Will Self - The Book of Dave

So Michelle savoured the brutal incomprehension of friends and colleagues. Her girlfriends, exasperated by her refusal to tell them anything — let alone all — included her out. Michelle didn't care — she even revelled in her mother's anger. On Sunday evenings she burrowed down to Brixton on the filthy tube, then was winched up to Streatham on a still filthier bus. Past the ice rink, where those black girls rapped me on the head with their rings … Fucking Irish … I cried in the bogs. . My tutu ruffed up … Blood in my hair … Michelle could find comfort even in the stony silence of a chicken tea. Ron at the lager, Cath fretting at the cuffs of her cardie with chipped nails, pressing a damp serviette against her eye with the heel of her hand … Serves her bloody right … Disgrace, so feared, turned out to be … a relief. Nothing else bad could ever happen to Michelle. The horse had bolted into the stable. There in the pins-and-needles darkness its little hooves drummed on the taut walls of its stall. Where was this jealous God — this vengeful God? Who could he be? A cabbie who knew about statues and came too quick? A man whose face Michelle couldn't even remember.

Cheryl McArdle, the Personnel Director of LM & Q Associates, Exhibition Organizers, kneaded the prominent mole on her broad cheek; her brown sausage curls tumbled on to her padded shoulders. 'I've secured you six months on three quarters of your salary, will that be enough?' Michelle said, 'Thank you.' Cheryl pointed at the old communion ring that Michelle had got enlarged and now wore on the appropriate finger. 'Nice touch,' she said.

Michelle didn't like this lie. Looking back, years later, as Cal Devenish's features — his low brow and tight, otter ears — swam to the surface of her son's developing face, she realized it was biblical — the one lie had begotten the next. But at the time she thought, I don't like to deceive my employers … He has a right to know … It's his child too. She found herself calling the number scrawled on the taxi receipt. Dave wasn't in, but the guy who answered didn't mind giving her the address. Palmers Green — it was ridiculously distant, a trek so long that in making it Michelle felt the city parch into desert. When the cabbie opened the door, half naked, she nearly laughed — almost puked. His thin hair was tousled and through it she saw the exact pattern of his coming baldness. 'I didn't think,' she said. 'I didn't want…' Out of such hesitations whole lives can be stopped in their tracks 'You have a right…' She smoothed the contours of the hillock beneath her sheepskin coat and a sloppy grin spread across his face. What did he imagine? That I'm a plum fare, sweet as a nut? 'You'd better come in,' Dave said.

'You'd better come in,' Cal Devenish said. 'I'd better,' Michelle replied. Heavy gold cufflinks dangled from the cuffs of his thick white linen shirt. Cal had bought Beech House because there was money sloshing around in his account. Dead dad's money — and income from Blackie, his kids' TV programme about a depressed puppy, which had been sold to over three hundred networks worldwide. Cal didn't know what to do with the house that the money he didn't know what to do with had bought. In the tall rooms the plaster mouldings were wire-brushed, the wallpaper stripped away. It was a palimpsest, this house, the past rubbed up out of the surface of the present. There were a few things scattered on the original floorboards: phone directories, a phone, a standard lamp. They pretended she was an estate agent and he a sexy potential buyer, then they made love, in the hall, on the paint-spattered parquet.

When Carl was six he'd spend whole mornings diligently tying things up, looping string from the banisters to a chair leg, to a door handle, then propelling toy soldiers along these flimsy pulleys. In his ticking hovel Carl's father began tying events together in his fervid mind, linking all those half-recalled moments when his wife had avoided his eyes even more than usual, got undressed in the bathroom and slid, fully nightgowned, into bed. Dave pulled tight the granny knots that bound this change of plan — 'I got a call from Sandra and decided to go out with her after all, Mum didn't mind sitting' — to a new outfit she'd worn only a week before: 'It was in the sales …' 'What fucking sales?' he said out loud. 'What fucking sales do they have in October?'

Dave Rudman wheeled the cab past the National Gallery and headed north up the Charing Cross Road. Plastic horses plunged from the facade of the Hippodrome, cycle rickshaws were cluttering up the junction at Cambridge Circus. Rickshaws … rickshaws! What is this, fucking Delhi! Soon they'll be burning bloody corpses on the Albert Embankment. Dave was no longer in hock to guilt — he redeemed his shabby pledge for still more anger. All those hateful digs and savage barges, the slaps, the pinches, palming her face off like a freckled rugby ball — he was absolved of all responsibility for any of it, because she's been ripping me off… taking them off. . sick … I can see her face hot and sweaty … Plunging some other bloke's dick in her mouth … He had to stop the cab in Harrington Square and retch out of the half-opened door.

Forward Southampton Road … Right Fleet Road … Forward South End Road … It had been a headachey autumn day, the sun hammering its rays into crushed lager cans, embedding these glittering fragments in the city's terrazzo. Now, as the Heath yawned to the right of the cab and Dave saw clouds boiling over Highgate Hill, he had a moment of clarity: I don't have t'do this … the marriage has been over for bloody years … Only infantilism kept him driving on, an angry little boy whose legs weren't long enough for him to reach the brake pedal. Left Heath Street … left Beech Row … Points at the end: the Friends' Meeting House, New End school, the Horse and Groom, my wife fucking another man … This was the fuck-off gaff, double fronted, two flights of stairs doubling back on themselves to reach a grand front door. He took the stairs six at a time. He looked up to the heavens — cloudy Michelles writhed there, tier upon tier of them. Who was he? Who was this man? For the last decade, every time he looked at his son, Dave Rudman had felt this uncanny jolt — the impact of an unseen object on an unfunny bone. Who was this man? He raised the solid brass question mark and brought it down. 'Bang! Bang! Bang!' In the Family Court the judge beat the fragile bond to bloody mush with his gavel.

They'd been sleeping. She was lying on top of him. His legs were raised, his hands quietly cradled her buttocks. With each 'Bang!' he shlupped out of her, they came awake, parted with a jarring of hipbones, rolled away from each other. 'Jesus Christ!' Michelle cried. 'What the fuck can that be?' But she knew already.

When Cal swung the door open, Dave Rudman looked like an ape man, his arms dangling, his brow bulging. They stared at each other with mounting comprehension. Dave recognized this face, smudged with sleep; it was closely related to one he knew only too well. Over Cal Devenish's bare shoulder Dave could see Michelle doing a thing that in marriage was so workaday — picking up her underwear.

He drove to the old Globe, he got drunk. He drove drunk back to King's Cross and bought a bottle. A whore tried to toss him off in the back of the cab. He finished the bottle, he slept. He woke — and all over the city the plinths, pediments, columns and niches were quite empty; the Family of Man had fled. When Dave got back to the house it was mid morning. Carl was at school and the only evidence of Michelle was a hairbrush strung with long auburn hairs and a pair of high-topped leather boots. They were empty, broken at the ankle.