The Taxi Queue (11 page)

As she often had to work on Saturdays, Kirsty rarely had two free days in a row. Single days off were precious so she guarded them. Sometimes she guarded them so closely that nothing happened. Sometimes she felt lonely. She had received four or five text messages from Luka since they had split up and, as none of them sounded desperate, she had decided to ask him over. Sunday lunch would be best, she thought. Kirsty offered Luka a few dates and he accepted the first available.

He turned up on the doorstep with a bottle of wine. There were three buses backing up from the traffic lights, juddering and burning up diesel oil outside the house, so Kirsty didn't quite catch what he said after he'd said hello. Luka kissed her on the cheek. His face was damp and cold. He felt alien – even exotic – and she wondered how it would feel to have his face next to hers every day, forgetting for an instant that, until recently, she had done. Kirsty closed the door behind him and the buses showed red through the ridged glass.

As soon as they were in the kitchen, Kirsty opened the bottle. She had done some of the preparation in advance – chopping up the peppers and making a salad dressing; there was only the chicken to grill. She turned on the extractor fan over the stove and the noise was a refuge for her because she didn't have to talk or to listen to the silence. She could
pretend that she and Luka were friends and the extractor fan was on.

She said the food was ready. They sat at the kitchen table at right angles to each other – a jug full of daffodils between them – the brightest thing in the room – and the talk didn't flow, in spite of the wine, which by then was almost gone. Kirsty had made an orange polenta cake and asked Luka if he'd like a cup of coffee with it but he said no, he'd rather not wake up. He had a cigarette instead. He fiddled around making a roll-up, scattering shreds of tobacco on the floor, then went over to the creaky sash window and forced it wide open because he knew Kirsty didn't like smoking indoors. The room became cold in a few minutes and the warm citrus smell of the cake drifted away. Luka rested his wrists on the frame and blew smoke into the garden. Upstairs, the front door slammed and Kirsty heard the bump bump of bicycle wheels on the steps. She sat at the table, staring at Luka's back, wishing she hadn't turned down Abe's invitation to Sunday lunch in a pub.

‘Shall we go for a walk?' she said.

‘If you want,' Luka said.

They went to Roundwood Park. Luka walked on the kerb side and kept his hands in his pockets. He was wearing his oldest trainers and a pair of tartan socks that Kirsty hadn't seen before. There had been repairs to the gas pipes the previous week. The pavement had been dug up and put back haphazardly, leaving seams of tarmac in sticky footpaths. About halfway up the street, a pigeon landed a metre or so in front of them and carried on wobbling fast ahead like an automaton, as if it had forgotten it could fly.

‘Are the birds round here thick or something?' Luka said. He lunged forward and stamped his foot. Kirsty yelped. The pigeon raised itself off the ground with a few flaps and veered into the road as a car was passing. Kirsty shut her eyes. She felt the squelch but when she dared to look she saw the pigeon alive and pecking in the gutter.

As soon they were inside the park gates, Kirsty wished they had gone somewhere else. Roundwood Park wasn't a place you could get lost in, but she saw at a glance that it had shrunk since she had last been there.

‘Do you
like
it here?' Luka said.

‘Yes,' she said, rallying. ‘I do. It's a perfect curve – like a microcosm of the earth's surface.'

The park was surrounded by low houses and backed on to two cemeteries – the Willesden New Cemetery and the Jewish Reformed Cemetery – but the rounded hill was special. The top of the curve was marked out by a circle of trees and through them, looking westwards, you could see the tilting structure of the new Wembley Stadium arch and the tower blocks of Neasden. Kirsty liked the view, which wasn't of great interest and would never have appeared on a calendar. She liked the bland horizon and all the ordinary houses stretching towards it.

Luka nodded, though not in response to her answer. He nodded as if he were very wise and she had confirmed something detrimental to her that he already knew. His eyes didn't look wise, though. They looked belligerent.

Kirsty and Luka made a single circuit of the park, which took about ten minutes, then Luka said he was going to find the tube station. He headed off in the wrong direction, his collar up, his hands in his pockets, but Kirsty didn't call after him.

