The Taxi Queue Read online

‘Is Julian the boy who lives in that huge house at the top of the Hill?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Yes. You remember going there, don’t you?’

  Richard winced. ‘Why didn’t you talk about it then, if it bothered you? That was weeks ago. Why wait till now? That’s what I can’t understand about you, Vivienne.’

  ‘I wasn’t bothered.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The soundtrack from the DVD was suddenly louder. The girls must have turned up the volume. There was a crackle, as of explosives, and then the clatter of falling rubble. The girls burst out laughing.

  ‘I offered to go to the garden centre. You said that there was enough lawn fertiliser in the shed left over from last year. It was just a question of finding it,’ he said.

  ‘I did say that,’ she agreed.

  ‘So there was nothing you wanted me to do. I went for a walk. It was a beautiful day. It was a beautiful day.’ He glanced out again. Craig had started on the side of the hedge, was sweeping across it with diagonal strokes. The pavement was topped with a layer of leaves and Craig was ankle deep in them. Richard knew nothing about Craig. Only that he had a wife, Anne, twin boys and a vintage VW that was parked in the garage. Was there even the slightest chance that Craig would hang around outside a stranger’s house, or, when the stranger generously and hospitably took him in, inform her that she had mistaken her own identity? He thought, on the whole, not. And John Henry North, Judge of the Admiralty, would he have done such a thing? The inscription on the monument was full, but somehow, although John North had been ‘Deplored by the Irish Bar, the Senate and his County’, that particular unwise choice hadn’t been part of the list.

  ‘And before Julian’s party. Where were you then?’ Vivienne said.

  ‘Somewhere similar, I suppose. I can’t remember.’ Richard was beginning to dislike the sound of his voice.

  ‘It’s a good thing I didn’t say yes to the “Our Families” DVD,’ Vivienne said.

  ‘Say that again.’

  ‘I said, it’s a good thing I didn’t say yes to the “Our Families” DVD. Paula said Glen wants us to be in it.’

  Richard couldn’t see Vivienne’s face. She was placing their used coffee cups on the tray. ‘You said no?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I just didn’t say yes.’ She straightened up.

  ‘That’s no bloody use with Paula. Who’s eligible?’

  ‘People like us, I suppose. We’re church members and we have children.’

  ‘So Paula and Hartley don’t qualify?’

  ‘They’re a couple, not a family.’

  ‘But they’re happy,’ Richard said. ‘Totally united, as far as one can see.’ He glanced at Vivienne and saw that the remark was unwelcome. ‘Not like two halves of an egg, more like a double buggy,’ he continued. But Vivienne failed to respond. Richard felt the weariness in his shoulders and his head, as if effort was needed to be held in place. He knew, in that moment, where his spine might protrude and cave in when he reached old age.

  ‘I’ll tell Paula a definite no, then,’ Vivienne said, her face poker calm, but her lower lip trembling in a disorganised way. ‘Do you think the girls would wander off on their own from the tennis courts? They said they were waiting by the entrance gate. Where would they go? They’re basically sensible, aren’t they?’ Her expression had changed, was now beseeching.

  ‘Yes,’ Richard said. ‘They’re basically sensible. And I did pick them up, albeit late – and useless.’

  Richard took a deep breath and leant forward to gather up the pile of brochures. They would be better off without the presence of so many English cottages set against blue sky. ‘Sorry, Vivienne,’ he said.

  4

  THE HOUSE IN Iverdale Road absorbed as much heat from the sun as a matchwood shack – only Kirsty’s basement stayed tepid. It was as if the spec builders of the 1900s had skimped on a layer of bricks – or perhaps it was the design that was at fault; the room that fitted directly under the slate roof without an intervening attic. Even with all the windows open a draught was hard to come by. What came through the gaps was noise, day and night: faulty bus brakes that shrieked like hurt animals and the repeated whoosh of passing cars. There was no breeze to cool down the local infants and stop them from wailing – nor to disperse the intermittent stench from next door’s drains.

