Will Self - The Book of Dave

'Bloody hell!' Dave expostulated and then again, 'Bloody hell!'

'There's no need to blaspheme, David, no need at all. P'raps if you'd had Christ Jesus in your life, fings wouldn't've got to this pass.'

'Whaddya mean by that?' Dave glared into Gladys's mad blue eyes. 'What's my mum been saying?'

'Only that … well … it isn't my place.' Gladys folded pious hands on her — book and held it in front of her belly.

'No, go on, it is your place, obviously.'

'Well, only that you and your 'Chelle ain't that happy — and I know it can't be good in the cabs eever what wiv this resesshun an' that…'

Dave drove back across town to Gospel Oak. He clonked through Dalston, past the burnt-out hulk of the Four Aces. What was that black geezer's name? Went in the nick there with a shooter — blew his fucking head off… Least Benny's dying in a private cubicle thing. With curtains … curtains, cubicles … shmeiss ponce. . thass it! The steam baths — that's what Benny was on about … the Porchester out west, that's where him an' his mates used to hang out … playing cards, snarfin' cheese sarnies and bowls of jelly and custard … Fat men. . all with gold jewellery … rings … ID bracelets. . they all smoked too … King Edward cigars … pipes, fags … I remember the shmeiss ponce … little fellow … Lewis Levy, who bilked his turn with the shmeiss. I'm too 'ot — that's what he whined, I'm gonna 'ave a seizure. . The others'd watch him scarper through the steam room, then when he'd gone they'd dump on 'im …fucking runt, fucking shmo, fucking chancer, dodgy little cunt, shmeiss ponce!

The cabbies used their ire to withstand the steam's sting as they rubbed away the filth of the job, the city pigment drilled into their skins like a tattoo of the A-Z. They talked, bloody hell how they talked … There was one mate of Benny's, Roy Voss — he knew it all, how many hansoms and growlers there used to be, when they got rid of 'em … sold 'em off for firewood … he knew all the kinds of cabs there's been on the roads … never grew tired of recounting bits of cabbing lore, it was like … I dunno … it was like the cabbing was some sorta secret government or sumffing running the whole bloody country … Benny and the others used to take the piss.

When Dave Rudman got home that night wanting food and sympathy, Michelle announced that she was going out and so was the au pair. 'I'm meeting up with Sandra, we're going to see Pavarotti.'

'What, she got tickets?'

'No, course not. We're gonna have a few drinks and watch him on that screen thingy in Covent Garden. You don't mind, do you? It's not as if you're making that much at the moment, so I — '

'So you what? What?!' Dave tousled his son's hair with an angry hand, then stalked up the little stairs. Over the next hour, as Michelle got ready, the argument flared and guttered.

They did good rowing, Dave and Michelle. When she was pregnant with Carl he'd hit her, once. Her body had always assailed him with ambivalence — he wanted to possess it and yet he was also repelled. Her marbled belly, her engorged breasts — it shamed him the way they tipped him into revulsion. After the blow had been struck Michelle waited patiently, until he was maudlin and self-piteous, then hit him back, much harder. 'You never,' she'd screamed, 'ever lay a finger on me again or I'll fucking have you …' Her red hair fizzed round her freckled face. '… I'll have you put away!'

On this particular evening they argued about who did what in the house. 'You never change a lightbulb.' 'So, you never stack the dishwasher.' It was really an argument about money, so they moved on to 'You never pay a bill.' 'I can't, I can't! So what if you do clear more than me — you do fuck-all for your money, I graft!' Still, the arguments about money — pressing as they were, with the overdraft screaming red and the living expenses rising inexorably — were really arguments about sex, so they argued about that instead. The arguments about sex cut to the bone of their already lean self-regard, they couldn't even be had aloud — they were too threatening to Dave and Michelle's self-assembled world. So the sex arguments were soundless howls. I hate your clumsy cock and your slobbery mouth … Your pathetic wobbly belly makes me sick …. Why can't you be even a little tender to me … ?

I've had so many better, happier lovers than you …. The au-fucking-pair would have me in a sec! Maybe that's the way it should be — me and Gertie and the boy. She looks after him and gives me the occasional fucking gobble — which is more than you're ever bloody up for. . You! You know nothing about women … nothing at all … You pant and grunt … You're a pig — not a man …

After Michelle had gone, Dave bathed Carl and immersed the child in his own tantrum. 'I wen' swimmin',' his son said.

'What?' Dave snapped.

'I wen' swimmin' … swimmin', swimmin' … swimmin' Carl swivelled round in the soapy water, as his humped back capsized blue boats and yellow ducks. 'I swimmin' — swimmin'!' A wave broke over the side of the bath and soaked Dave's trainers, then swamped the floor. 'Stop it!' he shouted, but the little boy went on chanting, 'Lookitme I swimmin', I swimmin'!' Until Dave lashed out and left three livid fingerprints on Carl's shoulder blade. One … Two … Three … There was silence for three beats, the child awed by the cataclysm of adult rage, then, 'Waaaa!' It was the first time Dave had hit the boy — it wasn't to be the last.

'I'm sorry, Boysie, I'm sorry,' he whimpered, pressing his brutish face into the good smell of skin and soap.

In the morning Dave could hardly rise, he was so mired in shame. He shook as he made Carl eggy soldiers and watched the child bayonet his face with them. Carl didn't bear a grudge — but it wasn't his forgiveness Dave needed. 'Wouldja phone in for me, love?' Michelle croaked when Dave brought her a cup of tea. 'Say I'm sick. I've gotta dreadful pain in my neck.'

'You are sick,' Dave stated flatly — then he asked, 'Did 'e do it, then?'

'You what, love?'

'Did he do it, Pavarotti, did he do Nessun whatsit, y'know, the World Cup song?'

'Oh … oh yeah, yeah, he did, as an encore.'

Sleep no more. . Dave took Carl to nursery, went for a full English and a dump and a read of the paper, then picked him up again. He'd decided to take the victim swimming at a pool down at the Elephant and Castle, which had flumes and a wave machine. It was the right kind of penance. Dave hated public pools, hated their atmosphere of institutional rot and medicalized exercise, their chemical reek and plugholes clotted with the hairs of the multitude. He slung the cab down through Euston and along the wide trench of Gower Street. Bloody peculiar … He looked in the mirror at his passenger, whose car seat was strapped into the back of the cab. But when he's with me it's like I'm drifting again. . It's like I thought the job would be. . just driving, just drifting through town. . no worries. .

Carl paddled in between green, frog-shaped floats, his orange water-wings pinioning him to the surface. His father circled him like a remorseful yet sportive shark, closing in with an outstretched arm to sweep the child into hilarity. 'I swimmin', Daddy … I swimmin' … Lookitme!' Dave persuaded the surly lifeguard to switch on the wave machine. Chlorine combers boiled up in the deep end and came hissing towards them. Carl bobbed, squealing with delight. The waves broke on the tiled foreshore under a prismatic neon sun. His father rose and sank, troubled by an uncomfortable intimation. The agitated water was cupped in a stony outcrop of the two-thousand-year-old city: London, a porous slab of rock through which a million rivulets percolated — sewers, conduits, entombed rivers. High up in the brick escarpments and masonry pinnacles, basins, baths and toilets slopped. The fern-fringed plunge pools in health spas, the Jacuzzis of the rich bubbling beside Millionaire's Row, the reservoirs in the Lea Valley, the O-ring itself — a mighty orbital motorway of fluid coursing beneath the tarmac plain. With each automated surge Dave felt the future seething, the present boiling, the past churning.