The Book of Dave by Will Self Read Free Book Online Page B

Up Hill and on along Cricklewood Broadway. This was another ring of the city. Outside
the grocer's there were stacks of plantains and boxes of sweet potatoes under flapping plastic – garish, alien vegetables
infesting the lacklustre suburb. Outside the pound shops West Africans flicked amber worry beads and peered at displays of
washing-up brushes. A big pub hove into view, the Crown, engraved glass, double bow windows, free-standing sign. It looked
impressive, but it's only been made over to look like what it once was. Inside are fifteen kinds of piss on electronic tap, a video jukebox and a bunch of slappers giving the come-on to farting salesmen full of refried cheer.
    'And what's this county called, then?' the fare asked.
    'County yourself bloody lucky you don't live here, sir,' Dave said, then laughed to show he wasn't serious. Not that I'm racial or anything, it's only that if I'm perfectly honest, at the end of this particular bloody awful day, I can't stand the fucking shvartzers . . . Can't stand their tight, furry curls, their chocolate skin, their blubbery lips . . . their dreadful fucking driving … Shvartzers. Hard to think of Big End, whom Dave had known since he was a teenager, as a shvartzer. But it's better to say shvartzer than coon or nigger, innit? Afro-Caribbean's plain stupid, 'coz they aren't all that. If Benny were still alive he'd be amazed to see black, black cabbies, fucking blown away. Black, black cabbies and diesel dykes inall. Not that there are anything like as many blacks as there were Jews – thank fucking God. Benny said that in the sixties most cabbies were Jewish. What the fuck's 'appened to 'em? Disappeared to Emerson Park, Redbridge and fucking Stanmore, living out their days behind double glazing, under the watchful eyes of lawyer daughters and doctor sons. Hung up their ski jackets and fur boots, quit the patch leaving only their bloody shtoopid shlang behind 'em.
    The cab bundled on past bed shops and a new Matalan, before finally ridding itself of the endless parade of commerce and entering
authentic suburbia, the great shrubbery of three-bedroom, inter-war semis that defined London more than any mere black cab
or Big Ben ever could. The road fell away towards the North Circular, splitting into three tongues, one poking through the
arch of a still higher flyover, while the two others lolled down to the ground. The VDU facades of PC World and Computer Warehouse
glared at each other across six lanes. The cab passed between them, then was aloft, buffeted by wind, spattered by grit, slapped
by waste paper. To the east seagulls soared above the sea-greenery of Hampstead. Like a kid's snowstorm toy, the little cab shaken up. Dave remembered the little kid crying, huge pink finger marks on his naked bum. And what he had whimpered: Not hurting Dad … not hurting … as he confused the pain and the action that had caused it.
    Dave had been driving for so many years he hardly ever thought about the actual graft of turning the wheel – except for when
he did, and then it was a torment. When Carl was little and I felt like this, I'd find a call box and pull over. I was working nights. 'Do you want to speak to Daddy? Daddy's on the phone?' The sound of two-year-old breathing rasping the mouthpiece, then his voice, piping yet oddly distinct:
    'Daddy?'
    'Hiyah, Runty, how's it going, mate?'
    'Mummy, issa ghost.'
    The ghost drove on up the Broadway past the uglified slab of the Connaught Business Centre and on through Colindale, turning
right down Colindale Avenue by the Newspaper Library, where ageing amateur genealogists sifted the dusty old doings of their
ancestors between their arthritic fingers. The copper roof of the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill shone
in a single faint beam from the setting sun. 'That's NIMR, isn't it?' said the fare, but Dave didn't hear him, he was aiming
for it, tacking the cab this way and that: under the MI at Bunns Lane,