The Book of Dave

by Will Self

  Over the foam shoulder pads of the Turks the wheatfield swelled, the ashes shimmered, the crows circled and the clouds – impacted upon by incomparably many puffs of causation – arranged themselves into greyish-blond sweeps of cirrus, cumulus blobs of tip-tilt nose and receding chin. In the core of it all was a ragged hole through which the Skip Tracer intoned, 'Juss don't go borrowing on me, son – don't do that. The vig'll kill you.'

  Dave made to shut the door and the lead Turk stuck his foot in it. He knew they were only there to put the frighteners on him, smack me about a bit … so why am I reaching for Fred's gun? Why? P'raps I've simply 'ad enuff? Through the crack between the door and its hinge Mustafa saw Dave grab the shotgun. He ducked back, leaving Rifak exposed as the ex-cabbie levelled twin barrels at his gut. 'Get the fuck ahtuv-' Dave began to say. He didn't finish because the Turk threw himself forward, knocking the gun aside, and grabbed for his throat.

  For a while there was a mercilessly inefficient struggle, neither one gaining an advantage – so that when Rifak did manage to get hold of the shotgun, it was with that element of shocked surprise with which a younger brother wrests a toy from his older sibling. Still in the giddy grip of his accomplishment, Rifak pulled both triggers – really just to see what might happen – and smoky flame tore a big chunk out of Dave's middle. Such a big chunk that for the moments before he fell a visible notch could be seen in Dave's side between his hip and his ribcage. Then he did fall, and, despite the liberal scarlet splashes, streaks and even blobs that rendered a chair, the newspaper, his cigarette packet and lighter, and one of Phyllis's darning mushrooms objects at once challenging and messy, Dave nevertheless found himself to be lunging up fresh blood.

  Mustafa began the clean-up while the shotgun's report still echoed through the environs like the angry slamming of a giant car door. A quarter mile off Fred Redmond's sleep was perturbed by the after-echo. He stirred, thinking, Eye sware vat man puts vat byrdskara on urlia an urlia evri bluddë mawnin. The flock of crows lifted off from the ash plantation – oily rags flapping in the thickening sunlight. Mustafa calmly snapped on rubber gloves, took the shotgun from the stunned Rifak, wiped it down with a shirt-tail pulled from his crocodile-skin belt, kneeled and, taking the dying man's hands carefully in his own, arranged everything so that Dave held the trigger guard and the stock, while the gory muzzle was rammed in his chest cavity. Straightening up, Mustafa turned to Rifak. 'I tellya one fing,' he said in cockney, 'I'm not goin' dahn fer vis one, you div. They come lookin' – I'm pointin'. Now get in the fucking cab.'

  As the Fairway pulled off up the lane with Mustafa driving, he adjusted the rearview mirror, so that he could check that the ex-cabbie truly was dying.

  Dave was – and his entire life was passing before him. Not the significant or profound parts of it – his mother's love, Carl's birth, getting his badge, a priceless fuck – but the prosaica: the flicked spout of a milk carton; cash-point queues; the sweet rack in a video-rental outlet; a television programme about Flemish canals; warped furniture piled in front of a matchbox terraced house in Erith; the dirty 'tester' on a hospital wall; the loose chain on his moped when he was a Knowledge Boy; the name plaque reading JONCKHEERE on the bodywork of a coach juddering at a traffic light; the Hammersmith roundabout; a computer-generated phone call telling him he'd won a prize; a rolled-up ball of silver paper – but most of all, the fares. The fares, the endless succession of fares – their cropped faces in the mirror: male, female, old, young, white, brown, yellow, black (although it had to be conceded far fewer of these); their eyes wary, hesitant, bored, angry, screwed up with laughter, closed in a gob-stopping snog; their skin stretched and slack, lined and scored; their mouths purse-lipped, clenched, half open, sour goo on their mulish teeth. The fares, picking their noses, dabbing at their eyes and peering at him with self-satisfaction, confident in their own small nugget of Knowledge, which he, groaning, was forced to extract from them: Where to, guv? Where to, luv? Where to … ? Where to … ? Where to … ?

