… Yet never got anywhere: his bush hat and cravat were no protection against the smirch of exhaust on his bronze back. Turning his own back on the Bank of England, Dave would sidle down to the river, then idle over one of the bridges. He would only recover any sense of where he was when, leaning over the parapet, he saw the stern of a sightseeing boat disappear beneath it, its wake a foaming gash in the beery water. Straightening up, swivelling — the London diorama pivoted about him: the toothpick steeples and cruet cupolas of the remaining Wren churches, the steel braces and concrete Karnak of Broadgate and the Barbican, the AstroTurf lawns and inflated, latex walls of the Tower, the brass doorknob of the Monument. Downriver a flock of pigeons clattered over the prettified wharves on the south bank, where graduate stevedores in blue striped aprons loaded boudin noir into the holds of German financial engineers.
All day Dave Rudman walked hither and thither. Newly ignorant of London, he attached himself to flocks of tourists, and together with them followed the shepherd's staff of a raised umbrella to where he might listen to a Walloon explanation of St Paul's. Or else he drifted over to South Kensington and sauntered through the museums, slowly absorbing the perverse stratigraphy that had arranged these fossils in horizontal bands, interspersed with gift shops and cafes. Returning to daylight after aeons, Dave threw his head back and allowed the vivid sense of estrangement — which had haunted him all that long hot summer — to beat down anew.
One afternoon Dave was browsing the bookstalls under Waterloo Bridge — Shell Touring Guide to Anglesey… The Houseboats of Srinigar … Theatrical Design in the Thirties — when the usual eddies of cinephiles, skateboarders and tourists channelled, then flowed steadily, upstream towards the Millennium Wheel. The London mob, so assured of its own theatricality that it gave parts to screevers, classical-music underachievers and dossers senatorially draped with sleeping-bag togas. Dave was stoically disposed to ignore them — until the trestle table of books was kicked in the leg and collapsed. Then, ever so wearily, it occurred to him: They're running scared … It's a bomb — an attack … Everyone's been waiting for it — lad in the paper shop, he said don't go into town today … I've got responsibilities … to Phyl, to Steve — to Carl even. . He began hobbling along with the crowd, intending to peel away across Jubilee Gardens — for quite suddenly Dave was completely orientated.
Coming out from under Hungerford Bridge, he realized how wrong he'd been — this was a rush to another's danger, another spectacular revival that London had been waiting centuries for. Dave's head fell back on his neck and he was part of the ring of upturned faces. The Millennium Wheel arced overhead, a bracelet on a puffy wrist of cloud. Usually it moved so slowly that in capturing its ponderous progress blood rushed to spectators' temples, and they staggered, feeling the dizzying revolution of the Globe beneath their feet. But it had stopped.
The mob had also achieved a critical, lowing mass — there was no way forward or back, serried info-boards blocked off Jubilee Gardens with a screed on history and renovation. The crowd was already unattractive … soon they'll get ugly. They smelled of sugar and hydrolysed corn syrup, Marlboro Lights and pirated Calvin Klein. On the terrace of County Hall a party of schoolchildren from Lille bounced up and down in cradles of rubber webbing. Police in Kevlar jackets armed with submachine guns shoved their way down the steps off Westminster Bridge — the crowd parted with an anguished, polyphonic moan.
The Wheel had stopped moving. Whadda they call it now … the London Eye? He remembered his one revolution with Gary and little Jason — the boy in his Spiderman costume, spreadeagled against the clear glass of the pod. As they rose up in a smooth parabola, London popped up beneath them, the cardboard ministries and papery monuments unfolding into three dimensions of doubtful solidity. Dave had felt an express lift of nausea shoot up his gullet. The only way I could stop myself from puking or screaming was by calling it over, picking out a cab on Lambeth Bridge and bunging myself in the driver's seat and driving it out to Picketts Lock or Willesden, Camberwell or Wanstead Flats … the Days Inn in Hounslow …
There was another tiny costumed figure spreadeagled against the sky. Like son — like father. . Hearing the crackle of the police loudhailers, as they forced the ghouls through a gap in the fence and back over the parched grass towards the Shell Centre, Dave Rudman wondered whether Fucker's doing it now, calling it over, the points and the runs. . trying to give himself an, an identity … convince himself he's not just another nutter. . Because that's what the man next to Dave was saying to his mate:
'Look at that fucking nutter willya!'
'Ow djoo fink ee manijed 2 gé ahtuv ve capsúl?' the other one spat.
Dave was wondering this too, because, rather than heading around the Wheel's rim — which was equipped with a safety ladder — Fucker was a third of the way along a spoke that tended towards the hub at a sixty-degree angle. He inched up caterpillar-like, dragging his rolled-up cocoon behind him. There was a second insect struggling to exit the capsule Finch must have been riding in, but for some reason only his top half had emerged through the escape hatch. Has he lost his bottle? Or were enraged tourists grabbing on to his costumed legs? Slapstick in the sky. The police were furious — yet surely they realized that these stupid men were no more terrorists … than I am? Surely they wouldn't shoot with their snub muzzles that swung from the retreating crowd up to the Wheel? Surely they would wait for I dunno … whadda they call 'em? trained negotiators. Breathless, Dave Rudman was about to turn away when the bug on the white stalk staggered, yanked from behind by his lopsided burden, and fell.
Gary Finch had taken the fall slowly — almost leisurely. Had he been unconscious — or experiencing a dizzy high at pulling off the Big One? Perhaps his clownish mind had been gripped by the absurdity of it all — or perhaps he felt a final release from the Lord Chancellor's Department and the lawyers, the mediators and the Child Support Agency? For weeks after, night after night in the sweaty bed, deep down in the coiled mattress, Dave revisited each bone-powdering crunch and flesh-cleaving impact. There was so much blood when Gary hit the balustrade — a screen-washer spray that arced high enough for the individual drops to fall among the leaves of the stunted plane trees and glitter there like berries. While Finch's body was a travesty, the stuffing knocked out of it, broken on the Wheel.
Phyllis didn't tell Dave about the two Turks who came into Choufleur a month or so after Fucker Finch had died. What was the point — Dave's mate was dead now, why drag still more of his pain and messy bewilderment into their lives? Besides, Dave was so sunk down inside himself; Phyllis tried to regard him as a bear with a bothered head, resting up in their little cottage on the edge of the woods. Much of the time this was a fairytale — Dave was down so far, almost back where she'd first encountered him, limping from the day room to the men's toilet in his black bathrobe so he could wring a few drops of piss from his drugged bladder. Still this, she hoped, this is genuine grief, isn't it? Best not send him back to the shrink.