Will Self - The Book of Dave

Carl knew that, despite his long stay on Ham, the Driver had never lost his initial revulsion for the motos; now, in this charged moment, Tyga's gaping jaws and peg teeth struck terror into him. Dropping his staff, the Driver reared back, tripped, then fell headlong to the ground, where he lay motionless. Wassamatter wivim, Cawl? Issë urtë? Tyga goggled at the black stain of the Driver's robe on the carpet of leaves. Antonë knelt and lifted up the Driver's head. Ees it a brik, he said, ees aht cold. Nah we reelë gotta moovit. Swiftly the two men stripped and coated themselves with a slather of moto oil.

Carl had splashed in the shallows with the motos, yet he had no idea if the beasts would consent to bear him and Antonë into open water. The rank was orderly if excitable as he led them down to the shoreline. Only Sweetë moaned:

— Eye wanna fowidj, lemme fowidj.

— Plennë uv fowidj ovah vare, Carl told her, pointing to the distance, where the rocks of Nimar rose up above the waves. Cummon nah.

He coaxed Tyga a few paces into the sea, then, grasping a handful of neck wattle, swung himself on to the moto's broad back. Behind him Antonë followed suit with Champ. Cummon nah! Carl urged Tyga on, and, feeling the rising water buoy up his body, the moto began to paddle strongly. Eye thwimmin! Eye thwimmin! he lisped. Looking back, Carl saw the two other motos enter the water after Antonë and Champ. As they came out of the bay, then scraped across the reef, the waves began to break over Tyga's back, and Carl was instantly soaked. His anger had drained away with the advancing sea to be replaced by a naked terror. Yet, looking back at the shore, he saw the Driver still lying prone, final confirmation — if any were needed — that there was no going back.

When Michelle came out of the lawyers' offices, which were sunk in the isthmus of nineteenth-century stonework separating Savile Row from Vigo Street, her logical course would have been to take a cab. She had become a cab-hailing type of bird — she had the money, she had the gym-toned wing to fling in the air, she was even dressed for it in a fashionable mac like a shiny red bell tent. Her hair had recently been dyed its natural colour — only more so. Yet she couldn't hail a cab; if an orange TAXI sign had shone out from the London downpour she'd have turned tail and flapped away. The likelihood that it was driven by her ex-husband, Dave, was infinitesimal, still the Law of Sod said it would be him, echo-locating her by bouncing a screech of anger off the buildings and picking it up with his bat ears. He was that mad.

'I honestly think he's mad,' Michelle had said to the lawyer, whose name was Blair. 'There's already a restraining order to prevent him coming near to the house.' She felt comfortable with the 'honestly'; it sounded right for this dark wood panelling and thick, turquoise carpet.

'But he's breached it, yes?' Blair took notes on a yellow legal pad with a gold propelling pencil. He was leaning far back in his leather swivel chair and had to stretch to reach the notepad. This emphasized his petiteness.

'Well … yeah … I mean pretty drastically so far as I can see. My … partner and I saw him in the garden, at night, but he ran off.'

'And this was in December?'

'Yeah.' Yeah? You sound like trailer-park trash.

'You didn't report it to the police?' Blair raised one plucked eyebrow on his sallow forehead.

'That's what Fischbein — the other lawyer — asked us. We were so shocked, it'd never happened before.' Michelle took a sip of coffee: it was tepid, and she put the bone-china cup down next to a plate of refined shortbread. 'When he broke the order again we did call the police, but there was nothing we could get him for, because … because … my son … he wouldn't. .' Michelle gulped down hot tears with more tepid coffee. I'm gonna start crying now … the thought of being offered a tissue by Blair — who'd asked her to call him 'Mitchell' — nauseated her. Not that Blair made any move to dispense tissues; he remained recumbent and tapped his unnaturally small teeth with the tip of his pencil. Michelle controlled herself and went on: 'My son wouldn't say anything against his father — that's what he told me. Still, he doesn't want his dad turning up like that, outside his new school. It upsets him … his dad acts … I dunno, crazy, but Carl's very loyal … He's angry with both of us.'

Then it came pouring out of her, the whole sorry, stereotypical tale. Yet even as Michelle recounted the clouts Dave Rudman had aimed at her and the crockery he'd hurled, the way the volume of the rows had risen into a vacuous silence, followed by the lawyers' letters and the fruitless mediation, she was aware that this was precisely what Mitchell Blair required. He might have spent hours extracting this evidence from her; instead it came bagged, tagged and slammed down on his Moroccan leather desktop. The gold pencil raced across the narrow feint to keep pace with her.

When Michelle had finished — or at any rate ceased, for there could be no end to such a litany — Blair cleared his throat: 'Erhem.' 'Ms Brodie,' he said, 'may I summarize?' He smiled. 'Your ex-husband was physically and mentally abusive within the marriage. You divorced on those grounds and your only son, Carl, initially stayed with you at the family home. Your husband moved to a rented flat near by. To begin with they had normal contact, alternate weekends and Wednesday visits, half school holidays when Mr Rudman's … ah, work, permitted. During this time he, ah, behaved himself well enough. Then, when last year you began a relationship with Mr Devenish, and you and your son moved in with him to a new house in Hampstead, your ex-husband became abusive again. Increasingly so. He turned up at your house and banged on the door; he also made threats which led to … Mr Fischbein obtaining a non-molestation order through the County Court, although your son continued to have contact with his father.'

'Carl's old enough to go to see his father by himself. I didn't want to stop them seeing each other.'

'Quite so. But now the situation has changed again, your ex-husband's behaviour is highly erratic, and you feel that — '

'I dunno what I feel, but I'm worried about what Dave might do. Fischbein said it was difficult to get a further injunction unless Dave had been arrested — I don't want to wait for that to happen, I don'tthinkitsrightthat — ' Michelle's words tumbled out, Blair caught them in his plump hands, set them down in the opulent solemnity of the office. The air was stilled by leather-bound precedents — they might have been anywhere, or even in another, quieter era.

'What Mr Fischbein says of the Family Division at County Court may well be true, but, given the right approach' — Blair paused to emphasize that such an approach was a Blair speciality — 'it is entirely possible to obtain a total exclusion order from the Principal Registry in the High Court. If this is breached, a power of arrest is automatically invoked carrying a committal warrant for six months' imprisonment. As to visitation rights, if you insist on these continuing, there can be supervised access.'

'Me?' Michelle was nonplussed. 'If I insist?'

'That's right, but you may regard it as in your best interests for any contact between your son and your ex-husband to be stopped at once.'

Michelle had sat through years of deliberations with lawyers, mediators, court welfare officers and Child Support Agency assessors: 'your best interests' was not a phrase she had heard during all this time; 'the child's best interests' certainly; there had also been much talk of'the relationship's interests', as if it were an entity in its own right; but her own, unalloyed, selfish interests had never been alluded to. 'I'm sorry … Mister Blair.'