by Will Self
When Carl resumed his place at the top of the dyke, Lyttulmun had been tied and dragged across the dusty ground to the gibbet. Here a gang of chavs were straining to winch him up. The next moto had already been selected from the pen, and, as if cowed by Lyttulmun's bellows, she lay submissively, awaiting the Guvnor's blade. One of the London Circuit Drivers came over and turned so that he could watch the abomination die in his mirror. Execrations floated over the wind-smudged wheatie field:
– Bluddë toyist beest! cried one of the blood-spattered chavs beneath the gibbet. Oo duz ee fink ee iz!
Then, quite abruptly, the focus of the action shifted. The Driver struck out with his black arm and screeched: Trap that flyer! Carl followed his quavering finger to where a squat dad had broken from the crowd by the new Shelter and was zigzagging towards the gibbet. Two or three chaps tried in vain to catch the bloke, but in their cumbersome flakjackets, with their railings drawn, they were too clumsy to arrest Gari Funch before he reached the first upright and, with the nimbleness of a true stack-jumper, clambered straight up it.
Gari Funch gained the cross beam and stood upright on it, one foot on each side of the rope from which the dying Lyttulmun hung. Chavs, chaps and Chilmen came running up and made a circle of upturned faces. B4 U kil annuva 1, Gari roared, yaw gonna aff 2 kil me furs! The Drivers and Hamstermen had joined the audience, the former with their backs turned, the latter with their heads bowed. Wivaht ve motos, Gari continued, his fat lips blubbery with emotion, vare aynt no Am ennëwä, so U may az wel tayk me aht inall! Cummon U fukkas – bringiton!
Ees rí, Carl said to Antonë, thass wot ve Dryva wonz, wivaht ve motos vares no Am, an ve PeeSeeO doan wan no Am atall. Carl gathered himself together and stood up on the top of the dyke, fully exposing himself. He took in the whole deranged panorama below: the trapped motos now snorting and lowing in their pen, the saddened Hamsters gathered beneath the gibbet, the steely agents of the PCO. He felt a hatch inside his mind slide open and at long last he heard over the intercom the crackling, unearthly voice of Dave:
– All you have done, the Supreme Driver intoned, all your dad ever did, was to speed the destruction of your beloved island. Be that as it may – you must not blame yourself, my son, for that destruction would have come anyway, sooner or later. You have seen New London! You have witnessed the mighty currents of change that course through its smoky gaffs and muddy alleyways. The Public Carriage Office has no need of motos – nor of the truth. They require only the Book and the Wheel, the Drivers and the Inspectors, the King and his servile lawyers!
The oracular Arpee fell silent – the intercom clicked off. The crowd surrounding the gibbet had caught sight of Carl. At first one or two of the Hamstermen gestured and cried out, then more and more – Drivers, chaps, chavs and Chilmen – turned from Funch to confront this strange apparition. Hearkening to the acclamation, from the bethan gaffs on the near side of the wall, hidden in their cloakyfings, came the mummies of Ham, cowed and terrified. Carl took a deep breath. He needed no intercom to tell him this: that if it hadn't been Dave who so blighted the world, it would've been some other god – Jeebus or Joey or Ali – with his own savage edicts. The only recrimination that Carl allowed himself was to mourn this foolish quest for a dad he'd never known – when right at hand there had always been a bloke who was prepared to be a true father to him. He held out his hand and helped Antonë Böm to stand upright.
– U – U – he struggled to say.
– Eye no, Eye no, Böm replied in comforting Mokni. Eye no.
– U, Uve awlways bin a dad 2 me, Tonë, nah cummon, me öl mayt.
The steady easterly had pushed the cloud up in a massy white bank above the Ferbiddun Zön, so that all of Ham was revealed, a green foetus floating in its amniotic lagoon. It was in bigwatt splendour that the three ill-assorted figures – the slim young dad, the portly queer and the shambling moto – made their way down to the manor and whatever fate awaited them.
16
Made in China
October 2003
Dave Rudman didn't go into town much – and when he did, he took the tube. He walked the six miles from Chipping Ongar to Epping, then got on the train. In mid morning, on a weekday, the tube was the emptiest of places. The ex-cabbie sat alone on the snazzy seats; the rubberized floor at his feet was scattered with flakes of discarded newsprint – the dandruff of current affairs.
