The Taxi Queue Read online

  ‘Is ready.’ The man with the grey moustache was leaning over the end of the counter holding a cup of espresso.

  Abe stretched up for it and said ‘Cheers’. There were two paper wraps of sugar in the saucer. ‘Have you got any real sugar?’ he asked. The man looked puzzled. Abe mimed dipping a lump of sugar into his coffee and sucking it. The man nodded, suddenly happy, and turned to the shelf behind him. He opened a biscuit tin and handed over two small macaroons.

  ‘Thank you,’ Abe said. ‘You’re a star.’

  The man beamed and continued his drying-up. Abe took one of the biscuits, dipped it in the coffee and sucked it. The almond taste was bitter. Abe took a swig of coffee.

  ‘You study?’ Vasco said.

  ‘Soon. I’m going to give up work.’

  The man laughed. ‘What your boss say?’

  ‘He’s a tosser,’ Abe said. He looked again at the title he had written. ‘Business Plan’. A rational head which, following the pattern of his old school essays, would acquire a short, wind-filled, ruptured body. As the rush from the coffee hit his brain, he tore off the sheet and crumpled it into a ball.

  Suddenly the café was full of people. A queue was forming at the counter for lunchtime sandwiches. Office workers started pushing for places at the tiny tables – colliding with an opposite stream who were trying to leave with their takeaways. The man with the grey moustache was working at speed, delving into the fillers and pressing them into the bread, juggling cups under the sputtering spouts of the coffee machine. He looked as if he had six hands. A chubby woman wearing a bobble hat and a tatty raincoat wedged herself into the place opposite Abe. She placed her tray, with its plate of egg sandwiches, mug of tea and iced bun, on top of Abe’s notebook. Picking up one of the sandwiches, she squinted at it, before taking a bite that left a row of tooth marks in a jagged crescent moon shape. Her lower arms were covered in a fine dust of hair; the sleeves of the coat halfway between her wrists and her elbows. Abe eased his notebook out from under the tray and the white pages reappeared streaked with a film of reddish grease. In this part of the world, this district of suits, Abe’s pull-on hat had given the wrong signals. Like to like, the lady must have thought. Abe ripped the stained pages out. The woman started on the iced bun. She looked at Abe over its gluey top with tired eyes. He picked up his bag and his notebook, and shimmied through the gap between the table and the end of the counter. The man with the grey moustache was strewing salami across three open baguettes as if he were dealing a pack of cards. Abe left the right money and pushed his way to the exit.

  ‘You’ve forgot your studies,’ the man called out as Abe passed through the door.

  ‘No worries,’ Abe said.

  ‘Study well,’ the man added – laughing at him.

  Abe set off up the street to look for Karumi. The buildings he passed were uncared for, bypassed by developers; similar to the battered row of shops that Vasco’s was part of and made of the same Victorian brick, the rusty colour of faded theatre curtains. The next block consisted of tall commercial properties with twice as many storeys. These frontages were boarded by black-painted panels at ground-floor level; the warehouse windows above were covered with mesh. Abe pushed open a door and entered a hallway with unplastered walls. To the left was an old-fashioned lift with a concertina gate. The stairs were enclosed in a metal cage towards the back of the building. Abe passed through the gap in the grille and started to climb. The steps resounded as if they were hollow and Abe pounded up, two at a time, glancing down into the well at each platform where the stairs turned. Every level had a door and a keypad for entry but there was no signage to indicate which businesses occupied the premises. As Abe reached the last bend, the door at the top started buzzing. He jumped the final steps and pushed it open.

  The room he entered was high-ceilinged, peaceful like a courtyard, with the grey daylight filtered through paper blinds. A shallow stone bowl full of water stood in the centre with two long leather sofas to either side. A man was sitting on one of them, prodding at an electronic diary with the point of a pencil.

  Shane was at the far end behind a slate-topped table. He smiled as Abe walked towards him. ‘I saw you in the CCTV, coming up the stairs,’ he said.

  ‘Erase it later,’ Abe said. ‘When can you get away?’

  ‘Afternoon. Threeish. Lunch is the busiest time.’ Shane looked slightly puzzled.

