Will Self - The Book of Dave

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.

Winter was a long time in arriving that year. The earth refused to relinquish its heat, no winds came and the leaves, declining to exit the trees, remained there limp and furled. Waking from shameful dreams in which all his past liaisons — including his marriage — took on a fantastical, honeyed hue, Dave Rudman would stagger down the stairs to the kitchen, where pensionable flies drowsed on the rough-adzed windowsills. Death had never felt so close before — not even in the fibrillating heart of his madness. Death's dust coated every surface, and he felt a frantic irritation with pernickety manual tasks — flicking at the waxed cardboard spout of a milk carton — that he was certain would haunt him for ever. Dave trudged across the cloying fields and watched the local farmer harrowing, a mob of seagulls in the tractor's banded wake. He'd had the occasional pint in the local pub with the farmer — and he raised his arm in ordinary acknowledgement.