The Taxi Queue Read online

  Richard picked up a towel and rubbed his hair, until soft tufts of it stood up. He took off his jacket and placed it over the back of a chair. From the knee down his trousers were wet and furrowed, the crease still holding up. The fridge behind him was chock-full, so crammed that its internal light was masked and everything inside looked shadowy. Suddenly he noticed that the door was wide open and began to rummage inside. He was unaware of Abe staring at him.

  ‘Prayer, Praise and Pasta,’ Abe said. ‘Do your girls like that?’ He said it to be friendly.

  Richard straightened up. He looked, for a second, taken aback by Abe’s question. ‘It’s more a grown-up thing,’ he said. ‘We take it in turns to go to each other’s houses. Vivienne’s good about all that. PP and P. Actually, the girls can’t eat pasta. They’re allergic to wheat.’

  ‘I’m interested in religion,’ Abe said.

  ‘Religion,’ Richard repeated as if it were a strange and perplexing word. He paused. ‘Faith, I suppose, is what Vivienne would call it. What she’d say we – had.’ He shut the fridge door without having taken anything out. He seemed undecided.

  ‘Yes. Faith,’ Abe said. ‘Whatever. My mother’s started one up.’

  ‘She has?’

  ‘Well, not started from scratch. More revived an old one. She does chanting.’

  ‘Good heavens.’

  ‘Egyptian. It seemed wrong to let all that stuff lie around unused,’ Abe said. ‘I’m going to make her a website. I’ll give you the card I made, if you like. You can keep it.’ His mother had given him The Egyptian Book of the Dead as part of his Christmas present, but he hadn’t made much headway with it. There was one part of the book that he liked, though; it hovered on the edge of his thoughts. After death, a person had to give an account of his life and what counted was not what he had or had not done, but how truthful the account was. The person’s heart was weighed against truth. Abe put his hand in his top pocket and laid a small rectangular card on the table. ‘Truth’s a feather,’ he said. ‘That’s why that feather’s on it.’

  Richard walked over to the table and picked up the card. He looked at it and laid it down again carefully. ‘I’m a bit out of my depth on this one, I’m afraid, but thank you very much.’

  ‘My mum sings – and my sister,’ Abe said.

  ‘What’s your sort of music?’ Richard asked.

  Abe hesitated. He was a bit allergic to older people discussing their favourite albums. He hoped Richard wouldn’t go down that path. ‘Ba-roque,’ he said, with a hint of challenge. He had never used the word before. He left the very shortest pause between the two syllables.

  ‘Is that something I should know about?’ Richard said, cautiously.

  Abe shrugged his shoulders. ‘It depends,’ he said. ‘Been around a while.’

  Richard seemed as if he might ask another question. He ran his hand up and down the side of his face, as if testing his shaving, then he nodded and went back to the fridge and took out two dishes.

  ‘Where are they, Vivienne and the girls?’ Abe asked.

  ‘France. Skiing,’ Richard said. ‘I’m not a skier. Are you?’

  Abe shook his head.

  ‘I never got the hang of it. To be truthful I’m afraid of falling.’ Richard stood, holding a dish in either hand, poised like a pair of scales.

  Abe went across and took them from him. ‘Do the girls go out on their own?’ he asked, going to the microwave oven and opening the door.

  ‘No, not yet. They’re too young for that,’ Richard said.

  Abe adjusted the rack inside the oven and inserted the dishes. ‘I had this idea when I was about twelve that I’d choose a tube station where I’d never been, go there and see what was going on. I went to Chalk Farm. I knew it wasn’t country but I was expecting, from the name, that it might be different from London. Somewhere you could get real cider or magic mushrooms. Fresh eggs. I can remember expecting eggs. Pale – like chalk. Some rubbish. I thought I might bring a present back for my mum.’

  ‘They haven’t been anywhere on their own yet – apart from sleepovers and we try to keep them to a minimum,’ Richard said.

  ‘Why’s that?’ Abe punched in a number and pressed the start button.

  ‘Too many sweets after lights out,’ Richard said. ‘They get hyper.’

