Low down on the scabrous underbelly of South London, the BMW raced from one shopping parade to the next. From OK Chicken to Perfect Chicken, from Bootiful Chicken to Luvverly Chicken, from Royal Chicken to Chicken Imperium, from Chicken Universe to one forlorn joint in the filthy crotch of Burgess Park that was simply dubbed 'Chicken'. Down here, where men wore nylon snoods, the light industrial premises massed and every public, horizontal thing was planted with metal thorns, Cal felt the turbid threat of the city, which might choose — quite impersonally — to climb into the car at the lights and suggest, at gunpoint, that he step out.
Driscoll House, built in 1913, was Castle Dossula. Vast and foursquare, beneath its crenellations ranged scores of loopholes, behind each a rental embrasure. Weekly rates were pegged to the emergency-housing benefit. The security door was propped open with a pallet. Cal made inquiries at a battered plexiglas window. Then he was led along a corridor. Doors opened to either side and faces emerged, pitted, veined and puce. Their owners were drinking fortified wine with Antabuse chasers, and the stop-start strain on their sclerotic hearts was going to kill them stone-dead.
The string-vested seneschal stopped in front of No. 137 and unlocked it with a key from his enormous bunch. Inside were knickers in a twist and jeans draped over a chair; a cheap candle had melted into a Formica tabletop and curled over like a limp dick. 'She wozere,' said the seneschal, "coz I 'eard 'er carryin' on wiv 'owie.'
'Howie?' Cal queried, although from other Daisy hunts he recognized the name.
'Jock geezer, piggy ring in 'is 'ooter, sells the Issue. Collects bottles. Drinks wiv a school dahn at ve Bullring, but 'e azza flop in Mottingham.'
Mottingham was so far out on the outskirts of the city that the Avenues the BMW swished along were damp with the sweeter showers of the countryside beyond. At bucolic roundabouts cellophane-wrapped flowers were stacked up to mark the site of fatal collisions. The makeshift shrines were garlanded with plastic gewgaws and papered with scrawled cards; so the prosaic, the accidental, was factored into a Divine Plan for London.
At the address the seneschal had given him Cal found two black teenagers smoking weed and watching a video of a nightmare on another street. A tenner elicited a further address, where ' 'owie an' 'is bird' had gone to score. At this location — a plyboard warren of bedsits in a venerable Victorian villa — the finder's fee was upped to twenty quid. Finally, at 3.30 a.m., Cal ran her to ground, dry-heaving under a rhododendron bush in the gardens of a derelict pub. The huaraches he'd brought her back from Mexico lay discarded near by. In the silence between his daughter's spasms Cal could hear a nightjar churring, although he thought it was a scooter accelerating along the A20. When he got her into the car, Daisy began to babble about the environment. There was no sign of Howie.
'What's the baddest thing in the world, Dad?'
'What did ya say, Tiger?'
'Dad, what's the baddest thing in the world?' Carl stood before Dave in baby elephant pyjama trousers. His front teeth were big white pegs in his chubby six-year-old face. 'Dad, what's the baddest thing in the world?' He repeated himself, and then, because he was a bright kid, never confused like his father by the sheer amorphousness of everything, he supplied his own answer: 'Is it killing yourself?'
Dave Rudman, on his knees in the North London playing field, looked south to where his son is banged up … He wept and clawed at the grass. He salaamed, head-butting the ground. Fuck you, earth. . and the blow stove in the roof of a vault full of nastiness. I was in their garden … in their fucking garden … I buried it in their garden … that mad fucking rant … Why did I do it? Why? It put me eleven fucking grand out of pocket, that's why I'm skint — that's why I can't pay Cohen, that's why I'm mushing every fucking hour of the day …
'What's the baddest thing in the world, Dad?' Dave imagined six-year-old Carl sitting cross-legged by the mess his father had made, picking up a lolly stick and dabbling it in the mud.
'Worst,' Dave croaked aloud, 'the worst thing in the world is to kill yourself, Tiger, but not if you do it to stop yourself killing someone else.'
In the Trophy Room of the Swiss Cottage Sports Centre — group rental £25 per hour, pick up and leave the key at main reception the Fathers First group did laps in liquid anger, thrashing up and down the lanes, the chlorine of hatred stinging their eyes. 'I'm gonna fucking kill her!' bellowed Billy O'Neil. He was standing in spotless Timberlands, his manicured fists were clenched, the sweat stood out on his tousled brow. 'Calm down, Billy,' Keith Greaves said, 'please calm down.' Billy couldn't hear him — nor could the other premier-division dads. They watched, appalled and yet entranced, as the big man was manipulated by the dextrous fist of rage. Rage that pulled on the strings threaded through all their lives, so they poked their own little fists into others' faces, kicked their feet into kidneys, and slammed car doors so hard the glass disintegrated into 'ackney diamonds. Dave Rudman's face was in his hands; his fingers sought out the shameful scars of his failed hair transplant. 'Calm down, Billy,' Keith said again — while Dave began to cry.
Carl understood that it was part of the whole expensive package. Along with Cal Devenish came Beech House, the Range Rover Vogue, the Tuscan holidays and of course the poncey fucking school Privilege sucked — he longed for his dad. Longed for Dave, who took him out in the cab and showed him parts of the city Wormwood Scrubs, Lea Bridge, the Honor Oak Reservoir — which the 'ampstead wankers would never see. In the past three years, as he'd seen Dave less and less, so Carl's idea of his father had come unstuck, detaching itself from both any foundation in the past and the increasingly disturbing reality of the man.
In Carl's view, Dave was a knight of the open road. He knew the city and he knew its people. Dave was as at home up West in a fancy restaurant as he was in Muratori's, the cabbies' King's Cross cafe. Everyone knew him — cops, bartenders, fellow cabbies, waver-uppers — knew him and respected him. 'Orlright, Tufty!' they sang out as the Fairway squealed to a halt and chip and block got out. So on the fateful day, last October, when Carl came out of the elaborate wrought-iron gates of his new school and there was his dad, hunched down at the wheel of the cab, unshaven, white gunk at the corners of his peeling lips, oily patches under his burnt-out eyes, it was a dreadful shock. 'Cummear, son,' Dave growled, 'cummear.'
Carl's first instinct was to run. Boys in his class had already spotted the odd apparition: a London taxi cab parked in Frognal at four in the afternoon. Not dropping off or picking up, poised five feet from the kerb, but deep in the gutter. Worse still, the Fairway — which, in the days when his father had pride, had never carried any kind of advertising — now sported Supersides. The driver-side one showed a blonde in her bra and knickers tearing a strip from her own inner thigh; below it was the double-entendre PAINLESSLY OFF, PLEASURABLY ON. Puerile eyes sucked this up.
Why's he cummear? Why … ? Carl was torn between anxiety for his father, who he knew wasn't allowed within half a mile of Beech House, and anger that he was shaming him in front of the other boys. He hurried over, wrenched open the back door of the cab, slung his school bag in, leaped in after it and called to his father, 'Drive on, cabbie!'