The Taxi Queue Page 4

  ‘What are you doing, Abe?’

  ‘I thought you might have some raisins.’

  ‘I haven’t.’

  He carried on poking around inside.

  ‘What are you looking for now?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He pulled out a small packet. ‘Why have you got an elastic band round these walnuts?’

  ‘To stop them falling out.’

  ‘Neat.’ He was already chewing. ‘They’re a bit stale.’ Abe dipped into the packet again. ‘Anyway, like I said, eventually, I got through to the taxi queue outside Paddington Station. What?’ he asked, interrupting himself, catching some expression on Kirsty’s face.

  ‘I didn’t say anything. Carry on.’ Kirsty blinked as the vapour came off the onion and a dribble of juice ran out.

  ‘You never take black cabs. I know.’ Abe leant his head back and tipped the remaining particles of walnuts into his mouth. Then he continued. He didn’t name the man he had shared the taxi with, or say anything about him, other than that he lived in Sudbury Hill. He described the journey in detail, making it sound like the snow scene in Narnia. Kirsty carried on chopping the onion, rhythmically slicing it into smaller and smaller pieces. Abe reached the point where the man offered to put him up for the night. He stopped. Kirsty put down the knife and looked up at him. The story had come to an end. She hadn’t said anything; she had just let him tell it. Abe was smiling. It was his silly lips-together smile that went on for hours. Kirsty couldn’t see what he was so pleased about.

  ‘You told this man you lived in Harrow?’ Kirsty said. ‘You’ve never even been there, have you?’

  ‘No,’ Abe agreed. ‘Why would I want to go to Harrow?’

  ‘What did this man look like, then?’ Kirsty asked.

  ‘Gorgeous,’ Abe said.

  ‘Gorgeous?’

  ‘Yeah. Why not?’ Abe started to laugh.

  ‘What’s he called?’

  ‘Richard.’

  ‘He doesn’t have another name?’

  ‘Could be Epworth.’

  ‘Are you seeing him again?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. Is there a bottle open?’

  ‘No.’

  Abe opened the fridge and closed it again. ‘Have you got anything to drink?’

  ‘Just water.’

  Abe looked sceptical but he picked up his coat. ‘See you.’

  6

  ON SATURDAY NIGHT, Kirsty heard the front door slam and the uneven pulse of feet tramping upstairs to Abe’s party. She retreated to her bathroom in the basement and immersed herself in hot water. Voices and music from Abe’s rooms – occasional shouts of laughter – were relayed down the pipework and distorted by strange echoes. By the time she got out of the bath the house was throbbing. Kirsty went into her bedroom and shut the door. The smell of dope seeped under it. Kirsty lay in bed with the duvet pulled over her head. She was conscious of pressure on the framework of the house but she slept. Halfway through the night people started to leave. Then she woke up. Minicab drivers hooted in the street or pounded up the steps and rang the doorbell. The tramping happened in reverse. Once, someone fell down the stairs. Once, someone knocked over Declan’s bicycle, making it clatter on the hall floor.

  At about two o’clock on Sunday afternoon Luka came round.

  ‘What’s all this?’ he asked, pointing at the bin liners piled by the front path and crammed full of bottles and cans. The smell of stale alcohol hung around like old smoke.

  ‘It’s Abe’s rubbish. He had a party,’ Kirsty said. ‘The bin men don’t come till Tuesday.’

  ‘Did you go to the party?’ Luka looked bedraggled in his wet jeans and fleece. The snow had turned to rain overnight, and his hair was as flat to his head as a black bathing cap.

  ‘No,’ Kirsty replied.

  ‘Place stinks,’ he said, as he walked through the front door, carrying a plastic bag containing chicken curry from the Caribbean café along Iverdale Road.

  ‘Thanks.’

  He generally brought food with him – sometimes takeaways, sometimes minced beef or sausages from the supermarket, which Kirsty would cook. He was fixed up with various evening jobs – shelf filling, bar work, shop security – menial employment for a graduate of the University of Zagreb but the only type of employment available if you had ‘NO WORK OR RECOURSE TO PUBLIC FUNDS’ stamped in your passport. Sunday afternoon was one of the few times he and Kirsty were both free. He came alone. Eugen refused to visit the Iverdale Road house in case he met Abe. It still felt strange not seeing Eugen – someone vaguely in the way of their relationship. They had grown accustomed to his being there. Kirsty and Luka ate the food and watched DVDs and had sex, all on her bed. In the New Cross flat they had lived in one room and Luka seemed to want to carry on that way. It was dark by about four o’clock, so they drew the curtains and put the lights on, and it felt later than it was.

