The Taxi Queue (4 page)

‘No, it seems to have stopped for the moment,' Richard said.

Abe was relieved. He wouldn't have wanted to be marooned at Richard's. He would have dug his way out.

They had taken showers in separate bathrooms. Richard had disappeared to the en suite and Abe had used the guest bathroom, decked out with an array of thick towels and baskets of miniature soaps and bath products. Abe picked them up and sniffed them. He made a face as he pulled the previous day's shirt over his head, missing the whiff of fabric conditioner, which, if he was on top of the washing, eased him into a new day.

Richard had made him breakfast – tea, cereal and toast. He turned on the kitchen television and they listened to the chirruping presenters. They heard the weather forecast and the travel news. The routine had gone smoothly, as if Abe were a regular house guest. As Abe was swallowing his last gulp of tea, Richard slipped his hand in his inside jacket pocket and muttered something about ‘meeting up again'. A business card was pushed across the kitchen table. The action was commonplace enough but the words reminded Abe of his economics teacher who had said something similar on the last day of school. Abe had been polite and given Mr Owen a phone number. Realising that some similar response was called for, Abe patted his own pocket. Then, seeing the card with the feather on still lying where he had left it, he reached for it, took out a pen and scribbled a number down on the back – also out of politeness.

They had been ready to leave – Abe was putting on the
shoes that he had left by the front door – when the unhurried pace changed. Richard turned abruptly and shot back up the stairs that were tucked round the corner of the hall. Abe heard him above, walking across the bedrooms – checking up, Abe supposed. But he hadn't left anything – he had nothing to leave. The footsteps went to and fro. A cupboard door clicked. Abe thought of another kind of checking up. His bent head went hot, starting at the nape of his neck and moving over his skull to his forehead. Richard came back down again. From the corner of his eye, Abe saw that he had an odd, panicky look – but it wasn't suspicion. Abe could read suspicion on a face.

Richard stood fingering the buttons of his overcoat, as if wondering whether to undo them. ‘You go on ahead,' he said to Abe, who was still crouching on the floor, tying his laces, tugging at them. Richard started to explain the way to the tube station.

‘Cool,' Abe said about the explanation that had somehow taken the place of saying goodbye. Abe straightened up and left, shutting the door behind him. His last view was of Richard locked in position in the middle of the hall. It was as if the sight of a man doing up his shoes had unhinged him.

The trains out of Paddington Station were running sporadically. ‘
CANCELLED
' appeared several times on the departures board and there was one deranged heading composed of a string of consonants. Among the positive entries was the Oxford service, which called at Reading. Abe bought a newspaper and a takeaway cup of coffee. There were no crowds; in fact, remarkably few people. Abe felt a change in mood – a lightening – as if he might be going on holiday. This buoyancy continued throughout the journey. The unusual brightness, reflected by the snow, shone through the dirty train windows. Once they left the built-up districts and were out in the open, Abe shifted across to a seat that
was in shadow. He looked at the changed white fields. The countryside in the Thames Valley had expanded under the snow. He sipped at the coffee and enjoyed the scenery.

When Abe arrived at work he remained upbeat. Ben and Holly, who shared his office on the third floor of the slab-like building, had taken advantage of the transport chaos and called in, stranded. Liam, the boss, sent an e-mail round cancelling the weekly departmental meeting and kept his door, on the floor above, shut. This gave Abe a chance to progress
BRAND BUILDING IN THE BUSINESS TO BUSINESS MARKET SECTOR
but he failed to get started. The words sounded aggressive, reverberating round his head. Abe wandered about the empty spaces between the desks. He stared out at the similar premises across the courtyard; the figures inside, jackets discarded, sitting at their computers. If he moved his head to one side he could see some white in a gap between buildings. Usually it was green. That was Berkshire. Or maybe it was the university campus. He had never got to know Reading, only the walks to the station and to the pub round the corner.

