Will Self - The Book of Dave

All those ice-cream scoops of brown flesh … I can't touch 'em … Yasmin seemed to have no such reservations. She escorted Dave upstairs to a room where damp carpet off-cuts surrounded an avocado Jacuzzi. 'Tek yer things off, loov, an' 'op in, ahl give yer oondercarriage a good old soapin',' she sung-said, while sliding from the harem pants to reveal the grim webbing of a suspender belt.

'It… it wasn't… what I — '

'C'mon, loov, don't be shy like.' Yasmin propped one huge haunch on the rim of the Jacuzzi and dabbled the flub-a-dub-dub of the water with electric-blue talons. 'Wassermatter, don'choo fancy me?' Dave recoiled … I don't fancy you at all … I can't do this. . Rubbed by her … Rubbed by someone you don't wanna rub in return … like a. . like a bloody shmeiss ponce!

He couldn't find a cab until he was back up by Westferry Road. 'You're lucky, my son.' The driver wore a Hawaiian shirt decorated with the Miami skyline. 'That dahn there, thass bandit cuntry. You don't wanna be dahn there before sun-up.' His saviour had more fucking rabbit than Watership Down and went on and on about football: Platt, Juventus, Spurs' chances in the new season. Dave moved to the tip-down seat and stared at the cabbie's shirt so that one city supplanted the other. The tide of booze and speed was subsiding; in its wake were mudflats of gloopy wakefulness.

In Gospel Oak he turned the key and admitted himself to Michelle's face.

'It's your granddad … it's Benny …' She didn't need to say any more — Dave sobbed, heaved, then buckled. She caught him in the sternum with her sharp little shoulder. He lurched upstairs to the bathroom, with her close behind. He tore open his own crazy face and fumbled in the potted pathos of the family medicaments — Calpol, Milk of Magnesia, Rennies, Band-Aids — for the ancient Valium he knew was there. Then he burrowed into her hollow and finally, with the analgesic sounds of Carl waking in his ears, and a mouthful of chalk, Dave Rudman slept.

The funeral was way up in Edmonton. Thinking back to his early childhood and the colourful cavalcade that surrounded Benny Cohen, Dave was appalled by the few old crocks who managed to make it to the cemetery. Two crotchety cabs drew up at the cemetery gates and disgorged eight or nine bent little men, the desiccated, salty residuum left behind after all those Saturday afternoons sweating in the Turkish baths. A couple of them could barely walk and felt their way forward to the anatomical wound of Benny's grave with rubber-tipped sticks, as if probing the gravel for unexploded death bombs.

Dave drove his mother and father from East Finchley. His sister, Samantha, tipped up from Golders Green in a dark green Jaguar XJS. Michelle stayed at home in Gospel Oak with Carl. Noel was in Aberystwyth refusing his medication. Annette Rudman resolutely refused to grieve. Dave wondered if her hatred of cabbing alone could be responsible — or was there some other more vital failure that she perceived in both her father and her eldest son?

A hack rabbi retained by the cemetery brayed Kaddish in the chilly prayer hall. When he stepped away from the podium, Aunt Gladys came swishing up in a stiff billow of black nylon. Dave was grateful to her — even if she disturbed the piss-poor congregation with her purple-bound book, there was at least passion in her reading: 'O 'ow grate the goodness of our God, oo prepareff a way fer our escape from this awful monster; yea, that monster, deff an' 'ell, which I call the deff of the body, an' also the deff of the spirit.' Later, as they sat scraping chopped liver from paper plates in the front room of the house on Heath View, he thanked her. Benny's former colleagues nattered, salad cream smudging their moustaches, but they talked more about the roadworks on the North Circular than they did about him.

Benny's death changed Dave the way a father's should, for, like so many families, the Rudmans were wrongly geared, the slow maturation of this generation and the speedy ageing of the last leaving them out of sync. In his grief Dave saw clearly the beauty of his son and the massive forbearance of his wife. He apologized, he curbed his resentment — he did what was necessary to save the marriage for the next few years, so that when it failed it could do so spectacularly. They let go of the bovine au pair. Dave dropped her at Euston and off she clopped on pointy hoofs, fresh meat for an unsavoury boyfriend in Droitwich.

Carl became Dave's main fare. It made sense: Michelle was earning four times what he could. Leave on left Fitzjohn's Avenue … Comply Finchley Road … Comply Avenue Road … Left Adelaide Road … Dave drove Carl to swimming pools where they squirmed in the urinary waters. Leave on left Kensington Gore … Right Queen's Gate … Left Cromwell Road. He drove the kid to museums, where they goggled at animatronic dinosaurs. He drove him to playground after playground after playground, where they swung and slid and see-sawed. Boarding the roundabout, Dave pushed it with one foot on the rubberized surround — 'eek-eek, eek-eek, eek-eek', building up speed until the little boy was screaming with intoxication. Feeling his blood pound in his temples, Dave leaned back and watched as the clouds overhead revolved on the axis that was him.

Yes, he was at the centre of it all, and the Knowledge was Dave's Kaddish for his grandfather as well as his son's birthright. It named the God of the city, and prayed that His Kingdom be established, a New London, run by run, point by point. 'I'm sorry for your loss,' people said, but how could Benny Cohen, of all people, have got lost? It was inconceivable to Dave that even when dead his granddad would be disorientated.

In the dark of winter Dave succumbed to depression, a winding down, the numb indifference of a mind that couldn't stumble … to … the … next … thought. Each morning the comb had a full head of hair, while this dumb slaphead looked back at Dave from the mirror. 'Get out,' Michelle urged him. 'Go do something anything. See your mates, get pissed — I don't care.' Yet Dave couldn't; instead he watched TV, or hobbled up Fleet Road to Two Worlds, where he sat reading the Daily Express while Faisal dished up curry. Every week or so Aunt Gladys called: 'Come dahn the Tabbanakcle wiv me,' she urged. 'It'll make you feel better.' Eventually, to get her off his back, he did.

He picked her up in Leytonstone early on a wintry Sunday morning, and they drove across town to South Kensington with the Fairway's wipers sucking bits of road from the aqueous city. Gladys sat bolt upright in the middle of the rear seat — she wanted to go back twice to check that the cats were alright, but Dave wouldn't let her. He must have passed the Mormon Tabernacle a thousand times or more since he got his badge — Exhibition Road was on the tourist loop — but he'd never noticed its elegant golden spire or smooth stone facade.

They were late and the service had begun, so they stood waiting in a vestibule decorated with a panorama of Mormon life. A Nordic baby was born and raised. He studied, married, was gifted with his own baby. The family grew as the Mormon did construction work, then more work — now white collar. In old age the snowy-haired Saint, fulfilled, instructed a granddaughter, before dying a peaceful death on white pillows. The soft hands of a sky god reached down to gather him up. The Mormon go-round was lived out in a city of wide boulevards and spacious, modern dwellings. The Mormon Knowledge was a simple grid pattern, while beyond the 'burbs green hills rose to bluey mountains. Heaven was a ski resort in the Rockies.