The Book of Dave (47 page)

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 panniÂkins 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.

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 fucking 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.