Abe made a few calls not connected with work. He left a message for his friend Shane, suggesting they meet. Shane was hoping to start a business leasing Japanese exercise equipment to gyms and health clubs. He had asked Abe to go in with him. The equipment, Shane claimed, was superb. It made even the top-of-the-range stuff seem clunky. The machinery was powder-coated in soft colours and had some nice features, like the built-in screen that tracked the simulated run up Ben Nevis or the row along the Boat Race course between Putney and Hammersmith Bridges. Shane was planning to target spas and fitness centres. Abe hadn't said yes or no. He needed to check it out – but the idea of working for himself appealed to him. Maybe he'd go to Tokyo.

At lunchtime, Abe went down to the Beehive and ate a vegetarian chilli. It was on the Specials board. He returned to the office, feeling bloated from the chewy undercooked
beans. The daylight was going. A dark patch of sky beyond the next building was spreading like dye across wet cloth. The fluorescent tubes that had glimmered redundantly throughout the morning now turned the office pink. Abe got down to work.

AT SIX O'CLOCK
that evening Kirsty Rivers came out of a small shop tucked away
behind Oxford Street on the north side. She set the burglar alarm, turned off the lights and pulled down the security shutter. There were no late nights at the shop – apart from the stocktake once a month – and no earlies either, whatever the weather. The business acted as an address, or an office, for people who didn't have one. Kirsty spent the day sending, receiving and forwarding mail. She wrapped up fragile and oddly shaped parcels. Gloria, her mother, couldn't understand why Kirsty was doing anything so lowly when she had a 2:1 in media and music. She said that if Kirsty was interested in post she should go and run the Post Office. It needed someone with a brain. Kirsty said that people of her age didn't run anything.

She was hungry so she crossed the road to the Lebanese grocer's opposite. A clear plastic sheet was draped over the display at the front and snow was collecting in the dips between the piles of fruit. Kirsty went inside and walked up one aisle and down the other, picking up a packet of halva, another of almonds and a bag of pleated cotton wool. The man behind the counter raised an eyebrow but Kirsty ignored it. She had decided, over time, that the eyebrow was not connected with the contents of the basket. The mind was elsewhere.

Leaving the smell of cold oranges, she walked along the backstreets towards Marble Arch. There was an enigmatic life behind Oxford Street that had nothing to do with department stores or tourist touts. Tall terraced houses were divided into offices. Drab lighting and the occasional chandelier shone behind full-length net curtains. There were black cars parked on yellow lines and occupied by sleek, sleeping drivers, newsagents selling foreign newspapers, tiny barbers' shops with only two chairs. Even in the snow, smartly dressed old women walked their dogs and waiters wrapped in tight white aprons sat on the back steps of hotels, sheltered by canopies. Kirsty liked the calm and the strangeness – the chink of unexplained money. She felt that however long she spent there she would lack information. She made her way to the Marble Arch end of Edgware Road and caught a bus. The lower deck was already crammed with people but the stream of incoming passengers continued boarding, squeezing into gaps fit only for flexible pipes. Kirsty forced her way up the stairs and stood on the upper deck, dipping into the nuts with her gloves on, munching them, lurching whenever the bus started and stopped. The windows were closed, steamy and running with water inside and out. Kirsty could feel the heat from the cough of the woman standing next to her. She tried to breathe shallowly. Her phone rang; it was Marlene.

‘How was your New Year?' Marlene said.

‘Don't ask,' Kirsty said.

‘Tell me,' Marlene insisted in her compelling voice.

‘Luka was working. He did an all-night stint at a bar, earning double time,' Kirsty said. ‘He invited me along.'

‘But you didn't go.'

‘No.' Kirsty's conversations with Marlene generally reached a quick anticlimax. On the last stroke of midnight, Luka had rung to say the happy stuff. Kirsty had heard mayhem in the background – cheering and stamping and whooping singing. Abe had rung too at a quarter past twelve and shouted, ‘Kirstabel, I love you. Why haven't you called to wish me Happy New Year?'

‘
Something
happened,' Marlene said. ‘I can hear you remembering.'

‘Two people said they loved me.' Kirsty glanced sideways at the woman with the cough.

‘What were their names?' Marlene asked.

Kirsty paused. ‘Luka and Abe.'

Marlene sighed.

‘I made a cup of tea and took it to bed but I fell asleep before I'd drunk it,' Kirsty said.

