The Taxi Queue Read Online Free Page A

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