't they, a chat or a straightener with their old woman … same bloody difference.

  He woke in the afternoons to hear the twitter of birds and sirens outside. Parting the curtains, he saw a pigeon fluffed up on the TV aerial. So many of them flying rats … but you never see their kids. All that summer he drove nights, fearing the monster truck rally of daytime traffic and the jerky crowds of battery chicken people. Molten anger puddled into depression. He had hoped for some explosion of sexual licence – instead his cock went as soft and limp as a snail. Eventually he did go to the doctor – because that's what you did, didn't you, eat shit? After all twelve million repeat prescriptions can't be wrong … can they?

  Fanning, the GP, had a consulting room like a teenager's bedroom in a mail-order catalogue: MDF in jig-sawn amoeba shapes, shiny ringbinders, a blood-pressure cuff from Accessorize. Little posters showed happy folk with the treatable maladies. There was a battered cardboard box full of crap toys on the floor – the Fisher-Price logo alone made Dave cry, vinegary tears, sour and reeking. There was only one thing now that wasn't toyist – and that was toys.

  Fanning, who wore woven thread around his plump wrist and tan pantaloons fastened with a drawstring, was neither unsympathetic nor unprofessional. He had a good, poseable manner. He heard out Dave's stuttered symptoms: 'C-can't sleep. N-no appetite. P-panicky.' Then rearranged his limbs before asking the appropriate questions. 'Sex? Y-you gotta be j-joking, mate. T-talk about what? T-to who?' Finally, he reached for his pad and prescribed Prozac with a clear conscience. For, while many of the patients who shuffled into his consulting room were emotional malingerers – unwilling to turn up for any of life's feelings – this big, raw-boned fellow was reeling. He doesn't have either the wit or the imagination to know what's happening.

  The first sign that the pills were working was that the baby oil slithered away – Dave could smell the bacon fat spread on the cooker and the bleach burning in the toilet. When he opened the window, heavy meadow-sweet air blew in from the Heath. Tiny bubbles rushed to the surface of his brown mind in a mounting ebullition; there was a neuropathic fizzle at the tips of his fingers and toes. With reckless levity Dave vaulted pedestrian barriers and stood looking at the rainbow whorls of oil on the wet tarmac.

  When Carl came to spend a week with his dad in August, Dave was still gathering momentum. He put the lad in the cab and drove him all over town: down east, up west, to shelters where they listened to old geezers with white, wattled necks pour scorn on 'culluds' and Ken Livingstone's proposed congestion charge. Dave took Carl to see his grandparents – and even to his aunt's house, where Carl played computer games with his cousin Daniel. When they left he was astounded to see his dad give his aunt a kiss. During the hot nights Carl slept soundly if sweatily. At any rate he wasn't aware that Dave hardly lay down but paced from one end of the flat to the other, bopping first one wall and then the other with his brow so that matching niches appeared in the plaster.

  Carl thought his father so much improved, so happy and confident, that when it came time for him to pack up his little rucksack and take the short hike back to his mum's, he didn't see any reason why he shouldn't tell the truth: 'Y'know, Dad, she's seeing that bloke again and …' He watched, appalled, as Dave's face crumpled, yet he couldn't stop himself. '… and she'sputthe'ouseupfersale.'

  She swore … She promised … She fucking swore . . . And again: She swore … She promised . . . She f
ucking swore … This was what Rudman called over as he rammed the Fairway up the M4 to Wales. At last, after all these years, he was going to visit his brother, Noel, in hospital. The cab, howling in overdrive, carried its overwrought driver past Swindon and Bristol, then over the Severn Bridge, a lyre strung with high-tension cables upon which Aeolus played his grandiose airs.

  Dave reached Aberystwyth and found a B & B. He drove out to the mental hospital, only to discover that his brother had been discharged three months before. It was then that he stared into the chasm of unloving. My kid brother … I never looked after him. He backtracked and found Noel's bedsit in a labyrinth of gas meters and fire doors two houses down from his own B&B. His brother – overweight, puffy with medication – was a caricature of himself: Dave Rudman wearing a whole-body fat suit. Noel had big plans. He was going to get a job, ascend a career ladder, source a house and a wife. Only trouble was he couldn't zip up his own flies. Dave wept – while Noel regarded him with consoling eyes. He'd been out in the fungus field for so long now that encounters with people he knew were non-sequential. The two of them were still pelting each other with rowan berries and charging through North End Woods. 'You, you've hurt yourself,' he said. 'Haven't you, Dave?'

