Will Self - The Book of Dave

When they finally drew up outside the two churches of Willingale, the September day, which had been brooding all morning, began to arrange itself in the purpling drapery of a coming downpour, unfurling great swags of cumulonimbus on to the shushed land. Stepping down from the high vehicle, Michelle found herself aptly diminished and was able, in all humility, to approach the similarly shrunken figures of Paul and Annette Rudman, who stood by the lychgate with their daughter, Sam, uncertain of what they should do or feel. Michelle tore away the fine embroidered cloth to show them her cropped, ginger head. They ought to … They have a right … I wish they'd under —… Chopped-off intimations of her own shame accompanied her silent obeisance. Cal hung back, while Carl advanced and applied his lips to the strange faces of his former granddad and granny.

It was a measure of the dissipation of the Church's doctrine — its moral authority knocked over as casually as a drunk topples a beer glass — that a suicide's funeral was to be held in the more youthful of these senescent buildings. But then, self-murder and the mildewed hassocks, the musty drapes, the tarnished communion rail, the worm-holy rood screen, the foxed flyleaves of the prayer books — it all sat well together. After all, the Church had murdered itself, as with every decade more and more depressed dubiousness crept into its synods and convocations, until, speaking in tongues, it beat its own skull in at the back of the vestry. Divorcees and devil-worshippers, schismatics, sodomites and self-murderers — they were all the same for the impotent figures who stood in the pulpit and peered down at pitiful congregations, their numbers winnowed out by satellite television and interest-free credit. 'Dearly beloved,' they intoned — and meant it, because if they expected anyone to pitch up at all, they had to go round to their parishioners' houses and help them on with their underpants.

Clear across the flat lands of Essex the spires stabbed up at the sky, abandoned launch pads from which the soul ships had long since blasted off. Inside them, clad in laughably obsolete uniforms — frilly laboratory coats, army surplices — the priests did kitchen-garden juju with corn dollies and ewers full of sour water. They were marionettes and mime artists, fifth-rate impressionists at the end of the world pier, officiating over a state cult for which the state no longer had any use.

Michelle stood at the back behind a ragtag bunch of mourners who could have comfortably been accommodated in three London cabs. She recognized none of them besides immediate family. Not Anthony Bohm and Jane Bernal, nor Mo from the taxi garage. Faisal was a stranger to her — and Fred Redmond a terrible sight, guilt-stricken almost to the point of expiring. Nonetheless, in her ignorance Michelle realized that this was where I came in. An involuntary hand went to her head, and she felt the impoverished frass of middle-aged hair thin on her scalp. She conjured up the cavernous, suburban Catholic churches of her childhood, where Cath Brodie wept, rent her British Home Stores garments, and even banged her head on the flags. Michelle recalled the lubricious sanctity and smelly mysticism of these venues. At least … at least it was dark in there, while here was bright and desiccated, the priest's hands were as papery as the pages he turned, his voice rustled out: 'We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord …' Phyllis was weeping softly — Annette Rudman looked straight ahead through the battleship-grey legs of a medieval knight imprisoned in a glass slide. Through force of habit her husband checked his watch and made a wager with himself on the length of the sermon.

'When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin … thou makest his beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment: every man therefore is but vanity.' Michelle Brodie smoothed black silk over her leg. All my life — my adult life — I thought the secret lay in birth … but all along the secret was that we're going to die. In that moment, with the priest starting to say a few uplifting words about a man he'd never known, all the suppleness left Michelle, body and mind slackened, and she exhaled deeply. She felt her age — and she looked it as well.

At the graveside Carl looked anywhere save at that earthy trench. He eyed a little posse of local kids who were lounging in the road on their BMX bikes … fucking chavs. Their baggy jeans rode up over their skinny shanks as they hobby-horsed up and down, scooting fallen beech mast and immature chestnuts with their trainers. Carl felt his top lip — the transparent down of the year before was hardening into stubble. 'Man that is born of woman …' dad that is born of mum '… hath but a short time to live …' is fucking dead you mean! Yet there was a sincerity in these words that not even an adolescent could sneer away, no matter how desultory the hireling's delivery: 'Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven …' Right at hand was a man who was prepared to be a father to Carl, and, intuiting that now was the right time, Cal laid a paternal hand on his shoulder.

Cal Devenish had a whole pile of old 35-mm film canisters that he kept in the detached garage of Beech House. They were mementoes of the time in his life when he'd imagined he might — despite every evidence to the contrary — become an inspired auteur, decanting his miraculous vision of the world on to celluloid. Stoner Cal worshipped the neophyte Greek goddess Media at College and, funded by indulgent Daddy, he persuaded friends to act as his crew. Together they'd shot a few thousand feet of wooden acting and recorded Cal's cardboard words. To give him some small credit, when Cal had seen the first week's rushes he was consumed by shame and canned the whole shoot. Cal threw away the stock, keeping only the cans for biros, paper clips and plastic oddments.

'Y'know,' Cal said to his son as they sat side by side on a wrought-iron bench in the garden, 'when you read over this stuff' — he chonked together the exercise books — 'you've gotta admit that Dave was on to something.' He'd fetched one of the old film canisters from the garage, and now Carl laid the two books inside the shallow tray and eased the lid on. Cal helped him seal it with a long strip of gaffer tape.

Michelle had allowed the digging of a hole beyond the teak decking that separated the lawn from the big bed where, when spring came, mail-order blooms would be planted. There were limits — even to honouring the dead. The son placed the film canister in the moist, friable earth — then the father covered it. Short of digging up the other book — the one the dead cabbie swore he'd buried there — this was what they both felt he probably would have wanted. Michelle stayed inside. She sat at the kitchen worktop, coffee cup cold on the marble slab, her fists ground so hard into her eye sockets that a belated eternity ring Cal had given her drew blood.

Carl didn't feel Dave's presence in the sigh of the autumnal wind through alder, birch or poplar. The London that spread out below them might have been impressive to a visitor — to a native it was mundane. Later father and son went out, the two intent on escaping the bad vibe. There in the road, pulled over to the kerb, was a Knowledge Boy on a scooter; or rather, a Knowledge Man, because when he pushed his full-face crash helmet up on his head to speak to them Carl saw that he was older than Dave would have been — had he lived — for another decade. 'Oi, guv,' he said, addressing Cal, 'can I get froo to Well Walk dahn vis way?' Cal looked uncomprehending — but Carl, whose Knowledge was far fresher, patiently explained to the sad old loser that he'd have to work his way back round via New End and Christ Church Hill. 'Ve streets on vis manna iss awl tangled up lyke bluddë spaghetti,' the wizened Knowledge Boy said, before he farted off on his bike.