  Abe thought of his father skulking about on the bottom two floors. He imagined him stooping, half asleep, under the low basement ceiling, holding a spliff between his thumb and index finger, raising it to his mouth out of vagueness rather than for pleasure. He had assumed that Neil’s choice of leaving the upper floors empty had come from laziness, combined with an ignorance of property values and ways of increasing them – even from an aversion to increasing value on principle. Abe didn’t credit his father with making practical decisions but he had to acknowledge, in the present heat, that maybe Neil’s choice of carelessly ignoring half of the house hadn’t been so stupid after all. Abe found himself thinking of his father. Since giving up full-time work, he thought of him often. He had intimations of failure – sensing what that might feel like – while anticipating that he had endless time and talent to ward failure off.

  By eleven at night the air had cooled a little, but Abe left the portable electric fan running. He picked up a solitary banana from the bowl on the table and began to peel it. He had eaten the end of a loaf earlier. Now he felt hungry. He went through to his kitchen and opened one of the cupboards. There was a selection of vitamins in brown bottles, also some small jars; chilli flakes, curry powder, coriander seed, mixed herbs. He had tea, coffee, a tin of tomato puree, a packet of basmati rice. Abe shook the rice packet. Empty – like his bank account. He aimed it at the sleek Swedish bin.

  Abe had started sharing the shifts at Karumi with his friend, Shane, working a few afternoons a week. The pay was fairly basic. His boss made a lot of the fact that the employees could have treatment at fifty per cent but as Abe didn’t have tendonitis, sciatica, trapped nerve or any kind of back, neck or joint pain, this wasn’t much of a perk. The Japanese-exercise-equipment idea, which had seemed poised like a Hokusai wave ready to break, was now more of an outgoing tide. Neither the keyholder of the storage facility in Barking, where the equipment was allegedly housed, nor the head man in Dorset returned their calls. On weekday mornings, when Kirsty struggled in to central London in the rush hour, Abe took himself off to the park. The trees, heavy with leaves, made interlocking pools of shadow down the main path and straggly roses had begun flowering in the formal beds. Abe chose a tree that stood by itself – a copper beech – and lay beneath it, catching up on the sleep that eluded him at night. The sleep was weird; not really restful. He dreamt, on one occasion, of dancing a slow sexy dance with the man who worked at the checkout of the local Costcutter. This was an unhurried, memorable dream, not spoiled by the furtive knowledge that in reality the man was charm-free. Mostly they were short napping dreams about work, being late, fighting muggers. Through half-closed eyes, Abe was aware of the park characters who sat on benches and walked between the shrubs, muttering to themselves. They left him alone in his own private shadow with his head resting on his T-shirt.

  Abe finished the banana and lit a cigarette. Sometimes he thought that he would be forced back into marketing. He couldn’t doze his life away. The part of his brain that was used for work had moulded to marketing ways. No one had told him how careful you had to be about your first career choice – that there might be divorce proceedings but certainly not annulment. He could write the marketing job ads in his head. There was no need to buy a newspaper and turn to the appointments. An outstanding opportunity to make a major contribution to a growing business with a highly satisfied customer base. He played around, shuffling words. A growing opportunity to make a highly satisfied contribution to a major business with an outstanding customer base. He could see the layout of the imaginary application form; the creepy section headed Is there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself? No,
was the answer. The pages of the A4 notebook he carried around with him remained blank.

  At about midnight Kirsty’s doorbell rang. As the bell box was placed high in the hall, the sound carried all the way up the house. After a few seconds it went again; insistent this time, as if the person outside was leaning on the button. Abe went out to the top landing. ‘Shut the fuck up,’ he said. He switched on the light, leant over the banister rail and looked down the well of the house, but there was no sign of Kirsty. He came clattering down the front stairs. A pale face was pressed up against the glass of the front door. Minicab drivers were face-pressers, especially if they’d come to the wrong address. Friends generally weren’t. Abe opened the door, prepared to slam it straight back. Luka was on the doorstep. ‘Where is Kirsty?’ he said.

  ‘No idea,’ Abe said.

  ‘I’m homeless,’ Luka said. The ‘h’ at the beginning of the word emerged guttural and melancholy from far down his throat.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ Abe said.

  Luka stepped inside. Kirsty came along the hall just then, fresh out of the bath, making wet footprints on the floor. She stopped when she saw Luka and pulled the belt of her kimono tight round her. ‘Luka. What are you doing here?’ she asked.

