The Taxi Queue (3 page)

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.

It was true that Kirsty criticised Abe as a matter of routine. Some of the things he did left her breathless. Luka couldn't grasp that it's possible to feel more than one thing at a time, or even nothing at all plus one other feeling. It was natural to hate and love a brother. It felt quite normal. There was no need to agonise over it.

‘We'll carry on seeing each other,' Kirsty said, stretching out to touch Luka's pale face. He looked very serious.

‘
Will
we?' Luka jerked his head out of reach.

Kirsty hadn't asked him to move to Iverdale Road with her. The absence of the invitation hung there like a huge change of address card with only one name on it.

‘This will be hard for Eugen,' Luka said. Eugen was his great friend – also from Croatia. He had had a short affair with Abe and turned gloomy when it ended.

‘He'll get over it,' Kirsty said.

They stared at one another.

‘You won't be on your own. Zoë and Leanne are still here,' Kirsty said.

‘You didn't say you wanted to leave,' Luka said.

‘This just happened, Luka. My dad died. I didn't plan it.'

‘So you wouldn't have left in the foreseeable future?'

‘I don't know,' Kirsty said. She remembered the cement-patched steps to Neil's front door and the gabled dormer window in the roof that looked like a silly miniature house in its own right. She had never heard Luka, or anyone young, talk about the foreseeable future. As a concept, it was impossible. He had probably been taught the phrase in English lessons at school in Zagreb.

Luka's eyes challenged her but Kirsty didn't rise. A picture – or a feeling – of a deep pot containing two children came to her. No one else, looking in, would know what it felt like down there. She felt the day – endless and exhausting – had been wasted. She and Abe should have taken everything more slowly. They shouldn't have laughed so much. Now the day was over and the only way to reclaim it would be to talk about the man who had been her father and to ask questions that had no answers. She wanted to understand how Neil could have ignored his children and then left them everything he possessed. She had said things in the wrong order and she couldn't go back. It was impossible to go back. If you changed one thing, everything changed.

ABE'S FEET SHIFTED
with the rhythm of the tube train. Warm air pumped through the ventilators inside the carriage and he took off his hat and scarf and stuffed them in his pockets. Deep in the underground tunnels weather was absent. The puny inch or so of snow that lay above ground was irrelevant, existing only as an anxious thought in the faces around him. Other passengers were standing but not so tightly packed that Abe was held steady by them. He ignored the overhead rail nearby – he didn't enjoy strap-hanging. He was aware of the need for balance and subtle footwork. Balance was a matter of the body – or was it of the mind? He could follow his thoughts, but only at a slight distance. Too close, and he lost the movement of the train and jolted sideways, as if coming to from a dream. Then he had to regain equilibrium. This took a few seconds.

Abe had woken with the beeping of an alarm clock. He had heard ticking though not from the clock. The ticks were loud, not quite regular – accompanied by gurgling from the other side of the room. He was baffled at first, then realised that he was in an unfamiliar room and the sounds were in the pipework. Water in a heating system was beginning to flow. Abe was aware of a strange posh smell that hung about the bedhead – new upholstery mixed with the kind of room spray that came in glass bottles. He opened an eye and saw the weird ruched curtains that trapped shadows in
undulating lines. Richard was silhouetted against them, pulling on a bathrobe. Abe turned over into the place where Richard had been lying – warm as a jumper he had just taken off. He felt comfortable burrowed there but the next layer – beyond the hollow of the bed – he resisted. Abe stuck his nose back in the pillow. ‘Is it still snowing?' he asked when he emerged.