by Tony Parsons
Andrzej pulled a face. ‘Need a hug?’
‘Maybe later.’
He shook his head. ‘What a country,’ he said. ‘You need anything?’
‘Like what?’
‘To defend yourself,’ he said, lowering his voice although nobody could hear him. ‘Something to defend yourself with.’
‘Why would I need that?’ I said.
‘In case they come back,’ he said, genuinely surprised. ‘Those guys you messed up.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t want any trouble,’ I said.
Andrzej looked at me with pity.
‘Oh, you already got plenty of that,’ he said.
Nick Kazan was young, a good-looking boy at the far end of his twenties, and that’s all I noticed about him when I picked him up from the flat in Notting Hill. Most of our clients were older. Nobody used VIP Motors unless they were some kind of big shot with company money to burn. This kid – crumpled suit, no tie, a floppy head of Hugh Grant hair – looked like a struggling young professional. The Heathrow Express was more his price range.
We were turning on to the road to the airport when he spoke to me.
‘For a driver,’ he said, ‘you don’t say very much, do you?’
There was still a little bit of Liverpool in his accent that he had not managed to lose at university. I could feel he was watching me in the mirror, but I kept my eyes on the road, the traffic heavy yet moving along nicely, the first of the planes starting to appear as we headed west.
‘The mouthy driver,’ I said. ‘That’s a stereotype.’
He laughed, and looked out of the window. There is something hypnotic about the planes along that road. You look at them and you realize you can go anywhere.
‘Do you think you’re going to prison?’ he said.
Now I looked at him.
‘What terminal do you want?’ I said, making my voice hard.
‘Surprise me,’ he said, leaning forward to place a business card on the armrest next to me. There was his name and the logo of his paper on the card. I did not pick it up. He placed a tiny voice recorder next to his business card, and it was as small as a mobile phone. There was a little red light on it to show you it was working. He also had a notebook in his hands. It was a bit belt and braces, especially as I wasn’t planning to say another word. But he was good at his job. He knew how to make you open up.
‘So what are you, Tom?’ he said.
Tom. I loved that.
‘The police think you’re some kind of crazed vigilante,’ he said. ‘Those are serious charges. My editor thinks you’re a noble have-a-go hero. Which one are you?’
A 747 flew right over our heads. I ducked down to watch it go. A light rain began to fall, and I flicked on the wiper.
‘Why didn’t you just knock on my door?’ I said. A few reporters already had, and it was horrible. Shouting these questions at me, and at Tess, and taking our picture without asking. I wanted to get one of their cameras and smash it, to make them go and to leave us alone, but Tess stopped me. She said it would make things worse.
Nick Kazan was smiling. ‘If I had door-stepped you, would you have talked to me?’ he said.
I looked back at him in the rear-view mirror.
‘You think we’re talking now?’ I said.
I had pulled into the fast lane and put my foot down and we were nearly at the airport. The ride had been on account. One way. I was slinging him out at Heathrow whether he liked it or not.
‘Not the first time you’ve had some trouble, is it, Tom?’ he said. ‘You had a business, right? A building business. You were good with your hands. Always have been, I bet. No real education, but clever.’
‘Story of my life,’ I said, and cursed myself. Why was I talking to him? I was meant to be saying nothing.
‘And it collapsed,’ he said, and I wondered how he knew all this stuff. ‘Your business folded. You went bankrupt.’ He was writing in his little notebook and the red light was shining on the voice recorder. ‘You can find out about people so easy these days,’ he said.
I laughed bitterly. ‘You think you can just go online and get the story of someone’s life?’ I said.
‘Tell me what I’m missing,’ he said.
‘It’s all the paperwork,’ I said. ‘They kill you with the paperwork. The small businessman. They bury you. All these pen pushers who never employed anyone, who never ran a company, who never built anything in their soft little lives.’
He nodded, watching the planes.
‘Couldn’t pay your bills,’ he said. ‘Started driving cabs. Sorry – limos. Shipping shagged-out old businessmen to Heathrow and back. A bit of a comedown after having your own business.’
‘Better than benefits,’ I said, feeling the blood getting hot. ‘Better than asking the state to take care of me.’
He was writing it all down as if this was all some story that we were telling together.