  ‘He’s homeless,’ Abe said, shutting the door.

  Luka stood holding a large zip-up holdall in front of him with both hands. The bag was heavy and hung sagging a few inches from the floor but he didn’t put it down. ‘My house has been repossessed by the landlord’s mortgage company,’ he said.

  ‘Which house?’ Kirsty asked.

  ‘My house. In New Cross. We have all had to leave.’

  ‘It’s really late, Luka,’ Kirsty said.

  ‘I’m sorry. I have been travelling all day to far parts of London, taking my boxes, my possessions, to various houses for safe keeping,’ Luka said.

  ‘Couldn’t any of those people put you up – the ones you took the boxes to?’ Kirsty asked.

  ‘No. That is impossible. These are cousins of people my mother knows in Zagreb.’

  Abe admired the way Luka said ‘no’. The word, stripped of limp, English negativity, had real intent behind it. Luka seemed more foreign than when he had last seen him. Abe couldn’t understand how that had come about. Surely the longer a person spent in a place, the more acclimatised they became? Yet Luka, having seemed like a real Londoner previously, now put up resistance to blending in. His black hair projected defiantly outwards but his body had shrunk into itself. His English was odd. He made a special pocket of air around himself that was not London air.

  ‘What about Eugen? Can’t you stay with him?’ Kirsty asked.

  ‘He has gone back to Croatia,’ Luka replied, giving Abe a sidelong look of reproach.

  ‘Oh Luka, you must be able to find somewhere else?’ Kirsty said. After her initial questions she had caved in. Luka would interpret this as a ‘yes’. Understandably. Abe would do the same himself.

  Luka put the bag down on the floor. ‘Where shall I sleep?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll leave you two to it,’ Abe said.

  5

  A FEW DAYS later Kirsty called Marlene to tell her what had happened. ‘This doesn’t surprise me. But you’ll cope, Kirst. You always do. Have you been to New Cross to check out the story? Call Zoë or Leanne. How transparent of Luka to talk of repossession,’ Marlene said. ‘He could easily have used one of those legal words that has no meaning.’

  Kirsty had been clear about Luka’s sleeping on the sofa. That she hadn’t been feeble about – and had got the instruction in immediately by showing him into the living room on the night he arrived and handing him the sleeping bag. He had a new job as a relief porter in a private hospital. No questions had been asked about his employment status but because the place was at the end of a long suburban lane, miles from a tube station, he had had to buy a second-hand bicycle to get to and from work. There were now two bikes in the narrow hall, Luka’s and Declan’s, and hardly room to get past. ‘Don’t you do enough wheeling with the trolleys?’ Abe said. ‘This place looks like a fucking bicycle shed.’ Kirsty imagined Luka wearing surgeon’s green scrubs – though that wasn’t what porters wore – pushing bed-bound patients in and out of cavernous lifts. All week he had been asleep when Kirsty left for work in the morning. She walked past the closed door in the hall and went straight out to the street, feeling as if she were the lodger, checking out of her own guest house. When she returned in the evening the living room door was still closed, but at that time of day she opened it and went in. She wandered around, trying to maintain right of way, like a rambler following an old path along the edge of a field. She drew the living-room curtains fully and let in the light. Luka’s clothes were in the zip-up bag. A pillow and a folded sleeping bag were placed on top of it in a forlorn pile.

  Kirsty looked about dispassionately, as if the room were no longer hers. She remembered the rolls of the dust that used to collect in the corners and round the legs of the furniture, like dry ice blown on to a stage set. They had gone – cleaned up in an early zealous burst – together with Neil’s derelict props: crockery and empty bottles used as ashtrays. But the furniture remained. Kirsty stared at the battered-looking sofa. It seemed to have aged further, used as a bed. The creases in the Indian cloth that covered it were in permanent pleats. Having been shut up for hours on end with Luka inside, the room had regained its former mustiness. She could smell that someone had slept there, but also Neil’s old druggy, alcoholic smells – weed, cigarettes, Nag Champa, wine, whisky – which she had thought her housekeeping and open-windows policy had done away with for ever. The feelings Kirsty had had as a child, of being a stranger in the house, of not belonging, came back to her. She didn’t feel quite at home. Picking up the indistinct sound of voices on Abe’s television, coming from upstairs, she wondered if she would have recognised Neil’s voice if she heard it again.

