The Taxi Queue Page 15

  ‘He is,’ Vivienne said. ‘Totally.’ Her expression was still puzzled but the diffused redness had shrunk to two small blotches on her cheeks. She looked around the room, making an effort at curiosity. ‘What really goes on here?’ she asked.

  ‘The usual stuff. Physiotherapy, acupuncture, osteopathy. What did you think went on?’

  ‘I thought all kinds of stupid things. The entrance is misleading.’ She paused. ‘But it’s pleasant once you get up here.’ She looked towards the stone bowl and glugging water with a professional eye.

  ‘I’m glad you like it,’ Abe said. ‘I’d recommend Tariq. He’s the osteopath. Different practitioners come and go throughout the week. They rent the rooms. But Tariq’s the best. If you ever have a bad back or anything, you should see him. Definitely. Do you work near here?’

  ‘Ruislip. If you know where that is.’

  ‘Out west somewhere, isn’t it? Probably a bit too far to come with a slipped disc.’

  Vivienne smiled.

  ‘I knew you weren’t the Shoreditch type. And you’re too nice to work in the City,’ Abe said. She was nice, since she had stopped being starchy. He got up and walked to the table. He picked up the bottle again. ‘Sure you don’t want some?’ Vivienne shook her head. Abe raised the bottle to his lips, put it down again and returned to the sofa. He remained standing. ‘It’s been really good to meet you,’ he said.

  ‘You too.’ Vivienne stood up and placed her sunglasses just above her forehead. She put out her hand but Abe ignored it. He gave her a hug. He looked down at the top of her head; the shiny hair that stayed put behind her ears – a different substance from Rivers hair. ‘I feel I know you,’ he said. He meant it. ‘I’d appreciate some feedback. On the Osiris spiel. What did you think? You can be honest. Really. Please tell me. I like to learn.’

  Vivienne skewed her lips to one side in concentration, trying to find the right words. ‘You made me feel rather trapped. But that’s probably just me.’

  ‘Trapped isn’t good. I’ll have to do better,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t believe in any of that esoteric rubbish – but you’re streets ahead of me. I’m useless.’

  ‘At what?’ he asked.

  Vivienne’s shoulders hunched under the summer jacket. The action was more defeatist than a shrug. She saw Abe looking and straightened herself up.

  ‘You came here,’ Abe said. ‘That was brave.’ He walked with her across the room. He hoped her step was buoyant – though probably a brisk rise and fall was the only way to walk in those sandals. He wanted to think that she looked a different person from the one who had first approached him. He opened the door and Vivienne went out.

  Abe returned to the table. He rested his elbows on the slate top and, cupping his hands, placed his two index fingers on the bridge of his nose. He could feel the heat of his breath. The conversation had gone all right, but for some reason he wasn’t as relieved as he would have expected to be. He felt, without knowing exactly how, that he had let Richard down, as if he, not Richard, had been the older one and should have acted more responsibly. The thought disconcerted him. Whether he had slipped up in January, or just now, or at some time in between he wasn’t quite sure. He remembered the stranger in the taxi offering him shelter and hospitality for the night; an offer made not exactly innocently, but in good faith. Abe passed his tongue over his lower lip. For a few minutes he concentrated, remaining quite still, apart from an errant muscle in the knee that had developed a life of its own. Then he removed his hands from his face and placed his fingers on the computer keyboard. He typed in the name of a well-known firm of City accountants and when the details came up on the screen he picked up the phone.

  As he waited to be put through to Richard’s secretary, Abe leant back and swung round slowly.

  ‘Clare Sharpe,’ a voice said. When Abe asked for Richard she said that he was in a client meeting and wondered if she could help. Abe said that it was a personal call. She said that if he left his number Richard would get back to him.

  ‘Don’t bother him, Clare,’ Abe said. ‘I’m going out any minute.’ He hesitated, then he said, ‘How is he?’ She said he was well. She sounded surprised to be asked.