  Abe stared at the plain but beautiful objects in the showcase beside the table – bowls and black Japanese teapots. The polished wood at the back of the cabinet mirrored them, turning them to the colour of clear honey.

  ‘Nice space to work in. Quiet,’ Abe said. ‘Just the water glugging and the voices.’

  ‘Buddhist monks on a continuous loop. They’re there to disguise the clicks of the credit card machine,’ Shane said.

  ‘So there’s money here,’ Abe said.

  ‘Yeah, plenty. We don’t get to see any of it.’

  ‘My mum likes this sort of thing,’ Abe said, referring to the chanting.

  Shane bounced his head from left to right and back again. He changed the pattern of the nodding and stuck his chin in the air, as if new higher notes were resounding inside his skull. Abe laughed.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Shane asked.

  ‘We’re going to see your mate about the machines,’ Abe said.

  ‘Oh shit.’ Shane stood up, agitated. ‘We were going to do that, weren’t we? I forgot to call him.’ He picked up his phone and started scrolling through the options. ‘He won’t be around. He lives in Dorset. But there’s a place over at Barking where you can go and have a look at the equipment. Do you want the number? See if anyone’s there? Sometimes there is.’

  ‘No. It’s all right,’ Abe said. ‘Sit down.’

  Shane sat down but carried on flicking through the phone’s address book.

  ‘Aren’t there any pictures?’ Abe asked.

  ‘Of the machines?’

  Abe pointed at the high bare walls. ‘No. Pictures of bones. I thought this was a sports injury centre.’

  ‘People don’t want to see that kind of stuff.’

  ‘The bones are in a different room,’ Abe said in a spooky voice.

  Shane blinked.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Abe said.

  ‘It’s great you came.’

  ‘I might go to the pub,’ Abe said.

  ‘Go on. I’ll join you later. The Peacock. Not the Friendly Camel.’

  ‘All right.’ Abe left the clinic and went down the six flights of stairs and out into the street.

  Abe retraced his steps; back to Vasco’s, across the street, down the alley. Everything looked drab. Bishopsgate, when he got there, was no more than a thoroughfare of heavy wheeled lorries and buses, rumbling up and down. Neither the 1880s nor the 1980s cast a historical glow. Abe had noticed before the distorting effect of his mood. Which was the right way of looking? He was conscious of drilling – the persistent demolition of buildings and road stone. It set his teeth on edge; communal teeth that shook all around him, rooted in concrete. He had achieved nothing; neither the master plan nor the new career. He had been thinking for so long about quitting work, just thinking, daydreaming, really. It felt weird that he had intervened and was making it happen. Like meddling, even though it was his own life. Already the decision seemed botched somehow. Not as risky as he had thought it would be. He liked risky better than botched, he thought. One was an assessment of a situation before and the other afterwards. How had he managed to get to botched already? He was sorry that Shane’s man was out of town, but he didn’t take it personally. He didn’t blame Shane. Abe kept walking. The weather brightened up and he pulled off his hat. He walked westwards, through Moorgate, Holborn, the West End, Bayswater. By the time he reached the slicked-up streets of Notting Hill Gate the sun was out and he had forgotten his disappointment. That was the good thing about walking. Somewhere along the way he had missed the Peacock.

  Three

 
1

  THE HIGH STREET of Harrow-on-the-Hill was full of returning boys and the traffic at a standstill. Richard had failed to take account of the new summer term. He put his arm across the back of the passenger seat and looked out of the rear window. Another car was already behind, tight on his bumper. The woman at the wheel smiled complacently. Bethany caught Richard’s eye. ‘How did we get in this mess?’ she asked.

  ‘We were moving. Then everything stopped,’ Richard said.

  ‘Stop bloody hooting!’ Bethany shouted to the car next to them. ‘You’re giving me a headache.’

  ‘Quiet, please,’ Richard said.

  In the wing mirror, Richard could see Martha put her hands over her shoulders and pull at the two ends of a silk scarf that Frances had lent her. ‘Jacquard,’ Frances had said it was. Martha had liked the word. Her face was nearly hidden. She caught her breath as the cloth pressed against her windpipe.