  Sometimes it crossed her mind that she and Abe were there under false pretences and that someone with a better claim would ask for the property back. She imagined a man watching a CCTV screen in a faraway room, idly looking at them – not with sinister intent, but simply looking, killing time, until the moment came to pull the plug on them. Since moving in, Kirsty had received several calls on the land line from people who asked to speak to Neil. Mostly they were cold callers who wanted to inform Mr Rivers that he had won a trip to the Caribbean or to persuade him to change his telephone provider. On one occasion it had been a woman called Dido and another time a woman with an actorly voice who wouldn’t give her name. Kirsty had had to tell these people that Neil had died. The conversations had left her shaky. Neither of the women she had spoken to had known that Neil had a daughter.

  Kirsty went down to the basement and saw Luka through the kitchen window. He was propping up the post in the garden fence, always in the same spot of shade, bare-chested, smoking his sprouting roll-ups – looking as miserable and proud as if he were waiting to be shot for a matter of honour. Kirsty found it hard to describe to herself how she felt when she saw him there. Every evening it was the same feeling, which administered a shock, like a jolt from a recurring dream and didn’t increase or lessen as the week went by. It was as if someone had planted a full-size tree which she hadn’t ordered or chosen, but which she knew for certain was impossible to dig up without either killing the tree or wrecking the garden.

  Kirsty had to take a deep breath before going out to join him. Having said ‘hi’, she picked up her small garden fork and worked in the shade cast by the shadow of the house. After being stuck in the shop all day, she liked kneeling on an old blanket and grubbing about in the flower bed she had made. The plants were only a few inches high, but they were trusting, wanting to live. Presumably they would have preferred to be somewhere else, a royal park or a sprinkled garden, but they were doing their best. The weeds were tall and tough. Angled and trapped against stones, they failed to come out whole. The thwarted life force seemed to knot and push the stem
s up thicker, even while she tugged at them. Kirsty prised out the stones embedded in the soil, like nuts in hard toffee, and found more lodged in the layer underneath. They scraped against the fork. She could see Luka’s feet out of the corner of her eye but the rootedness that she had observed in him through the kitchen window seemed more tolerable at ground level. She sensed that he was happy to watch her and after a time she forgot that he was there. When she stood up to stretch her legs, she broke the silence to ask about the hospital. Luka described his duties but left out the smells and pathetic sights. ‘Is it all right dealing with sick people, hour after hour?’ she asked.

  ‘It is best to be well,’ he said. ‘Like you and me.’ Luka smiled as if the thought of their health gave him pleasure.

  The calm ended when Abe appeared. Then Kirsty would have preferred large dogs around the place. The two men took up too much space and played a territorial game of pretending that the other had no right to be there. Abe talked non-stop and Luka was the silent statue – but it was the same game. Kirsty didn’t know whether she was supposed to be referee, spectator or prize.

  6

  AS SHE HAD warned, Paula did not return to London in time for Prayer Clinic on 3 June. She rang Vivienne at midday from a restaurant in Picardy. The weather was glorious. The restaurant had a Michelin star. She and Hartley hadn’t even started on what they’d ordered, although the waiter had brought round flamiche – an upmarket kind of leek tart – as an appetiser. She said she could see lunch taking rather a long time and then Hartley would need a snooze in a field, before driving on to the Channel tunnel. That would take them until, say, six o’clock at the earliest and they still wouldn’t have left France. Vivienne sighed when she put down the phone.

  She arrived at Hilly’s flat at about six thirty. A few of the group were already installed. Cushions had been set out in a circle on the floor and, although it was sunny outside, the blinds had been pulled down and tea lights had been set out in saucers and placed around the room. Hilly had no piano but Jennifer Patterson had brought her son’s recorder along. Another woman, Dawn, who was fairly new to the group, was singing along to it, as she went round lighting the tea lights with a taper: ‘’Tis the gift to be simple,’tis the gift to be free. ’Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be. And when we find ourselves in the place just right, ’twill be in the valley of love and delight.’