Will Self - The Book of Dave

The rows got worse — far worse. They were hallucinogenic, leaving both of them out of body, watching swirling patterns of mad, red and black hate. The commonplace accusations of inadequacy were no longer enough. Her face pale and pulpy except for when it was sweaty and livid — Michelle said the unsayable: 'He isn't your child anyway! He isn't.' And the silence that ensued hummed — they became aware of the ticking of the electricity meter, a motorbike snarling down Southampton Road. 'You what?' Dave said very quietly. 'Come again?' But Michelle, unable to believe she'd said it at all, crossed her thin arms, her characteristic posture: holding everything in check. She kept on believing she hadn't said it, so that when Dave barged her, his hip ramming her against the kitchen unit — she found it easy to believe this hadn't happened either.

The afternoon before dawn found him on the Goods Way, Dave had picked up a pol with a camera-friendly tie on the South Lambeth Road and dropped him at St Stephen's Gate. Finding himself in Pimlico, he parked the Fairway in Page Street and stalked, like a black pawn, between the chequerboard facades of the estate to the Regency Cafe. The Regency wasn't a cabbies' caff — but they did come in. There was a bijoux rank round the corner on Horseferry Road. On this particular evening the Gimp was in there — an older bloke Dave remembered from when Benny was still alive. He wasn't one of the steam-bath crowd, but Dave had seen him a few times in the Warwick Avenue shelter. Benny had always said that the Gimp was 'A wrong un, a sly fucker, I've 'eard tell 'e's a tout.' The Gimp had to be seventy-five … if 'e's a day. . but he looked alright. Jeans were pulled up tight over a pot belly; he sported a leather jacket and tinted designer glasses.

He called across the cafe, 'Orlright, Tufty, it is you, son, isn't it, Benny's lad?'

Dave admitted that it was.

'Cummova and join me,' the Gimp said. 'Go-orn, park yer arse.'

He was dabbling his tea, then bringing tiny spoonfuls of it to his sagging old lips … dis-gus-ting … 'Funny thing is,' said the Gimp, poking the teaspoon at Dave, 'I 'ad yer old lady in the cab s'afternoon — leastways I fink it was 'er.'

'Oowdjoo even know it was 'er?' Dave dismissed him with a wave of his smoky hand, but the Gimp was not to be deterred: 'I'm good wiv faces, see, and your granddad once showed me a snap of your wedding. Dead proud, 'e was. An' she's a looker, ain't — she hard to miss wiv that carrot top.' He is a tout. . good with faces my arse … 'Picked her up on Southampton Road in Gospel Oak — your manor, is it?'

'Yeah, yeah, it is, as it 'appens.' Dave sounded unconcerned indifferent even. 'Where'd you drop 'er off, then?'

' 'ampstead. Probly gone up there to meet a girlfriend in one of them wine bars. She was right dolled up, she was — looked lovely. You're a very lucky feller … Nah, my old Vera …'

Dave was no longer listening. Sitting there, sucking on his acrid teat and staring at the hideous Gimp sipping his soup-a-cup, Dave was looking instead into the wing mirror of his mind, where all the traffic behind him now appeared much, much larger. She had every opportunity, I've worked nights for half the time we've been together … Why wouldn't she? I know I disgust her. . After the boy I couldn't. . I couldn't make her come … It was all. . all slack down there … This was grotesque pleading, for he knew the truth: it wasn't that she was too big for him — he was too small for her. Michelle hadn't meant to; it was a skill she'd sucked up with her mother's formula — belittling a man until he was the size of a toy soldier, then putting him away in a box.

He dredged up the Gimp's real name. 'Where exactly in HampÂstead did you drop her off then … Ted? I only ask 'coz I said I'd meet her later and …' He stopped, realizing he was giving too much away, and the Gimp was looking at him queerly, although all he said was 'Beech Row, up the top end of Heath Street, right outside a big fuck-off gaff —'

'Didduloodoo-didduloodoo.' For once Dave's mobile went off at the right time. It was no one he knew — let alone wished to speak to. He feigned importance, though, and, making his excuses, left thinking, Cunt'll be dead soon enough.

At the bottom of the hill, in Gospel Oak, where single cigarettes were sold in the corner shops and kids huffed Evostik in seeping stairwells, Michelle Brodie cohabited with the secret that Carl Rudman was not her husband's child. Yet every time Michelle went up to Hampstead to visit her wealthy lover she thought, Why tell Cal now — why does he deserve to know what I've lived with for years? For ten years Michelle's life had been a horror film shot in extreme slow motion. At his birth it was universally acknowledged that the baby was 'the spit of his old man'. Michelle's mother, Cath, said so, Gary Finch said so, Dave's sister, Samantha, said so — even Annette Rudman, when pressed on the matter, conceded that her grandchild bore its father's features. Michelle wasn't so sure: she saw her lover's face cast like a shadow over the baby's pink flesh. She covertly brought her fingers together 'snip-snip', the way that peasants warded off the evil eye. 'Snip-snip', the way Cal Devenish had gestured when she wormed away from him, across the tousled bed in the Ramada Inn in Sheffield, and asked — a little breathlessly — 'Have you gotta condom?' Her blouse lay open, exposing her eager breast — had she ever been more lovely?

'No, no,' he'd guffawed. 'I don't have a condom — I didn't come with the intention of climbing into bed with anyone. But then,' he laughed again and his eyes dissolved into lusty, winey, cokey pools, 'I didn't count on meeting anyone as beautiful as you.' He took her in his arms and kissed her, and even though his breath was, well … rank. . she didn't mind because she supposed hers was as well. Then he broke the embrace and held up snipping fingers. 'Snip-snip. You see, I've had the snip. I know, I know …' He took a deep shuddery breath. 'I'm young for it. My wife had two very bad miscarriages before the baby and, well, we didn't think …' Michelle shushed him with her mouth. She didn't mind — she was too drunk. Sleeping with a married man was bad enough — but to discuss his feelings worse still: better to shush him up, then feed the flexing, velvety limb inside herself.

'Snip-snip'. It became their catch-sound, accompanied by the little manipulation that excised them from any responsibility. Five, ten, twenty? How many times had they met up in motorway motels, or done it on the cold mattresses of the empty, serviced flats that Cal was supposed to be managing for his property-dealing paterfamilias? 'Snip-snip'. Then came the evening at the Hilton — Cal made a fist with his little girl's nappy, punching a hole in Michelle's foamy emotions, and seven hours later Dave Rudman, the sap, crawled into it.

Throughout that autumn the new being erected its little stand inside her: Foetus '87; while Michelle, unwilling to acknowledge what was happening, went on supervising the construction of many other, far larger ones. Ideal Home, The Boat Show, The Motor Show. Up to Birmingham for Office Equipment '87 at the NEC — then back down again. Still Cal didn't call. 'Snip-snip'. She cut him out of her life. It was only when Manning, the fat Exhibitions Executive, stopped looking at her and instead began to sniff, that Michelle was forced to frame the realization I'M PREGNANT in orange, metre-high letters.

It was the first time she had stalled, been checked in her determination to make her life hers and hers alone. This feeling of warm yet tense swelling, the teary identification with everything small and vulnerable, was part of a double incubation: Michelle was giving birth to a secret — and abortion was out of the question. Her childhood had, she felt, been banal, her youth exposed and obvious — now her womanhood would be mysterious.