  The wind, not issuing from the west but coming from within the buildings themselves. The sun catching a chimneystack so that its bricks glowed gold against the sombre London sky. The cab purring noisily down the road, a woman in a headscarf turning, fearful that she was going to be pounced upon by a giant feral cat. The decree nisi, stuck to the doormat like a manila label. 'Welcome,' it said.

  Two days later Dave Rudman awoke with an erection so large and stiff it felt like a tent pole. For long minutes he writhed about under canvas, then rose and stumped to the bathroom. It was mid morning and out of a habit he didn't know he had he snapped on the television. On the furred screen a toyist atrocity was taking place – younger brothers kicking over the building-block tower their older siblings had piled up. It staggered and collapsed. Roiling dust clouds engulfed the camera. Dave Rudman stood looking at it for a while, trying to figure out what it was, then stumped back to the bedroom.

  Lying there, the sunlight poking between the drapes and picking out a single wall ornament – diamond battens around an oval mirror – he felt his hearing become sharper and sharper, more and more sensitive, until he could detect the very dust mites groping their way through the weave of the carpet; the 'eek' of a squeegee merchant's sponge a mile away in Camden Town; the 'shissshhh' of a deep-fat fryer in Dalston. Then he could hear It – the still, small, powdery voice of SmithKline Beecham … There is no god but you, Dave, It whispered, and you can be your own prophet. . .

  No Christian god smothering him in cosy-bundle sweet love; no wiseacre Jewish god, rebarbative yet shrewd in his defence; no Muslim god, geometric, elegant, cruel to be kind; no Hindu god-riot of fairground faces and multiple, writhing arms – this was a purely local, contingent deity, a god for the day, who divvied up pay-per-view prophecy: Peepul … the god looked in his rearview and saw them … chavs, coloureds, fucking pikeys, the Irish, hysterical-bloody-women … Peepul, they gotta be kept in line … there hasta be orforitë … It stands to reason, dunnit… There hasta be a Book of Rules … A set of instructions you can follow to the letter… Like the Knowledge … No muckin' abaht… twenty lists of sixteen runs – and the 'burbs. No argument. Paddington Green to Askew Road, Albert Bridge to Streatham Common . . . where they hitch up their Freemans skirts … nothing but … mail-order prossies. If you don't know the shortest way … on the cotton … then you don't get your badge, you don't make your living … Simple as that … plain as the nose on my face. If I'm not gonna be allowed to bring up my boy myself, then at least I've gotta be able to tell 'im what's what . . . givvim some fatherly advice … That's what I'm gonna do. Eggzackerly.

  It came to him fully formed – a plan and how to execute it. Dave's parents were surprised to see him again so soon – and without Carl. He seemed distracted, beating out a nervous tattoo with his shortbread on his plate. Later on he went into the garage and rooted there. 'Aren't you going to ask him why he's taking that thing away?' Annette Rudman hectored her husband, and Paul grunted 'No.'

  It came to him in solid chunks – wrote itself, really. He typed with his index fingers, poking sense into the keyboard of the old Apricot. He hadn't had anything to do with computers since his year at College – but that didn't matter because this machine dated from that time. It came to him when he awoke, in the unproblematic light of day – and for that reason was not to be doubted. It came to him as he sat in his black, terry towelling robe, driving the engine of creation forward with piston keystrokes. Yeah – he was the Driver, a fisher of fares.

  He began with the Knowledge. He had held it – now he dropped it, the tangled tarmac viscera fell out of him: Turnpike Lane Station to Malvern Road, Bishopswood Road to Westbury Avenue, Harold Wood to Stratford (via Newbury Park, Gants Hill, Redbridge, Wanstead, the Green Man Roundabout and Leytonstone). And he dumped the shitty points as well: Chapel Market, Angel Station, St Mark's Church, the Craft Council, the Institute of Child Health, the Value Added Tax Tribunal. As he wrote he felt himself ascending, chattering up over the wide river valley. He was the Flying I – he saw all the tailbacks on the Westway, the slow-moving traffic through the Hanger Lane gyratory system, the roadworks on North­umberland Avenue, the shed lorry-load in Kingston Vale. He grasped the metropolis in its entirety, he held in his shaky, nicotine-stained fingers each and every one of the billions of tiny undertakings its inhabitants engaged in, which, taken in sum, added up to chaos.

