Will Self - The Book of Dave

The cop laughed. 'What's your name, son?'

'Um, Dave … Dave — '

'Orlright, then, David, here's what you're going to do. You're going to get out of the cab, lock it up, toddle off somewhere and sleep it off. Unnerstan? This is your lucky morning, David — unnerstan?'

'Yeah-yeah …'course …' Dave struggled up, shut the window, groped for his change bag. He locked the cab under the amused eyes of the cops. Why aren't they nicking me? Probably from Vice or Drugs, going off shift and can't be arsed with the paperwork … Backlit by the sun coming up over the shoulder of Barnsbury, the three cops had adopted stylized postures: standing to attention, leaning, hands on hips. The dream still banged about in Dave's head as he limped away under their watchful eyes in the direction of York Way. The cops got back in their car and accelerated past him with a cheery wave. At once Dave doubled back towards his cab. Can't leave it there, onna yellow line … haveta move it … As if anticipating this, the cops had done a U-turn at the top of the road. 'Get away from that cab or I swear you're fucking nicked!' the big, smooth-faced cop shouted at him as the car came by, and Dave Rudman recoiled, zapped by the cattle prod of authority. He spent the next couple of hours jangling in a cafe on the Pentonville Road, waiting until he was sober enough to drive, drinking tea and watching the junkie scum swirl around the drain of the station.

Last night he'd been OK. Granted, not perfect, but OK. . He'd been driving, doing his thing, just another cabbie working the milling, never-ending London crowds. Now what was he? A crushed carrot lying in the gutter, a headless doll, a pissed-upon shadow of a man. Dave had gone out to work around six in the evening, intent on catching the last hour of the commuters. He thought he'd probably work until two or three in the morning, when the clubbers were all settled in — and more importantly Michelle was asleep. It was better to get home when there was no possibility of any interaction, because even the way she turned her head on the pillow could summon up Dave's rage.

For years now their marriage had been broken down. No, not only broken down … nicked by joyriders, ridden into the ground, then torched by the side of the road. It was the burnt-out shell of a relationship: the foam rubber of comfort fused by angry fire into the crushed bodywork of hearth, home and child. When, when did we last have a kind word for each other? When've we had a tender moment? Now that Carl had stopped climbing into their bed for a morning cuddle, they didn't even have this touching by proxy. Riding her would be like getting on a bicycle made from bones … Or my sister… Or my mother… Her face — so familiar, so fucking strange …

A few years before they had tried stratagems to make the marriage work. They'd gone away for a weekend at a hotel, leaving the boy with Michelle's mother. But once Michelle had had her spa treatments and they'd eaten stodge in the chintzy dining room, they were left even more profoundly alone together in their room, the four-poster bed corpsing them with its stagy insinuation. Michelle read property adverts in Country Life. Dave smoked at the window, blowing brown fog into white muslin curtains. They went home early and in silence. They picked up Carl from the flat on Streatham Hill and were grateful for his unceasing eight-year-old twitter, birdsong in their rotten garden.

Dave gave his wife flowers, because that's what you did … wasn't it … when you wanted to speak but couldn't find words? He bought them from roadside stalls, great sprays of lilies and spiky carnation pompoms, proxy Michelles that he laid tenderly on the back shelf of the cab. When he presented them to her, though, they didn't say anything much, only 'Flowers' — a flat, declarative statement of stamens, petals and stalks. Mostly she didn't even bother to arrange them, simply dumped the whole expensive stook in whichever vessel came to hand, a bucket or a waste-paper bin.

It had been easy not to take holidays together: she wanted to go abroad, he was desperate to remain within the orbit of London. Carl grew up with his parents overlapping rather than conjoined. One was always arriving when the other was leaving. They would spend a few hours — or at most days — together, before parting. Since, like all children, Carl had no accurate information on the manner in which other families ordered these things, he had mostly taken this way of life for granted. He was numb anyway — with a deep, dull fear. He didn't ask questions.

No shared holidays and no shared friends. His mother took Carl to meet her girlfriends, their husbands and children. He was an accessory of hers, rather than part of a family. This he sensed, while collecting acorns in suburban gardens, or hunched inside on rainy days watching videos, playing with a favourite toy, while the tipsy hilarity of adults sitting around a messy table washed over him.

His father, by contrast, made a little manikin of Carl. Out in the cab, there were bottles of Coke while Dave drank with Gary Finch and other geezers. There were trips to Carl's sad old doting grandparents in East Finchley — or to the football. But Carl intuited that his father wasn't bothered with the games they attended. He got the tickets through fellow cabbies who were season-ticket holders, then sat in the stand while Carl screamed, looking off into the glittery drapes of rain picked out by the floodlights. Peering up at his dad's face, Carl thought that it was like the advertisements painted on the pitch — only to be viewed obliquely and from a long way off. Up close Dave's features were distorting, becoming more and more unfamiliar.

In Gospel Oak, Carl carved out his own territory: first the estates at the back of their house, then the adventure playground on Parliament Hill, and eventually the Heath itself. He also learned to be the friend who's always asked back to tea, polite, self-effacing, the child these other parents thought they wished they had, not understanding that he was lost, elusive, living on a fantasy island remote from the rest of the world.

The house — which had seemed spacious for a young family — was too small for ill-feeling. Mild irritation could tenant a whole storey. From their bedroom — which was above the kitchen — Dave could hear if Michelle angrily opened the fridge, or even if cheese was frigidly unwrapped. When they rowed they used up the whole house. Screams filled the attic, shouts crammed the living room. Carl at first cowered — then fled. Once he'd gone they said dreadful things. Dave's anger was a secret nuclear programme. For years, in that dark place where his mother indulged him and his father neglected him, warped technicians had slaved to condense his vapoury unlovability, then compress it into a glowing core of hatred. Michelle had her own radioactive secret — fuse them together and you had almost unlimited destructive power.

For the first few years after the rows began Dave stored up huge reserves of rage, then hours or days later he would dump them on Carl. Dave hit the child in secret — a sly clip, an underhand slap delivered with perfect, insane timing, precisely beyond the eye line of its mother. The anger sparked in him, and hand or foot spasmed. The child howled with incomprehension, and the remorse — oh! it was so powerful, like a drug, a moral drug that made Dave behave better for weeks. Perhaps that was why Dave hit the son he loved — in order to discipline himself.

Then one day Carl's primary teacher snagged Dave in the playground and drew his attention to a thick welt on the boy's thin neck. 'I'm not saying anything,' she said when she'd heard out Dave's feeble explanation — but truly she was saying everything.