'Any folk who could destroy a thing of ancient beauty so brutally … well, nothing they could do would surprise me after that … and the way they treat their women too.'
So far as I'm concerned the way they treat their women is the best thing going for those fuckers … keep those bints in line, I say … you take my ex, she's only gone and slapped a fucking restraining order on me, now that'd never 'appen in Kabul, I'd have 'er trussed up in one of them black cloaky things before she could say CSA … 'I couldn't agree with you more. Very sad business.' 'Coz they should go a bit bloody further — take the kids off a them — no kids, no bloody power over us. .
Past the Odeon, with its egg-box roof, the cab squealed to a halt at some lights and the meter — which had been ticking away with generous increments — slowed to a trickle of pence. After fifteen years of cabbing Dave Rudman was so finely attuned to the meter that he could minutely calibrate it with his own outgoings. At the beginning of each day a spreadsheet popped up behind his heavy eyelids, and as he drove, picking up and dropping off, ranking up and driving again — so the figures were instantly calculated to inform him whether he was ahead or behind, if he could pay for his diesel, his insurance, his cab repayments, his food, his fags, his booze, his prescriptions, his child support and his divorce lawyer. At 8 p.m., when the second tariff band comes in, the figures alter accordingly; at 10 p.m., when the third starts, they change again. But they all oughta be the bloody same: 6 to 2, 2 to 10, 10 to 6. That way, you know what you're getting — punters inall. In the future the tariffs will be equal, oh, yeah. Time, distance and money — the three dimensions of Dave Rudman's universe. Up above it all was the Flying Eye, Russ Kane trying to make a joke out of a fucking lorry what's shed its load at the Robin Hood Roundabout…
Dave Rudman hardly ever used to go into the dozen or so cabbies' shelters that were still scattered about Central London. However, nowadays he was so skint he needed the cheap and greasy fuel the old biddies who ran them pumped out. They were weird little structures, the shelters, like antediluvian cricket pavilions of green wood, which the city had grown up around. Inside, the cabbies sat jawing and noshing at a table covered with a plastic cloth. So many cabbies, their faces dissipated by the life like those of prematurely aged peasants, worn out by their bigoted credo. Dave didn't want to talk about the lost boy, but last week, in the shelter in Grosvenor Gardens, when some pillock of a cabbie, seeing Dave's face, horsey with depression, stupidly asked what was eating him, Dave spilled. Then the other cabbie quipped: 'A woman is like a hurricane: when they pitch up they're wet and wild, and when they bugger off they take your house and your car.'
Michelle hadn't only taken Dave's house; she'd got a bigger, flasher one. She'd even got a new daddy for Dave's boy — and how fucking sick is that? As for this Cohen cow who was milking Dave, she must 'ave a fucking meter in her desk drawer and every time I bell her she pops it on and it goes up and up, fifty quid at a time, a wunner for a letter. Then there's the brief she gets to stand up on his hind legs in the judge's chambers for a grand a pop — but I bet she gets a kick-back, though. Cow. Lawyers — they're all scum.
As the cab crawled up the Edgware Road, the fare looked bemused by the shiny pavements thronged by Arabs. Arabs sitting behind the plate-glass windows of Maroush supping fruit juices and smoking shishas, Arabs stopping at kiosks to buy their newspapers full of squashed-fly print. Their women flapped along behind them, tagged and bagged, but under their chadors they're tricked out like fucking tarts in silk undies, they are. It gives 'em a big turn-on … And my ex, with her little job up in Hampstead, wrapping up thongs in fucking tissue paper… She's just the same … They're all the same. . 'Where to in Mill Hill exactly, guv?'
'Oh … sure … OK …' The fare did some uncrumpling. 'It's right next to somewhere called Wills Grove, but it doesn't have a name of its own, it's like a lane.'
'I know it.'
'You know it?'
'I know it — it's by the school.'
'That's right. I'm going to see a man who works at the National Research Institute — it's business — that's why I'm here. I work for CalBioTech — you may have heard of us. We're one of the organizations developing human genome patents …' When Dave didn't respond, the fare continued on another tack: 'I must say, I'm very impressed by how well you know London. Very impressed. In Denver, where I live, you can't get a driver who knows downtown let alone the 'burbs.'
Dave Rudman had been to New York once, dragged there resisting by his ex-wife, a drogue behind her jet. The human ant heap was bad enough — but worse was the disorientation. Even with the grid system, I didn't know the runs, I didn't know the points … I was fucking ignorant… I'll happily let America alone, mate, 'coz my Knowledge is all here. There are plenty of fucking thickos right here I don't need to go across the pond and learn your lot. Not that I'm even bothering with these ones, I've done it now, I've said my piece, an' I'll tell you what the real knowledge is fer nuffing! Women and their fucking wiles, kids and how the loss of them can drive a man fucking mad, money and how the getting of it breaks your bloody back! The obsolete Apricot computer sat in the garage of his parents' house on Heath View. It squatted there on an old steamer trunk, beside two of his father's defunct one-armed bandits, their innards exposed, once glossy oranges and lemons waxed by the twilight. In a rare moment of clarity — an oblique glance through the quarterlight of his mind — Dave Rudman remembered the long shifts in his Gospel Oak flat. The tapping and the transcribing, the laying down of His Law. Then his eyes tracked back to the misty windscreen, and the figure hunched over the keyboard hadn't been him at all — only some other monk or monkey.
'Well, we aim to please, sir. Most London cabbies see themselves as ambassadors for the city, part driver, part tour guide.' Dave slowed the cab before the junction with Sussex Gardens, allowing a Hispanic woman wearing a fur-trimmed denim jacket to shepherd her great shelf of bosom across the road. He sensed the fare's approbation like a sunlamp on his bald spot. 'Now to the right here, sir, almost all the property between here and Baker Street is owned by the Portman family; not a lot of people realize how much of London is concentrated in the hands of a very few, very rich people.'
'That's very inner-resting.'
'I'm glad you think so, sir, and this road we're driving up, you may've noticed that it's very straight for a London road, that's because it's the old Roman Watling Street.'
'You don't say.' I do fucking say. I fucking know. I know it all — I hold it all. If all of this were swamped, taken out by a huge fucking flood, who'd be able to tell you what it was like? Not the fucking Mayor or the Prime Minister — that's for sure. But me, an 'umble cabbie.
'Yes, if we were here seventeen hundred years ago, we might've seen a legion marching off to Chester, on its way up north to duff up a bunch of blue-painted savages.'
The cab, its wipers 'eek-eeking', pulled away from the lights and scraped by the concrete barnacles of the Hilton tucked beneath the Marylebone Flyover. It was late lunchtime on a wet December day, so the shop windows were lighting up. Dave tried to imagine who — who he knew — might be the type to have pitched up in a room there, for no other reason but to smoke crack with brasses from the Bayswater Road and rape the minibar. From some dark rank in his memory a recollection pulled away: Superb Sid, Sid Gold … picked 'im up last year outside the old Curiosity Shop … He was looking pretty fucking flush, pretty pleased with 'imself. Bespoke fucking whistle, cashmere overcoat, the whole bit. He wouldn't've done me any favours if I'd reminded 'im of the perm he used to sport at school. He became a brief, didn't 'e, criminal fucking brief — in both senses. Gave me his card. Ponce. Still, he's the type I'm gonna need because that Cohen cow ain't gonna come through. If I'm gonna see the boy again, I'm gonna have to get some dirt on that cunt Devenish. There has to be some … there always is … all you gotta do is dig.