  ‘Careful, Martha,’ Richard warned.

  Richard glimpsed his younger daughter, lifting her face in the direction of the mirror, examining individual strands of loose hair against the light and tucking them into the scarf.

  Everyone was beeping, for no known reason – more for general jollity. The sun was out for the first time in weeks and the colours were as clear as the Japanese paper flowers the girls floated in water. Cars were parked and double parked, and parents clung on to their vehicles as if fastened to outcrops on a rock face. They obstructed the road. Boys carelessly left the grown-ups and formed in groups. ‘Goodbye, George.’ ‘Goodbye Ollie.’ ‘We can’t leave the car, darling.’ The boys weren’t interested in saying goodbye. Traffic from the right was now looping round in front of Richard’s car. People carriers nudged up close, their windscreens like menacing, oversized spectacles. The beeping carried on, expressing nothing more than stupidity past a certain point. Richard and his daughters waited as if they had suddenly become good at waiting – turned in on themselves – listening to the regular cheeps of Martha sucking her thumb. Eventually a key player shifted and the vehicles started to move.

  Richard steered round the obstacles and wound a path down the hill, past an unbroken line of parked cars. He turned into the tennis club car park and found a space at the far end of the tarmac. ‘We’ve made it, girls,’ he said.

  He accompanied Bethany and Martha to the changing pavilion, then walked back to the road. He had forgotten that tennis was starting up again. Vivienne had had to remind him. There it was on the noticeboard; Saturday mornings at nine o’clock. Richard had felt unable to refuse to chauffeur the girls, on the grounds that tennis was in Harrow. It had seemed ridiculous to make an excuse. He had made a simple resolution to keep away from Abe’s road. That, he hoped, would do the trick.

  Richard turned to look through the chicken wire fence at the children lining up, his own two among them. The air shone. Even the shadows were bright. Another summer beginning, he thought. He was bothered by the ‘having to make the most of’ that didn’t colour the other seasons. ‘Hang on,’ he wanted to say. ‘I’m not ready for this.’ Other people seemed not to be affected, certainly not his daughters. They simply enjoyed themselves, full of high spirits to be out of doors with their arms and legs bare. His own dark-blue shirt seemed unseasonal. He rolled up the sleeves, turning the cloth over and over and exposing his pale forearms. The girls appeared tiny in the distance across three tennis courts. They were too far away for them to see him wave unless they were watching out for him – little figures wearing shorts and T-shirts and white tennis shoes, sunhats, too, because the day would be hot. Richard waved all the same, before turning away. He walked up the hill to the high street and went into a café.

  The long room was crowded; heavy with the fatty smell of reheated croissants. At first there appeared to be no boundaries between the people who occupied the space, nor between their furious talking, but as Richard wandered around trying to find a spare seat, his eyes separated out groups who were more or less facing each other across coffee cups and plates of scattered crumbs. He found a way between them, stepping over the bulky feet of sprawling, overgrown boys, and made for an alcove off the main room into which two tiny tables had been squashed. A couple occupied one but the other was free. Richard lowered his head, brushed aside some overhanging greenery and sat down on a small iron chair. The noise in the bower was less strident. He pulled out his newspaper and opened it at the point he had stopped reading at breakfast, folding back the pages until they made a neat rectangle. As he flattened the newspaper on the table, he noticed the woman across to his right, staring into her empty coffee cup, stabbing her teaspoon into it as if she were stubbing out a cigarette. His eyes were drawn to the gesture and the force that the woman put into it.

  ‘I tried not to call you,’ she said.

  Her companion said nothing.

  ‘I tried. But . . . it didn’t work.’ The grinding on the bottom of the coffee cup began again.

  The man remained silent.

  ‘It’s been difficult,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what to do.’

  Out of the corner of his eye, Richard saw the man lean across the table and reach for the spoon. He took it from the woman’s slim fingers with his larger ones and laid it in the saucer.

  ‘I needed to see you,’ the woman said. ‘Not to do anything. Just to see you – to ground this whole thing.’ She hesitated. She was swilling the dregs of coffee around in her cup as if it were good claret. ‘Three weeks ago. I managed three weeks.’