  ‘See you next week, Kirsty,’ Luka said when it was time to go. Then he left and the evening was still free. Kirsty felt less committed somehow than if he had stayed the night. She didn’t feel inwardly committed. She cleared away the takeaway cartons and the wafers of Rizla paper that fell out of Luka’s pockets. She went up to the living room, picked up her guitar and played a few chords. Fragments of words and music came to her, clear but evanescent. They came and went. There was a flavour to a song, at the back of her mind – serene and burnt at the edges, like a good day that carries on too long – but she couldn’t give it life.

  She tried singing random words that might fit but she sounded fake to herself and gave up. She listened to the hum of the traffic and looked at the gap where the curtains failed to meet, watching the brightness rush in whenever a bus went past. Somehow, her creative mood failed to coincide with the times she was free. As a student, she had sung in pubs and clubs but she had nothing to show for the last few months. Her only musical activity had been to sort out the CDs that Declan had left in the hall. Even that hadn’t gone as planned. Abe had asked her what they were and she had said, ‘What do you mean, what are they? They’re all different.’

  And he’d said, ‘Well, they weren’t all written in the same year, were they? What order do they go in? I don’t know anything about that sort of music.’ So although the collection was pretty eclectic, Kirsty had started him on Gregorian chant and sorted the rest into chronological order as best she could. For a time, Pachelbel and Albinoni had resounded through the house, then, ‘I’m going to have to skip this next bit,’ Abe had said, some time around the eighteenth century, ‘I can’t handle it.’ It was like the games they used to play. Abe always backed out halfway through.

  Kirsty went into the hall. She put on the coat that was hanging over the post at the foot of the stairs and left the house. Sunday travel was slow – a bit of a mission – but Kirsty caught a bus to Victoria and waited on the station for a train to Crystal Palace, retracing the old route home. She felt more impatient with herself than with the journey. As the train crossed the Thames, she looked through the window at the twinkling lamps of Chelsea Bridge, elongated into frayed strands of light by the sleet. The four towers of Battersea power station loomed above the tracks. Kirsty took off the scarf that Luka had given her for Christmas. It was woolly on one side and velvety on the other with stitching to keep the two sides together. Lying coiled in her lap, it seemed like a sleeping animal. She stroked it absent-mindedly. She realised how tired she was, but it wasn’t physical tiredness. She thought of the Sunday afternoons she and Luka had spent since she moved to Iverdale Road; the same pattern every time – food, DVD, sex – in her basement bedroom. The first of these afternoons had been just like the others, only it was the first. Luka was mostly irritable; though that didn’t stop him wanting to make love to her or keep hold of her as he dropped off to sleep. She was like a favourite doll, taking up little room in the bed. He clung to her and she responded to his touch.

  At Crystal Palace Kirsty got off the train. There were still traces of snow at the far end
of the platform. Kirsty took a gulp of south London air and pulled her phone out of her pocket. The rectangle of light glowed in the dark. She stared at it for a moment but she didn’t call Gloria. She thought of the walk from the station and the chance of an empty house. Gloria was often out. She crossed over to the up platform and travelled back to Victoria, past the dark tracts of common streaked with snow and the streets that showed their reverse side to the rail track. She felt different from when she had set out. She had put in the miles. Some part of her mind was loosened.

  At the beginning of February, when the sky seemed higher, Kirsty got round to painting the kitchen walls and cleaning out the insides of cupboards. She had always thought that the transition from girl to adult meant having more of life on the outside – both material things in place but also shifting the balance from pretending to doing – less daydreaming. The new ice-blue paint was thick and creamy, with an intensity that didn’t last once the brush went in, and wasn’t recreated on the uneven surface. Kirsty didn’t mind that the look wasn’t perfect. Living among the remnants of Neil’s things, she felt sheltered from the builders banging and drilling above her. Abe hadn’t hung on to anything. He had hired a skip and everything had gone into it: the beige mottled lino and the squares of patterned carpet with their edges bound in tape, the green-streaked bath, the kitchen units made of Formica. There hadn’t been so much up there but it looked a lot in the skip.

