Benny was still alive — but only just. He stopped at home behind nets distempered with nicotine and chuffed on his oxygen mask, lifting it now and again to insinuate a Woodbine beneath his walrus moustache. Benny's left leg had been amputated below the knee, and there was talk of the right hopping along too. When Dave went to see him, his grandfather waggled the stump at him like a gesturing hand, turning it out to express bemusement, karate-chopping for finality. Prised from his cab — which, although it stank of cigarette fumes, was always beautifully clean — the old man took on the appearance of a smoked oyster on Tubby Isaacs's stall, then a soused whelk, until finally — most unkosher this — he dwindled to a pickled winkle.
In the old Globe Mrs Hedges the landlady was berating two of Dave's mates, Fucker Finch and Norbert Davis. 'I'm not bein' funny,' said the withered Chow of a woman, 'but the trouble wiv you lot is that you all 'ad a crack at 'er an' none of yer is prepared to take the consequences, see.' Thick slap was plastered on her pouched cheeks, wind-chime earrings dragged deep slits in her earlobes. Dave sidled up to the bar. On the optic were bottles of Martell, Archers, and Jack Daniel's. On beer mats stood an outsized wine glass full of promotional lighters and a cubic ice bucket advertising Gordon's Gin. 'Usual, luv?' asked Mrs Hedges. Dave grunted affirmatively and she threw her weight on the pump so hard her bingo wings flapped. Fucker said, 'Orlright, then, geezer,' and he and Norbert rolled their eyes at him. Norbert — who was known as Big End, on account of the ridiculousness of his given name and by reason of racial stereotyping — said, 'My round, Tufty,' his deep voice shouting through the wall of his chest.
Mrs Hedges resumed, 'Believe you me, there's four blokes 'as come in the pub an' she's slept wiv all of 'em once. I told 'er old man "she wuz not 'erself", but 'e don' lissen, 'e went absolutely fucking ballistic, 'e cut 'er up an' that — which is a bit ironical seein' as she does it to 'erself anyways!' Mrs Hedges fell silent, then relayed Dave's pint to him, a brown torch with a creamy flame. 'Cheers,' Dave said, and the other two grunted affirmatively. Behind the bar lay a drift of Quavers packets, crisp notation rustling in silence. Big End's fluorescent jacket — he was a site chippie — lay on a nearby banquette like a crumpled drunk. 'I woz absolutely ragarsed last night,' Big End said, 'fucking mullered.'
'No kiddin',' Dave responded, bitter-mouthed.
'Wossup wiv you, Tufty?' Fucker put in. 'You're a bit down in the mouf.'
Tufty was Dave's cabbing nickname. It referred both to the unsmarmable sprig of hair at the back of his broad neck, and a cartoon squirrel that had fronted a 1960s road-safety campaign. Gary Finch — aka Fucker — was a cabbie as well; he and Dave had done the Knowledge at the same time, then they'd been butter boys together, wangling nights with cabs fronted by Gorgeous George at Nationwide Taxi Garages. 'Mister Hyde 'as pulled a stroke,' Dave explained. ' 'E's not in tonight, so Ali said I could 'ave the cab.'
'Result, no?' Fucker wiped a smear of lager from his full lips; with his curly mop, fat tummy and stubby legs, he was like a stationary bowling ball in the alley of the bar.
'Yeah, s'pose, still, I was looking forward to hoisting a few with you, an' then — '
'On to Browns, then a club, then a shebeen, then before I know it I'm rolling in at five in the fucking morning and the boiler's giving it this.' Fucker made an emu glove puppet of his hand and pecked at his own neck and head.
'Nick-nick.' Dave felt for him, but he thought also of Gary's wife, as rotund as her husband and with an extra ball stuffed up her jumper, due to fall out in a few weeks. Dave knew Debbie — and he knew Gary's mum and dad as well. They'd been a bit of a surrogate family for him. Dave wondered at the way things were panning out — the young couple had fallen out with both their families. Instead of cheeky cockney consanguinity, the mother-to-be was isolated in their flat in Edmonton, while Gary, well … Fucker by name …
'As soon as she fell pregnant,' Mrs Hedges coincidentally resumed, ' 'e done 'is nut an' cut 'er up again — she 'ad t'go fer a tonic from the doctor.' Big End tutted sympathetically. What am I doing here? Dave said to himself with Received Pronunciation, as Mrs Hedges's Hs fell at the floor by his feet and Ts stopped up his companions' throats. This isn't me, it's an act … because Dave hadn't dropped his Hs — he'd flung them away from himself, ninja stars that stuck quivering in the smoky bacon Victorian woodwork. There's no going back now, no three-point turn out of here. All that Knowledge, the city crumpled up in my head … He could envision it, the streets superimposed on the whorls of his cerebellum and I'm holding on to it. He downed the last of his pint and thudded the glass on to the bar. He snatched up his keys and swivelled to leave, his badge — which he wore on a leather thong around his neck — swinging into Fucker. 'Oi!' The tubby little man howled, clutched his mop of curls and fell against the bar. Dave, shocked, made to grab him before he fell, whereupon Finch reared up laughing, 'Adjoo there, mate! Adjoo there!' When he saw how shocked Dave was, he stopped and asked, 'You fucking off already?'
'May as well,' Dave said, addressing them all. 'I ain't gonna get a fare in 'ere am I, but if I start now I'll catch the theatre burst — might clear a wunner before midnight.'
'Well,' Big End put in, 'meet me down the club if you knock off'. As he bashed out through the door, Dave heard the fresh conversation resume behind him.
'She was pretty big by then?'
'Fucking big.'
'Is it John's?'
' 'Course it is …'
Outside in the Mile End Road, Dave unlocked the cab and stood for a moment looking west to where the buildings of the City stacked up. There were new blocks at Aldgate and down towards the Tower of London; a thicket of cranes sprouted over the old Broad Street Station, and above it all reared the black, glassy stack of the NatWest Tower. Another course of London was being laid on top of the last, millions of tons of steel, concrete, brick and stone, weighing down on the present, pressing it into the past.
While here, in the East End, magenta buddleia spears and coils of fluffy rosebay willowherb sprang from between the sheets of corrugated iron that fenced off the bombsite behind the pub. Benny had once told Dave that during the war sand had been gouged from the top of Hampstead Heath and poured into bags that were then piled in front of the hospitals and government ministries. When the ack-ack ceased and the barrage balloons were winched down, the pulverized terraces of the East End were swept up, loaded on to trucks, and dumped in the hollows and dips where the sand had been dug. Round and round it went, London's auto-cannibalism. It made Dave feel queasy to be standing suspended over such deep time, on the taut cable of a summer evening. He lowered himself into the cab and, starting the engine, felt better immediately, and better still when within seconds his Faredar peeped and he netted a commuter heading for Fenchurch Street. Go west, young man.
It was the tempo of the times — the years themselves were in a rush, the decades even, struggling to attain the next era. The matt-black chrysalis of the 1980s was splitting and, with stop-action rapidity, out came a vast moth, unfurling sticky, tinted-glass wings.