  ‘Hyper? That’s good isn’t it?’ Abe said. ‘Being hyper? Part of the fun. I’d like kids one day. I like kids.’

  Richard gave him a strange look. ‘But not yet.’

  ‘No. That’s on hold.’

  ‘Where else did you go?’ Richard asked. ‘On your mystery tours.’

  ‘I only did it the once. There wasn’t the same romance. I was left with the edges of the tube map. And weird places.’

  Richard smiled. ‘Bounds Green,’ he said. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by that name.’

  ‘You might be disappointed. But try it,’ Abe said. He slid on to the bench seating on one side of the table and sat down. He propped a cushion behind his head and leant back against the wall. Feathers, not foam, he thought. He felt happy: not energised or wanting to make plans, but peaceful. Richard was very trusting, very hospitable. This calmed Abe. He felt the rushing of the week had stopped and need not start again. On the other side of the kitchen Richard was opening a bottle and pouring red wine into two large, solid-looking glasses, splashing it in until the glasses were full and the bottle half empty. The fish pie was starting to smell good. Richard was walking towards him. Abe held out his hand. Richard put one of the glasses into it.

  ‘Cheers,’ Abe said and smiled. He didn’t think he’d misjudged the situation.

  Outside, the snow carried on falling, taking to itself the burden of movement.

  3

  NEIL RIVERS HAD died the previous summer and left Abe and Kirsty his house in Kensal Rise. He had never lived with his children. Neil Rivers had been a photographer once, momentarily famous, though there was no evidence of his work in 105 Iverdale Road – not even a copy of his celebrated poster. Over thirty years before his death, he had taken a picture of a girl leaning over Waterloo Bridge. Her hair flopped in a blonde sheet and her legs, under a micro-skirt, came up to the parapet. The image was classy; set at night, with a streak of dawn in the east that seemed more apocalyptic than hopeful. It still turned up in books about the seventies. The girl, Tamsin Spira, had gone on to be a model and a celebrity depressive – though the word celebrity wasn’t used liberally then. Afterwards, she had disappeared from view. Neil had given the photograph to the wrong person and had never made any money out of it. That had been the story, anyway.

  Abe and Kirsty used to get palmed off on Neil two or three times a year because Gloria, their mother, thought he ought to be aware of them. When Gloria gave up accompanying them, the visits to Iverdale Road decreased and eventually stopped. Neil made no effort to keep in touch. On one occasion the children rang the bell and there was no reply. Abe climbed from the front steps on to the dirty windowsill to see, he said, if Neil was lying there dead. But he wasn’t, so Abe and Kirsty went home. They often guessed information about him and got it wrong. Neil Rivers wasn’t especially interested in children but he was brazen enough to get along with them – not supplicating. He had a husky voice that kept getting caught up on bits of itself, as if it were a frayed piece of rope, being pulled along a pipe. ‘Hiya, kids,’ he used to say when they walked in and, ‘Fucking Ada,’ in an up-and-down drawl, if things weren’t going well. Having shown them where the biscuits were – in a tin with the pattern half missing – he left them alone. ‘I’ll take you out later,’ he said. ‘Think about where you want to go.’ Then he sat at the kitchen table and opened the newspaper flat in front of him.

  The first quarter of an hour visiting Neil at the house was always the worst. The children would stand still, getting used to the lack of attention. One part of them knew they had come to visit their father, but another part had no idea why they were there. They needed those minutes to think of him and get a
grip. The bruised look to the parts of his face that he shaved, the shoulders hunched over the newspaper, the sticking-out backbones, like the beginnings of wings underneath his creased shirt, his height in relation to the ridged panes in the front door. He was tall; probably a fraction taller than Abe at man height, but it was hard to be accurate. Because Neil showed so little interest in them, Abe and Kirsty didn’t believe that they would end up resembling him in any way. There was the haze of springy hair that all three of them had in common, though in different shades of brown – Abe’s the colour of cassette tape, darker than his sister’s. That had come from Grandad Abe. He was a GI who had had sex with Grandma Shirley and returned to America after the war. No one knew anything about him but judging by the Rivers hair and the even-toned skin that had no freckliness or pink to it he had been mixed-race. Kirsty had Gloria’s grey-blue eyes. Girls’ colour, Abe thought. Gloria had named her brown-eyed son after Grandad Abe because she thought he ought to be connected to his roots.