  Kirsty went to the local hardware shop and bought some checked zip-up bags that opened out like boxes. It seemed the right moment to clear out all the remaining stuff that was in Luka’s flat. Summer clothes, unwearable clothes, binders full of notes and coursework. Kirsty took the bags to New Cross. The flat smelled of shower gel and burnt toast. Zoë and Leanne were both in the kitchen. They were wearing suede boots with high heels and straightening their already flat English hair with hair straighteners. They hugged Kirsty and offered her coffee. Kirsty felt that a gulf existed between them. She remembered being a student but as if it were a faraway time she had left behind.

  Kirsty crossed the landing and went into Luka’s room. An enlarged version of a photo that Luka had taken of her the previous summer was stuck on the wall and a strip of different, passport-size photos of her was wedged into a corner of the mirror. Otherwise nothing had changed. The row of empty Croatian beer bottles was still lined up on the radiator. Kirsty walked to the window and stared out over the railway tracks. The first train that went by set the whole room juddering and then, a few minutes later, two passed each other and let off piercing screeches. Kirsty took her clothes out of the cupboard, then redistributed Luka’s jeans and T-shirts evenly along the hanging rail to close the gap. Opening and shutting drawers in a haphazard fashion, she came across jokey things Luka had given her: badges, worry beads, a yo-yo, a plastic cactus. She hesitated, wondering whether to take them or leave them. In the end, she added them to her collection. There was too much to carry, so she left one of the bags behind in the room. She called out goodbye to Zoë and Leanne. It took about an hour and a half to reach Iverdale Road on public transport. Having dumped the bags, she went back to New Cross. Luka and Eugen were there the second time, sitting on the floor, watching sport on television. At least they weren’t on the bed. She told Luka that she was clearing her stuff out. He nodded without taking his eyes from the screen. It felt odd to be ignored when there were pictures of Kirsty Rivers stuck around the room.

  When Luka came over on the following Sunday, Kirsty told him she wanted to stop the afternoons and said she hoped they could be friends. Luka wanted to know why and she said the afternoons were a bit monotonous and that she needed a break. He said everything would be different once he got a day job. His evenings and nights would be free. She said that wasn’t what she meant. They were lying on the bed but she got up then and started to put her clothes on. He pressed and pressed her, and she had to say she wasn’t in love with him, which didn’t sound nice spoken out loud. She couldn’t see why she had to say it after only fourteen months, or however long it was that they’d been together. He got up and sat on the edge of the bed. He said, ‘Come here, Kirsty,’ and she had to let him hold her, which didn’t work with him sitting and her standing. She ended up sitting on his knee. He was naked and she had some of her clothes on, and it was all ridiculous.

  Two

  1

  VIVIENNE EPWORTH LOOKED out of the window of Starbucks.

  ‘It’s had quite a history, that china cabinet,’ her mother was saying. ‘We found it in . . .’

  ‘Westmoreland,’ Vivienne said.

  ‘Yes, darling, exactly. When Westmoreland was Westmoreland. I shall never know why they gave up those lovely county names. In a village, I can’t remember where precisely. Though we had just crossed the border from Cumberland. We were travelling around. We used to do that a lot before you were born. Such a camp little man in the shop. It was a bookshop but he also sold antiques. There was some jewellery on a willow-pattern dish. I tried on a brooch, little garnets in a crescent shape, and he said, “Be careful, dear, the pin is rather acute.” Daddy and I often laughed about that.’

