Will Self - The Book of Dave

'Mitchell.' He smiled again with the titchy gnashers.

'I'm not used to what I want being talked about so … so …'

'Bluntly, Ms Brodie? If you retain me I act in your interests. There's a lot of nonsense talked in family law, and I'm not in the habit of contributing to it. If you require an order against your ex-husband with more' — he tapped them with the pencil — 'teeth, that is something I can arrange. The law — like any other art — is one of the possible.'

Glancing over her shoulder as she joined the parade of rainwear heading west along Oxford Street, Michelle saw schools of snorting black cabs, pods of red bus leviathans, and beyond it all the towering stack of Centrepoint rising up from the swell of masonry. A single sunbeam fingering its way through the dirty clouds picked out its concrete summit. She shuddered. Where was it now, the internal warmth of that long-maintained secret? The secret that had sutured up the bloody gash of Carl's birth, that had annulled every awful moment of her marriage to Dave Rudman, the secret that justified any number of Blairy bills whirling down like A4 snowflakes on to Cal Devenish's desk?

Michelle shuffled on past the cut-and-shut architecture of Oxford Street — the top storeys of Loire chateaux cemented to provincial car showrooms. In Selfridges she lost herself in the Food Hall among others of her kind: trim, middle-aged, nouveau riche women, anatomizing the ideal snack under lights of operating-theatre strength. This, surely, was what had been meant for her all along? The Queen Anne house in Hampstead, the coffee breaks with interior designers, and the trip home from the West End where she'd been visiting her expensive lawyer, bearing no malice but instead a glossy paper bag, inside it a bottle of L'Occitane Lavender Body Cream.

The mineshaft of the Northern Line gave way, once Michelle had been winched up through the heavy hill, to the pithead of Hampstead. She walked up Heath Street, which was shining under April sun after a low-pressure hosing. The shop windows were clotted with affluence — the pavements busy with the economically unproductive. Halfway up the hill Michelle passed Liberation, the lingerie shop she owned in partnership with her new friend Peter Prince. The window was thronged with knickers: flesh pink, organdie and eau-de-Nil scraps, worth, weight for weight, more than currency and hardly flying out of the place.

Two flights of stairs curled up from each side to the glossy maroon front door of Beech House. Twelve twelve-paned windows looked down on the narrow lane below — a gross of affluence. Michelle was still thinking about pants. Dave didn't take them off when he came to bed … disgusting paisley Y-fronts with white piping … I couldn't bear to touch them, if he guided my hand there I yanked it away. I could do it with him after exactly three glasses of wine, but his prick always felt small inside me, like a pip I could squeeze out… Then later, when the rows got violent, I lost all feeling in my tits … That GP said I should do a regular self-examination for lumps … Sod the fucking lumps — with Dave pawing me my tits were numb … numb with disgust…

The way that Beech House had been freshly tricked out could have been wholly deduced from the lacquered Chinese box full of decorative walking sticks that stood beside the front door. Michelle looked across the hall to where a door opened on to a kitchen fitted with slate worktops, quarry-tiled floor and oaken units. To be fair, he was always lying down in the hollow Cal had left in my bed … When Cal came back and we made love for the first time after so many years I thought I'd be embarrassed — him seeing what having a kid had done to me … my floppy white belly, my stretch marks. It wasn't like that at all … Shucking off her shiny mac, Michelle hugged her own baby-soft cashmere shoulders. Being naked in the daylight with him … it made me as young as a child … He felt like a father as much as a lover when he took off my dress. . Sweat prickled her brow as she sheathed her umbrella in the box. My father and Carl's. Then afterwards we slept so sweetly, such sweet dreams …

In the humming silence of the mid-afternoon house, redolent of beeswax, Michelle Brodie stared hungrily at the television in the kitchen: a packet of humdrum delights. From outside in the road she heard a tinkling 'Byeee!' and could imagine the girl in the brindled uniform of an exclusive Highgate school, her glossy mane and chocolate shoes. But before she could move towards the kettle and the television, Michelle sensed a presence in the house, faint but threatening. She rushed into the drawing room to find Cal bedded down in the Eames chair, the pink and black patchwork of the Financial Times spread on his slow-rising chest.

Michelle woke him up with a cup of Earl Grey. She told him about Blair and the letter he was going to send to her ex — he made the right noises, but his mind was in two other places. 'I can't face another day like today,' he sighed when it was his turn. 'There are consultants and accountants all over the offices like flies on a fucking corpse … and… and I told Saskia I'd go to find Daisy …' Michelle switched her grimace into a smirk of sympathy. If Cal noticed this, he chose not to remark on it; he understood. Daisy stank.

Cal Devenish — former writer, former hell raiser, now the emollient yet forceful face of Channel Devenish — was exhausted. The production company he'd taken over six years ago was being sold to an American media conglomerate. The business had been a wrinkled little thing when Cal got it; now it was a taut balloon of gassy cash. Devenish had developed a series of hit programmes: Tumour Swap, TWOC Rally, Whorecam — and especially Blackie, a kids' show featuring a depressed spaniel that had been Globally syndicated. As well as being a shrewd purveyor of eyetrash to the myopic, Cal was also a panellist on arts review shows and current events forums, a wag and a wit. He'd skilfully blended his waning creativity with orange foundation cream, then slapped it all over his face so that it didn't shine under the studio lights. He bestrode the steadily narrowing gulf between high culture and low entertainment like a credible, shrinking colossus. Even if he managed to flog Channel Devenish — and this was by no means in the bag — he was still going to have to do a management workout, three years in the shafts of corporate carters, while maintaining his public profile because they wanted that as well.

Devenish's career change had come with his recovery from addiction to cocaine, alcohol and commercial sex. Not that he pursued this recovery actively any more. There had been the predictable treatment centre, a Jenga of gables in the Greenbelt, where counsellors nutty as walnuts cracked other nutters with their shells. After that he did therapy for a while — both individual and group — so that he might irrigate his costive immaturity. Then he took to the gym, which tempered his skinny limbs, and acquired a goatee like a neat hairy portcullis, which, oddly, gave him gravitas. Now Cal worked all the hours he could, and when he wasn't working he was dealing with his troublesome daughter or moping around the house, never saying — although clearly thinking… what the fuck have I got myself into with this woman and her mad bloody ex-husband. Her sulky son … where will it all end?

They didn't fight, though. They never raised their voices. They had a great deal of compatible secrecy — which would serve as intimacy for a while. As they were working their way gingerly through this minefield of mutuality, the front door opened, then explosively slammed, the fanlight rattled, the stairs reverberated, and Carl's bedroom door provided the final report that an adolescent was in the house. Michelle became acutely aware of him … my sweety, my honey … sitting up there on the end of his bed, disdaining the pastel-painted work unit, complete with personal computer, ignoring the framed posters of Tintin book covers on the candy-striped walls, instead pawing yet again through the box of kiddy stuff that he'd brought with him from Gospel Oak. Shabby memorabilia of a time before he moved up in the world: an incredibly battered Hulk; some broken Beyblades; a toy London cab driven by a faceless plastic cabbie. Stuck through the window of the cab was a shard of plastic the size of Carl's middle finger. Why it should be talismanic he'd long since forgotten — he could not recall his father demolishing the telephone with its own receiver, nor himself, dutifully collecting the bits and storing them in his toy box — a small archaeologist of the immediate past.