Will Self - The Book of Dave

'She's done a runner again, Cal,' Saskia had cried that afternoon, a cry Cal heard via the phone as he drove home to Hampstead. He'd frozen for a moment — caught between crushing bergs of work and family — before answering, 'I thought she was on a locked ward?'

'You thought! You … thought!' Saskia snorted. 'That's novel!' She was standing, he supposed, in her kitchen. Toast crusts, apple cores, damp clouts, canisters of decadent marjoram and a greasy oven glove lay on the worktop. On the windowsill a miniature mesa of cacti supported a greenfly colony. 'They didn't have her on a section — she's gone!'

'I'll … I'll go and find her … later …' He'd manoeuvred the Beamer on to Hampstead Road. Laurence Corner, the army-surplus shop, was still open. I ought to pick up a mattock and a water bottle, I'll be needing them … later.

'You do that,' Saskia snapped.

To be fair, Cal thought now, as he turned down York Road, whatever Saskia's lunacies — the shopworn socialism, the maintenance-funded 'creativity', the double-barrels (bi-polar, obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, personality disorder) through which she shot at their daughter's pathology — the facts were simple: she'd been a single mother for thirteen years, and now she was a single grandmother. Some fucker rubbed his legs on Daisy's petals, then buzzed off again. And she, either hammered by Largactil or ranting on garage forecourts, was in no fit state to care for a baby. Shit… they had to tie her down and knock her out for the delivery. Even if she'd been sane, she was only sixteen …

He talked to the duty psychiatrist at St Thomas's, a distant, pharaonic figure. 'Yes, Mr Devenish … your daughter, Daisy. I understand your concern.' But don't share it, obviously. 'Her GP hadn't been in touch, and the consultant here hadn't made any provision. We had no grounds for holding her against her will.' Except that she's a fucking loony. 'She was quite lucid when she left … said she was going back' — he consulted a tan transcript — 'to Driscoll House?'

Unwilling to abandon sickroom security, Cal stood for a while by the double doors, looking towards Westminster Bridge. On the lobby floor, in front of the shuttered coffee shop, a ham and tomato sandwich was reduced by scurrying feet to a smear of red, brown and pink.

Heading south down the old Kent Road, Cal felt mangling hands of anxiety on his neck. He remembered the girl found dead in the fountains at Marlborough Gate. Three days fouling up a tourist attraction — when they dragged her out in her sodden stonewashed jeans she was unidentifiable.

That morning he'd been roused by the whale song of marital farts, semiconscious leviathans calling to one another across a glutinous ocean of duck down. 5 a.m. and fully awake … Cal looked at Michelle's profile etched on the pillow beside him by the acid light of a London dawn. She's holding out on me, I know it. There's something she isn't telling me — it doesn't add up. Her secret is soft — she moulds it to evade detection. It's hidden inside her body — she's a mule …

Low down on the scabrous underbelly of South London, the BMW raced from one shopping parade to the next. From OK Chicken to Perfect Chicken, from Bootiful Chicken to Luvverly Chicken, from Royal Chicken to Chicken Imperium, from Chicken Universe to one forlorn joint in the filthy crotch of Burgess Park that was simply dubbed 'Chicken'. Down here, where men wore nylon snoods, the light industrial premises massed and every public, horizontal thing was planted with metal thorns, Cal felt the turbid threat of the city, which might choose — quite impersonally — to climb into the car at the lights and suggest, at gunpoint, that he step out.

Driscoll House, built in 1913, was Castle Dossula. Vast and foursquare, beneath its crenellations ranged scores of loopholes, behind each a rental embrasure. Weekly rates were pegged to the emergency-housing benefit. The security door was propped open with a pallet. Cal made inquiries at a battered plexiglas window. Then he was led along a corridor. Doors opened to either side and faces emerged, pitted, veined and puce. Their owners were drinking fortified wine with Antabuse chasers, and the stop-start strain on their sclerotic hearts was going to kill them stone-dead.