‘Then one night you come home after a hard day’s collar and there are two burglars in your house,’ he said. ‘Out of their minds on God knows what. Your family are asleep upstairs. You don’t know if they’ve got weapons. But you overpower the bastards. Take them down the station, where you’re the one who gets treated like the criminal. Your wife’s name is Tess, right?’
‘I don’t want her in any story,’ I said, and a lorry with Polish plates sounded its horn as I drifted into its lane. ‘You leave her out of it.’
‘This must be horrible for her,’ he said. ‘For Tess. It must be a nightmare. Trying to bring up your children – Rory and … Keeva? Is that Irish? – and you’ve got these scumbags breaking into your home. Your husband does what any man would do. And then he gets sent to jail.’
‘I’m going to get out,’ I said, seeing the signs for the airport, and realizing it only when I said it. ‘This country is no good any more.’
‘Get out?’ he said.
‘This was a great country,’ I said. ‘Look at it now. The crime, the grime. The lack of respect. The lack of fear. The wicked walk free and the innocent suffer. Defend your home, protect your family – the most natural things in the world – and they treat you like a villain.’
Nick Kazan was smiling at me. But I could see that he wasn’t laughing at me.
We were silent. The rain came down harder. The Merc’s solitary big windscreen wiper slapped back and forth.
‘I love the rain,’ I said, talking to myself more than him. ‘It washes the streets clean. All the gangs, all the little hard nuts, all the scum – the rain washes it all away for a bit.’
Now Nick Kazan was staring at me with an open mouth. He began to write furiously in his notebook. He looked up and shook his head.
‘You’re Travis Bickle, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘You’re the Travis Bickle of Barnsbury!’
I must have looked blank.
‘Travis Bickle. You never saw that film? You never saw Taxi Driver?’
He kept writing. I kept driving. There wasn’t far to go now. I could see he was getting excited but I could not understand why.
‘I’m getting out,’ I said. ‘One day soon, I’m getting out.’
‘But a lot of people feel like that, Tom,’ he said, and the rain-slick road to the airport hummed beneath us.
12
The screen of our television set was covered in white scratches where they had dragged it out to the garden, and it made Nick Kazan seem as though he was talking in a snowstorm.
‘Tom Finn is the product of a state that can no longer protect its citizens,’ he was saying. ‘What else could he have done? He was damned if he did – and dead if he didn’t.’
Tess took my hand, her eyes not leaving the screen, her face with the look that it had had for days, as though something in her was wound up tight, and would not leave her alone.
‘He’s getting better,’ I said, and she shook her head, not really listening, and concentrating on the TV as though it was these journalists and presenters who were going to decide my
fate. But it was true. He was nowhere near as nervy as he had been on the sofa of breakfast television this morning, just after his piece had appeared.
‘My guess is that he is what the future looks like,’ he said, and the man sitting on the other side of the presenter sneered at him.
‘Then we don’t have much of a future,’ he said. He was thin with glasses and he talked a lot about human rights. He had been brought in to disagree with everything Nick said. ‘You are making this man into some fifteen-minute hero – and he is clearly just a thug.’
‘You bastard,’ muttered Tess, who never swore. ‘You bloody bastard!’
The security light out front came on and a shadow seemed to fall across the window. I heard the soft clink of bottles in the recycling bin at the side of the house and both of us jumped up immediately.
‘It’s them,’ Tess said, and she wrung her hands, and the gesture tore at my heart.
‘It’s not them,’ I said.
When I looked through the slats in the blinds I expected to see the yellow eyes of our fox staring back at me. But there was only the glow of cigarettes in the darkness. The reporters were still out there.
‘You’re right,’ Tess said. ‘He’s getting better at it. Talking more slowly.’ She inhaled theatrically. The homework book she had been marking before Nick Kazan came on was still in her hands. ‘He’s taking a breath every now and then. It’s calmed him down.’
She liked him. She thought he was on my side. I wasn’t quite so sure.
I moved the stack of homework books Tess was marking and sat next to her. The presenter was talking now, sighing and rolling his eyes and acting as though everything was horribly obvious. I tried to connect the words to me but I couldn’t. So I flicked open the top book. It was history.
