The Taxi Queue (12 page)

Vivienne arrived home at seven o'clock. As she walked into the hall, she could hear the noise of dice being shaken in a pot and counters placed in plodding sequence on a board, through the open door of the kitchen. Otherwise it was a silence of meticulous cooperation. Henka, the girl who came in to look after Bethany and Martha, had a tranquillising effect on them. She had introduced them to old-fashioned games – Ludo, Snakes and Ladders, dominoes – and endlessly played with them. Vivienne thought it was all rather repetitive. Henka's main drawback was that she couldn't drive and was therefore unable to take the girls to their activities. Ability to drive had been part of the person specification for the job but Henka had scored on the point of church attendance. She was Roman Catholic, which was understandable, since she was Polish. She had stuck with her childhood faith. Vivienne went into the kitchen to say hello but Bethany and Martha were too absorbed in the game to give her more than passing kisses.

Vivienne walked across to the study and, having unfastened the security locks, pushed the window open because the room seemed airless. The Epworth paperwork was all organised in box files on open shelves. Vivienne took down the health file and flicked through the contents. She found nothing,
just the policy itself, various advice notices of increases in the premiums and some old correspondence about a mole Bethany had had removed from her arm. She returned it to its place.

The desk was Richard's. It was the old-fashioned sort, made of oak, with a pull-down front and compartments inside. There was no key, so it wasn't private, just exclusively his, as the dressing table in their bedroom was hers. All couples had pieces of furniture that were particular to one or the other and, in the very old, this extended to chairs. She and Richard were too young to have special chairs, but the thought was comforting that one day this might be the case. Vivienne half wished they had reached that point. She lowered the desktop and looked inside. Richard wasn't a hoarder of memorabilia. He kept his bank statements and investments bumf for three years, then put the papers through the shredder. The only personal item was a worn leather wallet in which he kept spare credit cards, his driver's licence and a couple of baby photos of the girls. That was all. His mother was the keeper of his childhood: photographs, school reports, the weekly letters from boarding school. Not having lived with any other men apart from her father, who had also been economical with his possessions, Vivienne assumed that salting stuff away was more a female habit. The exception to the rule was business cards. There was a stack of them in one of the desk compartments. They accumulated like offerings of bread for overfed birds. Vivienne took them out and riffled through them but found nothing medical among them. She picked up the wallet. A card was sticking from one of the pockets. She wondered why it was there, in this special place, and not part of the stack. She pulled it out. It had a design on one side – a feather – and, turning it over, she saw there was a telephone number, handwritten, on the back. The style was different from a normal business card. It couldn't have come from a shop or a gallery as there was no trading name or address.

Through the open window Vivienne could hear next door's children playing table tennis in their garage – the rapid plop of bats on the ball and shouted score keeping. The boys were a few years older than Bethany and Martha, though that didn't stop the girls speaking disparagingly of them in deliberately audible voices. Their daddy had recently gone to live with another woman, taking his car with him, which was why one half of the double garage was free for the table tennis. Of course, table tennis was no substitute for a father but the boys seemed to enjoy it. Vivienne imagined the daddy returning and driving smack into the table. People couldn't expect things to stay the same.

She looked at the card again; the feather was pretty, a nice design. She went to the desk and put it back where she had found it. Then she relocked the window. The sky, striped with dark cloud, was still disconcertingly light – the debilitated light of early evening when the clocks have gone on but spring hasn't caught up – enough to give definition to the roofs in the distance. There was something depressing about the early weeks of daylight saving, Vivienne thought, parsimonious. But daylight couldn't be shifted about like money between accounts. It got its revenge by producing evenings that were dull and pale – often until the end of May, by which time the concept of saving light was irrelevant.

