Will Self - The Book of Dave

A young woman came limping towards him. She wore a bright blue puffa jacket and her brown ringlets lay hopelessly on her pitted cheeks. She had the broken nails and scuffed trainers of poverty. 'Excuse me, love,' Dave began, 'but you wouldn't happen to know …' then he tailed off, because she was looking at him with eyes bruised by utter disorientation. Her dry lips parted and she said, 'Pliz? Pliz?' She doesn't know where she is. . She hasn't got a fucking clue. . She looks like she's been brought here from Massy-fucking-donia smacked out in a van … Kept locked up in a gaff near here for months getting fucked stupid. . Fucked up the cunt — fucked up the Gary. . She don't know where she is — she don't even know what city she's in … 'Don't worry, love,' he said, 'you don't worry.'

He left her and stumbled down through a new development: tall, narrow townhouses ranged round courtyards choked with cars. There was a kosher deli open and outside it Frummer kids were gathered licking ice lollies. As Dave limped by, they stared at him, their pale blue eyes, velvet skullcaps and corkscrew payess giving them the look of earnest spaniels. Next he found himself on a towpath beside a sluggish reach of brown water.

He was losing it — whole chunks of the city were falling out of him. Kenton and Kingsbury, Kingston and Knightsbridge. He didn't know the name of this canal, or any other, only that it was oozing south, so he turned in the opposite direction and walked north. North past the grassy ramparts of reservoirs guarded by palisades of Giant Hogweed, north, past the tumbledown shacks of shedonists, who'd pitched up on this toxic Limpopo in their bashed barges and cashiered dredgers. He skirted industrial estates where metal tortured itself and ducked under the echoic stages of elevated roadways. He traversed pancake-flat parks where adolescents mooched on mountain bikes, their thin faces lost in the shadows of their hoodies. They moved slowly, so very slowly, their feet only just maintaining purchase on the very outer edge of the pedals.

Towards evening Dave found himself mounting a hill. Up he went through saw-leafed patches of nettles and the whippy stalks of brambles, while Stanmore and Streatham dropped from the back of his hot head to lie gently steaming on the crushed grass behind. He was disembowelled — he was losing it; and as he lost it the crushed plastic bottle of his soul expanded with sudden cracks and pops.

At the crown of the hill the shrubbery gave way to cool shady groves of silver birch and alder. In the middle of a clearing there was a concrete trig' point. Dave turned back to see the city he had lost spreading to the far hills of the south in brick peak after tarmac trough, blood-orange under the dying sun. In the foreground tall towers stood up to the ochre sky, while to the southeast close-stacked blocks were already subsumed to an electric glare. In the mid distance a river streaked silver and beside it a mighty wheel revolved so slowly.

Dave knew none of it — his Knowledge was gone. The city was a nameless conurbation, its street and shop signs, its plaques and placards, plucked then torn away by a tsunami of meltwater that dashed up the estuary. He saw this as clearly as he'd ever seen anything in his life. The screen had been removed from his eyes, the mirror cast away, and he was privileged with a second sight into deep time. The great wave came on, thrusting before it a scurf of beakers, stirrers, spigots, tubes, toy soldiers, disposable razors, computer-disc cases, pill bottles, swizzle sticks, tongue depressors, hypodermic syringes, tin-can webbing, pallet tape, clips, clasps, brackets, plugs, bungs, stoppers, toothbrushes, dentures, Evian bottles, film canisters, widgets, detergent bottles, disposable lighters, poseable figurines of superheros, cutlery, hubcaps, knick-knacks, mountings, hair grips, combs, earphones, Tupperware containers, streetlight protectors — and a myriad other bits of moulded plastic, which minutes later washed up against the hills of Hampstead, Highgate, Harrow and Epping, forming salt-bleached reefs, which would remain there for centuries, the lunar pull of the new lagoon freeing spiny fragments to bob into the cockle-picking hands of know-nothing carrot-crunchers who would scrutinize them and be filled with great awe by the notion that anything ever had — or ever would be again — Made in China.

Dave turned and wandered away into the woodland, dipping down into damp hollows where midges swirled, then rising up over root-buttressed ridges overarched by the gnarled limbs of oaks that sawed at the thickening night.

When the ex-driver crossed over the M25 and walked down into Epping, darkness had fallen. White flashes from the exposed rails of the tube station imprinted after-images of the privet-lined paths he trudged along. A public-address system barked 'This is the Central Line service for all stations to West Ruislip', but it meant nothing to Dave. On he went, over humped fields of alien maize, up to another wood of smooth-barked beech where pipistrelles stroked his remaining hair. Some trees had been pollarded, and outlined against the bruised night sky they resembled the knobkerries of giants sunk in the beaten earth.

Coppices stirred, then rattled, as Dave mounted a footbridge over the MII. Out in the middle he stopped and peered down at the streaming traffic, car after van after lorry, their headlights drilling the murk. The windscreens were blank until they shot beneath the parapet, then, momentarily, the drivers' faces were revealed: jaws bunched, eyes white-rimmed with exhaustion. Dave understood now that they would always be pinioned in this moment, while he was free to swim in the entire current of fluvial time.

The moon rose over the coxcomb of a wood, and it looked like a headlight cratered with flyspecks. He reached Phyllis's cottage beyond Chipping Ongar after midnight. He was as ignorant as a baby, and accordingly she gathered him to her breast.

Dave Rudman met up with Anthony Bohm in the boardroom of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. It was a featureless white box, buried on a subterranean level. Steel-framed windows gave on to the bottom of an atrium, where stripy stones propped up dildo cactuses. Bohm sat, his goatee dowsing his regulation psychotherapist's Cornish-pasty shoes. Dave had walked from Sloane Square — Bohm had been tied up on Albert Bridge for hours. A Fighting Father was suspended from one of the cast-iron towers. 'Dressed as Thomas More,' Bohm laughed — an unendearing neigh. 'But why, when he was little more than a domestic tyrant?'

'Location,' Dave explained. 'His house — his statue on the Embankment.'

'Um, quite so — did you say you'd walked here?' Bohm was amazed.

'Yeah, it's all up with me, Tonë — the cabbing, that is. I thought it meant, well, everything — it was who I was, but now — '

'I suppose you associate it with the loss — as you see it — of Carl?'

'That's about the size of it, mate. The Knowledge was what I had to pass on. I believed that even before I wrote that mad rant and buried it in their garden — now it seems like a load of bollocks, a load of fucking bollocks.'

As he grew agitated the consonants flaked away from the scalp of his diction: 'Ant, I gotta — I haffta, I gotta go back there. I gotta dig it up. S'pose 'e found it? It'd fuck wiv 'is 'ed. I mean — I know it ain't likely — but what if 'e did?' Bohm refused to be drawn. If Rudman was seeking permission for this peculiar escapade, he was not in the business of granting it. He took a different tack: 'You know one of them, don't you, the Fighting Fathers?'

'Yeah, Fucker — Gary Finch. Daft tosser — he's like a, a tool for them. 'E don't really get it — ' e does what they tell 'im to do. 'E's always the one up on the plinth, or the column or the building, with the old Bill trying to talk him down.'