With a slappety-clack the train accelerated through sprawling housing estates and satellite towns cluttered with toyist developments – hair-dryer civic centres and filing-tray multi-storey car parks. Slowly at first, then with more and more crashes and bashes, until it reached a crescendo of steel squealing upon steel and threw itself beneath Mile End. The tunnel was at first just cut-and-cover, so that plashes of daylight fell on the soot-blackened walls and worming high-tension cables. Then the train buried still deeper into the scabrous crust of the city – through bloody orange, shitty brown and black bile, down to the London clay. At Bank, Dave took the escalator up to ground level and emerged, a blinking fieldmouse, into the stony kernel of it all. He discovered himself under the pediment of the old Stock Exchange, with getters and secretaries coursing past, greenish flickers on the grey-glass screens of the buildings. Above him an energetic statue of General Smuts struck out for Holborn …
… Yet never got anywhere: his bush hat and cravat were no protection against the smirch of exhaust on his bronze back. Turning his own back on the Bank of England, Dave would sidle down to the river, then idle over one of the bridges. He would only recover any sense of where he was when, leaning over the parapet, he saw the stern of a sightseeing boat disappear beneath it, its wake a foaming gash in the beery water. Straightening up, swivelling – the London diorama pivoted about him: the toothpick steeples and cruet cupolas of the remaining Wren churches, the steel braces and concrete Karnak of Broadgate and the Barbican, the AstroTurf lawns and inflated, latex walls of the Tower, the brass doorknob of the Monument. Downriver a flock of pigeons clattered over the prettified wharves on the south bank, where graduate stevedores in blue striped aprons loaded boudin noir into the holds of German financial engineers.
All day Dave Rudman walked hither and thither. Newly ignorant of London, he attached himself to flocks of tourists, and together with them followed the shepherd's staff of a raised umbrella to where he might listen to a Walloon explanation of St Paul's. Or else he drifted over to South Kensington and sauntered through the museums, slowly absorbing the perverse stratigraphy that had arranged these fossils in horizontal bands, interspersed with gift shops and cafes. Returning to daylight after aeons, Dave threw his head back and allowed the vivid sense of estrangement – which had haunted him all that long hot summer – to beat down anew.
One afternoon Dave was browsing the bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge – Shell Touring Guide to Anglesey… The Houseboats of Srinigar … Theatrical Design in the Thirties – when the usual eddies of cinephiles, skateboarders and tourists channelled, then flowed steadily, upstream towards the Millennium Wheel. The London mob, so assured of its own theatricality that it gave parts to screevers, classical-music underachievers and dossers senatorially draped with sleeping-bag togas. Dave was stoically disposed to ignore them – until the trestle table of books was kicked in the leg and collapsed. Then, ever so wearily, it occurred to him: They're running scared … It's a bomb – an attack … Everyone's been waiting for it – lad in the paper shop, he said don't go into town today … I've got responsibilities … to Phyl, to Steve – to Carl even . . . He began hobbling along with the crowd, intending to peel away across Jubilee Gardens – for quite suddenly Dave was completely orientated.
Coming out from under Hungerford Bridge, he realized how wrong he'd been – this was a rush to another's danger, another spectacular revival that London had been waiting centuries for. Dave's head fell back on his neck and he was part of the ring of upturned faces. The Millennium Wheel arced overhead, a bracelet on a puffy wrist of cloud. Usually it mo
ved so slowly that in capturing its ponderous progress blood rushed to spectators' temples, and they staggered, feeling the dizzying revolution of the Globe beneath their feet. But it had stopped.
The mob had also achieved a critical, lowing mass – there was no way forward or back, serried info-boards blocked off Jubilee Gardens with a screed on history and renovation. The crowd was already unattractive … soon they'll get ugly. They smelled of sugar and hydrolysed corn syrup, Marlboro Lights and pirated Calvin Klein. On the terrace of County Hall a party of schoolchildren from Lille bounced up and down in cradles of rubber webbing. Police in Kevlar jackets armed with submachine guns shoved their way down the steps off Westminster Bridge – the crowd parted with an anguished, polyphonic moan.
