The Taxi Queue Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    â€˜How was your New Year?’ Marlene said.
    â€˜Don’t ask,’ Kirsty said.
    â€˜Tell me,’ Marlene insisted in her compelling voice.
    â€˜Luka was working. He did an all-night stint at a bar, earning double time,’ Kirsty said. ‘He invited me along.’
    â€˜But you didn’t go.’
    â€˜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?’
    â€˜
Something
happened,’ Marlene said. ‘I can hear you remembering.’
    â€˜Two people said they loved me.’ Kirsty glanced sideways at the woman with the cough.
    â€˜What were their names?’ Marlene asked.
    Kirsty paused. ‘Luka and Abe.’
    Marlene sighed.
    â€˜I made a cup of tea and took it to bed but I fell asleep before I’d drunk it,’ Kirsty said.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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