Authors: Will Self
The Book of Dave (52 page)
All was as before: the Taffy on the roof rack, the glossy jeejees straining in the shafts, the long black limmo pressing the
mob into the gutter. They drove up the Finchley Road and by the time they had passed the Swizz Cottage they were in the sticks.
Carl was thrilled to see open field strips and woodlands for the first time in blobs, while up ahead the burbs rose, wave
after wave of hewer, streaked purple, lavender and blue, gently steaming under the bigwatt foglamp of buddout. Ringnecks dipped
and rose through the shreds of mist while gulls circled overhead. The characteristic London reek â which had filled the lad's
nostrils for so long he had become unaware of it â had abated.
How can we conceive of this scene in the time of Dave? the Lawyer mused. Why, in contradiction of the Knowledge itself, we
see that these roads out of London are not straight but winding up and over steep hills and down into deep defiles. And where
is the great mass of brick and crete that the Book describes? How can it be that here in London itself it has gone so entirely,
while in so many other places in the kingdom there are the remains of many ancient gaffs? The Drivers charged with the Book's
interpretation cite the MadeinChina â yet they swaddle themselves in ambiguities when it comes to the question of whether
this deluge preceded or followed the Age of Dave.
The Lawyer of Blunt would have continued with these flying speculations were it not that the limmo had now gained a spur of
burbland and was jolting along a flagged highway towards Beech House itself. As they drew closer, Carl saw a high facade topped
with a triangular pediment, twelve-paned windows, irony fencing and two staircases curving up to a grand door on the first
storey. Crowds were milling on the beaten earth in front of the dävine semi: Drivers and Inspectors, mendicant stalkers, pilgrims
who had struggled on foot up from the city below, and even a handful of outrageous mushers who flapped about in the hewer
crying out broken orisons to the Lost Boy. At the very eye of this hurly-burly stood a row of wooden booths, and as the Taffy
reined in the jeejees, leaped down and the travellers stepped out, Carl saw that these were tenanted by still more Drivers
and that the pilgrims who mobbed them â lawds, luvvies, commoners, even a few chavs â were all sore afflicted.
One after another they presented themselves to the Drivers in the booths, placing before their mirrors a crippled leg, a scrofulous
neck, an arm purulent with the discharge of a carbuncle. The Driver called over a run and a few points, sprinkled the diseased
or damaged member with a few drops of dävine evian, palmed the supplicant the tinfoil badge, then held out his hand for some
dosh. Eyeing the scene critically the Lawyer of Blunt muttered: Such peculation defiles our faith more than any grander exactions
of the PCO or even the King. Then, as they worked their way towards Beech House, he wisely remained silent, save for saluting
the indulgence sellers: Where to, guv? Where to, guv? Where to â¦
While the common pilgrims had to queue to enter the shrine, the Lawyer and his companions were ushered straight in by an obsequious
fony. Beech House was bare and unprepossessing, the chambers stark and without any adornment. In the harsh foglight that streamed
through the uncurtained windows, every scuff that tens of thousands of trainers had left on the boards could be seen. At the
centre of each room was an eerie tableau of life-sized figures. One showed Dave in his cab; a second, Dave, Chelle and the
Lost Boy at the Breakup; a third, Dave burying the Book. The effigies were wax and obviously of considerable antiquity, for
they were clad in worn and tatty garments, and their features disfigured by the heat of summer and the chill of kipper. In
one of the tableaux the Lost Boy's nose was missing, and the effigy of Chelle had been so assailed with stones and brickbats
that one leg had come away from the body and dangled in its sagging hose.
Initially the fony, like his Bedlam counterpart, was disposed to offer a commentary; however, the Lawyer of Blunt soon disabused
him of this requirement, and so it was in silence that they at last descended to the inner sanctum of the shrine, down a corkscrewing
staircase that bore into the very earth. The fony sparked a letric and by its faint wattage they saw weeping brickwork and
the white tendrils of deep, questing roots. The fony could not forbear from affecting a tone of great reverence and informing
them that:
â Viss, yer reervús, iz ware Ãall Bgan 2 fouzand yeers ago, wen Dave berried ve Búk. Eer à lay til ve Kings great-great-granddad
â but an umble woolly bloke on ve burbz â duggà up.
