The Book of Dave (48 page)

It came to him fully formed – a plan and how to execute it. Dave's parents were surprised to see him again so soon – and without
Carl. He seemed distracted, beating out a nervous tattoo with his shortbread on his plate. Later on he went into the garage
and rooted there. 'Aren't you going to ask him why he's taking that thing away?' Annette Rudman hectored her husband, and
Paul grunted 'No.'

It came to him in solid chunks – wrote itself, really. He typed with his index fingers, poking sense into the keyboard of
the old Apricot. He hadn't had anything to do with computers since his year at College – but that didn't matter because this
machine dated from that time. It came to him when he awoke, in the unproblematic light of day – and for that reason was not
to be doubted. It came to him as he sat in his black, terry towelling robe, driving the engine of creation forward with piston
keystrokes. Yeah – he was the Driver, a fisher of fares.

He began with the Knowledge. He had held it – now he dropped it, the tangled tarmac viscera fell out of him: Turnpike Lane
Station to Malvern Road, Bishopswood Road to Westbury Avenue, Harold Wood to Stratford (via Newbury Park, Gants Hill, Redbridge,
Wanstead, the Green Man Roundabout and Leytonstone). And he dumped the shitty points as well: Chapel Market, Angel Station,
St Mark's Church, the Craft Council, the Institute of Child Health, the Value Added Tax Tribunal. As he wrote he felt himself
ascending, chattering up over the wide river valley. He was the Flying I – he saw all the tailbacks on the Westway, the slow-moving
traffic through the Hanger Lane gyratory system, the roadworks on North­umberland Avenue, the shed lorry-load in Kingston
Vale. He grasped the metropolis in its entirety, he held in his shaky, nicotine-stained fingers each and every one of the
billions of tiny undertakings its inhabitants engaged in, which, taken in sum, added up to chaos.

Yet this was not all. In transcribing his Knowledge Dave Rudman embroidered it. This was no plain cloth word-map, but a rich
brocade of parable, chiasmus and homily.
Where to, guv?
he began each run, and when it intersected with a suitable tale he grasped it, then set it down. He kept driving, for out
on the night-time streets the map, the territory and prophecy became as one. Whipping beneath the dour facade of the Royal
Court Theatre in Sloane Square, he hit the button and began to rant …
This plonker clipped
me as I was turning into Cliveden Place. I pulls over and gives it to 'im
straight: put up or I'll call the old Bill. He digs deep, comes up wiv fifty
nicker. Result – it only cost me a score to patch the cab up. You gotta be
sharp in this business, no-wot-eye-meen? The world's out there, through
the screen, issall through the screen. It ain't out back, it ain't in the
fucking mirror. People are in the mirror . .
. And the fare – some provincial cake-decorator who'd only just quit that self-same theatre – squawked assent through the intercom,
bored and a little repulsed, but never suspecting that this was only the tip of a dirty great doctrinal iceberg which that
very morning the cabbie had been pounding into an obsolete computer.

Standing on the cobbled forecourt of Charing Cross Station – at the very epicentre of the Knowledge – a fare abused him, daring
to question the meter: 'Ten-fucking-quid! A tenner from Camden Town! You're taking the piss!' But the words wailed over the
Driver, because the Charing Cross, he happened to know, was a fake, the lions in the Square were fakes, the cars, vans and
lorries were …
toys – the whole city was toyist …
The tin snare drum of the Inn on the Park, the cruet of Westminster Cathedral …
Black
pepper, sir? All uv it Made in China … Made of fucking plastic
… and only the Driver knew what was real any more, only the Driver would come again.

A messiah mushing through the two-millennium-old city. A preacher hearkening to his Faredar, and once he has the fare on board,
not only subjecting them to his Revelation but also to his unique Doxology. For the Knowledge, once completed, naturally led
to a series of Letters to the Lost Boy from the Driver. Epistles, the intent of which was to SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT and tell
Carl MAN-TO-MAN what truly happened between his mother THE BITCH and his POOR OLD DAD.
Your mother…'chelle
… when she had you she changed, she became – ha, ha – chellish. She
wouldn't give me a fucking look-in – she cut off my fucking balls. I tellya,
mate, you're better off never going near fucking women 'cept when they're
on the blob .
. .
On the fucking rag … Once they've squeezed one aht
they ain't worf dipping yer wick in anyway … Better off with the au
pair – if Uve got one… Or any old tart… When they're mummies they
ain't got no sense … When they get older iss worse still … Fucking
boilers. When you fink abaht it the queers have got right idea – no fucking
Richards – and no bleeding kids neither.

The Knowledge may have had its glossolalia, but these dribs and drabs of humdrum misogyny flowed together into a mighty Jordan,
nothing less than A COMPLETE RE-EVALUATION OF THE WAY MEN AND WOMEN should conduct their lives together. Which, as the Driver
saw it, was mostly apart, the mummies crossing over into purdah on the far bank.

The DJ from Crash, having hailed the Fairway by Vauxhall Station long after dawn and relapsed into the stale and ghastly fug,
never supposed for a second that when the cabbie's red-rimmed eyes fixed on his via the mirror, and his mouth twisted out
the observation 'It'd be better if we never 'ad to shack up wiv 'em in the first place – don't chew agree? Knock 'em up –
then fuck off!', this was not a random remark, morning ingloriousness triggered by memories of recent sexual rejection, but
rather one proposition among hundreds that made up a comprehensive blueprint for a society in which, once the old world had
been swept away by a MIGHTY WAVE, EVERYTHING WOULD BE SPLIT DOWN THE MIDDLE.

'You take my situation,' he urged the drunk doorman, the wayward priest, the absconding cashier, the reluctant whore. 'I only
gets to see my lad every other weekend – thass not right. It should oughta be straight down the middle. Straight dahn ve fuckin'
middul. If I ad mí way …' They let him have his way, turning aside to concentrate on sandbags slumped over men-at-work
signs. '… it'd be all change on Wednesdays, right across the whole fucking country. Kiddies going from their daddies to
their mummies. 'Coz I'm not a monster – '

'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.