Dave turned and wandered away into the woodland, dipping down into damp hollows where midges swirled, then rising up over root-buttressed ridges overarched by the gnarled limbs of oaks that sawed at the thickening night.
When the ex-driver crossed over the M25 and walked down into Epping, darkness had fallen. White flashes from the exposed rails of the tube station imprinted after-images of the privet-lined paths he trudged along. A public-address system barked 'This is the Central Line service for all stations to West Ruislip', but it meant nothing to Dave. On he went, over humped fields of alien maize, up to another wood of smooth-barked beech where pipistrelles stroked his remaining hair. Some trees had been pollarded, and outlined against the bruised night sky they resembled the knobkerries of giants sunk in the beaten earth.
Coppices stirred, then rattled, as Dave mounted a footbridge over the MII. Out in the middle he stopped and peered down at the streaming traffic, car after van after lorry, their headlights drilling the murk. The windscreens were blank until they shot beneath the parapet, then, momentarily, the drivers' faces were revealed: jaws bunched, eyes white-rimmed with exhaustion. Dave understood now that they would always be pinioned in this moment, while he was free to swim in the entire current of fluvial time.
The moon rose over the coxcomb of a wood, and it looked like a headlight cratered with flyspecks. He reached Phyllis's cottage beyond Chipping Ongar after midnight. He was as ignorant as a baby, and accordingly she gathered him to her breast.
Dave Rudman met up with Anthony Bohm in the boardroom of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. It was a featureless white box, buried on a subterranean level. Steel-framed windows gave on to the bottom of an atrium, where stripy stones propped up dildo cactuses. Bohm sat, his goatee dowsing his regulation psychotherapist's Cornish-pasty shoes. Dave had walked from Sloane Square — Bohm had been tied up on Albert Bridge for hours. A Fighting Father was suspended from one of the cast-iron towers. 'Dressed as Thomas More,' Bohm laughed — an unendearing neigh. 'But why, when he was little more than a domestic tyrant?'
'Location,' Dave explained. 'His house — his statue on the Embankment.'
'Um, quite so — did you say you'd walked here?' Bohm was amazed.
'Yeah, it's all up with me, Tonë — the cabbing, that is. I thought it meant, well, everything — it was who I was, but now — '
'I suppose you associate it with the loss — as you see it — of Carl?'
'That's about the size of it, mate. The Knowledge was what I had to pass on. I believed that even before I wrote that mad rant and buried it in their garden — now it seems like a load of bollocks, a load of fucking bollocks.'
As he grew agitated the consonants flaked away from the scalp of his diction: 'Ant, I gotta — I haffta, I gotta go back there. I gotta dig it up. S'pose 'e found it? It'd fuck wiv 'is 'ed. I mean — I know it ain't likely — but what if 'e did?' Bohm refused to be drawn. If Rudman was seeking permission for this peculiar escapade, he was not in the business of granting it. He took a different tack: 'You know one of them, don't you, the Fighting Fathers?'
'Yeah, Fucker — Gary Finch. Daft tosser — he's like a, a tool for them. 'E don't really get it — ' e does what they tell 'im to do. 'E's always the one up on the plinth, or the column or the building, with the old Bill trying to talk him down.'
Bohm contemplated this — along with his shoe — for quite a while. Dave looked at the gilt-framed portraits on the wall; celebrated and self-important sawbones stared back at him. 'Am I right in thinking,' Bohm said eventually, 'that you see in Gary Finch's fate what might've happened — had things turned out differently — to you?'
There were misty haloes around the streetlights, and the parked cars were blistered with raindrops. The night was subdued save for the swish of the occasional vehicle plummeting down Heath Street and the divine booming of jets holding a pattern above London. The long, low villa next to Beech House was entirely dark; its round windows goggled through wisteria lashes at the figure that came padding along the pavement. Steel rods pierced the high garden wall, Aero props were strung with razor wire, a blue alarm light pulsed, a stylized child was obliterated by a black bar. DO NOT PLAY ON THIS SCAFFOLD the sign read. Dave Rudman decided to double back and work his way through the gardens.
It took him over an hour. Every time a cat sneezed or a fox yelped he froze for whole minutes. He was in full possession of his faculties while creeping like a madman through exotic plantations of gunnera and black bamboo, and imported bark chips that shifted under his rubber soles. A green nylon rucksack was slung over his shoulder, in it a mattock he'd bought the day before from an army-surplus shop on the Euston Road. He was going equipped — yet not sufficiently, and he realized what he would find before he hauled over the last wall. And there it was: the York paving, glinting in the diffused light, the non-renewable hardwood decking, solid enough for a man-o'-war. Under it — deep under it — was the Book. How the fuck, Dave thought. How the fuck am I going to get it up?
Cal Devenish stood at the French windows in the drawing room examining his own jet reflection for signs of guilt. Not long now … Papers all signed — deal all done … Share price inflated — the bunce creamed off. Business flogged — the bunce skimmed off again. . yet he saw neither satisfaction nor shame in his face — only an intractable weariness, along with other things: a settle big enough for a cardinal to prop his fat behind on; a dormant log-effect gas fire; investment art on the silky wallpaper; and shoved up in the corners of the room the little beige boxes of the alarm system installed to protect it. Cal wondered where his son was; it made a change — he wryly conceded — to wondering where his daughter was.
Now that the truth was free to range the burgundy carpets of Beech House, its elegant chambers resounded with the cackling of a freak who's been told a sick joke. The sympathetic hatch opened between Cal and Carl on the night they sprang Daisy from the nick had been slammed resolutely shut. Carl took to wearing River Island jackets and Burberry baseball caps as nurture wiped the floor with nature. Cal even thought the lad physically resembled the dad who'd changed his nappies and blown his nose. A long streak of fifteen-year-old, his ears stuck out like Rudman's, and like Dave he took the high dive off Hampstead and into the London lagoon. Carl stayed away from Beech House and hung out on the estate down in Gospel Oak — for this Cal was guiltily grateful, because when his new son was in residence, Carl passed on those sly digs and underhand blows he himself had received, years before, from Dave.
Dave Rudman and Cal Devenish — two men sharing the same cab. Cal sat on one of the tip-down seats, and they caromed along the road of life separated by only a few centimetres of foam rubber, vinyl and steel. They were idiotic twins, conjoined in ignorance of each other. 'Snip-snip'. Cal had cut out his conscience as the surgeon snipped his vas deferens — while Dave Rudman forgot his dates. Yet their denials were but tributaries of a far mightier river of masculine unknowing.
Where was Carl? He was upstairs in his hated, modular study-bedroom. He knew his parents thought he was out — and he delighted in allowing their ignorance to shade into anxiety. Except he didn't think of Michelle and Cal as his parents — only 'that fucker' and 'that cunt', the words lubricated by hatred. Carl was upstairs with a Benson & Hedges stuck under his downy top lip and a rolled gold Dunhill lighter — purloined from Cal's desk — in his downy hand. He lit up while striking a defiant pose in front of the mirror, then swished back the curtains and eased up the sash window.