The Book of Dave

by Will Self

  'I tellya something, guv,' he regaled the MP he was driving back to Kennington from a late division, 'I don't like the trade much myself– most cabbies are ignorant, lairy an' fucking racial.' The pol, full of claret, sighed ambiguously. 'And as for the Public Carriage Office, they've got a fucking monopoly going, what with there only being one vehicle supplier – don't tell me they ain't on the take.' The pol didn't tell him anything, only sighed again, so the Prophet continued. 'But at least they've kept the whole show on the road. There've been licensed cabs in London for four hundred years now. Growlers, Clarences, Hansoms, there's as much bloody tradition in the trade as there is the 'ouses of Parliament – maybe more. The old drivers – they know what's what, they 'ave the Knowledge, like me granddad Benny – straight as a fucking die.

  'Tellya what,' he kept on at the man, who was leaning in through the window to pay his fare, lamplight smoothing the nap of his velvet collar, 'p'raps the PCO should run the whole fucking country and your lot should get behind the wheel.' The pol tipped out of weary guilt – he hated the hectoring cabbie so. And when he'd gone the cabbie rested his forehead on the boss of the steering wheel. Rested it there for so long that when, at length, he sat up, he saw the letters 'Lti' stamped on his forehead.

  'GOD SAID: MEET ME AT MY HOUSE ON SUNDAY BEFORE LUNCH.' Dave goggled at the placard, his blood seething with a deathly fizz. In the rearview was a trinity of black faces swathed in white muslin. Members of some fucking nigger sect . . . whom nonetheless he felt impelled to hector, as he dropped them off at this redbrick barn of a church, on a patch of wasted ground, in a notch of north London estate, 'How the fuck can I do that?' He jerked a thumb at the placard. 'I haven't got a pot to piss in or the time to piss in it. It's alright for you lot, you don't pay any bloody taxes, do you, you don't even pay your fucking road tax, but blokes like me we're on the level, we cough up, we make ourselves known …' – and here he parodied an official voice – '… to the CSA and they cut our fucking balls off with the child support.' The Coptic worshippers cleared out of the Fairway as fast as they could and tipped out of fear, fumbling coin into the angry white man's sweating hand.

  The cabbie drove away rattling with fury. Not so much as a fucking thank you for picking 'em up – let alone dropping 'em off… It's a fucking punishment. I 'ate life so much … And this too made its way into the computer.

  Dave stopped making any effort to see Carl at all. His son walked across the Heath and leaned on his dad's buzzer – but Dave wouldn't open the door. He was inside, in the omni-smelling semi-darkness, in his threadbare black bathrobe, clacking away. He'd found the 'contact diary' Rebecca Cohen had urged him to keep in the first months after the separation. This held details of all the time he'd spent with Carl. The boy dragged reluctantly for boating trips on the Serpentine. Fucking chancer with his pedalos for twenty-fucking-quid an hour . . . same as any other bloody fleet owner … trying to rip us off . . . thought we were mugs, fucking tourists. In the rewrite, Dave's run-in acquired mythic status: the man in the booth was emblematic of every grasping capitalist, his flotilla of fibreglass vessels needed liberating, father and son pedalled away laughing through bobbing flocks of inquisitive fowl.

  Back and back he went, probing with 26+ tabular tongues the rotten cavities of swimming sessions and football games, children's parties and Sunday-morning matinees. In Dave's warped recollection, the bouncy castle hired by the upper-middle-class parents of five-year-old Carl's slumming schoolfriend became a mighty bastion, inflated with prestige, power and dosh. Flash it abaht, thass wot wankas lyk vat dú. Him standing there with a cocktail sausage on a toothpick, made to feel like an oik by those fucking toffs while carillons of laughter floated over the impeccably maintained gardens of the Holly Lodge Estate.

  Michelle called him up and cajoled him into a meeting. The rendezvous was a pasta and salad joint in Belsize Park. She spent two full hours in front of the mirror, and worked hard on her mascara and eyeshadow to meet the man who'd blackened both her eyes. To begin with it went well enough, true. He looks fucking dreadful … Unshaven … greasy hair … stained jeans … Still, he didn't talk too loud or throw his arms about. He wouldn't eat, though, and he stared so savagely at her cleavage that Michelle, involuntarily, kept fussing with the lie of her blouse. Swirls of rainbow dye on the silk. 'Carl's half-term starts next Friday,' she said, then added, 'He needs you, he wants to see you … but not' – this was a mistake – 'like this.' Dave was back on the doorstep of Beech House, watching her pick up her knickers. He was back on the doorstep, looking at his son's face blown up out of all proportion.

