It was a long kipper night in London. From door to door of the city the seeseeteevee men of the PCO moved with stealth and efficiency. Scholars, tradesmen, craftsmen, common day labourers and a smattering of lawyers. In all, some two hundred daddies and a handful of mummies were judged to have been tainted by the Geezer's flying. Under torture they all confessed.
They prised Symun Dévúsh's tongue from his gullet and pounded his chest to get him to breathe. Then they stretched the talking member from its root and cut it off. As he gargled in his own blood, they broke his knuckles and all the joints of his fingers with a punishment club. Then they branded him with the F for flyer on his forehead. Finally, as he swooned close to death, he was taken by cab to the Isle of Dogs and bundled aboard a ferry. The vessel lay off in the London roads that night, and in the small units of the first tariff a second exile was brought out to her by the pilot's pedalo.
This queer was unmolested and unchained. He had with him a capacious changingbag and to ward off the kipper cold he wore a heavy, bubbery cloakyfing with an oilskin cape over its shoulders. Soon after he'd come aboard, the gaffer interviewed him in his cabin: Mì awdas R onlë 2 tayk U sarf 2 Wyc, ware U R 2 B landid. Eye no nuffing uv oo U R aw wot U av dun, mayt, so folla ve rools uv mì ferrë an Eyel giv U no aggro. But fukkabaht an Eyel av U, unnerstood? Antonë Böm nodded his head slowly while tugging his prematurely white beard. He assumed others must have suffered far worse fates that long night, and — while not comprehending the cause of it — appreciated his light escape.
For the remainder of that kipper Böm remained at the Bouncy Castle of Wyc. He tutored a few of the Hack's children who were in residence, and he treated the maladies of both chavs and bondsmen as well as he was able. He knew nothing of the prisoner who languished in the dungeon beneath his feet. When buddout came, a pedalo set out from Wyc. It was a light, fast craft, pedalled by the closest and most trustworthy retainers of the Lawyer. It carried a sole passenger and set course for the last finger of land that pointed from the uninhabited island of Barn towards Ham.
Three months later, when the days were stretching to meet the summer solstice, another far larger pedalo headed south. This vessel belonged to Mister Greaves, the Hack of Ham, and was crewed by his dads. It set course first for the Hack's semi at Stanmaw, where trade goods were to be loaded, together with the sick fares of the Shelter. For Ham was its ultimate destination, and on the narrow thwart set in the prow there hunched a plump figure, his spectacles flashing in the switched-on foglamp. The new teacher and surgeon for the Hamsters that the Driver had requested was on his way at last.
8. The Shmeiss Ponce: September 1992
The fare was lolling by the Bank of England. The dirty building, with its grooved walls and milled balustrades, was a big copper coin tossed down in the City. He beckoned lazily with an upraised finger, summoning the waiter, and Dave slewed the cab to a halt behind a van disgorging toilet paper. The fare — tall, officer class, sandy-haired, three-pieced — lounged over the road. While he slid into the back, Dave listened to the City itself. Could he hear the aftermath of the awful carnage of the day before? The final gargle as the dregs of fifteen billion pounds were sucked out of its dealing rooms? The sweat and moan of shirt-sleeved, plastic piano players pounding out the blues of ruin? No, there was only the hum of everyday urban vacuity.
'Where to, guv?'
'City of London School, d'you know it?' In the rearview mirror the sandy man's moist face belied his dry manner.
'No problem.'
'Not that… um, I'm not… I'm picking up my sons there, then we'll double back to Liverpool Street, yah?'
'No problem.' The sandy man blotted himself out with the Standard … Would've pegged 'im as a total getter, but p'raps he's come down a few pegs … Dave almost felt like telling the sandy man how bad things were for the trade. I can't make the bloody payments, mate, can't make 'em. I've the mortgage on top of that… living whatsits … the cab costs more than just the loan as well, there's your servicing, your diesel, your bits an' bobs, I'll tell you, some days I'd do better staying at home, least I'd know how much I was down then. We're next in the bloody food chain, mate, that's a fact — you lot push the wrong button, sell short instead of long or whatever, an' it's us lot who catch it.
When they got down to Queen Victoria Street the sandy man left his fat briefcase in the back — a repository of trust. He took Dave's time — lounging off along one of the walkways leading into the school, which was tied up to the Embankment like a redbrick cruiser. Domine dirige nos … There was time enough for Dave to read the nameplate on its immobile hull. Time enough for Dave to buff up his resentments and see them shine.
The Fairway no longer shone. When Dave first bought the cab, he lavished his attention on it, laving it, waxing it, shammy-leathering it personally in an autosexual frenzy. It was — he thought — a cool, dark reflection of the man he was. Now it was agony to stroke and rub the black flanks of the thing he'd come to hate, so he took it into the garage where one of Ali Baba's lads gave it a loveless seeing-to.
At the beginning of the year the cabbie had been clearing a minimum of seven hundred pounds every week. A flat fucking neves, no joke, mate, double-bloody-bubble fer Sundays … Then BCCI collapsed. Gang of fucking coke heads, it never looked like a bank to me anyway, I remember ferrying those dodgy wallahs to their gaff on the Cromwell Road, all smirk an'no bloody tips … And the unemployment figures cranked up to three million. No matter, the Tories were still back in come April, rotten bunch, half of them shtupping their secretaries, the other half on the take … Then in June Lloyd's lost two billion. Granted they were a bunch of dumb toffs — only too happy to take unlimited liability before the shit hit the propellor, but they weren't just Names to me, mate — they were fares. . Then only last month the stock market goes fucking tits-up. Five billion off shares in a morning and the big bull needed a fucking Bic round its chops — too late, it's gone an' turned into a bear … Then Paddies all over the fucking shop in their fertilizer dump trucks. Bomb upside the NatWest Tower, Bomb in fucking Victoria Street — I blame … my wife …
All of this is only braggadocio, confessed to the windscreen of the cab as if there were still a fare sitting on the tip seat, ear inclined to the sliding window. When it winds down, Dave is left with his diminished self: a big little balding man who's afraid to look at his own sparse brow in the rearview mirror … RE-CREATE YOUR HAIRLINE … DEVELOPED IN JAPAN — but why? I've never seen a bald Jap … NEW GENERATIONS STRAND-BY-STRAND REFUSION WITH TECHNO-FUSE CAN RE-CREATE YOUR HAIRLINE AND PROVIDE A TOTALLY NATURAL–LOOKING HEALTHY HEAD OF HAIR. TECHNO-FUSE IS INTEGRATED WITH YOUR SCALP AND THE PROCEDURE CAN BE PERFORMED OVER A PERIOD OF TIME, INVOLVES NO SURGERY AND NO ONE NEED EVER KNOW … CALL WIGMORE TRICHOLOGICAL CLINIC NOW. NOW!
The copywriter's medicalese has become Rudman's own private thoughts, a pabulum to chew over: Good News about hair loss. Perhaps if I did it, she'd fancy me … Because it's all about him, the way Michelle turns away in the bed they still, mysteriously, share and edges to the extreme far side of the mattress, where she rolls herself into a chaste belt of duck down.