Will Self - The Book of Dave

Still, at least Carla had been importuning in an immaculate split-level house surrounded by clean, crisp snow. There had been glasses of good wine on the glossy white rug in front of the circular, bronze fireplace. Everything clean and untainted. As I walked from the terminal to the cab rank, I stepped on sticky gum and there was spit everywhere. The people's faces were so closed up … so angry. Now this cab driver, all I can see of him in the mirror is a pair of bloodshot eyes. He's exhausted, his hands shake even though they're clamped to the wheel . .Is he drunk? Withdrawing from drink or drugs — or worse? He mutters to himself, his voice is peculiar … breathless — almost squeaking. He aspirates flat swear words, cunts and fucks, mixed in with what? Is it religious stuff— talk of a book, a prophet? He's going to turn to me and say he has special telepathy or a divine hot line — but how could a schizophrenic drive a London cab? He's too old for a flamboyant psychotic breakdown, surely?

On the Chiswick flyover, Jane Bernal, despite herself, fastened her seatbelt. She did it as unobtrusively as possible, pulling the strap gently, terrified it might snag, or that the crazed cabbie would swivel round, taking his eyes off the road, and berate her for her lack of faith. Crazy indeed, to've flown across the Atlantic, the whole cabin still humming with anxiety after the Twin Towers, each locked in his or her own miserable fears of being one of the holy martyrs' Chosen Ones, and to now find myself more frightened on the ground. But as the cab shimmied on into the wet city, Dr Bernal allowed her professional detachment to come to the fore. He's ill, she thought as he turned off at Chiswick Lane and worked his way through Shepherd's Bush to the A40. He's ill and he doesn't even know it.

She'd seen men like this — and they were almost always men in her consulting room at Heath Hospital: punctilious managers who couldn't comprehend why it was that they had to check the cooker five hundred times in succession; big-fisted brawlers who assumed foetal positions on the floor; fiery entrepreneurs doused by overwhelming uncertainty. Men of this stripe went mad the same way that they got cancers or arteriosclerosis: blindly, ignorantly, the absent fathers of their own, growing maladies — 'I'm just a little short of breath', 'They're only very quiet voices' — until the skin of their denial was stretched so taut it ripped apart.

She tried to strike up a conversation with the cabbie as they turned up Lisson Grove. 'Have you got any special plans for the holiday?'

'Very low-key, love, dead quiet, me and my old people, maybe my sister and her lot,' he began plausibly enough, then trailed off into 'I'll haveta slaughter the fucking meter … Can't afford it … Serve it up to that fucking cunt of a lawyer,' under his laboured breath.

Jane tried again as they belted past the zoo. 'Will you be working much?'

'Maybe,' he sighed. 'I might go out if I can be bothered,' running down into 'If you go into the forbidden zone and start diggin' abaht … well… what can you expect?'

As the cab chuffed up Primrose Hill, its headlights and foglamps carving a tunnel through the darkness, Jane decided she ought to do more. The man was driving a runaway train — and the points were welded up ahead. My own Christmas, well, not so bad. On the day I'll go out to Hertfordshire and see Mother. Amazing, her resilience, her good humour. My God! It would be vaguely insulting if it weren't such a relief, only she could ingratiate herself with the staff in that dreadful home, charm them into caring for her, giving her treats, petting her. For the rest, silence or good music, not much food, a lot of solitude. Walks on the Heath, the time to think while others … well, often fall apart. Not so bad, not so bad at all. Being queer and self-sufficient is the best present at this season.

The cab gargled round the bend by the Washington pub and into England's Lane. 'Which one, love?' he snapped.

'Up here on the left, please, driver, by that shop, Dolce Vita.' Jane summoned herself, grasped the handle of the bag, backed out of the door pulling it after her. On the pavement she sorted through her purse and put three cashpoint-ironed twenties together with one of her cards. Best be straightforward, the only approach that ever works. 'Here's a little extra,' she said, crumpling the bundle into his waiting palm, 'and also my card — don't be put off by the title, I think I might be able to help you.'

'Ta, love.' He didn't even look at it. 'Receipt?'

'No, thank you' — he made to drive away — 'and merry Christmas, driver.' But the cab was ten yards off already, hidden by a net curtain of drizzle and moving with the heavy inertia of a bad dream.

Dave Rudman looked at the card half an hour later. After he'd parked the cab up in Agincourt Road, Gospel Oak. After he'd clamped on the steering lock and taken out the radio. After he'd unlocked the door and pushed the chewed-up pile of loan offers and credit-card teasers across the sad mat. After he'd padded up the bare stairs and into the barer bedroom. After he'd dumped his coin holder and his cash bag on the table by the window and stripped to his rancid pants. After he'd swigged from the bottle, swallowed the pills and slumped across the unmade bed. He looked at it in the glow from the street lamp and read DR JANE BERNAL, FRCPSYCH, CONSULTANT, PSYCHIATRY DEPARTMENT, HEATH HOSPITAL. He contemplated the oblong of pasteboard for long seconds, then he shredded it deliberately with his sore fingers, a tatter of quick and cuticle. Then he threw the wad towards the radiator and heard it disintegrate with his hurting ears, each little piece falling to the dusty carpet. Then he twisted and fell across the bed, and, raising one hand above his head, slowly and methodically began to bludgeon it into the pillows, as if it were a peg and his fist an unfeeling mallet.

When Symun Dévúsh had been a little boy, his mummy, Effi, often came to him and took him from his moto. She led him away so it was just the two of them, all snugglewise and cuddleup. The other mummies thought this strange — and said so — but Effi was their knee woman and a rapper like her mummy Sharun before her. Drivers came and went while the knee woman remained, a power to be reckoned with on the island of Ham. Effi told little Symun the old legends of Ham, from before the Breakup and the Book that had ordained it, legends that, she maintained, went back to the MadeinChina, when the world had been created out of the maelstrom.

Am iz shaypd lyke a feetus, she intoned, coz í iz 1. According to Effi, Ham was the aborted child of the Mutha, an ancient warrior queen of the giants, who leaped from island to island across the archipelago of Ing, pursued by her treacherous enemies. Fearing herself about to be caught, the Mutha sucked seawater into her vagina as an abortifacient, then squatted in the Great Lagoon and voided herself of Ham. When her pursuers saw the foetus, they were terrified, because it was an abomination — part moto and part human — and so they fled. The Mutha stayed and revived the corpse of her child, revived it so successfully that it grew and grew until it became an island. And on this island a second race of smaller giants sprang up, who, over years, then decades and finally centuries, gradually separated themselves into the two species of men and motos. Í woz so slo, Effi said, vat vares awlways a bí uv moto inna Amster, anna bí uv Amster inna moto. Together they cultivated Ham, establishing the fields for wheatie and the orchards for fruit, the woodlands for moto foraging and the saltings for samphire. These giants were prodigious climbers — for at that time there were many more stacks in the Great Lagoon and they were far higher. The islanders of Ham were thus rich in seafowl and moto oil, and their home was a veritable Arcadia. The giants used brick, crete and yok from the zones to build their castles, the five towers, which guarded the island from covetous invaders. They also built the groynes to protect Ham's coastline from the eroding sea. They planted the blisterweed that grew along the shoreline. An vay uzed vair bare bluddë ands 2 do í, Effi said, closing her own bony fist and shaking it in front of the little boy's wondering eyes. Vay wur vat bluddë strong an ard.