  'You slag!' Dave swept the plates from the table, a wine-glass stem snapped like a glass bone. He grabbed her cleavage and ripped it. Buttons popped. He slapped her face – once, twice, and he was going for a third when the waiter, whose tofu face suggested he wouldn't say boo to a goose liver, seized him from behind. The police released him that evening – Michelle had refused to press charges. Two days later a restraining order appeared on the mat at Agincourt Road. He was free to contest it – but he didn't. Instead Dave went to Prontaprint and blew up page 45 of the A-Z on the photocopier. On to this he drew the mile-diameter circle around Beech House with a thick felt pen. Then he committed this new Knowledge to his mad memory – every street, every point, running round and round it like that fucking hamster the boy used to have, stuck in its wheel. Silly cow fed it too much . . . Its stomach blew up and it died. Then he incorporated this new evidence of his MARTYRDOM into the document that was taking shape beneath his fingers, and that he referred to – unconscious of any precedent, devoid of any irony – as THE BOOK.

  He typed, he drove, he took the pills religiously. Last thing before oblivion, whisky glugged, lungs tarmacked, he crucified his head on the dirty pillow.

  There were only two seasons in this hyperboreal city: the brief summer when fatty sun-screen and fallen food fried on the paved tundra, then the long dark winter of drizzle welling up from the concrete permafrost. It was December, and it was done. Dave went up to Colindale to speak to an old acquaintance of his dad who worked at ABC Print, at the end of Annesley Avenue, by the polythene scrap of the Silk Stream, where gulls mournfully circled over the Montrose recreation ground and a knock-kneed old geezer stood in the road mixing mortar on a bit of plyboard.

  'On metal you say?' Dick Winterbottom looked quizzically at Dave Rudman. 'Yeah, yeah, we can do that, as it 'appens.' The printer wore a cloth coat the brown of wrapping paper, the baggy skin under his eyes was scaly with age, a roll up pierced his lip like a narwhal's horn. 'Not that it guarantees it'll last for ever – for that you'd aff to dye-stamp it.' Machinery comfortingly clunked and slapped. There were stacks of cardboard, ricks of papery hay, and over it all hung the smell of inky fertilizer. 'You're Paul Rudman's boy – aren'tcha?' Dave looked at the saintly old printer – a headlight was on full beam behind his head.

  Dave was up and down to Colindale several times. Winterbottom, quite rightly, thought him crazy – so Dave had to put down a three-grand deposit. He had to pick the metal for the plates that would be pages, he had to select the rings to bind them. He had to correct the proofs himself – and supervise the presses – because no one, repeat NO ONE was to have sight of the copy. 'A one-off like this,' Winterbottom remarked, 'the cost is fee-numb-in-awl. Phenomenal. Sure you don't wanta 'ave us do ten or twenty more – it'll cost yer the same?' But Dave Rudman wanted one – there had to be ONLY ONE. Then, when it was done and he'd taken delivery, he handed the cheque over for the balance and took the film from the press, the computer discs from the setting machine, and any other evidence there was of The Book's production. He found a providential skip, poured petrol on this stuff, flicked a match, got in the motor and drove away.

  It would have to be by night. He would need equipment: a torch that strapped on to his head, a mattock for the digging, dark clothes and stuff to black up his face. It would have to be a dark night as well, a moonless night, issa commando raid inter the Ferbid
dun Zön. Dave was far gone now. He could see nothing that wasn't presented to him in the screen; by day he warned potential fares he was coming by keeping the foglamps on all the fucking time. By night he transfixed them in the glare of his headlights. A woman could have been raped and battered to death within feet of him – and he never would have noticed. He trapped the hated fucking flyers up West and drove them out to Heathrow, past the Moto Services at Heston, ranting all the way, 'Forward,' forward, forward … no longer aware of whether he was speaking aloud or in his mishmash mind.