  2

  AT SIX O’CLOCK, Kirsty pulled down the roller shutter on the main part of the shop, leaving the front accessible to clients with keys to the mail boxes. For once, and perhaps because of the fine weather, she had no trouble dislodging the lingerers. The place had emptied itself. Kirsty walked along the roads behind Oxford Street towards the bus stop. She passed the waiters who sat in the shade on the back steps of the hotel. ‘Hello. You-me have sex?’ one called out.

  ‘No chance,’ Kirsty said. Although it was the end of the working day, the air was warm. The parks would be full of people lazing in deckchairs or lying in the sun, as the shadows tapered. It would be good to sit by water, Kirsty thought, or go swimming, or have a picnic. She took out her phone and left messages with Marlene and a couple of other friends. No one replied. She thought of Luka already leaning against the fence waiting for her – or perhaps just waiting. She wondered whether Gloria was in. She thought of the train to Crystal Palace in the rush hour; the crowds and the heat.

  Gloria was sewing in the small garden at the back of the house when Kirsty arrived. The sewing machine was on the wooden table with its electric cable plugged in to an extension lead that snaked its way indoors to one of the kitchen plugs. Silky cloth, the oily colour of a dark pond, lay smoothly under the presser foot of the machine and rose and dipped into folds that hung over the table and almost touched the ground.

  ‘I’ll just finish this seam, Kirsty, then we’ll have a drink,’ Gloria said.

  ‘Don’t worry about me. You keep going. I’ll sit on the grass,’ Kirsty said.

  ‘I haven’t cut it yet this year,’ Gloria said.

  ‘I can see that.’ Kirsty lay down on her back and was immediately hidden. The grass was thicker than in Iverdale Road and the weeds were frondy; not the low-growing tough rosettes that she struggled with at home. She pretended she was in a meadow. Although the garden was hemmed in by neighbouring houses, from her supine position Kirsty could see only the sky. An aeroplane crossed her field of vision, its engine noise masked by the whirring that started and stopped as Gloria depressed her foot on the pedal and raised it. Kirsty was lulled by the sound, though as a child she’d been maddened by it – another barrier to getting Gloria’s attention. No one else’s mother had made clothes for fun. That had been the eccentricity, not the heaving of the sewing machine out of doors. For all Kirsty had known, that was where all summertime sewing took place. Gloria used to make anything loose that could be stitched until, at about the age of seven, Kirsty had objected to the baggy floral trousers and gypsy skirts. She had wanted things with a bit of Lycra that you chose from rails in high street shops. The colours weren’t as good. She admitted that now. Acidic or plain boring – high street colours. But never again – unless she borrowed Gloria’s clothes – did she have to dress in shades it was hard to find a name for.

  The whirring noise stopped. Through the grass, Kirsty could see that Gloria’s foot was no longer on the pedal. She sat up. Gloria was snipping at a thread with the scissors. She stood up, folded the cloth into a pile and picked it up. ‘Stay there, Kirsty. I’ll go and get the wine,’ she said.

  Kirsty could see more of the garden now. The jasmine that was draped over the fences, and which produced thousands of starry scented flowers later in the summer, was sprouting fresh dark leaves and stems tinged with red. Its branches hung down and met the grass, nearly concealing the sleeping Buddha who rested serenely on his stone bed, his eyes closed in perfect curves. Long ago, Kirsty used to wrap him in blankets. He kept his dignity, whatever she did to him. Gloria reappeared carrying the old tin tray with an open bottle of wine and two glasses, carefully balanced. She bent and put the tray on the grass next to Kirsty, flattening the stems. She sat down herself, her feet tucked under her and her skir
t spreading out. Kirsty leant across and poured the wine. Gloria took a deep breath and smiled. ‘This is nice.’ She looked happy, Kirsty thought, less fierce than when they had lived at home with her. Gloria had been tenacious – working, bringing them up, but also hanging on to her music, her New Age hobbies, her occasional boyfriends. They were probably in that order of importance. Sometimes the hanging on had made her grim. It was clearly a relief to her that she no longer had to provide for her children. She didn’t seem old, although she was their mother.

  ‘How’s the house?’ Gloria asked.

  ‘All right. I like it.’

  ‘Weird to think of you there.’

  ‘Do you mind?’

