Through a scraggy barrier of trees and over the balding grass with every yard they gained the compression of bodies grew greater. 'Palace-stein! Palace-stein! Palace-stein!' I'm not racial, Dave admonished himself — yet their fanaticism smelled alien, a dangerous spice, saffron and suicide. A head taller than the crowd, he was borne forward on an undulating carpet of scalps, entire acres of hair combed over by the teeth of the breeze. Up ahead the scene was Babylonian: flags and banners waved, obelisks of speakers loomed on a stage, only the yowl of feedback stopped the subsidence of this era into the last.
All masses — no matter how pacific — contain within their sumps many thousands of litres of adrenalin the motor oil of rage. Dave Rudman felt this potential conflagration slopping about them as he and Phyl were driven forward to the steady, four-stroke beat of a massive Lembeg drum. Then they were trapped against a barrier fence. Through its wide mesh police snappers in blue-checked baseball caps probed their telephoto lenses. A line of stewards sporting fluorescent tabards bearing the legend IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, THE MOST COMPASSIONATE, THE MOST MERCIFUL struggled to keep back the demonstrators, who barked, 'Who let the dogs out?!' before yelping their own reply, 'Bush! Bush!'
Dave felt himself detaching, lifting up into the now lustreless sky where surveillance helicopters chattered and swooped. He felt for Phyllis's mitten — a soft anchor — to ground him, but it was gone. She was gone. He began frantically scanning thousands of faces. Izzat'er? Izzat? Izzat? The rant started inside his pock-marked face. Fucking lefties … dumb cunts … middle-class tossers … 'Who let the dogs out?! Bush! Bush!' They don't even know where they fucking are … Pakkies down from Bradford … The fucking stewards couldn't find their way to Tottenham Court Road … He began shouldering his way back through the whippy limbs of this human scrub, still looking for Phyl but understanding that it was pointless. When he reached a clearing where three whey-faced kiddies were drinking cans of Mecca-Cola in a shieling of milk crates, he had a moment of clarity. They weren't having sex yet, but we're like a married couple … at ease in ways both profoundly irritating and comforting; we aren't having sex, although he couldn't have said which of them was resisting the slide into that damp pit of guttural obfuscation; we aren't having sex — nevertheless he'd agreed to come along on this idiotic march because … I love her.
The air was crinkled up like cellophane by the exhaust fumes. It stank; he stank. He felt the ingrained lubricant of a thousand thousand fill-ups slide between his fingertips and the shaky rim of the wheel. His past was a mirage, glimpsed across the stained forecourt of time. Through the miserable slot of the Fairway's windscreen he could see the glistening skin of the Swiss Re Building, as like some monstrous penis it self-erected over the City. It already had a nickname — the Gherkin — but a proper cockney wouldn't ask for a gherkin and chips, he'd say wally … gissa wally.
As the cockney wally rose up, it dumbly forced new parallaxes on the earthbound toilers. Dave Rudman had never felt so imprisoned in the wobble boards of the cab's bodywork, so coiled in razor wire, so commanded to KEEP LEFT, GIVE WAY and STOP. The CCTV cameras angled across the box junctions; the traffic wardens like urban Watusi with hand-held computers for spears; the cops in their cars; the PCO in their concrete bunker — every square foot of London was accounted for, taxed and levied. He looked about him at the other cars in the jam. The drivers sat, mobile-phone hands clamped to their aching heads, suffering the neuralgia of ceaseless communication. The radio on the Fairway's dash muttered on: 'Lorry shed its load on the A3 Kingston Bypass. . stop-start traffic there … Lane out on the Marylebone Flyover …' Dave had become a cabbie to miss out on the supervisory eyes that made adult working life another fidgety classroom, yet here he was '… coming into junctions fifteen and sixteen on the Emtwenny5, that's the Emfaw and the Emfawty, lane and speed restrictions are in force …' with the worst guvnor of all — insecurity. Insecurity and the Flying Eye, its rotary eyelid blinking overhead.
Dave pulled into a side street and turned off the ignition. He got out his pills and began to pop the antidepressants out of their plastic blisters. He didn't stop until the gulches of his jeans were choked with little white boulders. Then he opened the door, picked up his change bag, got out and chinked away, scattering dumb Smarties as he went. He didn't look to see if he was parked on a yellow line; he didn't even bother to lock the cab. He didn't care. It was over — he'd grabbed the fat moment. He was free.
As he walked, Dave Rudman looked not up to the sky, nor around him at the brutal buildings, but at the ground, at the tarmac upon which his life had been rolled out. Tarmac blue-black and asphalt dimpled; tarmac folded and humped like a grey-brown blanket; tarmac cratered, bashed and gashed. This was the petrified skin he'd been feeling all his prostituted life, its texture transmitted through rubber tread and steel shock-absorber. Dave felt a compulsion to kneel down on the kerb and bow his head into the gutter — to lick the abrasive surface with his rough old tongue.
Dave licked between Phyllis's shoulder blades and drove his tongue down her grooved back. She shuddered and, grabbing his thigh, pulled it up and over her own so that he half straddled her. In the confusion of their bodies — his hairy shanks, her sweaty thighs, his bow-taut cock, her engorged basketry of cowl and lip — there was clear intent; so that when he penetrated her, they moved into and out of one another with fluid ease, revving and squealing, before arriving quite suddenly.
Dave and Phyl were having sex in her cottage outside Chipping Ongar. They'd had sex the previous evening after a healthy meal of cauliflower cheese. They had woken twice — perhaps three times — in the night to do it again, and now, with the larks crying over the fields outside, they were having sex once more. There was no billing or cooing between them — mouth chanced upon mouth infrequently. She pulled him into her spasmodically, her heels jamming on his hips. He felt the solidity of her — she wasn't blubbery but taut with fat. He plunged and rebounded. No words were spoken — yet neither doubted that they were making love, plenty of honeyed love to be stored for the future in their cells, should there come another time of scarcity when they needed replenishing.
In the late morning Dave walked into the little town to get the Sunday papers. Even in brisk March, with branches still bare, and rain showers moving across the Essex landscape like shading on a drawing, the gathering heat of summer was resounding through the land. He paused by the ancient moat of the long-since-levelled castle and lost himself in the subsurface bloom of duckweed. This would be a special day — they would not fret or worry. Towards evening they might walk across the fields to Good Easter, watching the returning flocks of swifts clench, then relax in the umber sky. The letters had been sent, the calls had been made, the reports had been written. At Phyllis's instigation Dave had taken matters into his own hands. Lawyers — they both agreed — would only sop up money and make things worse, like they always did. Better to make as direct an approach as possible and state — with clarity and humility — that if Carl was at all willing, and his mother would permit it, Dave would like to resume seeing his son.