IN HIS LAST
week of employment Abe took a day off. He had a lie-in, then he went by tube to Liverpool Street. He would have called the office and said he was sick but illness, in the health insurance business, was a commodity. If you weren't careful you were fast-tracked to the Personal Advisory team. ‘Good morning, this is Danielle speaking, could you give me your policy number, please.' ‘Piss off, this is Abe and I've got the flu.' Abe had some leave owing and he had
genuinely
taken a day off work. He was proud of that. He was heading for Karumi, the sports injury treatment centre in Shoreditch, where his friend Shane worked as a receptionist. Shane was still planning to lease Japanese exercise equipment to gyms and health clubs. Abe had called him and they had arranged a time to go and look at the machinery.

Bishopsgate was the only street Abe knew where everyone kept up. They put one foot in front of the other and moved. As soon as he stepped off the escalator, people carved him up, whooshing by him as if they were on wheels, shouting at each other across him. Abe liked the part of London around Liverpool Street. He liked the reverberations between the massive Victorian buildings and the glassier buildings put up yesterday – and the way everyone, scurrying at ground level, male and female, wore Thatcher-style suits with square-cut shoulders. As it was a day off, Abe was wearing jeans and his white hooded jacket. Also his hat as there was a bit of a wind.

Abe turned off the main road and followed a tall brick wall, stylishly blackened by old pollution, then, when that came to a dead end, because the railway had right of way, he chose a side street at random and cut through an alley, dodging a stream of water that bubbled up through the concrete from a leaking pipe. He hoped he was heading in the right direction. After crossing two intersections he paused. On the far side of the road was a row comprising a half-demolished building, a betting shop, a funeral director, a sandwich bar called Vasco's. These were the first signs of commercial life since he had left Bishopsgate. Abe needed some coffee. He waited for a gap between the cars and went across.

Glancing in through the window of T. Shipley & Son, Funeral Directors, he noticed a framed poem, propped like a photograph, next to the urn. Before Neil died, funeral directors' premises seemed like gaps in the high street. Now Abe was slightly fascinated – aware that there were quirky differences between them. Unobtrusiveness came in various styles. He pressed his face against the glass to read the poem. The gist of it was that death was nothing at all and that the dead person had just gone into another room. Abe read it a second time and still couldn't make sense of it. He thought about calling in and telling whoever was in charge that they were eroding the customer base. Why not just shut up shop and reopen as a deli or a launderette? Looking beyond the window display, he saw a vase of stiff white flowers standing on a table and, just behind it, a panelled door. He supposed it must lead to a room. He tried to imagine it and summoned up an interior, closed like a box, unlit and unfurnished – but the picture lasted less than a second. He saw the reflections of the street again, a post van going past, himself staring at the glass. He thought of the cinema screen blanking out at the moment of a death. You feel the pitch into nothingness – then the credits appear and you shuffle out of your seat, assuming that's how it will always be; with the capacity to see and to stand up after the shock
has worn off. Then Abe thought about Neil and felt sad and guilty, because his death had been, in a way, nothing at all.

Abe turned away and pushed open the door of Vasco's, hunching his shoulders because the doorway was narrow, as was the interior, with its seating crammed into a sliver of space along the wall. He walked past the counter – the mounds of flaked tuna, sliced tomato, chopped egg, shredded lettuce, each in plastic containers behind curved glass. There were only three customers: two women giggling over some photos on a phone and an elderly man eating a doughnut. Abe negotiated the bolted-down tables and slipped into a seat at the far end, also bolted down. He had set aside the day to replan his life. Vasco's wasn't the ideal setting but it would do for the time being. The man behind the sandwich counter was watching him. A kind-looking man with a grey moustache. Abe held up his index finger with his thumb an inch below it, to indicate that he would like an espresso. The man smiled and nodded. Abe liked an old-style sandwich bar. He even liked the sandwiches once in a while. White sliced bread, brown sliced bread, white sticks, chewy as old slippers. There was one with a breaded escalope of meat – chicken or veal – slapped inside a white stick. The smear of bright yellow butter got stuck to the breadcrumbs and the filling fell out as soon as you bit into it. He might order one of those later, if they had one. But this was the moment for creativity. He had purposely left his laptop at home. Abe fished around one-handedly in his bag and took out a clean A4 notebook. He opened it at the first page and stared at it from a wide angle, leaning against the back of the seat, as if he were long-sighted. Running the middle finger of his left hand slowly down the spiral binding of the notebook from top to bottom produced a tingly feeling that started in his fingertip and moved up through his hand and past his wrist. After a while the sensation dulled. Abe wrote ‘Business Plan' at the top of the page.