  Gloria sipped the wine and looked thoughtful. ‘No. It’s just weird. Everything comes back in some way or other if you wait long enough.’

  ‘Not everything?’

  ‘Unexpected things,’ Gloria said. ‘The things you had thought had snapped right off. Anyway, it’s a house. It was a waste, really, with just Neil in it.’

  ‘There were tenants once, weren’t there?’

  ‘For a while there were people upstairs, an Irish couple, I can’t remember their names, and then, when they left, a woman called Gaynor, who had callers – and a Siamese cat that used to streak up and down the stairs with its ears pinned back. It was nervous of Neil.’

  ‘He probably kicked it.’

  ‘No. He wouldn’t have done that,’ Gloria said.

  ‘Abe and I thought of getting a cat but then he was given the fish.’

  ‘How are they?’

  ‘That’s what Abe says. “How are my fish?”’

  ‘After Gaynor, the upstairs was empty. Neil didn’t bother,’ Gloria said.

  Kirsty liked to think of the tenants who came and went. And Gaynor’s callers. From a distance, the arrangements seemed fluid. It was only when you had your nose pressed right in a situation that you thought it would last for ever. ‘I’d like to have met the upstairs people. It would have made it more interesting. I could have played with the cat. Did it go in the garden?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. It just went mad on the stairs.’

  ‘The back door was always locked,’ Kirsty said. ‘The bolts were rusty.’

  ‘You were always interested in the way doors were fastened.’

  ‘Funny,’ Kirsty said. She thought of her childhood self without sentiment; remembering herself not as photograph-sweet, but as empty – the inside of a person who is new enough to know nothing. She was still unsure how she was doing – filling the space.

  ‘No one used the garden,’ Gloria said. ‘The only time I remember going out there was when Neil had a bonfire. He burnt a lot of old furniture. I can see him now, knocking the flaming pile into shape with a table leg so that it wouldn’t fall into the fence and set it alight.’

  ‘You make it sound like the Middle Ages.’

  ‘It was a bit like that. Without the witches.’

  Kirsty picked up a piece of the jasmine that was within reach. She held it between her two hands and tugged at its elastic strength. She realised she was crushing the new shoots and let the stem fall across her lap. ‘We never liked going to see him,’ she said. ‘We didn’t hate it, but there was nothing to do. He never made us a bonfire.’

  ‘No. I thought he might get more interested in you as you got older. But it never happened. There was that time when you went there and he wasn’t in. I was going to give him a bollocking about that but then I thought, why bother?’

  ‘He didn’t change?’

  ‘No, he didn’t change.’

  This suddenly struck Kirsty as unlikely, given the bonfire. There must have been other flarings. The famous photograph of Tamsin had been one. There must have been others over a lifetime. Somehow, it had been convenient for all of them to think of Neil as a lost cause.

  ‘Would it have made a difference if we’d tried harder?’ she asked.

  ‘You were children,’ Gloria said.

  ‘Children can try.’

  ‘Yes and no.’

  ‘He must have thought about us though – or he wouldn’t have left us the house.’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know what went on in his head. I think he didn’t want you to reject him. He preferred that you didn’t know him at all. In the end, he gave you what he had. It could have been worse,’ Gloria said.

  ‘You’ve never said that before. About rejection.’

  ‘I don’t know what went on in his head.’

  Kirsty stopped drinking after the second glass of wine. It would be a mistake to fall asleep on the train. She was glad that Gloria hadn’t asked about Abe – and she herself hadn’t mentioned Luka. Sometimes it was good not to talk about the present. She thought of Neil’s own childhood. His father, the GI, who hadn’t stayed in Britain once the Second World War ended. They had never had news of him. Neil’s mother, Shirley, back in the late 1940s had wanted to forget everything about her American boyfriend. Women did that in those days – wished something had never happened, then lived the rest of their lives as if the wish had come true. She hadn’t put her baby up for adoption, though. Shirley had focused on the hair and said her own sister’s had been bushy – bushy was a forties word. And since her sister had gone to live in Belfast there was nothing to disprove it. She might well have had a perm that had gone wrong. Reality gives its support to odd causes.