‘It can only get better, Kirst. I hate that new beginning propaganda. It's not real. Since when was January a new beginning? I read your stars for the year and it said, “You already have wings. Soon you will fly.”' Then Marlene said that she had a call waiting and rang off.

Kirsty put the phone in her pocket and took out the almonds again.

‘You'll never get fat,' the woman with the cough said. ‘However many nuts you eat.'

After almost an hour, the bus reached Kensal Rise. Kirsty began to ease her way down, edging past the people who were standing on the stairs. By the time she was at the bottom, the bus was at the Iverdale Road stop. Kirsty stepped off and skidded across the pavement in her shoes with wafer-thin soles. She never planned ahead with shoes, perhaps because the house was only twenty metres from the stop – a mixed-brick terraced house with a scruffy hedge at the front. Some terraces have a look of uprightness but this one needed shared walls to prop itself up. The roof sprouted buddleia – charred-looking spikes that resisted the snow. Kirsty's footsteps were the first since the snowfall, though the slush thrown up by the traffic spattered the front path. No one had walked up to deliver pizza flyers and Abe wasn't yet back. He hadn't come home the previous night. Sometimes he stopped out for days at a time. Kirsty placed her feet gingerly on the ice-covered steps and opened the door. The house, punctured by gaps in the woodwork, felt as cold as a
shed. Apart from the rumble of buses outside, the place was quiet. No sound of Abe's builders from the upper floors, though they often worked in the evenings.

Kirsty went down to the basement, still with her coat on, holding the roll of cotton wool. She pulled pieces off and stuffed them into the joins of the warped window frames where shafts of air were coming in. She felt as if she were tending wounds, patching up lesions, but then, when she finished, the windows looked like a home for cocooned butterflies. The draught was tamed. On a whim, Kirsty switched off the lights. She skirted round her bed in the dark and went back to the window to look at the garden refashioned by snow. She tried to guess what lay beneath; the bumps and stumps that had once been a bucket, a deckchair frame, a wheel from a motorbike. It felt odd to be staring from the unlit house – a quirky thing that she would never have done in ordinary weather. The buildings in the next street seemed suddenly much closer and more companionable, as if they were part of a village – not a picturesque village, but a place where, once upon a time, you might have spoken to your neighbours. She stayed for about ten minutes, just staring out.

When Abe returned at eight o'clock, Kirsty was preparing her supper – chopping up garlic and onions to cook with some rice and chickpeas.

‘Nothing fucking works in this country,' he said, as he walked into her kitchen. Abe generally came in to see her, if he had nothing better to do. He sounded cheerful. He waved the evening paper and slapped it down next to her on the speckled Formica worktop, like a husband in a fifties film. Kirsty glanced at the fuzzy picture of lines of cars, stranded in white drifts on a motorway. She moved the newspaper to one side because it was half over the chopping board, on top of the bits of garlic.

‘Let's have a party at the weekend,' Abe said, putting an
arm round her and picking a chickpea out of the open tin with his free hand. ‘A house-warming.'

‘You've had one already,' Kirsty said, extricating herself from the cold sleeve.

‘Oh,
that
wasn't a proper party,' Abe said. ‘That was just having a few friends round. We'll have a proper one and you come to it this time. We'll use the whole house.'

Abe had celebrated every major purchase he had made: the American-style fridge, the high-speed shower, the wide-screen television. On these occasions he drank a lot of Prosecco and took various drugs.

‘I won't know anyone,' Kirsty said.

‘Of course you will. Ask people.'

‘Will Declan be coming?'

‘No idea,' Abe said.

Declan was a musician who played recorder and flute. Kirsty had known him at university. He alternated between animation and Zen-like calm, and had furrows running from his nose to his chin that made him look older than he was. He and Abe had got it on – at least Kirsty assumed so because at one time she kept bumping into him around the house. She hadn't seen him since before Christmas but he had left his bicycle, a black waterproof and a stack of CDs in the hall. It was funny thinking of the people – men – who started out as her friends and then fancied her brother. They tended to drift away after an involvement with Abe. She had lost a few friends that way. Kirsty ran a knife down the papery casing of an onion and began peeling it, section by section. From the corner of her eye, she saw Abe pull off his hat and stuff it into his coat pocket. Then he took off the coat and draped it over a chair.