I made him like that, she thought, as she walked back to Iverdale Road. There was nothing horrible about him and now there is. He was the type who would have gone on, for years, being all right, neither better nor worse, like a packet of sugar at the back of the cupboard. She had met him at a former cinema in New Cross. She was singing in a charity event, dressed in a low-cut black T-shirt and a bronze-coloured tiered skirt that had once belonged to Gloria. He had been at the front, checking the bags for
bombs and weapons. It was a joke, really, peering between the lipsticks and condoms and paper hankies. By the time she came out, at the end of the concert, dressed in her usual clothes, with Gloria's skirt in a Tesco bag, everyone had gone home. There was only the sound of the wind and the pre-Christmas traffic toiling back from the West End. Luka was there, sitting on a concrete bollard, waiting. Kirsty asked him if he'd found anything suspicious in the bags and he said only a small landmine. It hadn't seemed worth making a fuss about it, he said, spoiling everyone's evening. ‘It was a good concert, though,' he said. ‘I
liked
it.' She asked him what he liked about it and he smiled.

He had come all the way from Croatia to London, leaving his mother alone in Zagreb. His family had seen worse things than ever turned up in bags at London concerts. Kirsty felt – although Luka wasn't, ultimately, or even in the short term, her responsibility – that rejecting him was a breach of hospitality. There were no words she could say – none that were safe – to make him himself again, though she knew what they were, the unsafe ones.

A WEEK AFTER
Easter, Paula rang Vivienne at work. ‘Have you had a think about the “Our Families” DVD, darling? Glen needs to firm up on the numbers.'

‘No, not yet. I haven't had a chance to talk to Richard,' Vivienne said. She and Paula had already had the same interchange when Vivienne had rung up to thank Paula for the party. Their conversations often had an overlapping effect, which was sometimes soothing, sometimes irritating. Vivienne preferred to be left alone at work. Then the days – working and non-working – separated themselves out, or at least blurred within their different categories. Through the glass screen of her office, Vivienne could see into the showroom. A red-headed woman, wearing a tightly belted mac, was walking aimlessly in and out of the screened compartments. The baths, basins, bidets and toilets were arranged in their style/range groups, as if they were in real bathrooms with half-walls round them. The gleaming white was sepulchral and generally calming. The groups were, in their way, like impeccable families: clean, matching, durable and with clearly defined roles. ‘I don't think we're suitable,' she said, deciding she must take a unilateral decision. Her earlier excuse jarred.

‘Whatever do you mean?' Paula said.

‘Not perfect. As a family.'

‘Darling, you're all scrummy. Who mentioned perfect? This is “
Our
”. It's meant to be an inspiration to the couples
who want to get married in St Dunstan's or bring their babies for baptism.'

‘Richard and I aren't really screen types. I'd be hopeless.'

‘Sweetie, we're not talking Hollywood,' Paula said.

Vivienne felt affronted – which was absurd. She transferred the receiver to the other ear and crashed it against her earring.

Paula was saying, ‘I do think family values should be
celebrated
. Oh, before I forget, I found a pair of spotty socks in the garden. I wondered if they belonged to Martha, I know she's always stripping off.'

‘Yes, they'll be hers. Don't send them. I'll pick them up some time,' Vivienne said.

‘How's Richard?' Paula asked.

Vivienne hesitated, wondering whether Paula had picked up on Richard's behaviour at the lunch party: his solitary time in the garden; his failure to appear for the Pattersons' party medley. She had hoped Paula hadn't noticed.

‘We were a teeny bit worried about him. He didn't seem quite on bouncy form,' Paula said.

‘He could have done with more time off over Easter – but he's all right, I think.'

‘You two should get away,' Paula said.

‘We might do something for my mother's seventieth in June.'

‘That's ages away. In any case, I was thinking more of a twosome. You know, darling, Hartley and I would always have your girls for a night, if we're free.' She broke off and made a sound as if she were licking a spoon. ‘We're off on a spoiling holiday in Normandy, eating tons of cream, did I tell you? Just a few days. I might have to miss Prayer Clinic. You'll lead the meeting if I'm not back, won't you, June the third.?

‘That's not your ma's birthday, is it? The meeting will be at Hilly's house but she refuses point-blank to lead.'