  Death itself Dave Rudman remained in ignorance of – he was a tourist, standing beside a large monument, staring bemusedly at the map that showed its location. True, as a dark crescent eclipsed his view of the sun, so he struggled to avoid unconsciousness, backpedalling into the present. His heart stopped, his legs pushed feebly against the doorjamb, his hands convulsed and his hips jerked – yet he couldn't hang on and expired like that, in quizzical pain.

  The funeral was held at Willingale, a quiet little village a few miles away, deeper into the fastness of north Essex. Willingale – if it was remarked upon at all – was known for its two churches, which stood adjacent to one another, in a single churchyard overlooked by a sentinel yew and many massy beeches. One of these churches was Gothic enough – it had flinty walls and stepped buttresses that mounted to a castellated tower; the other, older edifice was a plain stone barn, with a shingled roof topped off by the characteristic vernacular campanile of Essex – a clapboard hutch rising to a tapered point. The yarn thereabouts was that the second church had been built by a wealthy lady who had fallen out with her sister over who took precedence in the pews of the first. The locals – credulous peasants that they were – had got it quite wrong; as anyone with the slightest architectural knowledge could have told them – and frequently had – Willingale's two churches were separated from one another by two hundred years in time, if only a hundred or so yards in space.

  No one – not even Phyllis Vance – seriously doubted that Dave Rudman had taken his own life: the heavy history of depression, the toxic jungle of his brain chemistry, the loss of both son and career, the opportunity, the scrawled notes in the margins of the newspaper: EMPTY, I'VE HAD ENOUGH, TAKING THE PLUNGE. These were, if not incontrovertible truths, at any rate telling clues in the absence of any others. There were no others – the Turks, their cab, their breakfast at the Little Chef – no one had noticed any of this, while in Clapton, Fatima bore the consequences of the crime: more bruises on arms and legs, Rifak in a raki-sodden, self-piteous heap.

  Even so, Phyllis Vance had enough canniness to introduce doubts into the mind of the local coroner, so many doubts that the death certificate laconically recorded the end of Dave's wayward journey through life with a further 'misadventure'.

  If it bothered Phyllis that her lover was to be interred in Willingale – so near to and yet so remote from his native city – she showed no sign of it. In death she was more proprietorial of Dave Rudman than she had ever been during his life – she needed him near to her and Steve. Not that she was off-putting when it came to Michelle and Carl – she wanted them at the funeral more than anyone else; there to observe how properly it had all been arranged, and how skilfully she had talked round the priest – a circuit vicar who passed through Willingale once a month like a tardy rural bus service – into committing this recent and most unobservant of his parishioners.

  For the fractured Devenish family – who had driven from London respectively silent, stunned and surly in their opulently padded seats – this voyage in their brand-new Volkswagen Touareg was way off road. Michelle, irretrievably lost in her memories of how it all went wrong, lacked even the spirit to argue with Cal when, bedevilled by nerves, he took wrong turning after wrong turning. In the back, immersed in a soundscape injected straight into his brain by a computer, Carl smirked, then winced. He couldn't tell which of them he hated more – his slutty mummy, his unreal real daddy, or the stupid fucking cabbie who'd blown his bollocks off. There were painful blisters full of nicotinic fluid on the insides of Carl's skinny arms, for at night, at the open window of his bedroom, looking out over the light lagoon of the city, he touched the furious tip of a cigarette to his own flesh, desperate to discover if he could feel anything at all any more.

  When they finally drew up outside the two churches of Willingale, the September day, which had been brooding all morning, began to arrange itself in the purpling drapery of a coming downpour, unfurling great swags of cumulonimbus on to the shushed
land. Stepping down from the high vehicle, Michelle found herself aptly diminished and was able, in all humility, to approach the similarly shrunken figures of Paul and Annette Rudman, who stood by the lychgate with their daughter, Sam, uncertain of what they should do or feel. Michelle tore away the fine embroidered cloth to show them her cropped, ginger head. They ought to … They have a right … I wish they'd under –… Chopped-off intimations of her own shame accompanied her silent obeisance. Cal hung back, while Carl advanced and applied his lips to the strange faces of his former granddad and granny.

