Will Self - The Book of Dave

There were only four years between the three Rudman kids, Samantha, David and Noel. They stuck together. On summer mornings they'd set off down the steep slope of Ossulton Way, carrying Tupperware containers of sandwiches in their dad's old army rucksack. Sam had five bob for Tizer and crisps. In the shoe-box house they left behind them was the senseless slaughter of a one-sided row, their father a sitting duck in the weedy pond of his hangover, their mother railing against him. In front of the children lay the valley of the Mutton Brook, and beyond it the hills of Hampstead and Highgate rose up, a mass of shrubbery, studded with the red-tiled roofs of detached villas.

It would take them hours to reach the Heath, dawdling along the Avenues of the Hampstead Garden Suburb, sweet with the smell of warm tar, fresh-cut grass and clipped privet. Dave and Noel pelted each other with the orange buckshot of rowan berries and tore satisfying slabs of bark from the silver birches. Serious Samantha — her mother's daughter — sought out the gaps in the net curtains and scrutinized the interiors of rooms, noting three-piece suites, Sanderson's wallpaper, television cabinets — all the aspirational durables.

When they reached North End Woods Dave and Noel would run and whoop, while Sam acquired her first detached home, with a hollow oak for a kitchen and a fallen beech for a living room. Noel always wanted to play cowboys and Indians; Dave had a more unusual kind of make-believe. He saw his grandfather's cab nosing through the bracken. With its goggling headlights, bonnet muzzle and toothy bumper, it was like a cartoon beast. He waved it down, and together cab and boy cruised the hummocks and dells, picking up and dropping off imaginary passengers.

They were close, the Rudman kids, too close. They clung together on the cold margins of their parents' marriage, and when the opportunity came along both oldest and youngest fled. Sam into a career, then marriage to Howard, whom she had met, dancing to 'Chirpy-Chirpy Cheep-Cheep', at the Maccabi Youth Club in West Hampstead. She was nineteen and unashamedly, anachronistically, married him for his money.

Noel fled to Aberystwyth. The family had once had a couple of mournful B&B holidays there, and Dave supposed that his younger brother imagined staying for good would be a permanent holiday. It didn't turn out that way. Dave knew they'd all regret this falling apart, yet there was nothing he could do. The Rudmans weren't the sort to make an effort, to keep up. They weren't — in the idiom of the time — people people.

After Dave dropped out of College he did eighteen months as a driver-labourer for a builder's up in Stoke Newington. He loved the rattle-bang of the three-ton flat-bed truck as it whacked over the London potholes; he loved the peculiar groan of the dinky tipper as he deftly piloted it up a pair of planks, to offload stock bricks and clayey soil into a skip. He loved everything to do with driving — driving made him feel free. It was easy, it was simple, it was open to all. The minute you got in a vehicle and turned the ignition the world was revved up with possibilities. Which would he rather have, a driving licence or an HND? No fucking contest … So he put his application into the Public Carriage Office on Penton Street and began puttering about the cavernous city on his moped, committing its concrete gulches and York stone wadis to memory.

Annette Rudman had nothing but contempt for her father. On Sunday afternoons, when his black cab came puttering down Heath View, she behaved as if it were a loan shark arriving to collect her in lieu of the interest. Fought you'd escape, didja? Fought you'd get away from the East End, my girl? Fought you'd become a teacher and move out to the bloody sticks? No chance, my love … no chance at all … Even though Benny was nothing but friendly, his daughter would put him in his place with her Received Pronunciation and her cultivated vocabulary. She made him drink endless cups of tea — and when he asked for the toilet, directed him to the lavatory.

But little Dave loved Benny — loved his patter and his natty threads — pressed grey slacks, tweed caps with elasticated sides, zip-up suede jackets and mirror-shiny shoes. He loved the way his grandfather exuded his Knowledge, a comprehensive understanding not only of the London streets — but what went on in them as well. After thirty-odd years behind the wheel, Benny Cohen gave the distinct impression that he'd been plying for a hire for a couple of millennia. As he drove his grandson through the city, he regaled him with a steady stream of anecdotes and facts, a spiel that spilled from the corner of his mouth and blew over his shoulder braided with cigarette smoke.

As he drove down from Vallance Road to the old Globe, Dave reflected on how his grandfather had stayed on. A remnant of the Jewish ghetto in the East End, living out his days in a small flat on the inter-war LCC estate off the Bethnal Green Road. Now he was surrounded by a rising tide of Bengalis. 'Not that I mind them; they're mostly well behaved. Still, their food smells fucking awful.' Benny's food didn't smell of anything at all, the slow worm noodles and watery chicken soup he slurped down at Bloom's in Whitechapel, under an enlarged photographic mural of the old Brick Lane Market without a brown face in sight.

Benny was still alive — but only just. He stopped at home behind nets distempered with nicotine and chuffed on his oxygen mask, lifting it now and again to insinuate a Woodbine beneath his walrus moustache. Benny's left leg had been amputated below the knee, and there was talk of the right hopping along too. When Dave went to see him, his grandfather waggled the stump at him like a gesturing hand, turning it out to express bemusement, karate-chopping for finality. Prised from his cab — which, although it stank of cigarette fumes, was always beautifully clean — the old man took on the appearance of a smoked oyster on Tubby Isaacs's stall, then a soused whelk, until finally — most unkosher this — he dwindled to a pickled winkle.

In the old Globe Mrs Hedges the landlady was berating two of Dave's mates, Fucker Finch and Norbert Davis. 'I'm not bein' funny,' said the withered Chow of a woman, 'but the trouble wiv you lot is that you all 'ad a crack at 'er an' none of yer is prepared to take the consequences, see.' Thick slap was plastered on her pouched cheeks, wind-chime earrings dragged deep slits in her earlobes. Dave sidled up to the bar. On the optic were bottles of Martell, Archers, and Jack Daniel's. On beer mats stood an outsized wine glass full of promotional lighters and a cubic ice bucket advertising Gordon's Gin. 'Usual, luv?' asked Mrs Hedges. Dave grunted affirmatively and she threw her weight on the pump so hard her bingo wings flapped. Fucker said, 'Orlright, then, geezer,' and he and Norbert rolled their eyes at him. Norbert — who was known as Big End, on account of the ridiculousness of his given name and by reason of racial stereotyping — said, 'My round, Tufty,' his deep voice shouting through the wall of his chest.

Mrs Hedges resumed, 'Believe you me, there's four blokes 'as come in the pub an' she's slept wiv all of 'em once. I told 'er old man "she wuz not 'erself", but 'e don' lissen, 'e went absolutely fucking ballistic, 'e cut 'er up an' that — which is a bit ironical seein' as she does it to 'erself anyways!' Mrs Hedges fell silent, then relayed Dave's pint to him, a brown torch with a creamy flame. 'Cheers,' Dave said, and the other two grunted affirmatively. Behind the bar lay a drift of Quavers packets, crisp notation rustling in silence. Big End's fluorescent jacket — he was a site chippie — lay on a nearby banquette like a crumpled drunk. 'I woz absolutely ragarsed last night,' Big End said, 'fucking mullered.'