Carl looked and all he saw was a yok-flagged pit. It had no resonance, no atmosphere of sanctity. Its revelation was only
in its emptiness â a void on to which any idea or belief might be superimposed.
When they were once more without, the Lawyer took the opportunity to point out to his young companion the biggest points of
the distant city: the NatWest Tower, the Lloyd's Building; No. 1 Canada Square; the Gherkin and the vast complex of the PCO
itself â the dreaded Tower. It squatted by the river, its high walls forming a rough rectangle with a sentinel tower at each
corner. In the centre rose the white keep, and from its roof flew the banner of the PCO. Even from twenty clicks away the
Tower emanated overbearing power, its flint walls glinting with embedded broken glass and coils of razor wire. Carl looked
up to the screen, hoping to see a harbinger of the dävine, but there was only a single gull, its wings flexing in the airy
currents, swinging back and forth as if it were suspended from a wire.
They drove back to London in contemplative silence, and the Lawyer of Blunt let them out at Marble Arch; for while he had
to go about the town canvassing signatures for Böm's brief and arranging for its deposition at the Lawd Chancellor's Department,
it was decided that the other two would take a turn in the Royal hunting park. Dave f-forfend, the Lawyer stammered, b-but
should our plans go awry you may soon find yourselves in close confinement.
As the Taffy cabbie whipped up the jeejees and the limmo pulled away in the direction of Selfridges, Böm realized they had
made a bad mistake. The noise in the square was loud and mounting, while from the Edgware Road came the sound of chanting.
He looked up and saw that the roofs of the buildings were thronged with seeseeteevee men. The chanting grew closer. It was
the same horde who had been terrorizing the mummies and opares in Westminster the day before, and now there were far more
of them â perhaps as many as two or three hundred dads. As before, they were tightly packed and marching at a run. Their uniform
black T-shirts, their high-topped white trainers, their gnashing teeth â it all gave them the aspect of a many-legged, many-headed
beast intent on some monstrous and predatory act.
They were preceded by twenty or so mounted Drivers and a platoon of chaps with shooters at the ready. As they came into the
square some fanned out to stop the traffic, while another posse escorted a sweatbox towards the Arch itself. O my Dave! Antonë
exclaimed. It's an execution, we don't want to get mixed up in this. It was, however, too late for them to escape, for along
with the dads and Drivers came the London mob in all its perversity: lawds, bondsmen, tradesdads and chavs. Carl saw the most
gussied-up dandies cavorting alongside the filthiest slubberdegullions. From the Queers' Quarter came blokes who looked like
Antonë, plump, digit beards, soft hands in their belts. There were opares and mummies mixed up in the ruck, with the ubiquitous
urchins darting here and there, snatching at cockpieces, cutting at purses. A great proportion of the crowd were mullered,
for the landlawds of the city's numerous boozers, not content with plying their wares to the mob as it processed from the
Tower to Marble Arch, had seen fit to join it. There were many little vans bumping along with barrels resting on them from
which chasers could be bought for a penny. The stench of jack was overpowering.
Fukk ve SeeEssA! Fukk ve SeeEssA! the angry dads chanted. Some held aloft effigies of mummies lashed to long poles. The cloakyfings
of these dummies bulged in a peculiar and obscene fashion as they were thrust up and down. The mob propelled all before them
â and Carl and Antonë found themselves in the front row of the spectators, who, trapped between ranks of dads and Drivers,
ranged about the arch. The sweatbox had been drawn up to the pale-pink cliff, and a pair of warders roughly extricated a mummy
from the inside. She screamed and tried to claw her way back in to where three children could be seen, weeping and beseeching.
The warders were having none of this and dragged her up a ramp on to the top of the arch, then over to where a barbecue was
erected amid a pile of faggots.
Fukk ve SeeEssA! Fukk ve SeeEssA! The dads sank the poles bearing the effigies in the dusty ground and linked arms. Two hefty
chavs in the livery of the PCO stepped forward into the square. One bore an immense drum on his back, which the other beat
upon. The defeaning reports of the drum reverberated from the crete frontage of the Odeon, and the crowd began to fall silent,
save for a few urchins who were climbing about on the scaffold. A Driver stepped forward, while behind him a fony unrolled an A4, and once he had it in his mirror the Driver began to read
in a deep, stentorian voice that was clearly audible to the whole assembly:
â That you, Sharún Lees, on three separate occasions, did wilfully retain your three kiddies and keep them concealed from
their lawful dad; for this heinous malefaction, a profaning of the Book and the Wheel and of Dave Himself, you have been sentenced
in the Children and Families Advisory and Support Services Forecourt to be burned and the noxious exhaust of your chellish
body piped into your kiddies. Let it be marked, no Changeover â
â No lyf! the crowd bayed.
