Anyway, the Turks had been civil enough. She didn't doubt that they were chaps, the heavy mob — but they weren't going to get heavy with her. The talker — a burly bloke with black stubble running all the way up to the racoon rings beneath his feral eyes — wore a navy-blue blazer with brass buttons. He spoke with sudden flicks of his hands, shaking the weighty rolex on his hairy wrist, showing off his manicure. 'Pliz?' he queried after every reply Phyllis made. 'Pliz?' They were standing out in the road, beside the plate-glass window of the Theatre Museum. In it there was a dummy Harlequin wearing a golden mask and a patterned bodystocking — diamonds of lilac, mauve and citrine. She explained to the Turks that Gary Finch was dead. 'You might've read it in the papers — he fell, fell from the wheel, the big wheel?' She made a big wheel shape with her outstretched arms. 'Pliz?' the main Turk said — and his sidekick jabbered at the Royal Opera House, the earpiece of his mobile phone like a nanobot about to crawl into his hairy ear.
Phyllis couldn't exactly dump anyone in it — she didn't know Gary's ex, his dad or his other mates, and she wasn't going to ask Dave. If I did know 'em I'd tell… it's their fucking problem — not mine, not Dave's. Her boss came out to see what the bother was, and even though he was an innocuous man, effeminate, with glossy chestnut hair, silk shirt and high-waisted trousers, the Turks still took this as their cue to leave. Phyllis noticed that they were driving an old London cab. It had dirty patches where its supersides and official plates had been removed. She turned towards the staff entrance of the restaurant — then looked back to see the two blokes standing by their strange old motor.
Winter was a long time in arriving that year. The earth refused to relinquish its heat, no winds came and the leaves, declining to exit the trees, remained there limp and furled. Waking from shameful dreams in which all his past liaisons — including his marriage — took on a fantastical, honeyed hue, Dave Rudman would stagger down the stairs to the kitchen, where pensionable flies drowsed on the rough-adzed windowsills. Death had never felt so close before — not even in the fibrillating heart of his madness. Death's dust coated every surface, and he felt a frantic irritation with pernickety manual tasks — flicking at the waxed cardboard spout of a milk carton — that he was certain would haunt him for ever. Dave trudged across the cloying fields and watched the local farmer harrowing, a mob of seagulls in the tractor's banded wake. He'd had the occasional pint in the local pub with the farmer — and he raised his arm in ordinary acknowledgement.
At last the chill arrived and sought them out with numbing fingers. Phyllis and Dave had stopped making the love that bared their souls — instead they rolled their padded selves into bathrobes before bed and cuddled up to hot-water bottles. For even if winter baulked, the cottage remained impossible to heat. Steve was back in hospital. Money was short.
Gary's dad had wanted to give him a cabbie's send-off. There was even — and Dave thought this a little strong — a wreath in the shape of a steering wheel on top of the shiny black coffin. On the day the weather had been mercilessly hot, Debbie had brought Jason and Amber in beach wear — heliotrope shorts, garish singlets, tatty trainers. Even given the shit Gary had put her through, Dave still thought this a bit much. He was surprised to see a decent crowd pitch up at the crematorium — even if he hardly recognized any of them besides Big End and Dave Quinn.
It dawned on him, as a concealed speaker hissed a fugue, that the men of child-bruising age, in newly pressed suits and self-shined shoes, weren't cabbies at all — or even builders — but Fighting Fathers. Fighting Fathers who fidgeted like children and then, when the officiating priest offered everyone a chance to say 'a few words', spewed forth many and inappropriate ones, about how Gary had been 'a martyr to the Cause'. Debbie and the kids seemed bemused, while Gary's dad and mum were lost in teary contemplation of the coffin, which stood on the roller road to nowhere, waiting to drop off its fare.
Turning to look along the row of mourners, Dave saw a familiar profile etched against another — a juxtaposition that made both faces more fleshy. It was a profile he'd been expecting to see — the arrogant flick of surfer hair, the ski-jump nose, the pink glisten of well-irrigated skin. 'Gary was a man who loved his kids more than anything else,' the voice at the lectern was saying; 'he put them before everything, and when he died he was climbing that wheel for little Jason and Amber.' Little Jason was as big as his dad now and I swear he's stoned. The Fighting Father cleared his throat and consulted the text he'd prepared on the back of an envelope. 'I'm sorry, Dave,' Phyllis hissed, 'but I can't take any more of this — I'm going.'
Dave left with her. Outside the chapel of rest the hearse was reversing on the gravel. It was a brand new TX2 that had been chopped in half and the bodywork extended. Hand in hand, Dave and Phyllis near skipped down the Avenue of dwarf cypresses — it was a little moment of levity before the burden of it all descended on them. Looking back, Dave saw that the Skip Tracer had come outside and was standing in the porch, blotting his face with a brilliant mauve handkerchief. Dave thought he might call after them; instead all he did was smile — a tight little grimace — and raise his hand for a valedictory chop. Dave Rudman never saw a London taxi cab again without thinking of that hearse, obscene and elongated. He never saw a cab again without picturing its passenger as a cadaver and its driver as a sullen undertaker.
When Christmas was past Dave took the two exercise books that had lain abandoned on top of a bookcase in the snug sitting room. He put them in a Jiffy bag he'd bought at the newsagents in Chipping Ongar. He wrote a letter to accompany them on their journey to the stranger who used to be his son. Bloody odd — I know, mate … might as well hear it from me. At the end of the day — you can throw these away — or keep them … It's up to you … Don't want to lay anything on you — I quite understand … it's difficult to explain … So he didn't, only signed off: I'm sorry — truly I am … because at long last he truly was.
The daffodils stalked from the copses in January — the apple blossom burst before the end of February. Winter, outgunned, retreated before the creeping, vegetative barrage. When the clouds rolled back, the sun had the switched-on intensity of a sunlamp, its ultraviolet rays frazzling the new shoots. Towards Harlow big cock chimneys belched out smoke, and in the lanes exhaust fumes lay in swathes, like the contrails of permanently grounded aircraft.
The cab-sale money was gone, and Dave looked for an earner. Driving a minicab was only logical. He applied to a couple of local outfits, and for the first time in months switched on his mobile phone. There was a text message waiting for him that announced itself with a sterile chirrup. It was from Carclass="underline" 'Thanks 4 the lettuce.'
Dave drove Macedonians to pull potatoes and Poles to wrench onions. The unwelcome guest workers dossed down fifteen to a labourer's cottage — or even in corrugated-iron barns on the farms. They clubbed together to hire Dave, so he could take them to the supermarket, where they bought gut-rot booze. He needed little knowledge for these A-to-B runs, no gazetteer imprinted on his cerebellum, no immemorial arrogance. So Dave drove stubbly old people to daycare centres and hairy housewives to be waxed. He picked kids up from school because some mum had rolled over her 4wd, then endured their torment behind his back. He drove City getters back from the tube terminus at Epping to their peculiar gated communities — crescents of modern semis, double-glazed, red-roofed, and marooned in fifty-acre fields of oilseed rape, so bright yellow that they jaundiced the sky above.