  Michelle considered it nothing short of a miracle that the three of them were managing to get on this well. Granted, the peculiar situation put stresses on all of us and allowances have to be made for Carl. Still, Beech House ticked over, and she revelled in the keeping of its moneyed beat. Redecorating was under way, and Michelle had taken a leave of absence from work. In her heart-of-hearts, where ambition was stilled, she knew she wasn't going back. Standing in the bay, at the ebony windowpane, looking out over rain-lacquered gardens at the lap of land that cuddled Hampstead, Michelle could see nothing much besides the questing fingers of TV aerials scratching the rushing night sky.

  Behind her in the high-ceilinged rooms, a new reality was taking shape. Carl was up in his computerized crack house, bossing his 'hos'; Cal was taking a bath. A stately pine dominated the drawing room, a heap of boxes contrived by the Harrods specialist gift-wrapping service spread out beneath its shaggy, sagging limbs. It's a lie … another fucking lie … Until they know which one of them is the boy's father, it's just another fucking lie … Michelle's head was reflected in the glass – a shapeless pile. At the flat in Fulham … I had those mirrored doors on the fitted cupboards … I used to watch blokes make love to me in them … Then with Dave crammed in beside me I watched my belly swell. I woke in the middle of the night… the night before we were married … I started shaking… I could see a figure in the dark … evil coming off it. I turned to Dave and he was awake already – he'd seen it too. He put on the light – it was only a shapeless pile of clothes on a chair. We both calmed down, then I said, 'We're making a big mistake, you know.' And he said, 'I know.' It was mad, but we were closer – we felt closer then than we did the whole next day. What's that, then – knowing you're making a big mistake but doing it anyway … a conspiracy?

  The hole was thigh-deep. Deep enough, surely, to withstand the delving of public-school-educated landscape gardeners. Deep enough to remain undisturbed until – by some mysterious signal that Dave could not yet divine – Carl would be informed and excavate it. Dave took the queer ringbinder of metal plates, wrapped it in a plastic bag and placed it in the hole. He dropped a chunk of York paving on top, then shovelled the earth and clay back in with his army-surplus mattock. He stomped with his claggy trainers until the surface was levelled off. He was turning to leave – for it was done – when she saw him.

  'Cal!' Michelle shouted. 'There's someone in the garden!' She already knew who this someone was. Cal came running from the bath, spattering bergamot bubbles and slip-sliding on the newly laid marble of the grandiose hall. In the garden Dave turned towards her cry. A flap of curtain was open, and buttery light spread across builders' rubble – barley-sugar twists of reinforced-steel in a fudge of old London bricks and mortar. Smoked salmon scraps from Greenspan's the deli… A Danish pastry ring and the News of the Screws … Dad shitting out his hangover in the bog … Sunday morning in the 'burbs … He fled.

  They saw him as he scattered along Beech Row. They saw him, Cal and Michelle, standing on the front step of their seven-figure lifestyle, and Michelle shook her red head and said, 'Poor Dave, what's he doing? Where's he going to?' Cal put a bare, wet arm around her shoulders.

  He was going to the day, because he couldn't hide in the nighttime any longer. The darkness was where he'd done it – the darkness was where they might find him. So he fled into the day, through the curtain of drizzle and into the chicane at the bottom of Park Lane, where Achilles was back up on his plinth, fending off the hair-styling wand of the Hilton with his black shield.

  13

  New London

  MAR 524 AD

  The mainsail, which all that tariff had bellied overhead like the wing of a mighty seafowl, now whipped, snagged, then crumpled. The ferry was going about. Cummon nah, U fukkas! the gaffer shouted down the forward hatch. Out of it burst a ragged company of dads, eleven in all: two coloureds, three pikeys, a Mick and five of the gaffer's own chavs. With their gaffer aiming kicks up their arses, the crew sprang to the rigging and swarmed aloft. The wind was quartering and the sails must be trimmed. The Catford Light had been raised – they would be in London before nightfall.

  From where Carl stood by the wheel, he could see all of the Trophy Room, this floating wooden island that had been his home for the past three blobs. Tyga was in his cage on the foredeck, the mate was at the wheel. Antonë Böm stood at the bow, his plump hands thrust in his drawstring jeans, his threadbare robes lashed by the stiff breeze. His mirror caught the foglight dancing upon the waves, while tucked beneath his arm was his leather-bound copy of the Book.

