Will Self - The Book of Dave

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.

Turning to look along the row of mourners, Dave saw a familiar profile etched against another — a juxtaposition that made both faces more fleshy. It was a profile he'd been expecting to see — the arrogant flick of surfer hair, the ski-jump nose, the pink glisten of well-irrigated skin. 'Gary was a man who loved his kids more than anything else,' the voice at the lectern was saying; 'he put them before everything, and when he died he was climbing that wheel for little Jason and Amber.' Little Jason was as big as his dad now and I swear he's stoned. The Fighting Father cleared his throat and consulted the text he'd prepared on the back of an envelope. 'I'm sorry, Dave,' Phyllis hissed, 'but I can't take any more of this — I'm going.'

Dave left with her. Outside the chapel of rest the hearse was reversing on the gravel. It was a brand new TX2 that had been chopped in half and the bodywork extended. Hand in hand, Dave and Phyllis near skipped down the Avenue of dwarf cypresses — it was a little moment of levity before the burden of it all descended on them. Looking back, Dave saw that the Skip Tracer had come outside and was standing in the porch, blotting his face with a brilliant mauve handkerchief. Dave thought he might call after them; instead all he did was smile — a tight little grimace — and raise his hand for a valedictory chop. Dave Rudman never saw a London taxi cab again without thinking of that hearse, obscene and elongated. He never saw a cab again without picturing its passenger as a cadaver and its driver as a sullen undertaker.

When Christmas was past Dave took the two exercise books that had lain abandoned on top of a bookcase in the snug sitting room. He put them in a Jiffy bag he'd bought at the newsagents in Chipping Ongar. He wrote a letter to accompany them on their journey to the stranger who used to be his son. Bloody odd — I know, mate … might as well hear it from me. At the end of the day — you can throw these away — or keep them … It's up to you … Don't want to lay anything on you — I quite understand … it's difficult to explain … So he didn't, only signed off: I'm sorry — truly I am … because at long last he truly was.

The daffodils stalked from the copses in January — the apple blossom burst before the end of February. Winter, outgunned, retreated before the creeping, vegetative barrage. When the clouds rolled back, the sun had the switched-on intensity of a sunlamp, its ultraviolet rays frazzling the new shoots. Towards Harlow big cock chimneys belched out smoke, and in the lanes exhaust fumes lay in swathes, like the contrails of permanently grounded aircraft.

The cab-sale money was gone, and Dave looked for an earner. Driving a minicab was only logical. He applied to a couple of local outfits, and for the first time in months switched on his mobile phone. There was a text message waiting for him that announced itself with a sterile chirrup. It was from Carl: 'Thanks 4 the lettuce.'

Dave drove Macedonians to pull potatoes and Poles to wrench onions. The unwelcome guest workers dossed down fifteen to a labourer's cottage — or even in corrugated-iron barns on the farms. They clubbed together to hire Dave, so he could take them to the supermarket, where they bought gut-rot booze. He needed little knowledge for these A-to-B runs, no gazetteer imprinted on his cerebellum, no immemorial arrogance. So Dave drove stubbly old people to daycare centres and hairy housewives to be waxed. He picked kids up from school because some mum had rolled over her 4wd, then endured their torment behind his back. He drove City getters back from the tube terminus at Epping to their peculiar gated communities — crescents of modern semis, double-glazed, red-roofed, and marooned in fifty-acre fields of oilseed rape, so bright yellow that they jaundiced the sky above.

'Support price is good,' the farmer, Fred Redmond, explained; except that to the minicab driver's ears his words sounded like 'Suppawt prys iss gúd,' because Redmond spoke an earthy Essex dialect. 'Folk are always moanin' on abaht the fucking E E Yew, but I tellya, Dave, wivaht the subsidë awl this land would be owned by wun bluddë corporation or annuva.' Not that Redmond was nostalgic about the past; he had a grown-up son who was a computer programmer in Toronto. 'And good-bluddë-luck to 'im.' Nor did he view himself as some noble steward of the native sod: 'Thass awl bollix, I've grubbedup 'edjez an' sprayed pestyside wiv the bess uv 'em.'

Even so, at first on short limps back from the pub — for Fred had a gammy leg — and then on longer stumps over fields and through woods, the farmer — seemingly inadvertently — began to instruct the ex-cabbie in the naming of the parts.

At first it was the crops — the wind-dimpled expanses of young wheat, the feathery rows of barley, the rattling stooks of alien maize. Then, as they wandered further, Fred Redmond deciphered the groves of crinkle-leafed oaks with their understorey of spiky green broom, saw-leafed nettles and ferny bracken. Before he moved out to the sticks, Dave would have been hard pressed to tell a silver birch from an ash. Now he discovered himself affectionately stroking the smooth bark of beeches and grateful for the whippy stalks of brambles, pricking him through his jeans into attention.

The pretty, yellow-gold furze flowers reminded Dave of posh, overprotected offspring, guarded by savage thorny fences. When Dave commented on this, Fred drew his attention to rampaging banks of blackthorn — 'Fukkin pest — but good fer keepin' off cattle' — before leading him down to the River Roding, a weedy rill that rived his own land, and showing him the mighty umbels of the Giant Hogweed growing on its shady banks. 'Iss tock-sick,' the farmer explained, 'weird bluddë poison — í doan bovver U when U rubbub against the stems — onlë layter when iss exposed to sunlyt.' Fred was charged with forcibly deporting these ecological migrants who'd muscled in from the Caucasus in the past quarter-century, but, as he put it: 'MAFF don't givva toss az long az the kiddies don't get 'urt. Beesyds — less I ware a fukkin space suit I get burned sumffing chronic cuttin' í dahn.' He pulled up a moleskin trouser leg to show Dave the white patches where his leathery skin had swelled with gleet, then burst.