The Book of Dave (63 page)

It bothered him much less than he thought it would. It helped that Fred handled the weapon with studious, unflashy movements:
aiming, firing, breaking, ejecting, reloading – a piece worker on a cat-food production line. The rabbits' eyes shone in the
big wattage, the gun reported, the dust and cordite smoke cleared to reveal another brown bump. They packed it in close to
three in the morning; the back of the pick-up was lumpy with little corpses. 'What'll you do with 'em?' Dave asked, hoping
for utilitarian news, rabbit stew canned and exported to starving Africans. 'Lanfil,' Fred snapped. 'Up bì Arlo.'

'U shúd C ve playce,' he resumed half an hour later when they were back at the cottage and companionably gulping sweetly burning
Jack Daniels. 'Iss lyke ve surfiss uv ve moon, Uje pyls uv rubbish, Uje mobs uv gulls cummin from ve C. Eye tellya, Dave,'
Fred said, relighting his mouse turd of a roll-up and blowing a thin thread of smoke into the tassels of the lampshade, 'Eye
sumtyms fink iss awl gon arsy-versy, yernowoteyemeen? Ve C az cumminta ve lan – ve lan az gon aht 2 C.'

The past has become our future and in the future lie all our yesterdays
…
Was it a stale aphorism freshly baked, or an ancient pop song dimly recalled? Dave could not have said.

They went out often after that – the old farmer, the reddish-brown hide on his neck creviced like sun-baked mud; and the ex-cabbie,
potbelly and arm wattles melting off him in the sweat of their night-time exertions. Another unlikely duo – a dad in search
of a lad, a lad wandering fields hazy blue with memories. Fred acquired his own tea mug at the cottage, his own chair and
cap hook. They would sit up well past dawn – not exactly getting drunk, although certainly not staying sober. Phyllis didn't
mind, Dave came to her in the dewy period before she arose to go to the city. Came to her lean and lovelorn, gently athletic.

One night in mid August they came back from the lamping and got
fucking lashed.
Dave was relieved Fred didn't become maudlin, only tight-lipped, little dribs of sadness escaping with his fag smoke. Yet
they both exposed their mummy selves that night, Fred regretting the lack of understanding he had shown to his son: 'Eye wannid
im on ve lan – vares bin Ridmuns eerabaht fer sentries,' while Dave regretted everything – and nothing – all at once, for
surely
it's only
a tosser who says he regrets nothing at all – it means he remembers
nothing … be-because to remember is to regret.

Too pissed to drive, Fred tottered off about six in the morning. Dave came out to see him on his way. The old farmer's boots
left crushed swathes in the unmown grass, each with its own scattering of mashed flower heads – dandelions, buttercups and
daisies – twisted like wreaths. Fred forgot his shotgun, which was leaned up against the bellying plaster by the front door
– as commonplace as an umbrella. Seeing it when she came down at seven, Phyl went back upstairs and gently shook Dave awake.
'Fred's left his gun in the house,' she said. 'Do make sure he comes over and gets it, we don't want any bother.' Dave grunted,
'Yeah, yeah, no bother, love, I'll get on it.' She felt his cheek against hers – as pocky as a newly surfaced road. She inhaled
his shitty whisky breath and tousled his sweaty tonsure. He flumped back into the bed – she turned, went downstairs and drank
a cup of rosehip tea standing at the draining board. She fetched her handbag, looked at the shotgun once more, then shut the
door carefully, listening for the latch to fall. She set off across the fields, on her way to catch the bus from Chipping
Ongar to Epping.

'Ewer runnin abaht tahn givvinit larj!' Rifak spat. He was in thrall to this woman, who was – his colleague thought – nothing
special, only another cockney whore who got her tits out in a pub on the Mile End Road every Sunday lunchtime, so she could
pick up a few quid from the dissolute boozers. However, Rifak, having stuck his cock in her arse, her mouth and latterly her
cunt, before slapping her about a bit, was now convinced that he possessed her more than he even possessed his wife. His wife
was a similarly abused girl, flown in from Central Anatolia and confined to the hejab and a flat above an upholsterer on the
Lower Clapton Road. Here she had endured two murderous pregnancies in rapid succession, stuffing her frightened face with
honey cakes, while receiving the hushed sympathy of other mummies.

By contrast Mustafa's phone conversation was measured and – h e felt – subtle. Their boss, who lived behind redbrick walls in
Cobham, liked to have situation reports – and Mustafa was happy to oblige. He held the razor-thin mobile so that it shaved
his hairy ear, and spoke eloquently of how this account was being pursued while that one had been closed. His Knowledge was
comprehensive, the entire conurbation – its grids of overpriced, semi-detached hutches, and sclerotic arteries clogged with
superfluous travel agencies – resolved into sums owed and the dizzying interest rates charged on them. In Mustafa's inner
eye, he saw the city laid out as a diorama, the mounting sums rising in fluorescent plumes of digits from unsuccessful beauty
salons and the serviced apartments where Toyota Lexus drivers fiddled with Romanian tarts.

They pulled off at Junction 7 and had breakfast in the Little Chef. During his seventeen years in London Mustafa had acquired
a taste for slopping up runny egg yolks and the juice of grilled tomatoes with a scoop of bread. While performing these expert
manipulations, he lectured Rifak on what a fool he was making of himself. Of the job in hand there was nothing to be said.
It was routine.

By the time they had paid their bill and walked out to the car park, the sun was pummelling its way through the overcast sky.
Ten or twenty wasps swayed by an overflowing bin, alighting on ketchup-smeared paper to feed. The two Turks got back in the
cab, drove up to the roundabout and took the A414 for Chipping Ongar. Peering through the windscreen, Mustafa still found
the monochrome fields and shaved copses lush and unsettling. He regretted the two sausages, the two rashers of bacon, the
two fried eggs, the two grilled tomatoes, the two axe heads of fried potato mush, the two bits of toast. His belly gurgled
like a nearly empty fuel tank.

Then he heard a cab come grunting down the lane and squeal to a halt.
Can't be a mate – they'd've called …An' it's too far for a fare
… The small crystalline facts he had ignored tinkled and shattered. He knew who it was even before he saw their hot cheeks
pumped up with blood.
It was me they were looking for all along
…
Looking at
Ali Baba's . .
.
Looking at Phyl's work . .
.
it was them as called Mum
and Dad in all…
Dave was forced to conclude that
I wanted this to
'appen,
and, more defiantly,
I was justified – why should I pay that
cunt back, why? I was off my bleedin' rocker …
Yet there were also his own words, echoing around the M25, all the way from the hackneyed past:
You never owe a Turk. Never.

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
…
?