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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