  Vivienne and her mother, Frances, were in Beaconsfield, which was close to where Frances lived. The cabinet referred to was several miles away in the corner of Frances’s dining room, with an old print of Alnwick Castle to its left and a pencil sketch of two little girls, Frances and her sister, Jane, to the right. Frances could summon up pieces of her furniture like genies from a bottle. The rain hadn’t left off; it spotted the glass and stained the road dark. A charity sales tout, a tall ponytailed girl wearing a green tunic, was hailing passers-by. She was especially physical – extending her arms and barricading the way. People walked round her, raising their umbrellas, stepping off the kerb to give her a wide berth. Even the elderly, of whom there were many in Beaconsfield, laboriously manoeuvred their shopping trolleys off and then on again, as if the girl were a burst water main or a piece of street furniture, maybe a bollard. Frances was facing inwards with her back to the street. She adored Starbucks. She liked the sofas and the newspapers and the froth in the coffee. She said the name as if it fizzed. There was no persuading her. To her it seemed young and louche and, compared with the place some of Frances’s friends went to, which had pink paper napkins and served coloured hot water, Vivienne acknowledged that she had a point.

  Vivienne had been seeing her mother for Lent. Every Friday morning. Her daughters, Bethany and Martha, had given up chocolate. Richard had given up alcohol and she, Vivienne, had given up her free morning. For the rest of the week she worked at a bathroom design centre in Ruislip where she was manager. Friday was the only time that felt approximately her own. The self-denial wasn’t pure mortification; it had a weary purpose behind it. Perhaps this was always the case with mortification. Vivienne needed to steel herself for the task and Easter was a convenient deadline.

  For nearly a year Frances had talked of downsizing – trading in her ample semi, with its stairs and landings, for neater accommodation all on one level. She had lived alone since her husband, Vivienne’s father, died, coping for most of that time, though routine turned into effort. Frances wished her house would shrink. ‘I need an easy-to-manage box,’ she said. ‘Preferably above ground. I’m going to be seventy, you know. Three score years and ten. That’s Your Chap’s recommended cut-off point.’ She had accumulated piles of particulars but refused to visit prospective properties on her own – by which she meant without Vivienne – citing random hazards such as wet floors, marble floors, unexpected changes of level involving steps, vendors who didn’t speak up, vendors who weren’t her sort of people.

  They had clocked up three of these mornings already. This was the fourth. They followed a pattern: viewings, then coffee and, over coffee, Frances verbally arranged her furniture around the properties viewed and failed to fit it in. Vivienne could see the arrangement going on for ever. House-hunting involved so many things that gave Frances pleasure: talking to strangers, lookin
g at people’s possessions, being driven round half-remembered suburban lanes, having her daughter to herself. She hadn’t been told that she was a Lenten penance. The weekliness had been a mistake, Vivienne reflected, wondering whether she should have factored in a lapse. Was it even possible to factor in a lapse? The slippery nature of the word suggested not. Richard, for instance, would undoubtedly have benefited from a relaxing glass of wine. He had been rather low since New Year and uninterested in sex, even on an occasional basis. Once or twice when he was working on an audit away from London she had the silly idea that the change of scene might ginger him up. Rather self-consciously, on the night of his return – or on edge the following morning because of the girls and the time factor – she waited for Richard to make a move and he didn’t. So she didn’t.

  Vivienne tucked her sleek short hair behind her ears and touched one of her moonstone earrings, twisting it round in the piercing. Perhaps the absence was never long enough. She stared out at the rain.

  The previous evening, Prayer Clinic had prayed for a couple called Ross and Julia. Ross had been diagnosed as having a rare cancer but had failed to tell Julia. He had even had treatment without telling her. Julia was a friend of one of the group – not herself a member of St Dunstan’s – so, in the general chat afterwards, they had discussed the situation in some detail. Prayer Clinic was in some ways rather like Book Club, where everyone ended up talking about characters and their actions in relation to their own lives, only in Prayer Clinic the comments were more respectful and sympathetic because the people were real. Everyone present, including Vivienne, had agreed it was impossible that any of their husbands would have withheld information about a serious illness, or that they themselves wouldn’t have known intuitively that something was wrong. She hadn’t been quite truthful. Even as she heard herself chiming in, saying the same as the others, only in a slightly different way, she could imagine all too clearly Richard keeping quiet – being brave and hoping to be cured without fuss. She should have said, ‘Hang on a minute. I made a mistake. Richard might well be a Ross-type person. He’s very uncommunicative.’ Her proclaimed confidence in female intuition had also been wishful thinking. Her own was almost certainly faulty, like a lamp with a poor connection.