The Wheel had stopped moving. Whadda they call it now … the London Eye? He remembered his one revolution with Gary and little Jason – the boy in his Spiderman costume, spreadeagled against the clear glass of the pod. As they rose up in a smooth parabola, London popped up beneath them, the cardboard ministries and papery monuments unfolding into three dimensions of doubtful solidity. Dave had felt an express lift of nausea shoot up his gullet. The only way I could stop myself from puking or screaming was by calling it over, picking out a cab on Lambeth Bridge and bunging myself in the driver's seat and driving it out to Picketts Lock or Willesden, Camberwell or Wanstead Flats … the Days Inn in Hounslow …
There was another tiny costumed figure spreadeagled against the sky. Like son – like father . . . Hearing the crackle of the police loudhailers, as they forced the ghouls through a gap in the fence and back over the parched grass towards the Shell Centre, Dave Rudman wondered whether Fucker's doing it now, calling it over, the points and the runs . . . trying to give himself an, an identity … convince himself he's not just another nutter . . . Because that's what the man next to Dave was saying to his mate:
'Look at that fucking nutter willya!'
'Ow djoo fink ee manijed 2 gé ahtuv ve capsúl?' the other one spat.
Dave was wondering this too, because, rather than heading around the Wheel's rim – which was equipped with a safety ladder – Fucker was a third of the way along a spoke that tended towards the hub at a sixty-degree angle. He inched up caterpillar-like, dragging his rolled-up cocoon behind him. There was a second insect struggling to exit the capsule Finch must have been riding in, but for some reason only his top half had emerged through the escape hatch. Has he lost his bottle? Or were enraged tourists grabbing on to his costumed legs? Slapstick in the sky. The police were furious – yet surely they realized that these stupid men were no more terrorists … than I am? Surely they wouldn't shoot with their snub muzzles that swung from the retreating crowd up to the Wheel? Surely they would wait for I dunno … whadda they call 'em? trained negotiators. Breathless, Dave Rudman was about to turn away when the bug on the white stalk staggered, yanked from behind by his lopsided burden, and fell.
Gary Finch had taken the fall slowly – almost leisurely. Had he been unconscious – or experiencing a dizzy high at pulling off the Big One? Perhaps his clownish mind had been gripped by the absurdity of it all – or perhaps he felt a final release from the Lord Chancellor's Department and the lawyers, the mediators and the Child Support Agency? For weeks after, night after night in the sweaty bed, deep down in the coiled mattress, Dave revisited each bone-powdering crunch and flesh-cleaving impact. There was so much blood when Gary hit the balustrade – a screen-washer spray that arced high enough for the individual drops to fall among the leaves of the stunted plane trees and glitter there like berries. While Finch's body was a travesty, the stuffing knocked out of it, broken on the Wheel.
Phyllis didn't tell Dave about the two Turks who came into Choufleur a month or so after Fucker Finch had died. What was the point – Dave's mate was dead now, why drag still more of his pain and messy bewilderment into their lives? Besides, Dave was so sunk down inside himself; Phyllis tried to regard him as a bear with a bothered head, resting up in their little cottage on the edge of the woods. Much of the time this was a fairytale – Dave was down so far, almost back where she'd first encountered him, limping from the day room to the men's toilet in his black bathrobe so he could wring a few drops of piss from his drugged bladder. Still this, she hoped, this is genuine grief, isn't it? Best not send him back to the shrink.
Anyway, the Turks had been civil enough. She didn't doubt that they were chaps, the heavy mob – but they weren't going to get heavy with her. The talker – a burly bloke with black stubble running all the way up to the racoon rings beneath his feral eyes – wore a navy-blue blazer with brass buttons. He spoke with sudden flicks of his hands, shaking the weighty rolex on his hairy wrist, showing off his manicure. 'Pliz?' he queried after every reply Phyllis made. 'Pliz?' They were standing out in the road, beside the plate-glass window of the Theatre Museum. In it there was a dummy Harlequin wearing a golden mask and a patterned bodystocking – diamonds of lilac, mauve and citrine. She explained to the Turks that Gary Finch was dead. 'You might've read it in the papers – he fell, fell from the wheel, the big wheel?' She made a big wheel shape with her outstretched arms. 'Pliz?' the main Turk said – and his sidekick jabbered at the Royal Opera House, the earpiece of his mobile phone like a nanobot about to crawl into his hairy ear.
