Will Self - The Book of Dave

There were only two seasons in this hyperboreal city: the brief summer when fatty sun-screen and fallen food fried on the paved tundra, then the long dark winter of drizzle welling up from the concrete permafrost. It was December, and it was done. Dave went up to Colindale to speak to an old acquaintance of his dad who worked at ABC Print, at the end of Annesley Avenue, by the polythene scrap of the Silk Stream, where gulls mournfully circled over the Montrose recreation ground and a knock-kneed old geezer stood in the road mixing mortar on a bit of plyboard.

'On metal you say?' Dick Winterbottom looked quizzically at Dave Rudman. 'Yeah, yeah, we can do that, as it 'appens.' The printer wore a cloth coat the brown of wrapping paper, the baggy skin under his eyes was scaly with age, a roll up pierced his lip like a narwhal's horn. 'Not that it guarantees it'll last for ever — for that you'd aff to dye-stamp it.' Machinery comfortingly clunked and slapped. There were stacks of cardboard, ricks of papery hay, and over it all hung the smell of inky fertilizer. 'You're Paul Rudman's boy — aren'tcha?' Dave looked at the saintly old printer — a headlight was on full beam behind his head.

Dave was up and down to Colindale several times. Winterbottom, quite rightly, thought him crazy — so Dave had to put down a three-grand deposit. He had to pick the metal for the plates that would be pages, he had to select the rings to bind them. He had to correct the proofs himself — and supervise the presses — because no one, repeat NO ONE was to have sight of the copy. 'A one-off like this,' Winterbottom remarked, 'the cost is fee-numb-in-awl. Phenomenal. Sure you don't wanta 'ave us do ten or twenty more — it'll cost yer the same?' But Dave Rudman wanted one — there had to be ONLY ONE. Then, when it was done and he'd taken delivery, he handed the cheque over for the balance and took the film from the press, the computer discs from the setting machine, and any other evidence there was of The Book's production. He found a providential skip, poured petrol on this stuff, flicked a match, got in the motor and drove away.

It would have to be by night. He would need equipment: a torch that strapped on to his head, a mattock for the digging, dark clothes and stuff to black up his face. It would have to be a dark night as well, a moonless night, issa commando raid inter the Ferbiddun Zön. Dave was far gone now. He could see nothing that wasn't presented to him in the screen; by day he warned potential fares he was coming by keeping the foglamps on all the fucking time. By night he transfixed them in the glare of his headlights. A woman could have been raped and battered to death within feet of him — and he never would have noticed. He trapped the hated fucking flyers up West and drove them out to Heathrow, past the Moto Services at Heston, ranting all the way, 'Forward,' forward, forward … no longer aware of whether he was speaking aloud or in his mishmash mind.

Michelle considered it nothing short of a miracle that the three of them were managing to get on this well. Granted, the peculiar situation put stresses on all of us and allowances have to be made for Carl. Still, Beech House ticked over, and she revelled in the keeping of its moneyed beat. Redecorating was under way, and Michelle had taken a leave of absence from work. In her heart-of-hearts, where ambition was stilled, she knew she wasn't going back. Standing in the bay, at the ebony windowpane, looking out over rain-lacquered gardens at the lap of land that cuddled Hampstead, Michelle could see nothing much besides the questing fingers of TV aerials scratching the rushing night sky.

Behind her in the high-ceilinged rooms, a new reality was taking shape. Carl was up in his computerized crack house, bossing his 'hos'; Cal was taking a bath. A stately pine dominated the drawing room, a heap of boxes contrived by the Harrods specialist gift-wrapping service spread out beneath its shaggy, sagging limbs. It's a lie … another fucking lie … Until they know which one of them is the boy's father, it's just another fucking lie … Michelle's head was reflected in the glass — a shapeless pile. At the flat in Fulham … I had those mirrored doors on the fitted cupboards … I used to watch blokes make love to me in them … Then with Dave crammed in beside me I watched my belly swell. I woke in the middle of the night … the night before we were married … I started shaking … I could see a figure in the dark … evil coming off it. I turned to Dave and he was awake already — he'd seen it too. He put on the light — it was only a shapeless pile of clothes on a chair. We both calmed down, then I said, 'We're making a big mistake, you know.' And he said, 'I know.' It was mad, but we were closer — we felt closer then than we did the whole next day. What's that, then — knowing you're making a big mistake but doing it anyway … a conspiracy?

The hole was thigh-deep. Deep enough, surely, to withstand the delving of public-school-educated landscape gardeners. Deep enough to remain undisturbed until — by some mysterious signal that Dave could not yet divine — Carl would be informed and excavate it. Dave took the queer ringbinder of metal plates, wrapped it in a plastic bag and placed it in the hole. He dropped a chunk of York paving on top, then shovelled the earth and clay back in with his army-surplus mattock. He stomped with his claggy trainers until the surface was levelled off. He was turning to leave — for it was done — when she saw him.

'Cal!' Michelle shouted. 'There's someone in the garden!' She already knew who this someone was. Cal came running from the bath, spattering bergamot bubbles and slip-sliding on the newly laid marble of the grandiose hall. In the garden Dave turned towards her cry. A flap of curtain was open, and buttery light spread across builders' rubble — barley-sugar twists of reinforced-steel in a fudge of old London bricks and mortar. Smoked salmon scraps from Greenspan's the deli… A Danish pastry ring and the News of the Screws … Dad shitting out his hangover in the bog … Sunday morning in the 'burbs … He fled.

They saw him as he scattered along Beech Row. They saw him, Cal and Michelle, standing on the front step of their seven-figure lifestyle, and Michelle shook her red head and said, 'Poor Dave, what's he doing? Where's he going to?' Cal put a bare, wet arm around her shoulders.

He was going to the day, because he couldn't hide in the nighttime any longer. The darkness was where he'd done it — the darkness was where they might find him. So he fled into the day, through the curtain of drizzle and into the chicane at the bottom of Park Lane, where Achilles was back up on his plinth, fending off the hair-styling wand of the Hilton with his black shield.

The mainsail, which all that tariff had bellied overhead like the wing of a mighty seafowl, now whipped, snagged, then crumpled. The ferry was going about. Cummon nah, U fukkas! the gaffer shouted down the forward hatch. Out of it burst a ragged company of dads, eleven in all: two coloureds, three pikeys, a Mick and five of the gaffer's own chavs. With their gaffer aiming kicks up their arses, the crew sprang to the rigging and swarmed aloft. The wind was quartering and the sails must be trimmed. The Catford Light had been raised — they would be in London before nightfall.