  A girl wearing a checked waistcoat and a full-length apron entered the alcove. ‘Would you like another of those?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ the man said. ‘Thank you,’ he added. The girl had already turned to Richard. She was standing over him, pulling on a piece of hair that covered one eye.

  ‘I’ll have a cappuccino, please,’ Richard said.

  ‘Any food? Panini with char-grilled peppers, spring rolls in lemon dip, couscous salad, mini pizza selection.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Richard said. ‘Just coffee.’

  The girl walked away. The arrangement of the short skirt showing in the inverted V of the apron made her look oddly geriatric, as if she had forgotten to pull down her dress after using the toilet. Richard’s neighbours had fallen silent. The woman kept looking at the man. Her eyes weren’t steady; it was as if fast-moving clouds passed across them. Richard was disturbed to be sitting so close – a non-participating third in this exchange, which was somehow inappropriate for the time of day. Seduction was turned inside out, showing the way it had been stitched together and the crude form of construction. Richard was alarmed by the woman’s intensity, the negative energy that she sent in gusts across the table. It affected him, who was nothing to do with the situation. He wondered, since it was the beginning of term, whether the couple were parents of different returning boys. They were the right sort of age. But he didn’t like to speculate on other people’s personal business; it made him uncomfortable, as if conjecture was participating in a lie. He wished the girl with the apron would return. When his coffee arrived he drank it too quickly, scalding his mouth.

  Richard left the café, leaving the correct money on the table. He walked along the high street towards the churchyard, drawn to the shadows which, from a distance, appeared green, underneath the canopy of new leaves. He thought of Bethany and Martha – what complications of relationship they might get caught in. He longed for them to be happy. Bethany would remain bold, he hoped, able to say what she wanted. He and Vivienne weren’t always good at that. And Martha? He smiled, remembering her in her usual state of undress, tearing across Paula’s lawn on Easter Day.

  Once inside the churchyard, Richard went along the footpaths, careful of the uneven ground. Some of the old graves pushed the earth up and some fell into it, taking the lie of the path with them. There were too many trees and tombs, too many secret corners, to achieve a clear line of vision, but Richard sensed that the place was empty of boys and parents, visitors of any kind. A gardener was
tidying up, only just visible, camouflaged by the leaf shadow pattern on his back. He was using a broom and a hoe, setting them aside every now and then to bend and tug at a misplaced weed or root with his bare hands. He would be there again next day, or next week, to pull up the replacements. Richard skirted round the man, envying the diligence and the repetitive actions. He trod cautiously, though the gardener was too absorbed to notice him. Richard went into the church porch and unlatched the door. The smell of old stone and old books seeped out as he edged the door open. Once inside, he had to put weight against the heavy wood to heave it shut.

  The church was pleasantly cool. Richard crossed the aisle and sat down in a pew. He checked his watch. Half an hour remained before he had to return to the tennis courts. He felt secure here, out of the way. He wasn’t going to pray. Praying was the wrong activity, a lonely occupation – too agitating without the presence of other praying people – not just stirring up thoughts of his own that were better left undisturbed but spoiling this Saturday peace. He wanted peace. If he asked God for help, he would need to bring to mind why he needed it and then he’d be back on the compulsive journey that looped back on itself. He sat silently, closed off from within and without, as if underwater.

  There were voices outside in the porch. A man talking, perhaps addressing the gardener. Reluctantly, Richard stood up, brushed his knees from habit and walked to the end of the pew. He went towards the north door, which wasn’t in use, and examined the memorial to its left – a woman lying draped over a tomb, her head concealed, some curled locks of hair escaping over her left arm. Richard bent and looked at the words carved beneath to find out who she was. John Henry North, he read, Judge of the Admiralty – Ireland. Honoured, Revered, Admired, Beloved, Deplored by the Irish Bar, the Senate and his County. The text continued at some length. For a second Richard was taken aback to read a man’s name. Then he remembered the displacement, common in tombs and memorials; the depiction, not of the deceased, but of grief itself – or the grieving spouse. The dead had the script, the bereft were dumb.