Will Self - The Book of Dave

Big End had married a white girl from Sidcup, and together they'd bought a house in Petts Wood. He hadn't been mucking about, Big End, he had his own joinery business now. The girl was a beautician. Petts Wood, on the leafy southeast borders of London, was as green and quiet as a cemetery. Big End imported some of his kids and threw raucous barbecues that drove his neighbours crazy.

Dave Rudman lay in a spare bedroom stacked with boxes full of moody beauty products: dirty cleansers, hidden concealers, bent foundation creams. He wept and blamed the break-up of his marriage on his baldness. He remembered the oddest week of his life, holed up in a hotel near the Gare Saint-Lazare. He'd cocked up all the arrangements and had to take the Metro out to La Defense every morning for his treatments. In this futuristic city he had Revolutionary Trichofuse. They bored little holes in his scalp and planted tussocks of hair harvested from his groin. The hotel was a smelly warren, and there were tarts bringing back punters at all hours — mostly Japanese. Every night Dave sat staring into the fag-packet-sized mirror for hours at his freshly harrowed pate. He prayed that this would make the difference; after all, he could hardly blame Michelle for not running her fingers through his hair if there was none.

For a few weeks after he got back to London the transplant looked credible. Michelle didn't begrudge him either the time or the money — she understood the naked thrust of vanity, an ambition located in the body alone, a frantic urge for skin to get on, hair to rise to the very top. Then overnight it happened: Dave went to bed still convinced the transplant was a goer and woke up to find that his forehead was a domed groin — he had pubic hair touching his eyebrows. He had to pay out five times as much to get the crinkle-cut hair removed as he'd paid to have it inserted. They filled in the depressions as best they could. He took to wearing a baseball cap.

Now Dave took his hatred out on himself, learning in the muffled little room to quietly bludgeon his head with his fist. 'Bash! Bash! Bash!' The Fairway sat neglected in the road outside, an empty plinth deserted by its statue. Dave still drove every day because he had to, but now he didn't merely neglect the Fairway, he abused it, giving it the sly digs and casual kicks formerly reserved for his family, until the cab's bodywork was dimpled by his animosity.

Only once during the whole protracted disembowelling of their marriage did Dave talk to Michelle about what had happened up in Hampstead. It was April 2001. They were sitting in a sunlit corridor of the Family Division Court at Somerset House. Dust lay heavier than justice on the parquet. Dave was with Rebecca Cohen and the barrister she'd subcontracted to do the talking. Cohen had dyed, caramel hair and a black Jaeger suit. The barrister's striped shirt was escaping from the waistband of his trousers, his yellowing briefs were escaping from their mauve ribbons. He had the florid, old-young face of a man who has witnessed many bad things — none of which has happened to him. Three embrasures along Michelle, tidy as ever, sat with her tag team: Fischbein, a killer newt, and a woman barrister whose downy face glowed. The barristers shuttled between the window seats; their aim was to cut a deal that could be presented to the judge in her chambers. 'It'll save a lot of money,' Cohen said, 'believe me.' The house was chopped up, the maintenance stacked, the child bundled — everything was going in Michelle's favour. She couldn't understand it — why, when he'd caught her in the act, was Dave passively acquiescing to this quickie divorce on the grounds of his bad behaviour?

The barristers were squaring off, trading bits of the Rudmans' lives, when Dave nipped past them and sat down beside her. 'You, him …' He was breathless from the tiny sprint; Cohen flapped behind him. Fischbein said, 'You mustn't approach my client directly,' but Michelle waved him away. When they were let alone, Dave said, 'One thing, tell me one thing — and don't fucking lie. D'you love him? Are you going to take Carl and move in with him? That's all I want to know.' Michelle said, 'I d o n ' t … I can't say … I'm sorry, David — truly I am.' While what Dave heard her say was It was nothing, it meant nothing … It's over. His guilt did the dubbing.

He moved into the flat on Agincourt Road. He thought something iffy must have been going on with the previous tenant, because the gaff reeked of baby oil, and talcum powder puffed from every square inch of the fitted shag carpet. Every other weekend Dave borrowed a vacuum cleaner from old Mrs Prentice who lived beneath him in a nylon housecoat. Glad of the human contact, she also offered him a box full of polishes and sprays. By the time he went to pick Carl up from his school, the gloomy little flat was spick and span, the Arsenal duvet pancake flat on the boy's bed, the video cassettes a neat little office block.

It was Carl's first year at secondary school, and he begged his father not to come near the place. Dave couldn't keep away. The school backed on to the branch line that ran beside Parliament Hill. Beneath its wonky weathervane and crap campanile the older pupils clustered at the gates. They wore Burberry baseball caps and white, nylon-furred parkas. The mouths of these inner-city Inuits spat consonants hard and sharp as teeth, while the girls' adobe skins suggested they'd been renting Mexico by the half-hour. Yet they seemed entirely sure of themselves, while Dave skulked, and when Carl reluctantly detached himself from his peers, they skulked away together.

Runty… Boysie. . .Champ… Tiger… These babyish nicknames were no longer applicable to the rootless stripling who flopped along by Dave's side. After the first couple of weekends they spent together, Dave was disabused of the idea that he knew intuitively what to do with the lad. If he didn't put together an exhaustive programme they were thrown back on each other's company — and Dave hadn't a clue what to say to Carl. Already he detected an awful adolescent surliness in him — isolated words roamed aimlessly in the lad's down-turned mouth. Was this payback for those livid marks? Whatever Dave uttered sounded tinny and insincere; he was reduced to the role of chirpy cockney cabbie. They had to talk fucking football. And go for endless kick-abouts. Belatedly Dave understood why the gulf between him and his own father had been unbridgeable.

Sunday evenings were the worst — the changeover. Dave couldn't bear to accompany Carl to the front door, so he left him at the mouth of the cul-de-sac; then, punched in the gut by loneliness, he hobbled back to the flat for lamb dhansak and a yanked foreskin. His life, henceforth, would be meted out in takeaway tinfoil panniÂkins and crispy tissues. There was no one to call — he'd made no investment in life beyond his wife and son; there were no relationships of trust or intimacy. These were interactions he'd only ever witnessed in the rounded oblong of his rearview mirror — the heartfelt confidence, the stuttered confession. These were things that fares said, and intimacy was a mysterious act fares engaged in once he'd dropped them off.

Only Gary Finch refused to let him alone. Fucker Finch — whose long-suffering Debbie had finally given him the push, and whose magic fingers had failed to conjure up another lovely assistant. Fucker was back cabbing — his old man had scraped the money together to front up his insurance and a few months' vehicle rental. Dave ran into him at the kiosk on Chelsea Bridge, where stretch-limo drivers drank midnight teas and watched spectral trains emerge from the cavernous hulk of Battersea Power Station, then jolt their empty, yellow-lit coaches into Victoria.