Will Self - The Book of Dave

Carl understood that it was part of the whole expensive package. Along with Cal Devenish came Beech House, the Range Rover Vogue, the Tuscan holidays and of course the poncey fucking school Privilege sucked — he longed for his dad. Longed for Dave, who took him out in the cab and showed him parts of the city Wormwood Scrubs, Lea Bridge, the Honor Oak Reservoir — which the 'ampstead wankers would never see. In the past three years, as he'd seen Dave less and less, so Carl's idea of his father had come unstuck, detaching itself from both any foundation in the past and the increasingly disturbing reality of the man.

In Carl's view, Dave was a knight of the open road. He knew the city and he knew its people. Dave was as at home up West in a fancy restaurant as he was in Muratori's, the cabbies' King's Cross cafe. Everyone knew him — cops, bartenders, fellow cabbies, waver-uppers — knew him and respected him. 'Orlright, Tufty!' they sang out as the Fairway squealed to a halt and chip and block got out. So on the fateful day, last October, when Carl came out of the elaborate wrought-iron gates of his new school and there was his dad, hunched down at the wheel of the cab, unshaven, white gunk at the corners of his peeling lips, oily patches under his burnt-out eyes, it was a dreadful shock. 'Cummear, son,' Dave growled, 'cummear.'

Carl's first instinct was to run. Boys in his class had already spotted the odd apparition: a London taxi cab parked in Frognal at four in the afternoon. Not dropping off or picking up, poised five feet from the kerb, but deep in the gutter. Worse still, the Fairway — which, in the days when his father had pride, had never carried any kind of advertising — now sported Supersides. The driver-side one showed a blonde in her bra and knickers tearing a strip from her own inner thigh; below it was the double-entendre PAINLESSLY OFF, PLEASURABLY ON. Puerile eyes sucked this up.

Why's he cummear? Why … ? Carl was torn between anxiety for his father, who he knew wasn't allowed within half a mile of Beech House, and anger that he was shaming him in front of the other boys. He hurried over, wrenched open the back door of the cab, slung his school bag in, leaped in after it and called to his father, 'Drive on, cabbie!'

Dave went along with him, saying, 'Where to, guv?' Flustered, Carl replied, 'Savernake Road.' Which was round the corner from Dave's flat. Carl thought they'd go and have a cup of tea together, or kick a ball around on Parliament Fields for half an hour, but his dad was too mad. He drove — leave on left Frognal. Left Arkwright Road. Right Fitzjohn's Avenue — and ranted: 'Fucking this and fucking that, fucking coons and fucking Yids, fucking young slappers and fucking old boilers.' It was as if, by impersonating a fare, Carl had exposed himself to the deepest, darkest, most atavistic stream of cabbie consciousness. Too shocked to say anything, Carl sat as his dad's voice crackled over the intercom. At the junction with Roderick Road the cab pulled over. Dave opened the back door and said, 'Op aht, sun.' Carl came forward but before he could say anything, Dave cried, 'No charge on this one!' And roared away.

Carl lay for a long time on the slope of damp grass that stretched up to Parliament Hill. He didn't care about his poncey striped uniform — or anything else. He couldn't cry, but his belly was tight with misery. When at last he'd risen and begun his tramp back through the dusk, the Heath itself was his confidante. He'd reached consciousness on this peculiar island, a couple of square miles of woodland and meadow set down in the lagoon of the city. He wavered from copse to tumulus, from felled old elm to crunchy bracken patch, making his way up to the sandy crossroads, where a single Victorian lamp standard stood, its homely glow illuminating the dark holly hedge that marked the entrance to Kenwood. In touching this roughened trunk and clutching that mossy bole, the lad connected with his past. Kite-flying on blustery days, the kamikaze nylon aircraft diving for the ground; family picnics among the house-high tangle of dead trees felled by the Great Storm of '87; and in the dead of winter, hurling ice chunks across the frozen surface of Highgate Pond, his woolly paws burning with cold fire.

In the sickening disparity between the affectionate enclosure of his early childhood and the loveless thicket of the present, Carl saw the person he would henceforth be: a young man expelled from Arcadia, an exile, driven out and forced to live on the fringes of society, his only bible a collection of arcana derived from a distant past, a time of loyal chaps and gaudy royalty. Shouldering his school bag, Carl slithered down the hill past the little reservoir and rejoined the path that led up to Well Walk. It was mummy time once more. His clothes were filthy, Michelle would be frantic with worry, he was late for supper at Beech House.

Dave Rudman lined up his pathetic row of male toiletries on the sink surround and resolved to make himself presentable. He washed his remaining hair, he shaved his muddled face, he ironed his trousers and put on a shirt, a tie and the tweed jacket he'd bought to fit in with Michelle's friends a decade before. She'd laughed at him — they'd laughed at him as well. Big-arsed Sandra, psycho Betty and doormat Jane. Dave could hear their laughter still as he drove down to Paddington. Hear it as he ranked up off Cleveland Terrace, hear it as he walked into the building where Gold's man had an office. Dave heard it together with Gold's friendly warning: 'This guy is good, very good, in fact — he's the best, but all he'll say to you is "I don't handle divorce."'

'I don't handle divorce,' the Skip Tracer said, picking his nails with a very sharp penknife. He hadn't even bothered to face Dave while the potential client was stating his business.

'It isn't divorce,' Dave protested to the close-cropped back of his head; 'we're divorced already, this is about the kid.'

'Whatever.' The Skip Tracer played an absent-minded arpeggio on his computer keyboard. 'Kids, divorce, whatever, I don't do nosebag neither.'

'What?'

'Sniff-sniff, chop-chop.' The Skip Tracer chopped out imaginary lines of cocaine on the desktop. 'YerknowhatImean, barley, rows of, nosebag. Don't touch it, never have, never will. Despise it — despise people that do.'

'I didn't say anything about … nosebag.' Dave shifted in his plastic chair and looked uneasily towards the window, where vertical louvres sliced up the nondescript terrace opposite.

'Didn't say — thought.' The Skip Tracer got up, turned around and jumped up so that he was sitting on his desk, a utilitarian steel unit that was pressed against a large map of the Dutch Antilles. He brandished the penknife at Dave. 'I'm quick on the … on the … quick on the uptake, see. Quick — that's me.' He ran his free hand through his thick grey-blond hair, which was very straight, long at the front and architecturally layered at the back. 'I'm so fast people jump to the conclusion that I'm doing nosebag. You did — didn't you?'

'No, not especially, you do seem a bit wire — '

'Wired, right, wired. Fucking wired, right. Nosebag, that's what you're thinking, right?' Fucking mental is more like it, I don't get this geezer at all. He looks like a toff, with the Gieves and Hawkes whistle, the braces, the black-bloody-brogues. Chinless as well, gold signet ring, gold cufflinks, but he talks like a bloody space cadet. 'I don't mind, I can handle it. I don't care what you think.' Gold said he did mostly financial stuff, chasing money, so that's good for me. Gold said it's all a grey area, this sort of work, and this fellow will do a B & E or a wiretap if he has to — not personal but he has people. 'I've just got a fast metabolism. See this shirt? Fresh on at lunchtime … this morning's' — the Skip Tracer leaped up, went over to a perforated metal cylinder in the corner and plucked up a limp rag — 'in the fucking bin. My cufflinks rust if I wear 'em two days running, 'coz the sweat's just lashing offa me, lashing offa me … I'm that fast, see, but it ain't nosebag. Now, what ya got for me?'