Will Self - The Book of Dave

'Annuva fing,' Redmond continued as they trudged on through the meadows, the dew of late morning soaking them to the crotch while blackbirds gorged in the hawthorn, 'iss served me well, the 'ogweed, iss lyke a letric fence — keeps folk offa my piggery.' Not that there were many folk to be seen. It never stopped impinging on Dave that, despite the squawk of televisions from behind leylandii and the ever-present roar of Japanese engines, once he stepped from the road there it was, the land, undulant and encompassing, with shimmery poplars shading the river beds and damp alders trailing their limp, phallic catkins.

Dave took to walking across to Redmond's piggery so he could commune with the pinky-tan beasts that grubbed in the dust or slumbered in their iron humpies. Looking at them from behind a taut, ticking strand of volts, he would allow himself to see, what? Some humanity in their eyes, sunk deep in their fleshy snouts — some delicacy too in their arched legs and high-heeled trotters. They would come snuffling up to him, and even though he knew he shouldn't — that such sentiments were inapposite for the bacon of the near future — he found himself addressing them with the baby names he'd once bestowed on Carl: 'Little Man' and 'Champ', 'Runty' and 'Tiger'. When he turned away the hogs ambled off, back to their muddy wallows.

As the summer days stretched out, Phyllis registered the change in Dave's state of mind. Letting him get over it had, she thought, been the right approach. He began to shave regularly, bought her bottles of the sweet German wine she liked and brought her bunches of wild flowers back from his rambles. One night in July they made love for the first time in three months; then spent, the two of them lying like beached porpoises on the salty mattress, she dared to murmur, 'It was prob'ly better that way for him.'

'Better in what way?' He nuzzled up to her, a hand fanning over the broken blood vessels that gathered, like tributaries, in the sunken valley at the small of her back. 'Better' — she hunkered up and pulled a pillow underneath her breasts — 'before those Turks caught up with him — the heavy mob that was after him for the cab debt.' She feared she'd said too much, because Dave rolled away from her and reached for his cigarettes on the bedside table. 'Them?' He spat fresh smoke and a rare gob of cabbie nous. 'They wouldn't've done much to him, duffed 'im up a bit maybe — broke 'is nose. They want their money same as everyone else — dead blokes ain't great earners.'

Was Phyllis too old for it? The thought had occurred to Dave when they started sleeping together, and she waved away the condoms with their ludicrous packaging of a chastely smiling youthful duo. She didn't say she was on the pill, only that it wasn't necessary. She still has her period, though … it was irregular, that much he noticed — now that he was noticing things again, things outside of himself. Best not push it … Not that there was time they were out of time — more that I gotta … accept what's happened … I'm gonna be one of those blokes what doesn't have kids — not ever. He couldn't forbear from connecting this realization with his behaviour towards Carl. It's payback time … even though he couldn't understand who he'd borrowed from. There was no cosmic fucking loanshark that he believed in. Not like Aunt Gladys squeaking across the Mormon basketball court in her sneakers … Devenish an' his ill-gotten dosh … Michelle even with 'er creams an' slap … They're all worshipping sumffing … like those fucking nutters totalling themselves in Bagdad … It's only that they want a heaven here, on earth.

At the back of the moat that half circled the old castle mound, a meadow unfolded and reached along to a little kids playground tucked in the far corner of a cricket pitch. Sitting on a bench sacred to the memory of a former Redmond, Dave Rudman meditatively stroked the bare ground left behind by his botched hair transplant. Dense thickets of furze and brambles extended along the edges of the field, and from these rabbits came hesitantly hip-hopping — first ones and twos, then, when this advance guard detected no danger, threes and fours. A brace of crows staggered to the ground near by, and the rabbits retreated. A bird scarer half a mile away went off with a flat 'bang', and the crows limped aloft. The rabbits came sniffing back. In the lolloping, furtive boogie of the animals, their ear-flick and paw scratch, Dave divined soft answers to the hard questions that assailed him.

After watching the rabbits for ten minutes or so, as the sun tugged up to its zenith, Dave noticed a sinister focus to their botheration — a glistening scrap on the turf that had also attracted a twister of flies. Strolling over from the bench, he found the broken necklace of vertebrae on its offal display cushion; other trinkets — the skull with semiprecious eyes, the ribcage like a gory tiara — lay a few paces off, surrounded by the parched shot of rabbit droppings. Don't push it. . Let her come to you. . She's 'ad enough drama in her life.

A shadow fell across the dead rabbit and Dave looked up to find Fred Redmond standing there with a shotgun broken over his bare arm. 'You … did you?' Dave didn't want to sound like a townie bleeding heart. 'Nah.' Redmond was offhand. 'Cooduv bin a fox — feral cá eevun. Eyem nó in ve abbit uv dissembowlin em. Still,' he continued, guiding Dave to the far side of the field with his free arm, 'vare a bluddë menniss, vay ar, lookí ve way awl viss bank eer iz riddulled wiv vare burrös — vayl av ve ole pitch subsydin if we doan keep em dahn. U shúd cumaht lampin wiv me wun nyt — gimme an and.'

Dave wasn't keen on the idea at all. But Phyllis said, 'Why don't you? It's the company he's after — since his wife died he's been on his own a lot. Besides, he's been a good neighbour to me and Steve over the years — not like some of the others round here. He's come over and done bits and bobs in the cottage — it'd be good if we could do something for him in return.'

They waited for a moonless, overcast night. Fred had an old car foglamp mounted on the back of his pick-up. 'Awl U gotta do iz aim ve beem an Eyel andul ve shoota.' They lurched along green lanes and rutted farm tracks. Fred swerved the pick-up off the road into areas of heath, where the fire-frazzled stumps of furze bushes stuck up in defensive palisades. They stopped, got out, went round and clambered up. Dazzled by the spotlight, Dave looked away into the bruised pink flesh of after-images, blinked a few times, then saw the rabbits, mute and curious, come nosing into the killing cone.

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.'