Jake, the salesperson, was taking a very long coffee break.
Vivienne craned her neck to see if she could get a glimpse of him in the small backyard, where he went to make calls on his mobile and to smoke a cigarette. Sometimes she had the impression that Paula was keeping her up to the mark in her marriage – setting encouraging goals, as she did with church activities. Then the idea seemed far-fetched; a sign of her own insecurity – the fear that she would never pass, as people used to say, with flying colours. Jake was standing with his back to her, apparently gazing at the ventilation brick in the wall opposite. The top of a comb stuck out of the back pocket of his trousers. He had been taking longer and longer breaks, ever since she had wondered whether she should talk to him about the gospel message. ‘Keep it short,' Glen had recommended. ‘It can be useful to begin with a scriptural sentence that means a lot to you. Don't mention sin in your opening pitch.' But she hadn't yet said a single
word
. Jake seemed to sense that she was revving up to it. Really, she was completely useless.

‘Darling, are you still there?' Paula asked.

‘Yes, of course.'

‘You went very quiet. But you are a quiet person. Restful. You don't rabbit on, like me.'

‘Whereabouts are you going?' Vivienne said.

‘Do you know Normandy?'

‘No, not really.'

‘Just imagine a half-timbered building in the middle of a field of cows. I'm hopeless at geography. I go somewhere and
enjoy
it and come back again.'

The woman wearing the tightly belted mac was contemplating an oval basin on a twisted pedestal that was part of the Petrarch range. She ran her hand along its curved underside. The mild sensuousness of the gesture unsettled Vivienne. Her body, slight as it was, felt surplus. She wondered which had come first, the useless feeling of her flesh or Richard's tired lack of interest. She felt ashamed, somehow, that such private things were visible, or could be heard in the voice – by Paula,
at least. The red-headed woman seemed to sense she was being watched and removed her hand quickly, as if she were in a museum and feared a custodian might bear down on her for touching the sculptures. It occurred to Vivienne that if other people had noticed that Richard seemed unwell she would be justified in delving around in the study at home, checking the file where they kept the health insurance policy and having a quick look in Richard's desk. It was nothing to be ashamed of, because illness was morally neutral, unlike adultery, and didn't impugn the investigator of it with jealousy or anything dubious. All the same, she knew in advance that she would feel uncomfortable about looking. She took a deep breath. ‘Paula, why did you ask about Richard? Did he say something was the matter?' she asked.

‘No. He didn't say anything.' Paula paused encouragingly. As Vivienne said nothing, she continued, ‘Actually, I thought he was his usual sweet self. It was Bellsie who said he seemed below par. When she went downstairs to find her bag he was, allegedly, slumped over the kitchen table.'

‘He'd probably had a bit too much to drink. He'd been sober all Lent,' Vivienne said.

‘Probably, darling. I wouldn't worry about it. Richard's gorgeous. In my book, he can do no wrong. “Slumped” was over the top, I'm sure. You know Bellsie. She has her own vocabulary. You're not worrying, are you?'

‘No. Look, Paula, I'll have to go. I'm on my own here.' Jake was still in the yard. It wasn't a lie.

‘Go, go, go. You did say “yes” to Prayer Clinic, didn't you? Put it in the diary. Thank you, angel. Lots of love. 'Bye.'

For the rest of the working day, Vivienne made an effort to suppress thoughts of Richard's malaise but business was flat and the image of Paula's guests wandering into the kitchen and gazing at her husband kept cropping up. In the late afternoon, Jake sold three bathrooms. Vivienne was glad of some
action. She worked out a favourable deal for the client and sorted out the paperwork. After she had telephoned the order through, she went out to the local patisserie and bought Jake a chocolate éclair. He looked a bit nervous as he accepted the little tissue paper package tied up with blue ribbon. He was a tall, good-looking lad, with a line in flamboyant ties and a diamond chip in his ear. Nervousness didn't suit him. Vivienne said he could go home early if he wanted to. He thanked her and smiled. She hoped that if she banished the thought of witness in the workplace, eventually they would be on easy terms again. He was a promising young salesman and she didn't want to lose him.