â No Breakup.
â No Nolidj!
â No Knowledge.
â No Nu Lundun! No Nú Lundun! No Nú Lundun!
Mercifully, the mummy had fainted dead away as the sentence was read. In the sweatbox the kiddies threw themselves against
the bars. Another driver stepped forward and began to pour glistening moto oil over the mummy, the barbecue and the faggots.
A third came afterwards with a lighter. There was a moment's stillness â then 'Fumf!' The mummy was a writhing, pulsing, fat-spitting
firework. Fonies pushed forward a funnel-shaped contrivance attached to a bellows and positioned it so as to suck up the noxious
exhaust. It was conducted through a pipe and into the sweatbox, the irony shutters of which were slammed against the whey
faces of the children and bolted by attendant Drivers.
'Fumf! Fumf! Fumf!' All through the crowd the dads had set their sinister effigies alight. The cloakyfings went up in a flash,
revealing that beneath them were bundles of live cats, tied by their necks to the poles. Their fur fizzed and flashed; they
yowled in torment. The dads began their chanting once more: Fukk ve SeeEssA! Fukk ve SeeEssA! Fukk ve SeeEssA! Fukk ve SeeEssA!
Carl could not conceive of a more horrific scene, as the pall of meaty smoke rose up over the square in poisonous billows,
and the mob eddied and moaned with evil exaltation. A thick musk of excitation emanated from the close-packed bodies around
him. The mummy was still writhing â although tongues of white flame were shooting from her eye sockets and mouth. Carl shut
his own eyes and resolved not to open them until they could escape this hell on earth.
Then he involuntarily opened them â because he'd received a sharp dig in the nape of his neck. Hanging in his visual field
was another pair of eyes â bloodshot, indifferent, very fatigued and framed by the mirror that was dangling right in front
of his face. Carl turned to his companion. Antonë also had a mirror positioned before his face and behind him stood a Driver
with a drawn blade. The crowd had fallen back on all sides, and a third Driver bearing a badge that showed the Wheel superimposed
on the Tower stepped up and unfurled an A4. He began reading in a bored voice:
â Carl Dévúsh and Antonë Böm, I arrest you both in the name of the PCO on charges of bilking, flying and treason. You will
accompany us to the Tower.
The crowd, its anarchic hysteria instantly transformed into fearful conformity, drew back to allow a wide gangway, and down
this Carl and Antonë were hustled in the direction of Park Lane.
Getting Out from Behind the Wheel
February 2003
In the sparkling-wine light police tape festooned the traffic lights and the crash barriers â the bunting of a criminally
enormous party. A police car, its blue light revolving, siren squawking suppressed whoops, shepherded people along the roadway
like a game little terrier. A volute of cloud twisted across the sky, and the cold bit into Dave's neck. He saw the already
discarded placards that littered the verge and the scores, then hundreds of demonstrators. Individually they were aimless,
yet the whole throng moved with collective determination over the churned-up sand of Rotten Row and towards Speakers' Corner.
Phyllis looked as eccentric as ever, wrapped up in a woollen coat sewn from crocheted panels of scarlet, green and yellow.
Her mad curls escaped from beneath the ear flaps of a Laplander's hat, her Dolly hands were tucked into matching mittens.
She took his cold hand in her woolly pad and squeezed it. 'The turn-out,' she said excitedly, 'it's huge. I knew â but I never
thought â so many people.' Dave saw gloomy old pranksters in harlequin tights, Socialist Worker clones in donkey jackets and
Doc Martens, laughing crocodiles of British Asian girls down from their northern redoubts, their Muslim Association of Great
Britain placards held at jaunty angles. Between these factions, stolidly tramping, in their pastel anoraks and buff fleeces,
was a great mass of ordinary punters, who, even to Dave's jaundiced eye, seemed secure in the knowledge that by their
sheer weight of numbers
they could prevent the bombers from taking off and Stop the War!
Through a scraggy barrier of trees and over the balding grass with every yard they gained the compression of bodies grew greater.