  It was a measure of the dissipation of the Church's doctrine – its moral authority knocked over as casually as a drunk topples a beer glass – that a suicide's funeral was to be held in the more youthful of these senescent buildings. But then, self-murder and the mildewed hassocks, the musty drapes, the tarnished communion rail, the worm-holy rood screen, the foxed flyleaves of the prayer books – it all sat well together. After all, the Church had murdered itself, as with every decade more and more depressed dubiousness crept into its synods and convocations, until, speaking in tongues, it beat its own skull in at the back of the vestry. Divorcees and devil-worshippers, schismatics, sodomites and self-murderers – they were all the same for the impotent figures who stood in the pulpit and peered down at pitiful congregations, their numbers winnowed out by satellite television and interest-free credit. 'Dearly beloved,' they intoned – and meant it, because if they expected anyone to pitch up at all, they had to go round to their parishioners' houses and help them on with their underpants.

  Clear across the flat lands of Essex the spires stabbed up at the sky, abandoned launch pads from which the soul ships had long since blasted off. Inside them, clad in laughably obsolete uniforms – frilly laboratory coats, army surplices – the priests did kitchen-garden juju with corn dollies and ewers full of sour water. They were marionettes and mime artists, fifth-rate impressionists at the end of the world pier, officiating over a state cult for which the state no longer had any use.

  Michelle stood at the back behind a ragtag bunch of mourners who could have comfortably been accommodated in three London cabs. She recognized none of them besides immediate family. Not Anthony Bohm and Jane Bernal, nor Mo from the taxi garage. Faisal was a stranger to her – and Fred Redmond a terrible sight, guilt-stricken almost to the point of expiring. Nonetheless, in her ignorance Michelle realized that this was where I came in. An involuntary hand went to her head, and she felt the impoverished frass of middle-aged hair thin on her scalp. She conjured up the cavernous, suburban Catholic churches of her childhood, where Cath Brodie wept, rent her British Home Stores garments, and even banged her head on the flags. Michelle recalled the lubricious sanctity and smelly mysticism of these venues. At least… at least it was dark in there, while here was bright and desiccated, the priest's hands were as papery as the pages he turned, his voice rustled out: 'We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord …' Phyllis was weeping softly – Annette Rudman looked straight ahead through the battleship-grey legs of a medieval knight imprisoned in a glass slide. Through force of habit her husband checked his watch and made a wager with himself on the length of the sermon.

  'When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin … thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment: every man therefore is but vanity.' Michelle Brodie smoothed black silk over her leg. All my life – my adult life –I thought the secret lay in birth … but all along the secret was that we're going to die. In that moment, with the priest starting to say a few uplifting words about a man he'd never known, all the suppleness left Michelle, body and mind slackened, and she exhaled deeply. She felt her age – and she looked it as well.

  At the graveside Carl looked anywhere save at that earthy trench. He eyed a little posse of local kids who were lounging in the road on their BMX bikes … fucking chavs. Their baggy jeans rode up over their skinny shanks as they hobby-horsed up and down, scooting fallen beech mast and immature chestnuts with their trainers. Carl felt his top lip – the transparent down of the year before was hardening into stubble. 'Man that is born of woman …' dad that is born of mum '… hath but a short time to live …' is fucking dead you mean! Yet there was a sincerity in these words that not even an adolescent could sneer away, no matter how desultory the hireling's delivery: 'Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven …' Right at hand was a man who was prepared to be a father to Carl, and, intuiting that now was the right time, Cal laid a paternal hand on his shoulder.