Phyllis couldn't exactly dump anyone in it – she didn't know Gary's ex, his dad or his other mates, and she wasn't going to ask Dave. If I did know 'em I'd tell… it's their fucking problem – not mine, not Dave's. Her boss came out to see what the bother was, and even though he was an innocuous man, effeminate, with glossy chestnut hair, silk shirt and high-waisted trousers, the Turks still took this as their cue to leave. Phyllis noticed that they were driving an old London cab. It had dirty patches where its supersides and official plates had been removed. She turned towards the staff entrance of the restaurant – then looked back to see the two blokes standing by their strange old motor.
Winter was a long time in arriving that year. The earth refused to relinquish its heat, no winds came and the leaves, declining to exit the trees, remained there limp and furled. Waking from shameful dreams in which all his past liaisons – including his marriage – took on a fantastical, honeyed hue, Dave Rudman would stagger down the stairs to the kitchen, where pensionable flies drowsed on the rough-adzed windowsills. Death had never felt so close before – not even in the fibrillating heart of his madness. Death's dust coated every surface, and he felt a frantic irritation with pernickety manual tasks – flicking at the waxed cardboard spout of a milk carton – that he was certain would haunt him for ever. Dave trudged across the cloying fields and watched the local farmer harrowing, a mob of seagulls in the tractor's banded wake. He'd had the occasional pint in the local pub with the farmer – and he raised his arm in ordinary acknowledgement.
At last the chill arrived and sought them out with numbing fingers. Phyllis and Dave had stopped making the love that bared their souls – instead they rolled their padded selves into bathrobes before bed and cuddled up to hot-water bottles. For even if winter baulked, the cottage remained impossible to heat. Steve was back in hospital. Money was short.
Gary's dad had wanted to give him a cabbie's send-off. There was even – and Dave thought this a little strong – a wreath in the shape of a steering wheel on top of the shiny black coffin. On the day the weather had been mercilessly hot, Debbie had brought Jason and Amber in beach wear – heliotrope shorts, garish singlets, tatty trainers. Even given the shit Gary had put her through, Dave still thought this a bit much. He was surprised to see a decent crowd pitch up at the crematorium – even if he hardly recognized any of them besides Big End and Dave Quinn.
It dawned on him, as a concealed speaker hissed a fugue, that the men of child-bruising age, in newly pressed suits and self-shined shoes, weren't cabbies at all – or even builders – but Fighting Fathers. Fighting Fathers who fidgeted like children and then, when the officiating priest offered everyone a chance to say 'a few words', spewed forth many and
inappropriate ones, about how Gary had been 'a martyr to the Cause'. Debbie and the kids seemed bemused, while Gary's dad and mum were lost in teary contemplation of the coffin, which stood on the roller road to nowhere, waiting to drop off its fare.
Turning to look along the row of mourners, Dave saw a familiar profile etched against another – a juxtaposition that made both faces more fleshy. It was a profile he'd been expecting to see – the arrogant flick of surfer hair, the ski-jump nose, the pink glisten of well-irrigated skin. 'Gary was a man who loved his kids more than anything else,' the voice at the lectern was saying; 'he put them before everything, and when he died he was climbing that wheel for little Jason and Amber.' Little Jason was as big as his dad now and I swear he's stoned. The Fighting Father cleared his throat and consulted the text he'd prepared on the back of an envelope. 'I'm sorry, Dave,' Phyllis hissed, 'but I can't take any more of this – I'm going.'
Dave left with her. Outside the chapel of rest the hearse was reversing on the gravel. It was a brand new TX2 that had been chopped in half and the bodywork extended. Hand in hand, Dave and Phyllis near skipped down the Avenue of dwarf cypresses – it was a little moment of levity before the burden of it all descended on them. Looking back, Dave saw that the Skip Tracer had come outside and was standing in the porch, blotting his face with a brilliant mauve handkerchief. Dave thought he might call after them; instead all he did was smile – a tight little grimace – and raise his hand for a valedictory chop. Dave Rudman never saw a London taxi cab again without thinking of that hearse, obscene and elongated. He never saw a cab again without picturing its passenger as a cadaver and its driver as a sullen undertaker.
