The done thing for an eager dad was to hearken to the New Arrival. In the event there wasn't room for Dave in the tangle of tubes and the jive of trained hands. Michelle's face was blanched with fatigue, flattened by agony, all her features wrenched to one side, like those of a skate or a turbot. She was that remote from him, Dave thought, deep under the womanly sea. When, at the crucial moment, he did head down to where scratchy brown paper towels were spread ready, he found the gash and the gush — then these other features twisting to confront him. Fucker Finch had said, 'Iss uncanny, yeah, but you'll recognize 'em from the off. Thass what iss bin like wiv awluv mine. I fought "Oh, so iss you issit…"' But Dave didn't recognize this miraculous, shiny fruit at all; it had fallen from a strange tree.
To be fair, Dave Rudman didn't have any paradigm for the birth of a child. He tried to talk to his father in the final fetid days when Michelle's bump pushed him from the house. 'I was at Tadcaster the day you were born,' Paul remarked, dabbing transcriptase on his pint glass with his wet bottom lip.
'Why?' Dave was nonplussed. 'Did you have some slots up there?'
'No, don't be daft, there was a good card that day, your mother wouldn't've wanted me within a mile of the hospital — she didn't for Sam or Noel neither. I phoned, checked everything was shipshape, then I scooped a monkey on the last two. Reverse forecast — you were a lucky little chap when it come to the gee-gees.'
Fathers — they were always absent, while houses — they endure. Put upon by plaster, MDF and emulsion; ground down by sanders and drills; fiddled with by plumbers and electricians — they come through it all that much more robust. Like so many others, Dave and Michelle had placed their faith in a house: it would be their repository of trust and belief. Dave did his bit and his rewards were fettuccine and salmon bakes, the occasional glass of white wine, a limp hand job on a Saturday morning.
Yet the strange thing was that the more Dave painted, hammered and wired, the more the finished thing was hers — all hers. Michelle had the capacity to psychically invest laminated surfaces, tiles and even the very tiny screws that pinioned towel rings to kitchen units. When she was at home, she was in the house, in every part of it, while he always felt like a lodger.
Strolling up to the ironmonger's at Southend Green, intent on track lighting, Dave noticed an Indian takeaway. The sign over the open door read: PIZZA WORLD AND CURRY WORLD — TWO WORLDS IN ONE. Peering inside, he was taken aback — Faisal, with whom he'd been at school in Woodside Park, was bustling about behind the counter. The nerdy boy who'd set out to become a doctor was sporting collar-length hair, thick sideburns and stained Kameeze. He was sowing the raw dough with rough-cut red peppers and whistling.
They hadn't been friends, and Faisal was wary. Dave was surprised to see him running this ghee shop — and said so. Hadn't he wanted to be a doctor? The other man muttered about family. Death. Duties. After that, whenever it got too tense at home, or the cloacal intensity of it drove him out — mother, mother-in-law, baby, three big hands competing to wipe one small bottom — Dave snuck to Two Worlds, where, on a wonky round table strewn with yellowing tabloids, he ate whatever Faisal set before him. Slowly the two men relaxed into a friendship — an unfocused closeness, as if they were sitting side by side on a riverbank and fishing as a pretext for intimacy.
Dave assumed his new friend was as godless as himself, yet within days of beginning to patronize Two Worlds, he found Faisal on his knees between the two chiller cabinets, making obeisance towards the Holloway Road. Given the glacial pace of male confidence, it took another two years for Dave to discover that Faisal was not simply on nodding terms with the Koran, but a highly advanced believer in the literal truth of the ancient text. As Dave munched his way through Desert Storm, the proprietor of Two Worlds enlightened him as to the totality of his own submission: it was all in the Koran, right down to diagrams of the microcircuitry in each and every warhead. 'You don't really believe that, do you?' Dave twitted him.
'Bloody right I do. It's … it's like a blueprint, Dave, that book, it's … it's got everything in it that ever has been and ever will be. It's a logical structure: "There is no God but God", that's the first proposition — all the rest follows logically, perfectly, including smart bombs, genetic engineering, the whole bloody lot.'
'Give over, mate! You can't, I mean — you were gonna be a doctor, a scientist, you must understand that some bloke, thousands of years ago, couldn't possibly —'
'Not some bloke, Dave. God.'
When Michelle returned to work, Dave went on a radio circuit. He thought the money would be steadier. It was, but he couldn't stand driving with one ear open to the seedy wheedle of the controller. He couldn't stand the other drivers scalping the jobs, claiming over the radio to be where they manifestly weren't, as if they're driving a fucking invisible cab. He got home more irritable than ever, snapping at the merest thing. He switched to nights — it gave him more time with the boy and less with her. Soon Dave hardly saw Michelle at all — their feet dovetailed in the bed for a couple of hours, then she fucked off into the West End where she held meetings in smoked-glass boxes. . the bitch. Abandoning us both.
At night Dave worked the mainline stations — Victoria and Paddington mostly. The west of London felt warmer in the winter, better lit, less susceptible to the chill of deep time. The fares were frowsty under the sodium lamps. In the back of the cab they slumped against their luggage, and Dave drove them home to Wembley, Twickenham and Muswell Hill. Or else they were tourists bound for the Bonnington, the Inn on the Park or the Lancaster — gaunt people-barns, where maids flitted through the lobbies, cardboard coffins of dying blooms cradled in their arms. In the wee-wee hours he parked up at an all-night cafe in Bayswater and sat reading the next day's news, while solider citizens lay abed waiting for it to happen. His fellow night people were exiguous — they wore the faces of forgotten comedians, unfunny and unloved.
Dave took junkies to score in the All Saints Road, tarts to fuck in Mayfair, punters to bet in the Gloucester Road, surgeons to cut in Bloomsbury, sous chefs to chop in Soho. He noticed nothing, retained nothing — glad only to be driving, moving through the whispering streets, feeling the surface beneath his wheels change from smooth to rough to rougher to rutted. In the blank dawns, when Hyde Park seethed with mist, he would find himself rattling through Belgravia, a bony fag stuck in his skull, and seeing the queues of visa applicants — already at this early hour lined up outside the consulates — it occurred to him that these are the people I dropped off a few hours ago … They can't fucking stand it here any more than I can … They want out right away …
Michelle click-clacked along Wigmore Street from Oxford Circus tube. She took chilly glances at the steely instruments in the display windows of the medical supply shops. Clamps, forceps, callipers — all were tastefully arranged in front of plastic skeletons. Anatomy 92. . her mind was already on the job. Michelle was the new Exhibitions Executive. Maternity leave or not, the management liked her new NCT style, for she'd honed her natural air of authority. On her first day back she stood in the Ladies applying a second full coating of slap — her freckle-faced days were over. She could hear someone being noisily sick in one of the stalls. A woman emerged. She was greasily emaciated, her woollen suit was a partially sloughed hide, yet her features were oddly fresh and composed. 'You must be Michelle Brodie,' she said, joining Michelle in front of the mirror. 'I'm Gail Farber, I'll be doing the job share with you. They're all wankers here, aren't they?'