Will Self - The Book of Dave

At first tariff on the day after his best friend had first lain with his wife, Fred took the clay bottle he had earmarked from the brick dresser in the Funch gaff. He also took a small tank of moto oil and some twine. From a hidden nook in the Shelter itself, he retrieved a missive he had laboriously composed. He slipped across the home field through the spectral dawn, over the brow of the hill between the moto wallows, then down into the Wess Wud. At the Perg, he retrieved his odd craft and hoisted it over his shoulder. He walked on through the dips and hollows of Sandi Wud, hardly conscious of his progress, lifting his legs over the trunks of fallen trees as if they belonged to another.

On the very spit of land where he'd been betrayed, Fred Ridmun mated earthenware and wood. The bottle sat snugly in the hollow he'd carved out of the deck. He rolled up the ragged sheet of A4 — a blank endpage torn from the Book itself — then inserted it in the neck. He stoppered the bottle and wound the oiled twine around its neck, pulling each loop tight. Then he lashed the bottle to the pedalo with strips of moto hide. He erected a little mast whittled from a sapling in a notch forward of the cargo, then rigged a diminutive sail of precious London cloth.

Pulling the keel of the pedalo over the shingle, the scraping sound merging with the rattle of the waves, Fred was aware that he was doing something that had been done before in times of distress. When, in the era of his great-great-grandparents, the pox had carried off half the island's population, just such a vessel had been dispatched to Chil. There was every chance that the prevailing currents would fail him, or that the little craft would become waterlogged and sink. However, if it was spotted by a Chilman, recovered and the bottle opened, and if the message was understood, then taken on to its intended recipient, the crude phonics Fred had scrawled could brook no misinterpretation: FLIAR ON AM. DAD SEZ EE IZ DAVE. CUM NAH PLEEZ KWIK MISTAH GREEVS. Fred Ridmun pushed the pedalo off and sat back on his haunches. A thin smile cut through his sharp features as the wind caught the patch of sail and the craft began to slap up and over the waves, heading due northeast. It was a providential course — for him.

Two nights later the equinoctial headlight rose over the big lagoon, and it was an earthy blood-red in colour. In the far distance sheet lightning slashed across the Surre hills. The restive Hamsters gathered outside their gaffs. They soon became terrified, because, as if these portents weren't bad enough, when it was barely above the horizon the headlight began to be blotted out by a black crescent that moved slowly but inexorably across its flys peckled surface. Effi Dévúsh cried out in the crowd that huddled in the streambed, saying:

— Iss a syne orlrì, me luvs, issa bluddë syne! Iss ve édlyt uv Dave, thass fer sure. Ees pu í on, an nah ees turned í off. An U wanna no wy?

There was a groaned chorus of whys from the other Hamsters.

— Eyel tell U wy — ees turned í off so as ee can run that fukkin fliar dahn!

She swivelled to confront her son, who, unnoticed by the others, had come among them, and now stood in their midst, his face covered with thick, fearful sweat and dark with dreadful incomprehension.

'Orlright, put 'em on full,' Dave Rudman called to Kemal the mechanic. The headlights flared in the gloom of the railway arch. 'Orlright, orlright' — Dave was blinded for several seconds, until earthy Victorian brickwork swam back from the blood-red aureoles and artificial mauve sundogs — 'now try dipped.' The lights flared again but with less intensity. 'Full again. . and DIPPED.' Kemal turned the lights off and came out from the cab shaking his tousled head; Dave stepped towards him, his face dark with incomprehension. 'Beats me,' he said, 'if it's not the bulbs.'

'Could be the alternator,' said Kemal, patting down the pockets of his oily overalls for his cigarettes.

'Yeah, yeah,' Dave laughed, 'it's always the alternator, innit? I dunno why I'm bothering, it ain't like I'm doing nights.'

Dave was renting from Ali Baba on the half-flat for eighty quid a week, and the night driver he shared the cab with was a fucking animal. Dave had given him the nickname Mister Hyde. Strictly speaking Dave didn't have to return the cab to the garage in Bethnal Green until eight, although he usually had it back an hour earlier. Early, clean and filled up — even though only the last was his responsibility. This particular evening Dr Jekyll had prevailed on Kemal to examine the headlights, which he'd noticed weren't working when he went through the Blackwall Tunnel.

Mister Hyde showed no such consideration. After the night shift the cab was always filthy: the ashtrays full, the driver's compartment rattling with discarded soft-drink cans. One morning when he picked the cab up, Dave found a used condom glued to the back seat by spunk and hair. Hyde was also nicking diesel, a couple of quid every fill-up. It was pathetic criminality, because ever since the Big-fucking-Bang the year before, the City Boys had been hellbent on booting the Footsie right back up again. If you got a getter, they'd double up on the meter, maybe treble it. Dave had whole days of cream fares splurging across town. He harvested tourists as if they were wheat and he was driving a fucking combine 'arvester. While Mister Hyde didn't even keep up with his rent, which was fucking stupid … You never owe a Turk. Never.

Ali came out from a glassed-off office — a heavy man with iron-filing hair who walked on the balls of his feet. His top lip bulged as if he had a moustache growing inside of it. 'Your man,' he said, showing Dave peg teeth,' 'e juss rang, 'e ain't gonna be in.'

'Oh, yeah.'

'Yeah, you wan' the cab?' Ali jabbed a tripod of fingers at the old Fairway. It was a gambler's gesture: twist, fold, hit me again.

'Um … well… yeah … why not? Ta.'

'My plezzure.' Ali stalked off again. Kemal tootled smoke and a high-pitched note. Dave realized the mechanic was giggling — but at whom?

At around seven thirty, after he'd dropped off the cab, Dave Rudman was in the habit of stopping by the old Globe in Stepney for a drink with his mates. By day Dave kept a lid on it, but, after a few beers and a row or five of barley, he was ready for anything. The quiet pub funnelled into the noisy bedlam of a dance club. They went up west to the Wag or Camden Palace, or out to the sticks, where innocuous doors turned out to be fissures leading to subterranean reservoirs of sweat. At the end of a shift Dave got out of the cab feeling like a fucking cripple, so he liked the dancercise, but it was mostly home alone, or, even if accompanied by a damp, drunk girl, alone again by morning, a cooling depression in the pillow beside him.

The girlfriend Dave had when he was a teenager in Finchley went off to university. Some of the lads he'd been at school with went as well, and most of the others got management trainee positions and were issued with middle-class uniforms. Dropping out was passé — dropping in was cool. Into business, into the City, into property, into lifestyle. Everyone wanted mobility — on a graph. Dave Rudman should have been with them but he baulked. He didn't want to go away to work, or study, or even score cheap hash abroad. All Dave's peers wanted to get out of London — at least for a bit — while Dave wanted to go deeper in. Lun-dun — how could such leaden syllables be so magical? He craved London like an identity. He wanted to be a Londoner — not an assistant manager on twelve grand a year, married to Karen, who liked Spandau-fucking-Ballet.