The Taxi Queue Read Online Free

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.
    â€˜Played,’ Abe said.
    â€˜Neil played with you?’ Gloria said, with mock incredulity.
    â€˜Not really,’ Abe answered.
    â€˜What did Kirsty do?’
    â€˜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 theykept 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