Will Self - The Book of Dave

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.

As the Fairway bucketed northeast up the MII the two men inside were engaged in two different conversations. Rifak, who was driving, had his slick earpiece-and-mic combo inserted, and so was able to carry on his row with Janice while holding the rattling old cab steady in the slow lane. Mustafa, by contrast, lay almost prone on the back seat, one of his new Gucci loafers — of which he was inordinately proud — pressed against the window. Mustafa spoke in Turkish, Rifak in crumbly English. Both men were smoking, and their consonants cut like scimitars through the silky blue swags and furbelows.

'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.

Dave Rudman was sitting at the drop-leaf table in the tiny front room of the cottage reading yesterday's paper. There was an article on the vacant fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, rubbishing the proposals for the arty sculptures that might be poised there. The paper editorialized that this prime position should only be afforded to the image of a mighty national hero. Gary — Fucker Finch dressed as 'enry the Eighth … pigeons shitting on his doublet … Fighting Fathers banner in his bronze-bloody-hands … Dave had a biro in his hand and annotated the newspaper, scrawling in the blank linchets between rips of text and photos: EMPTY, I'VE HAD ENOUGH, TAKING THE PLUNGE.

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.'