  The gaffer of the Trophy Room had accepted Böm's story without questioning. Stalkers and their butterboys were common enough in the further dominions of King David. Besides, the queer let drop the names of powerful connections in London, and as for the monstrous brindled beast they had with them, the gaffer consented to take it aboard – such freaks fetched a pretty price in the Smoke. It would pay these lowly Drivers' passage to the capital.

  The Plateists of Bril had not cavilled at Antonë and Carl's decision – theirs was a society founded not on coercion but on liberty of conscience. The travellers rested and waited for Tyga's wounds to heal; then, furnished with fresh provisions, they were rowed out into the sea lanes in one of the Plateists' pedalos. Although this craft was far larger than the Hack of Ham's, it still seemed a mere cockleshell bobbing on the waves when the Trophy Room came beating up the main of Cot under full sail.

  The Trophy Room, Carl thought, was a vessel such as the giantess might have ridden in. It creaked and groaned with constant life, it stank of tar, hempen rope and its spicy cargo of fags and booze from the far south, beeswax from Ex and even a few tanks of moto oil freshly loaded at Wyc. Below decks rats scuttled and the alien chavs blubbered with their clipped tongues. There was more irony attached to the Trophy Room's rigging alone than Carl had seen before in his entire life. The gaffer wore a golden cap embroidered with the arms of his getter, and held the course of the ferry by eye and memory, with little recourse to his traficmaster.

  The coast of Cot was a panorama that unrolled alongside the ferry. Bëthan semis stood in the hedged fields, their white plaster and black beams sharp against the tawny ground. After the Trophy Room had made the northern cape of Cot, these isolated buildings were succeeded by small manors, which clumped together into bigger and bigger settlements. Here the semis were of brick and crete – some of them two storeys high. The Shelters were magnificent; great green halls capable of holding a hundred fares at intercom. On their roofs stood wheel vanes, and the loud chimes that rang out from their slatted speakers carried over the waters.

  Having crossed the sound between Cot and Durbi, the Trophy Room anchored off Nott to trade. Carl was astonished by Nott Bouncy Castle – and refused for a while to believe that it could be of human construction, rather than a curiously shaped stack. When the crowds piled out from the Bouncy Castle's gates, then came churning in their pedalos across the harbour to the ferry, Carl took refuge with Tyga, snuggling down in his comforting flesh folds. The gaffer threw a tarp over them. While the Nott blokes bargained with the gaffer, Antonë Böm remained below deck, scratching away at his notebooks in the tiny cabin.

  The Trophy Room lay off Blackheath under a dipped headlight. The Port of London Authority pedalo came out to the ferry with a pilot. They were to proceed upriver at first tariff and berth in St Katharine's Dock. The pedalo returned to the city carrying lettuce fr
om the gaffer to his getter in Lombard Street, and from Antonë Böm to the Lawyer of Blunt at Somerset House, his fuckoffgaff in the Strand.

  Neither Antonë nor Carl could sleep that night. They assembled their few, pathetic belongings over and over again, packing and repacking their changingbags.

  – You know, Carl, Antonë said, speaking softly, the gaffer will only take one payment from us for our passage and that payment alone. He has made it clear that if we do not give him this – this thing, he will hand us over to the harbour master as soon as the ferry docks.

  -I, I understand, Carl replied, tears flowing down his cheeks. He went up on deck. The headlight was a silvery sliver, the dashboard a smear of illumination.

  – Paw Tyga. Carl stroked the moto's salty jowls and spoke in comforting Mokni: Iss onlë 4 a lyttul wyl, yeah, an Eyem shor ve gaffa ul lúkarfta U.

  Tyga regarded him with tiny trusting eyes. But Eyeth wuwwyed abaht U, Cawl, he lisped. Eyeth wuwwyed abaht U.

  The foglamp came on in a screen demisted, and revealed the great earthen rampart of the Emtwenny5. A large, flat-bottomed pedalo came alongside the Trophy Room, its crew of Taffy chavs pedalling furiously. The pilot was still in his cabin, so Carl coaxed Tyga into the cargo sling, and he was swung over the side of the ferry and winched down into the well of the smaller vessel. Carl could hardly bear to look at poor Tyga. He thought of all the dangers they'd endured on the journey from Ham, and how at every opportunity the moto had placed his own life at the service of his young gaffer. Now he was being abandoned, almost certainly to a fate even worse than that of his rank.