Read Online The Book of Dave by Will Self - Free Book Online

the wheel and pulled back up the ramp. Before he had time to drive round to the rank, he got a fare. Bit dodgy but it was quiet up West, not enough Yanks, not enough shoppers … The lights up Regent Street flashed mostly at themselves.
    The new fare was tipsy as well … a City getter . . . one Lobb in the gutter, the other on top of his big shiny case, the boxy kind suits use for overnighters. His camelhair
overcoat was open, his jacket was undone, his blue-and-white check shirt was unbuttoned at the collar, his eggy-puke tie yanked down. He lunged in the back without asking, because he was pissed and yakking on his mobile. Dave remained stationary, pointedly not hitting the meter. 'Where to, guv?'
    'I don't fucking care where that tranche is, Beaky, put it in the other account, mix it up, shift it round – 'eathrow –' he flung
through the glass panel and then resumed: 'It's not a case of coverin' up, man, it's getting things done. I get things done
– you get things done, the whole whatsit moves … moves forward.' Dave could hear Beaky pecking to get in from the ether,
until he flicked the shift into drive and the cab lurched off through the unmanned police check and round the corner into
London Wall.
    The fare couldn't stop talking as Dave threaded the cab down through the dark fabric of the City to the Embankment. He got
out his laptop and began linking it up to his mobile with a pigtail of cable, until this proved beyond him, so he just read
stuff off it to Beaky. Not that Dave was paying much attention, but this getter – young, ferret face, lock of mousy hair on a voddie-sweat brow, fake signet ring – didn't care if he listened or not. The driver was only another part of the cab's equipment for him, like the reading light
or the fan heater. Dave obliged him – he had his own thoughts for company.
    Fifteen up West, fiver from those old girls, airport run'll score me thirty or forty. Rank up in the feeder park and 'ave a snack at Doug Sherry's, run back into town – if I'm lucky – and I'll call it a night. Globular old lamp-posts with fat fish curled round them stood along the Embankment, while above the drooling Thames cast-iron
lions sucked their dummies. The Millennium Wheel slowly revolved on the South Bank, its people-pods ever threatening to dip
into the silty wash. Dave hugged the river, zoning out as the cab puttered up through Olympia, until they hit the Cromwell
Road, where life-sized mannequins of business-class travellers advertised intercontinental seat-beds. Not real, toyist …
    Not toys, son, Dave's father said, machines for entertainment. They were in the lounge bar of the Green Man out at Enfield Lock; nicotine was smeared on Paul Rudman's hair and fingers like
toxic pollen. The week's take for the slot machines was racked out on the table in little pewter columns. Vince Bittern, the
ex-old Bill who ran the boozer, wasn't too bothered with exact calculation. He put his flabby forearm down the middle of the
table and curled it round a rough half of the stacks. Orlright, Paul? he demanded. No bother, mate, no bother, Dave's father acquiesced, lifting his wine glass of Bells to his wet lips so that the rim rattled on his denture. Dave sat
in the corner, his face cherried-up with shame – Dad was so weak, so bloody hopeless …
    Not toys, Dave told Carl, who was sitting on the tip seat immediately behind him, sighting back along the road, asking interminable
questions – a tyrannical seven-year-old inquisitor. They're real, son. The boy howled with anger, Nooooo, stop it! Stop lying! They're not real, they're toyist.
    Toyist. Dave had taken the child's coinage for his own. On good days only obvious fake things were toyist, like the giant spine stuck
on a chiropractor's in old Street, or the big plug sunk into the wall of a block on Foubert's Place. But on bad days almost
everything could be toyist: the Bloomberg VDU on the corner of North End Road