  Abe used to tell Neil interesting facts about himself. Sports scores, swimming lengths, favourite football team, maths test results; he had them off pat. It suited him not to be interrupted or asked questions. He could keep going for about ten minutes. Kirsty had nothing to say. Having collected her biscuit she went back up to the hall. She stared up at the things that were out of reach: the box above the front door that contained the batteries for the doorbell; the dust-encrusted mouldings; the electric cable, fuzzy with dirt, from which the light bulb was suspended. Sometimes the telephone rang and then she ran, in panic, into the living room. The ringing stopped abruptly when Neil picked up the phone in the basement kitchen and Kirsty would hear him talking through the open door. She looked out of the window at the passing buses and the row of shops opposite, each decorated in different colours of chipped and faded paint but all kitted out with the same neon lighting. When she had had enough of that, she sat down self-consciously on the lumpy sofa and the assorted chairs, as if they were strangers’ laps – pretending the strangers liked her. Draped over with faded Indian cloth, they seemed to her mostly female. Kirsty pressed her nose into the cushions and rugs and inhaled different flavours of dust, without being able to identify them. She wanted each to have a name as the battered enamel tins in the kitchen at home had names: coffee, tea, rice, bread. There were four floors to the house but, in essence, two halves separated by smell. Downstairs Kirsty could indulge her passion for sniffing. Upstairs, where Neil never ventured, the empty bedrooms and unused spare kitchen smelled uniform, cold and faintly vegetable, like dead cut flowers taken out of a vase. Kirsty used to go up there to breathe the difference and to examine the catches like windmills that fastened the cupboards. These things were enough. She went to visit Neil without complaining. Abe played on the stairs.

  Going home to Crystal Palace on the train, Kirsty passed the time by practising Neil’s intonation under her breath. Abe, four years older, never joined in. He made a point of being himself – disavowing role models – though once or twice, at school, Kirsty thought she recognised Neil’s slouch, as Abe sloped across the playground. ‘What did you do at Neil’s?’ Gloria asked them.

  ‘Played,’ Abe said.

  ‘Neil played with you?’ Gloria said, with mock incredulity.

  ‘Not really,’ Abe answered.

  ‘What did Kirsty do?’

  ‘Nothing, as far as I know,’ Abe said.

  Gloria and Neil had been in love at the beginning but incompatible. Gloria was definite about that. She presented the love and the incompatibility as if they had both taken place on one eventful day. The real sequence of events – that, although failing to get on, she and Neil had had at least two mating periods of not being able to keep off each other – she skated over. Kirsty used to tell children at school that her parents were divorced. Abe didn’t mention Neil at all past the age of eleven.

  Neil Rivers died of liver cancer after only a few weeks in hospital. No one told his children, or the mother of his children, that he was ill, so they didn’t go to see him. He was sixty. Abe’s name was down on the hospital admissions form as Neil’s next of kin, together with their old address and number. Gloria took the call informing them of the death and immediately rang her children. Abe was on the train, returning from Reading. Kirsty had just finished her finals. She was drinking with friends, on a triangle of green in front of a pub – lying on the grass with her possessions scattered around her: sunglasses, bags, flip-flops, phone.

  Abe and Kirsty made arrangements to meet the next morning at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. Then they went to the Register Office, which was in Wembley. They walked miles round the streets of west London because they kept going the wrong way. Kirsty was wearing strappy silver sandals that slipped whenever she stepped off a kerb. She wondered how people who were old or in an emotional state could cope. Abe, who was normally good with directions, wasn’t concentrating. He was thinking of Neil answering the admittance questions at the hospital and saying ‘Abe Rivers’ when they asked who was next of kin. He kept stopping in the middle of the pavement and saying, ‘He was our dad, Kirsty.’ And in the end Kirsty told him to shut up because it was too late for any of that. They thought the solicitor was another formality. It never occurred to them that Neil had left them anything. They hadn’t heard from him for years.