  Yet this was not all. In transcribing his Knowledge Dave Rudman embroidered it. This was no plain cloth word-map, but a rich brocade of parable, chiasmus and homily. Where to, guv? he began each run, and when it intersected with a suitable tale he grasped it, then set it down. He kept driving, for out on the night-time streets the map, the territory and prophecy became as one. Whipping beneath the dour facade of the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, he hit the button and began to rant … This plonker clipped me as I was turning into Cliveden Place. I pulls over and gives it to 'im straight: put up or I'll call the old Bill. He digs deep, comes up wiv fifty nicker. Result – it only cost me a score to patch the cab up. You gotta be sharp in this business, no-wot-eye-meen? The world's out there, through the screen, issall through the screen. It ain't out back, it ain't in the fucking mirror. People are in the mirror . . . And the fare – some provincial cake-decorator who'd only just quit that self-same theatre – squawked assent through the intercom, bored and a little repulsed, but never suspecting that this was only the tip of a dirty great doctrinal iceberg which that very morning the cabbie had been pounding into an obsolete computer.

  Standing on the cobbled forecourt of Charing Cross Station – at the very epicentre of the Knowledge – a fare abused him, daring to question the meter: 'Ten-fucking-quid! A tenner from Camden Town! You're taking the piss!' But the words wailed over the Driver, because the Charing Cross, he happened to know, was a fake, the lions in the Square were fakes, the cars, vans and lorries were … toys – the whole city was toyist … The tin snare drum of the Inn on the Park, the cruet of Westminster Cathedral … Black pepper, sir? All uv it Made in China … Made of fucking plastic … and only the Driver knew what was real any more, only the Driver would come again.

  A messiah mushing through the two-millennium-old city. A preacher hearkening to his Faredar, and once he has the fare on board, not only subjecting them to his Revelation but also to his unique Doxology. For the Knowledge, once completed, naturally led to a series of Letters to the Lost Boy from the Driver. Epistles, the intent of which was to SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT and tell Carl MAN-TO-MAN what truly happened between his mother THE BITCH and his POOR OLD DAD. Your mother…'chelle … when she had you she changed, she became – ha, ha – chellish. She wouldn't give me a fucking look-in – she cut off my fucking balls. I tellya, mate, you're better off never going nea
r fucking women 'cept when they're on the blob . . . On the fucking rag … Once they've squeezed one aht they ain't worf dipping yer wick in anyway … Better off with the au pair – if Uve got one… Or any old tart… When they're mummies they ain't got no sense … When they get older iss worse still … Fucking boilers. When you fink abaht it the queers have got right idea – no fucking Richards – and no bleeding kids neither.

  The Knowledge may have had its glossolalia, but these dribs and drabs of humdrum misogyny flowed together into a mighty Jordan, nothing less than A COMPLETE RE-EVALUATION OF THE WAY MEN AND WOMEN should conduct their lives together. Which, as the Driver saw it, was mostly apart, the mummies crossing over into purdah on the far bank.

  The DJ from Crash, having hailed the Fairway by Vauxhall Station long after dawn and relapsed into the stale and ghastly fug, never supposed for a second that when the cabbie's red-rimmed eyes fixed on his via the mirror, and his mouth twisted out the observation 'It'd be better if we never 'ad to shack up wiv 'em in the first place – don't chew agree? Knock 'em up – then fuck off!', this was not a random remark, morning ingloriousness triggered by memories of recent sexual rejection, but rather one proposition among hundreds that made up a comprehensive blueprint for a society in which, once the old world had been swept away by a MIGHTY WAVE, EVERYTHING WOULD BE SPLIT DOWN THE MIDDLE.

  'You take my situation,' he urged the drunk doorman, the wayward priest, the absconding cashier, the reluctant whore. 'I only gets to see my lad every other weekend – thass not right. It should oughta be straight down the middle. Straight dahn ve fuckin' middul. If I ad mí way …' They let him have his way, turning aside to concentrate on sandbags slumped over men-at-work signs. '… it'd be all change on Wednesdays, right across the whole fucking country. Kiddies going from their daddies to their mummies. 'Coz I'm not a monster – '