The string-vested seneschal stopped in front of No. 137 and unlocked it with a key from his enormous bunch. Inside were knickers in a twist and jeans draped over a chair; a cheap candle had melted into a Formica tabletop and curled over like a limp dick. 'She wozere,' said the seneschal, "coz I 'eard 'er carryin' on wiv 'owie.'

'Howie?' Cal queried, although from other Daisy hunts he recognized the name.

'Jock geezer, piggy ring in 'is 'ooter, sells the Issue. Collects bottles. Drinks wiv a school dahn at ve Bullring, but 'e azza flop in Mottingham.'

Mottingham was so far out on the outskirts of the city that the Avenues the BMW swished along were damp with the sweeter showers of the countryside beyond. At bucolic roundabouts cellophane-wrapped flowers were stacked up to mark the site of fatal collisions. The makeshift shrines were garlanded with plastic gewgaws and papered with scrawled cards; so the prosaic, the accidental, was factored into a Divine Plan for London.

At the address the seneschal had given him Cal found two black teenagers smoking weed and watching a video of a nightmare on another street. A tenner elicited a further address, where ' 'owie an' 'is bird' had gone to score. At this location — a plyboard warren of bedsits in a venerable Victorian villa — the finder's fee was upped to twenty quid. Finally, at 3.30 a.m., Cal ran her to ground, dry-heaving under a rhododendron bush in the gardens of a derelict pub. The huaraches he'd brought her back from Mexico lay discarded near by. In the silence between his daughter's spasms Cal could hear a nightjar churring, although he thought it was a scooter accelerating along the A20. When he got her into the car, Daisy began to babble about the environment. There was no sign of Howie.

'What's the baddest thing in the world, Dad?'

'What did ya say, Tiger?'

'Dad, what's the baddest thing in the world?' Carl stood before Dave in baby elephant pyjama trousers. His front teeth were big white pegs in his chubby six-year-old face. 'Dad, what's the baddest thing in the world?' He repeated himself, and then, because he was a bright kid, never confused like his father by the sheer amorphousness of everything, he supplied his own answer: 'Is it killing yourself?'

Dave Rudman, on his knees in the North London playing field, looked south to where his son is banged up … He wept and clawed at the grass. He salaamed, head-butting the ground. Fuck you, earth. . and the blow stove in the roof of a vault full of nastiness. I was in their garden … in their fucking garden … I buried it in their garden … that mad fucking rant … Why did I do it? Why? It put me eleven fucking grand out of pocket, that's why I'm skint — that's why I can't pay Cohen, that's why I'm mushing every fucking hour of the day …

'What's the baddest thing in the world, Dad?' Dave imagined six-year-old Carl sitting cross-legged by the mess his father had made, picking up a lolly stick and dabbling it in the mud.

'Worst,' Dave croaked aloud, 'the worst thing in the world is to kill yourself, Tiger, but not if you do it to stop yourself killing someone else.'

In the Trophy Room of the Swiss Cottage Sports Centre — group rental £25 per hour, pick up and leave the key at main reception the Fathers First group did laps in liquid anger, thrashing up and down the lanes, the chlorine of hatred stinging their eyes. 'I'm gonna fucking kill her!' bellowed Billy O'Neil. He was standing in spotless Timberlands, his manicured fists were clenched, the sweat stood out on his tousled brow. 'Calm down, Billy,' Keith Greaves said, 'please calm down.' Billy couldn't hear him — nor could the other premier-division dads. They watched, appalled and yet entranced, as the big man was manipulated by the dextrous fist of rage. Rage that pulled on the strings threaded through all their lives, so they poked their own little fists into others' faces, kicked their feet into kidneys, and slammed car doors so hard the glass disintegrated into 'ackney diamonds. Dave Rudman's face was in his hands; his fingers sought out the shameful scars of his failed hair transplant. 'Calm down, Billy,' Keith said again — while Dave began to cry.