'Palace-stein! Palace-stein! Palace-stein!'
I'm not racial,
Dave admonished himself â yet their fanaticism smelled alien, a dangerous spice, saffron and suicide. A head taller than the
crowd, he was borne forward on an undulating carpet of scalps, entire acres of hair combed over by the teeth of the breeze.
Up ahead the scene was Babylonian: flags and banners waved, obelisks of speakers loomed on a stage, only the yowl of feedback
stopped the subsidence of this era into the last.
All masses â no matter how pacific â contain within their sumps many thousands of litres of adrenalin the motor oil of rage.
Dave Rudman felt this potential conflagration slopping about them as he and Phyl were driven forward to the steady, four-stroke
beat of a massive Lembeg drum. Then they were trapped against a barrier fence. Through its wide mesh police snappers in blue-checked
baseball caps probed their telephoto lenses. A line of stewards sporting fluorescent tabards bearing the legend IN THE NAME
OF ALLAH, THE MOST COMPASSIONATE, THE MOST MERCIFUL struggled to keep back the demonstrators, who barked, 'Who let the dogs
out?!' before yelping their own reply, 'Bush! Bush!'
Dave felt himself detaching, lifting up into the now lustreless sky where surveillance helicopters chattered and swooped.
He felt for Phyllis's mitten â a soft anchor â to ground him, but it was gone. She was gone. He began frantically scanning
thousands of faces.
Izzat'er? Izzat? Izzat?
The rant started inside his pock-marked face.
Fucking lefties ⦠dumb cunts ⦠middle-class tossers
⦠'Who let the dogs out?! Bush! Bush!'
They don't even know where they fucking are
⦠Pakkies down from Bradford ⦠The fucking stewards couldn't find
their way to Tottenham Court Road â¦
He began shouldering his way back through the whippy limbs of this human scrub, still looking for Phyl but understanding that
it was pointless. When he reached a clearing where three whey-faced kiddies were drinking cans of Mecca-Cola in a shieling
of milk crates, he had a moment of clarity. They weren't having sex yet,
but we're like a married couple
⦠at ease in ways both profoundly irritating and comforting;
we aren't
having sex,
although he couldn't have said which of them was resisting the slide into that damp pit of guttural obfuscation;
we
aren't having sex â
nevertheless he'd agreed to come along on this idiotic march because â¦
I love her.
The air was crinkled up like cellophane by the exhaust fumes. It stank; he stank. He felt the ingrained lubricant of a thousand
thousand fill-ups slide between his fingertips and the shaky rim of the wheel. His past was a mirage, glimpsed across the
stained forecourt of time. Through the miserable slot of the Fairway's windscreen he could see the glistening skin of the
Swiss Re Building, as like some monstrous penis it self-erected over the City. It already had a nickname â the Gherkin â but
a proper cockney wouldn't ask for a gherkin and chips,
he'd say wally
â¦
gissa wally.
As the cockney wally rose up, it dumbly forced new parallaxes on the earthbound toilers. Dave Rudman had never felt so imprisoned
in the wobble boards of the cab's bodywork, so coiled in razor wire, so commanded to KEEP LEFT, GIVE WAY and STOP. The CCTV
cameras angled across the box junctions; the traffic wardens like urban Watusi with hand-held computers for spears; the cops
in their cars; the PCO in their concrete bunker â every square foot of London was accounted for, taxed and levied. He looked
about him at the other cars in the jam. The drivers sat, mobile-phone hands clamped to their aching heads, suffering the neuralgia
of ceaseless communication. The radio on the Fairway's dash muttered on: 'Lorry shed its load on the A3 Kingston Bypass .
. . stop-start traffic there ⦠Lane out on the Marylebone Flyover â¦' Dave had become a cabbie to miss out on the supervisory
eyes that made adult working life another fidgety classroom, yet here he was '⦠coming into junctions fifteen and sixteen
on the Emtwenny5, that's the Emfaw and the Emfawty, lane and speed restrictions are in force â¦' with the worst guvnor
of all â insecurity. Insecurity and the Flying Eye, its rotary eyelid blinking overhead.
