The Book of Dave (61 page)

Carl realized what was going to happen even before the first moto was prodded out from the pen and came waddling across to
where the Guvnor, the Hack and the Driver stood. Awluvem, he groaned. Vare gonna slorta awluvem! For once speechless, Antonë
gave Carl's shoulder a squeeze. Billi Brudi, who'd been guiding Lyttulmun by his jonckheeres, now kicked the beast on the
back of his leading arm, so he sank down and rolled over on the ground. With no preamble Fred Ridmun unsheathed his blade
– clearly, this was to be no ritual killing, no joyfully anticipated collision between men and motos. Billi did not kneel
to caress the moto – nor did the Guvnor call over the slaughter run; instead he lunged down and plunged the knife in with
a savage dig, as if to proclaim by action alone that this was guilty work. Lyttulmun, frightened and in pain, began to thrash
about. Tyga, smelling his wallow mate's blood on the breeze, reared up from behind the dyke, and Carl had to tear himself
away from the gory spectacle below so as to calm him and get him to lie down again.

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

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 moved 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.

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.