Will Self - The Book of Dave

The calls came at odd hours and in peculiar places — when Dave was eating at Two Worlds, or as he sat in the automated car wash, the nylon conifers whirling past the Fairway's windows: 'Freddy's done his bins.' The Skip Tracer always began without any preamble or pleasantry.

'Whaddya mean?'

'Freddy, top bin man, a fox he is — a fucking fox. Slunk up to Hampstead, spun your man's bins. Slunk down to Charlotte Street, spun Channel Devenish inall. No one's seen 'im, no one knows 'im, 'e don't exist. Got everything, got the shreddies.'

'Shreddies?'

'Stuff that's been through the shredder — top product, that. Top product. Nosebag for us.'

'But what… what can you do with stuff that's been shredded?'

'Betty. Sweaty Betty. Top shreddies girl, is Betty. Don't matter how they shred it — vertical, horizontal, fucking zigzag — same difference to her. She just loves it! Does it like a fiddly little jigsaw. Beautiful to watch, really — you should see it. Not her mindjoo not her. She's skinny as a fucking parking meter — got, I dunno, got anoxia — '

'Anorexia.'

'Whatever. Still, bit of a headfuck — sweat lashes offa her when she's working. Hence the moniker.'

Dealing with the Skip Tracer, Dave Rudman got the impression that he was only the smallest piece in a citywide jigsaw of horrendous fiddliness. Sitting under the Dutch Antilles in his office suite in Belgravia, the Skip Tracer spent the morning feeding the pages of the A-Z into the shredder and watching the papery spaghetti curl up and over. Then he changed his shirt and spent all afternoon putting London together again, breaking off only to make these preposterous calls: 'Got a tail on your man. Only a small team 'coz he's a know-nothing. A steerer, a sweeper, hands-free, no bovva, find out what he's up to — best way.'

'Are you serious?'

'Never seriouser, wassermatter you got frostbite have you, son? Tippy-toes plopping off? Been at the nosebag 'ave you — warned you 'bout that.'

'B-but the money, your fee — the tail's fee, Sweaty Betty's bloody fee — I can't afford all this.' There was a sound like a waste disposal being activated in the ether — so loud and sudden that Dave held the mobile inches away from his ear. When it stopped he realized that it had been the Skip Tracer laughing. 'Fee? I'm not bothered about the fee now, son, I told you from the off where there's daddies and kiddies involved … I dunno … call me sentimental … call me sentimental… GO ON — DO IT!'

'You're sentimental.'

'Maybe, maybe, scenty-mental like a fucking comedown, son. Race over, nosebag ripped off, trotting round the paddock, feeling fucking awful. Sweat all foamy on me flanks. I dunno … I dunno … just don't go borrowing on me, son, don't do that. The vig'll kill yer.'

'Like it did Phil Eddings.'

'You say something, bruv?' The kid in the back of the cab hunched right forward and stuck his fluffy snout through the hatch. Dave resisted the urge to scream, 'Bruv? Bruv! Whothefuckareyoucalling bruv?!' Because there was a long way to go to Shepperton and thirty-odd quid already on the meter. Dave's reverie had swept him downriver and now it was driving him back up. They were snarled up by roadworks in Greenwich, trapped exactly at the point where time begins — the Maritime Museum to one side, the Royal Naval College to the other. In the town centre the masts of the Cutty Sark lifted a tracery of rigging into the haze of exhaust fumes, while in the roadway stood a dumb fucking paddy with a big green lollipop sign that bellowed 'GO', while forty metres further on, past the clumsy incision the gangers had cut in the tarmac, a second man stood with a 'STOP' sign. Jobs for the boyos … and mine — as 'e gotta summer job?

Whatever his father's anxieties Carl was having a pedestrian summer. Michelle had taken him away for a week to a white-tiled compound on the shores of the Med. Here the boy mooched by the pool, or straddled a bulgy, inflatable beast that bobbed on the dilute chlorine. It was the summer when he shed his baby names — or rather, Michelle stopped calling him Sweety, Honey, Bunny or Gorgeous. She addressed him, curtly, as Carl, and when the waiters weren't looking allowed him surreptitious sips from her fruit-choked cocktails.

When they got back to London and his mother's days were taken up, Carl ranged over the Heath or trekked down to the West End, where he snuck into the lobbies of the smart hotels, sitting for whole afternoons unregarded on divans, filching smoked salmon sandwiches from cast-off plates.

Sunk in his own sebaceous ooze, growing like a human weed, his head spinning when he rose too fast — Carl had no conscious mind for mummies or daddies of any stripe or hue. With limp passivity he'd accepted that he could no longer see Dave. What good is that wanker to me anyway? And yet he couldn't stop tracking every black cab he saw, checking to see if the driver's window framed that battered head and those bat ears.

The only drama came one evening when Michelle was out at a Kenwood open-air concert — Chablis in a plastic sleeve, deli sandwiches, music on the half-shell. The phone rang at Beech House, and Carl answered the extension upstairs. It was Saskia, Cal's ex. It often was. Cal got on the line, and, although he'd replaced the receiver, Carl could hear him even from way upstairs, because Cal was shouting: 'What the fuck —! Couldn't you have —? Where is she —? Now —? ' Bitten-off yelps of anguish. Without quite understanding why he did so, the lad padded back down the carpeted sweep of stairs to hang over the banisters. When Cal came off the phone, he started, aware of eyes at his back.

Turning, he saw her son with an expression on his half-Rudman face that seemed, to Cal, oddly familiar — like déjà vu incarnate. On impulse he said, 'It's my daughter, Daisy, she's been arrested again. She's down at some police station in South London, I've got to bail her out — d'you want to come with me?'

They rode in Cal's Beamer through the night-time city. Men stood on every street corner wearing England football shirts printed with the number 10: fat Beckhams, thin Beckhams, young Beckhams, black Beckhams. Scores of unsuitable substitutes for a never-ending game. It wasn't the football chitchat, the complicity of the car ride, or even the grown-up stuff at the police station that did it. They rode over to her mother's flat with Daisy gurning in the passenger seat while Carl kept his head down in the back. It was one short exchange as they rolled home at 1 a.m. up Haverstock Hill. 'It must be tough,' Cal said, 'your dad being … I dunno … so disturbed.' And Carl said, 'It must be tough on you too — with Daisy.' That was it, a bond forged in the maddening furnace of summertime London.

Where was Carl? Where was Dave: the cabbing was all tangled up — the city itself was ductile in the furnace, it warped and curled, becoming overwrought. His Faredar tricked by human chaff, Dave found himself breaking rules, heading south, dropping off some fucking rude boy on the Railton Road. Then, backing into a tight space in back of Brixton Market, the chrome bumper of the Fairway kissed the rubber bumper of a mustard Vauxhall Carlton. Dave clambered out of the cab and, more out of reflex than because he felt responsible, went to examine the rear. No dink — no mark even. When he straightened up, he was surrounded by bredren in their saggy-arsed tracksuits and LA Raiders jackets, yellow gold on their fingers and in their teeth. Mad golliwog hair … Along Electric Avenue, outside the butchers', there were counters piled high with pigs' trotters. One of the men took a step forward, his hair was shaved suede-close, he had a sock puppet's stubbly muzzle. 'Tax, mun,' he said, poking a stiff little trotter right into Dave's chest.