Dave pulled into a side street and turned off the ignition. He got out his pills and began to pop the antidepressants out
of their plastic blisters. He didn't stop until the gulches of his jeans were choked with little white boulders. Then he opened
the door, picked up his change bag, got out and chinked away, scattering dumb Smarties as he went. He didn't look to see if
he was parked on a yellow line; he didn't even bother to lock the cab. He didn't care. It was over â he'd grabbed the fat moment.
He was free.
As he walked, Dave Rudman looked not up to the sky, nor around him at the brutal buildings, but at the ground, at the tarmac
upon which his life had been rolled out. Tarmac blue-black and asphalt dimpled; tarmac folded and humped like a grey-brown
blanket; tarmac cratered, bashed and gashed. This was the petrified skin he'd been feeling all his prostituted life, its texture
transmitted through rubber tread and steel shock-absorber. Dave felt a compulsion to kneel down on the kerb and bow his head
into the gutter â to lick the abrasive surface with his rough old tongue.
Dave licked between Phyllis's shoulder blades and drove his tongue down her grooved back. She shuddered and, grabbing his
thigh, pulled it up and over her own so that he half straddled her. In the confusion of their bodies â his hairy shanks, her
sweaty thighs, his bow-taut cock, her engorged basketry of cowl and lip â there was clear intent; so that when he penetrated
her, they moved into and out of one another with fluid ease, revving and squealing, before arriving quite suddenly.
Dave and Phyl were having sex in her cottage outside Chipping Ongar. They'd had sex the previous evening after a healthy meal
of cauliflower cheese. They had woken twice â perhaps three times â in the night to do it again, and now, with the larks crying
over the fields outside, they were having sex once more. There was no billing or cooing between them â mouth chanced upon
mouth infrequently. She pulled him into her spasmodically, her heels jamming on his hips. He felt the solidity of her â she
wasn't blubbery but taut with fat. He plunged and rebounded. No words were spoken â yet neither doubted that they were making
love, plenty of honeyed love to be stored for the future in their cells, should there come another time of scarcity when they
needed replenishing.
In the late morning Dave walked into the little town to get the Sunday papers. Even in brisk March, with branches still bare,
and rain showers moving across the Essex landscape like shading on a drawing, the gathering heat of summer was resounding
through the land. He paused by the ancient moat of the long-since-levelled castle and lost himself in the subsurface bloom
of duckweed. This would be a special day â they would not fret or worry. Towards evening they might walk across the fields
to Good Easter, watching the returning flocks of swifts clench, then relax in the umber sky. The letters had been sent, the
calls had been made, the reports had been written. At Phyllis's instigation Dave had taken matters into his own hands. Lawyers
â they both agreed â would only sop up money and make things worse, like they always did. Better to make as direct an approach
as possible and state â with clarity and humility â that if Carl was at all willing, and his mother would permit it, Dave
would like to resume seeing his son.
Dave ranked up by the cop shop on Old Burlington Street and walked down towards the offices of Undercroft Mendel. Since coming
off the antidepressants he still felt the elbow-jabs of reckless thoughts â but mostly he felt better. Much better. Even so,
he couldn't judge whether his damp palms were a withdrawal symptom or a dread anticipation. The newspaper rattle of pigeons
taking flight startled him â and he mounted the steps feeling dizzy, fists clenched in the pockets of his old tweed jacket.
There were no sugar-dusted shortbreads or gold-rimmed coffee cups. There was no propelling pencil or unctuous manner. Instead
of tipping back in his chair, Mitchell Blair leaned forward, doodling nervily on a yellow legal pad in unadorned biro. 'The
thing is, Mr Rudman ⦠at the end of the day' â he picked out demotic phrases from a mental file he maintained for such
occasions â 'it isn't down to the Lord Justice, CAFCASS or even the courts' â he glanced towards the reassuringly open door
â 'whether or not you resume contact with, er, Carl.'
'With my son, you mean.' Despite the rehearsals he'd been through with Phyl and every internal restraint he'd imposed upon
himself, Dave was already warming up.
'Well, that's precisely the issue.' At this, Blair, losing all professional detachment, ducked down behind a barricade of
heavy volumes. 'Ms Brodie has raised the matter of Carl's paternity. To be blunt, she doesn't believe that you are his biological
father.'
Dave shook his head slowly â a great lummox pole-axed by a low blow. He felt uncomprehending and untidy. He groped automatically
for a cigarette, although, even while so doing, he was appalled to hear his voice going on without him: 'Whaddya mean?'
