Carl thought his father so much improved, so happy and confident, that when it came time for him to pack up his little rucksack and take the short hike back to his mum's, he didn't see any reason why he shouldn't tell the truth: 'Y'know, Dad, she's seeing that bloke again and …' He watched, appalled, as Dave's face crumpled, yet he couldn't stop himself. '… and she'sputthe'ouseupfersale.'
She swore … She promised … She fucking swore. . And again: She swore … She promised. . She fucking swore … This was what Rudman called over as he rammed the Fairway up the M4 to Wales. At last, after all these years, he was going to visit his brother, Noel, in hospital. The cab, howling in overdrive, carried its overwrought driver past Swindon and Bristol, then over the Severn Bridge, a lyre strung with high-tension cables upon which Aeolus played his grandiose airs.
Dave reached Aberystwyth and found a B & B. He drove out to the mental hospital, only to discover that his brother had been discharged three months before. It was then that he stared into the chasm of unloving. My kid brother … I never looked after him. He backtracked and found Noel's bedsit in a labyrinth of gas meters and fire doors two houses down from his own B&B. His brother — overweight, puffy with medication — was a caricature of himself: Dave Rudman wearing a whole-body fat suit. Noel had big plans. He was going to get a job, ascend a career ladder, source a house and a wife. Only trouble was he couldn't zip up his own flies. Dave wept — while Noel regarded him with consoling eyes. He'd been out in the fungus field for so long now that encounters with people he knew were non-sequential. The two of them were still pelting each other with rowan berries and charging through North End Woods. 'You, you've hurt yourself,' he said. 'Haven't you, Dave?'
The wind, not issuing from the west but coming from within the buildings themselves. The sun catching a chimneystack so that its bricks glowed gold against the sombre London sky. The cab purring noisily down the road, a woman in a headscarf turning, fearful that she was going to be pounced upon by a giant feral cat. The decree nisi, stuck to the doormat like a manila label. 'Welcome,' it said.
Two days later Dave Rudman awoke with an erection so large and stiff it felt like a tent pole. For long minutes he writhed about under canvas, then rose and stumped to the bathroom. It was mid morning and out of a habit he didn't know he had he snapped on the television. On the furred screen a toyist atrocity was taking place — younger brothers kicking over the building-block tower their older siblings had piled up. It staggered and collapsed. Roiling dust clouds engulfed the camera. Dave Rudman stood looking at it for a while, trying to figure out what it was, then stumped back to the bedroom.
Lying there, the sunlight poking between the drapes and picking out a single wall ornament — diamond battens around an oval mirror — he felt his hearing become sharper and sharper, more and more sensitive, until he could detect the very dust mites groping their way through the weave of the carpet; the 'eek' of a squeegee merchant's sponge a mile away in Camden Town; the 'shissshhh' of a deep-fat fryer in Dalston. Then he could hear It — the still, small, powdery voice of SmithKline Beecham … There is no god but you, Dave, It whispered, and you can be your own prophet. .
No Christian god smothering him in cosy-bundle sweet love; no wiseacre Jewish god, rebarbative yet shrewd in his defence; no Muslim god, geometric, elegant, cruel to be kind; no Hindu god-riot of fairground faces and multiple, writhing arms — this was a purely local, contingent deity, a god for the day, who divvied up pay-per-view prophecy: Peepul … the god looked in his rearview and saw them … chavs, coloureds, fucking pikeys, the Irish, hysterical-bloody-women … Peepul, they gotta be kept in line … there hasta be orforitë … It stands to reason, dunnit… There hasta be a Book of Rules … A set of instructions you can follow to the letter… Like the Knowledge … No muckin' abaht… twenty lists of sixteen runs — and the 'burbs. No argument. Paddington Green to Askew Road, Albert Bridge to Streatham Common. . where they hitch up their Freemans skirts … nothing but … mail-order prossies. If you don't know the shortest way … on the cotton … then you don't get your badge, you don't make your living … Simple as that … plain as the nose on my face. If I'm not gonna be allowed to bring up my boy myself, then at least I've gotta be able to tell 'im what's what. . givvim some fatherly advice … That's what I'm gonna do. Eggzackerly.
It came to him fully formed — a plan and how to execute it. Dave's parents were surprised to see him again so soon — and without Carl. He seemed distracted, beating out a nervous tattoo with his shortbread on his plate. Later on he went into the garage and rooted there. 'Aren't you going to ask him why he's taking that thing away?' Annette Rudman hectored her husband, and Paul grunted 'No.'
It came to him in solid chunks — wrote itself, really. He typed with his index fingers, poking sense into the keyboard of the old Apricot. He hadn't had anything to do with computers since his year at College — but that didn't matter because this machine dated from that time. It came to him when he awoke, in the unproblematic light of day — and for that reason was not to be doubted. It came to him as he sat in his black, terry towelling robe, driving the engine of creation forward with piston keystrokes. Yeah — he was the Driver, a fisher of fares.
He began with the Knowledge. He had held it — now he dropped it, the tangled tarmac viscera fell out of him: Turnpike Lane Station to Malvern Road, Bishopswood Road to Westbury Avenue, Harold Wood to Stratford (via Newbury Park, Gants Hill, Redbridge, Wanstead, the Green Man Roundabout and Leytonstone). And he dumped the shitty points as welclass="underline" Chapel Market, Angel Station, St Mark's Church, the Craft Council, the Institute of Child Health, the Value Added Tax Tribunal. As he wrote he felt himself ascending, chattering up over the wide river valley. He was the Flying I — he saw all the tailbacks on the Westway, the slow-moving traffic through the Hanger Lane gyratory system, the roadworks on NorthÂumberland Avenue, the shed lorry-load in Kingston Vale. He grasped the metropolis in its entirety, he held in his shaky, nicotine-stained fingers each and every one of the billions of tiny undertakings its inhabitants engaged in, which, taken in sum, added up to chaos.
Yet this was not all. In transcribing his Knowledge Dave Rudman embroidered it. This was no plain cloth word-map, but a rich brocade of parable, chiasmus and homily. Where to, guv? he began each run, and when it intersected with a suitable tale he grasped it, then set it down. He kept driving, for out on the night-time streets the map, the territory and prophecy became as one. Whipping beneath the dour facade of the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, he hit the button and began to rant … This plonker clipped me as I was turning into Cliveden Place. I pulls over and gives it to 'im straight: put up or I'll call the old Bill. He digs deep, comes up wiv fifty nicker. Result — it only cost me a score to patch the cab up. You gotta be sharp in this business, no-wot-eye-meen? The world's out there, through the screen, issall through the screen. It ain't out back, it ain't in the fucking mirror. People are in the mirror. . And the fare — some provincial cake-decorator who'd only just quit that self-same theatre — squawked assent through the intercom, bored and a little repulsed, but never suspecting that this was only the tip of a dirty great doctrinal iceberg which that very morning the cabbie had been pounding into an obsolete computer.