‘Is ready.' The man with the grey moustache was leaning over the end of the counter holding a cup of espresso.

Abe stretched up for it and said ‘Cheers'. There were two paper wraps of sugar in the saucer. ‘Have you got any real sugar?' he asked. The man looked puzzled. Abe mimed dipping a lump of sugar into his coffee and sucking it. The man nodded, suddenly happy, and turned to the shelf behind him. He opened a biscuit tin and handed over two small macaroons.

‘Thank you,' Abe said. ‘You're a star.'

The man beamed and continued his drying-up. Abe took one of the biscuits, dipped it in the coffee and sucked it. The almond taste was bitter. Abe took a swig of coffee.

‘You study?' Vasco said.

‘Soon. I'm going to give up work.'

The man laughed. ‘What your boss say?'

‘He's a tosser,' Abe said. He looked again at the title he had written. ‘Business Plan'. A rational head which, following the pattern of his old school essays, would acquire a short, wind-filled, ruptured body. As the rush from the coffee hit his brain, he tore off the sheet and crumpled it into a ball.

Suddenly the café was full of people. A queue was forming at the counter for lunchtime sandwiches. Office workers started pushing for places at the tiny tables – colliding with an opposite stream who were trying to leave with their takeaways. The man with the grey moustache was working at speed, delving into the fillers and pressing them into the bread, juggling cups under the sputtering spouts of the coffee machine. He looked as if he had six hands. A chubby woman wearing a bobble hat and a tatty raincoat wedged herself into the place opposite Abe. She placed her tray, with its plate of egg sandwiches, mug of tea and iced bun, on top of Abe's notebook. Picking up one of the sandwiches, she squinted at it, before taking a bite that left a row of tooth marks in a jagged crescent moon shape. Her lower arms were covered in a fine dust of hair; the sleeves of the coat halfway between
her wrists and her elbows. Abe eased his notebook out from under the tray and the white pages reappeared streaked with a film of reddish grease. In this part of the world, this district of suits, Abe's pull-on hat had given the wrong signals. Like to like, the lady must have thought. Abe ripped the stained pages out. The woman started on the iced bun. She looked at Abe over its gluey top with tired eyes. He picked up his bag and his notebook, and shimmied through the gap between the table and the end of the counter. The man with the grey moustache was strewing salami across three open baguettes as if he were dealing a pack of cards. Abe left the right money and pushed his way to the exit.

‘You've forgot your studies,' the man called out as Abe passed through the door.

‘No worries,' Abe said.

‘Study well,' the man added – laughing at him.

Abe set off up the street to look for Karumi. The buildings he passed were uncared for, bypassed by developers; similar to the battered row of shops that Vasco's was part of and made of the same Victorian brick, the rusty colour of faded theatre curtains. The next block consisted of tall commercial properties with twice as many storeys. These frontages were boarded by black-painted panels at ground-floor level; the warehouse windows above were covered with mesh. Abe pushed open a door and entered a hallway with unplastered walls. To the left was an old-fashioned lift with a concertina gate. The stairs were enclosed in a metal cage towards the back of the building. Abe passed through the gap in the grille and started to climb. The steps resounded as if they were hollow and Abe pounded up, two at a time, glancing down into the well at each platform where the stairs turned. Every level had a door and a keypad for entry but there was no signage to indicate which businesses occupied the premises. As Abe reached the last bend, the door at the top started buzzing. He jumped the final steps and pushed it open.

The room he entered was high-ceilinged, peaceful like a courtyard, with the grey daylight filtered through paper blinds. A shallow stone bowl full of water stood in the centre with two long leather sofas to either side. A man was sitting on one of them, prodding at an electronic diary with the point of a pencil.