  The song that Kirsty had almost forgotten seemed as if it might get written – not in a rush of adrenalin but gradually, slowly, over the summer. If she became famous, or even if she didn’t, she would dedicate it to Neil: ‘In homage to Neil Rivers’. She felt fond of her house again. She wanted to get back there. She thought of the old furniture and was pleased that it hadn’t all gone up in smoke. The lumpy sofa covered in Indian cloth – it seemed right that someone in need of a bed should be sleeping on it.

  She and Gloria went inside and made some food – eggs on toast – and took it out into the garden to eat. Then, when they had finished, they carried the sewing machine into the kitchen because although it was still light, the shadows were long, stretched across from fence to fence, and the light wasn’t good enough to sew by. Kirsty left soon afterwards and walked to the station.

  3

  IT WAS ABOUT ten o’clock when Kirsty arrived back home. As she walked in, she could hear Abe’s television on upstairs. The lower part of the house was quiet. Kirsty opened the door to the living room. The pillow and folded sleeping bag were in a neat pile on the floor but the zip-up bag had gone. She turned on the light and looked round the room. The yellow-haired horse was on the bookshelf where she had placed it the previous evening, crammed between the cracked spines of Neil’s paperbacks. Otherwise everything was as it had always been: the sofa and chairs draped in Indian cloth, the threadbare rugs with their trailing fringes, the lifeless curtains. Two used wineglasses and an empty bottle stood on the floor. Kirsty went down to the kitchen. The back door was locked. There was no note. Notes are left in obvious places. She felt aggrieved that her hospitality was no longer required. She picked up her phone, about to call Luka, then stopped herself. She had wished him gone and now he was. It had been a safe kind of wish since she hadn’t imagined it coming true – she had failed to put her back into it. She hadn’t gone on to consider how she would feel if Luka left. Kirsty unbolted the back door and stepped outside, not knowing what to make of the changed situation. The garden smelled dry in spite of her manic watering the previous evening. She walked round to the tap and turned it on. The water gushed into the can and she regulated it to a more moderate pace. She filled the can seven or eight times and drenched her plants until they smelled green.

  Kirsty went back into the kitchen. She was surprised to see Abe sitting at the table. She hadn’t heard him come in, while she had been out in the garden.

  ‘I hope you’re pleased with yourself,’ he said.

  Kirsty had been about to say ‘hi’.

  ‘It feels good wrecking other people’s lives,
does it?’ His voice was quite neutral, given what he was saying.

  ‘I haven’t wrecked anyone’s life. What are you on about?’

  ‘Think about it.’

  ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea. Do you want one?’ she asked. ‘I went to see Mum after work.’ Kirsty switched the kettle on. She took two mugs off the shelf and a new packet of tea bags from the cupboard. She started to remove the plastic covering, running a fingernail under the join.

  ‘Righteous cow,’ Abe said.

  Kirsty’s mood was calm. That didn’t change. She was untouched by what Abe said. ‘I’m making this tea for you,’ she said when she heard the switch on the kettle click. ‘If you don’t want to stay for it, that’s fine by me.’

  ‘Some sort of control freak,’ Abe said.

  ‘Abe. Would you stop insulting me, or leave now. Please.’

  ‘Do you really not remember?’

  ‘Remember what?’

  ‘Think about it.’

  Kirsty poured the boiling water into one of the mugs. She held the kettle poised above the other one. ‘Do you want this or not?’

  ‘What is this, “control through tea”?’ he said. ‘You’re not a fucking Japanese tea master. You’ve got your priorities wrong.’

  ‘If you say so. But I don’t go round insulting people for no reason.’ Kirsty went to the fridge and took out the carton of milk. She poured a slug into the mug; some of it dribbled down the side.

  ‘So it’s all right to interfere in someone’s marriage, is it? To tell a woman you’ve never even met that her husband is gay?’

  Kirsty went still. ‘I didn’t do that.’ She stared at Abe.

  ‘As good as.’

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, so you want to know now, do you? You’ve remembered.’ Abe stood up. He walked towards the door and before Kirsty had a chance to stop him he had left the room. She could hear him going up the short flight of steps to the hall. Let this not be real, she thought.