  Cal Devenish had a whole pile of old 35-mm film canisters that he kept in the detached garage of Beech House. They were mementoes of the time in his life when he'd imagined he might – despite every evidence to the contrary – become an inspired auteur, decanting his miraculous vision of the world on to celluloid. Stoner Cal worshipped the neophyte Greek goddess Media at College and, funded by indulgent Daddy, he persuaded friends to act as his crew. Together they'd shot a few thousand feet of wooden acting and recorded Cal's cardboard words. To give him some small credit, when Cal had seen the first week's rushes he was consumed by shame and canned the whole shoot. Cal threw away the stock, keeping only the cans for biros, paper clips and plastic oddments.

  'Y'know,' Cal said to his son as they sat side by side on a wrought-iron bench in the garden, 'when you read over this stuff' – he chonked together the exercise books – 'you've gotta admit that Dave was on to something.' He'd fetched one of the old film canisters from the garage, and now Carl laid the two books inside the shallow tray and eased the lid on. Cal helped him seal it with a long strip of gaffer tape.

  Michelle had allowed the digging of a hole beyond the teak decking that separated the lawn from the big bed where, when spring came, mail-order blooms would be planted. There were limits – even to honouring the dead. The son placed the film canister in the moist, friable earth – then the father covered it. Short of digging up the other book – the one the dead cabbie swore he'd buried there – this was what they both felt he probably would have wanted. Michelle stayed inside. She sat at the kitchen worktop, coffee cup cold on the marble slab, her fists ground so hard into her eye sockets that a belated eternity ring Cal had given her drew blood.

  Carl didn't feel Dave's presence in the sigh of the autumnal wind through alder, birch or poplar. The London that spread out below them might have been impressive to a visitor – to a native it was mundane. Later father and son went out, the two intent on escaping the bad vibe. There in the road, pulled over to the kerb, was a Knowledge Boy on a scooter; or rather, a Knowledge Man, because when he pushed his full-face crash helmet up on his head to speak to them Carl saw that he was older than Dave would have been – had he lived – for another decade. 'Oi, guv,' he said, addressing Cal, 'can I get froo to Well Walk dahn vis way?' Cal looked uncomprehending – but Carl, whose Knowledge was far fresher, patiently explained to the sad old loser that he'd have to work his way back round via New End and Christ Church Hill. 'Ve streets on vis manna iss awl tangled up lyke bluddë spaghetti,' the wizened Knowledge Boy said, before he farted off on his bike.

  They were walking down Heath Street when Cal asked, 'Have you ever considered it – doing the Knowledge, I mean?' Carl didn't reply immediately – not out of surliness, only because it often took a while for messages from the outside world to make it over the high wall, to where he crouched, hidden inside his secret mummyself. Eventually he climbed up and over to the daddy side and replied, 'Nah, t'be honest I'm kind of interested in being a lawyer – there's gotta be more of a future in it.'

  Footnotes

  1 Dating is from the purported discovery of the Book of Dave.

  Arpee-English

  With Some Alternative Mokni Orthographies

  By the Same Author

  FICTION

  The Quantity Theory of Insanity

 
; Cock & Bull

  My Idea of Fun

  Grey Area

  Great Apes

  The Sweet Smell of Psychosis

  Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

  How the Dead Live

  Dorian

  Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe

  NON-FICTION

  Junk Mail

  Sore Sites

  Perfidious Man

  Feeding Frenzy

  Praise for The Book of Dave

  "Self is endlessly talented."

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  "Will Self's satire is thorough and multi-layered, reaching far beyond a simple skewering of the arbitrary nature of the sacred. Alternating between the future Ham and Dave's London provides plenty of deferred comedy… while simultaneously drawing solemn attention to the weight of our own historical footprint."

  —Village Voice

  "Fans of Self's previous edgy satires won't be disappointed with The Book of Dave, his latest riff on the strange complexities of the modern world. Balancing stories of pained intimacies between fathers and sons, it also brilliantly caricatures the fervor of literal-minded religious fundamentalizm…Blisteringly astute."