  The solicitor said they could call her Colleen. She occupied a tiny room on a half-landing off a staircase, in premises above a shop. Her desk had black metal legs that looked like weaponry and clanged when you knocked a foot against them. The shelves round the walls were empty. Colleen said the building was being redecorated and that this wasn’t her usual office. The three of them sat on plastic chairs; the type that stacked. Although the place lacked dignity, Kirsty wished she hadn’t worn the short white sundress with the wavy hem. Abe looked grown-up and tidy in his work suit and pressed shirt. Colleen was encased in a tight jacket and skirt. She asked their ages – twenty-five and twenty-one – and checked their ID. There was no punctuation in the will Abe and Kirsty were given to look at, and they didn’t understand at first that, between them, they owned a house. Neil himself had lived as if he were renting from a racketeer landlord. He had never shown any interest in his surroundings, nor in keeping them up. Colleen, who was also acting as Neil’s executor, told them that Neil had left instructions that there should be no funeral, just the crematorium and nobody in attendance. She said she could recommend an undertaker, if they hadn’t already chosen one. Abe and Kirsty didn’t know what to say. They had never had to deal with death. Abe took his mobile out of his pocket and stared at it.

  Colleen put on a different voice and told them that, unusually for London, even that part of London, the value of Neil’s house probably fell below the inheritance tax threshold. Since their father had no other assets, with any luck they wouldn’t need to pay anything to the Inland Revenue. Colleen assumed they would sell 105 Iverdale Road and turn it into nice crisp money. She smiled in a wincing kind of way as she described the poor state of repair of the house and its position on a main bus route. When she asked if Abe and Kirsty had any questions they were silent. They thanked her – they had had enough of her by then – and said they would be in touch. They went clattering down the stairs and across the road to a pub opposite and started on the beer. Abe rang up Gloria to tell her about the will, then passed the phone to Kirsty. ‘Jammy bastards,’ Gloria said. She had cried the previous evening when she heard that Neil was dead but she wasn’t crying now. Kirsty asked her if it made her angry that Neil had never helped to pay for them or given them anything while he was alive. Gloria said no, she hadn’t wanted his money. ‘Knock and the door will have nothing behind it. Take what you can get, Sweets,’ she said. ‘Enjoy it.’ After the day of dealing with weird official people, Abe and Kirsty felt suddenly elated, as if life had speeded up. They were giggly, almost hysterical. They kept clinking glasses, splashing the beer. ‘If someone gave you a donkey or a camper van you would want to take it
on at least one outing, wouldn’t you?’ Abe said. ‘Give it a run around.’ That summed up how they felt about the house. Abe said he would leave his job in Reading and take out a bank loan to do up his half of the property. He and Kirsty hugged each other and had more to drink, and the decision seemed irreversible.

  In a lull Abe said, ‘Is it all right, do you think, not doing anything?’

  Kirsty went still. She knew what he was talking about. No funeral. Nothing. ‘It’s what he wanted,’ she said. The sentence seemed the oddest thing she had ever said – more than grown-up, terrible. She wondered whether she might spend the rest of her life saying such things. She and Abe looked at each other.

  Then Abe said ‘I’m having upstairs’ and everything was fine again. Kirsty remembered liking the downstairs; downstairs had more character. The top floors had always been peripheral.

  After they left the pub, Abe went into town and Kirsty returned to the flat in New Cross that she shared with her boyfriend, Luka, and two second-year students, Zoë and Leanne.

  Kirsty told Luka about Neil’s house and said that she and Abe were going to move in together. Luka carried on pouring milk into his tea until the mug overflowed. Then, after a moment he said, ‘But he’s your brother.’

  ‘And?’ she said.

  ‘You don’t even like him.’

  ‘Yes I do. He’s been really helpful lately.’

  Luka was letting the spilt tea drip over the edge of the table and just watching it.