The inhabitants of ancient Egypt are called Mummies. They lived in the harsh climate of Sarah Dessert.
I closed the book. There was a carefully drawn picture of a penis and two giant testicles on the front. I wanted to throw it away. I wanted to flush it down the toilet or stuff it in the rubbish bin, or leave it out with the recycled trash. But I knew that Tess wouldn’t let me.
Nick Kazan was trying to speak, but the presenter was raising his voice, shutting him up. ‘Surely the young men he assaulted have rights, too,’ he said with a chilly smile. It wasn’t a question. ‘If I recall the film correctly, Travis Bickle was a psychopath.’
They flashed up two mugshots. A pair of mean boys with short hair. The bright cop lighting made their faces look very different from the two I had fought in the dark. I didn’t recognize them.
But Tess did. She stared at me and back to the damaged screen.
‘I taught them,’ she said. ‘Those two boys. Men, are they now? I suppose they’re men now.’
I looked at her. The homework books were in two neat piles on the floor. Marked and unmarked. ‘Not them,’ I said. ‘You mean lots of boys like them.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I taught them. Those two. I tried to. But you can’t teach them. Not really. Because of what their homes are like and because it’s hard and because it all takes years. And because, most of all, because they despise it.’
‘A quick look at tomorrow’s papers,’ the presenter purred. ‘The Guardian’s headline reads “Home Secretary Condemns Vigilante Cab Driver”. The Daily Mail leads with “Now Bickle’s Burglars Go Whining to Brussels” … The Sun has “Gotcha! Stick That in Your Swag Bag, says Travis Bickle of Barnsbury”.’
Tess turned off the TV. Then she moved sideways and leaned against me, sliding into me. The kind of perfect fit that you only get after years together.
She was silent for a bit, thinking about it all.
‘I just wish they had gone to someone else’s house,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s what I wish.’
I wrapped my arms around her, watching the firefly lights that rose and fell out on the street, and that was what I wished too. I wished the world would just leave us alone.
Tess shivered in my arms.
‘You’re shaking,’ I said.
‘Cold night,’ she said, and I held her tighter.
But it was summer now, and the night was warm, and it wasn’t cold at all.
We stepped out of the house and they were on us, shoving their questions and their cameras in our faces as we edged through the scrum, this mob of reporters and photographers who had washed up on our doorstep as soon as Nick Kazan’s story had appeared. Tess was carrying a tray of fairy cakes, covered in tin foil, and she raised it high, struggling to protect it from the crowd. More than anything, it was embarrassing, because they all acted as if they knew me. They called me by my name as if I was an old mate met by chance, and as if they were truly worried about my family and me.
‘Tom! Over here, Tom!’
‘Tom! Are you a vigilante? Are you the Travis Bickle of Barnsbury? Tom?’
‘Tess, Tess,’ one of them went. ‘Are you proud of him, Tess? Who are the cakes for?’
‘The children,’ Keeva said. ‘It’s the last day of term.’
‘What if he goes to jail, Tess? Will you stand by him? What will it mean to the family if Tom gets put away?’
Over the tray of cakes, Tess shot me a look that was beyond worried. It was just a second, but it was enough. There was a world in that look. It said – What if the worst happens? And – What if they broke up our family? And – What is going to happen to us?
Then Keeva spun away, and was between their legs and into the garden next door where a smaller boy and girl were waiting with pens and notebooks, as if in imitation of the reporters. I had no idea what was happening. Then I saw Keeva sign a couple of autographs, and turn to flash a smile at the exploding cameras. The reporters scrambled towards her.
‘Keeva, what do you think about your dad, Keeva?’
‘Keeva, get over here,’ I said, but it was Tess who claimed her, going next door and seizing her wrist and dragging her to the Mini where Rory already sat in the back, blinking nervously behind his glasses.
‘I’ll see you later,’ I told Tess, and she nodded briskly and drove off without looking back, Rory with his head bowed and Keeva turning to wave to the cameras.
I pulled on my chauffeur’s cap and the mob closed in around me. But I felt better now, with Tess and the children gone, because the reporters and the photographers could not touch me now, at least not in the same way, at least not in any way that really mattered.
Farren looked rich, even in faded jeans and a plain white shirt, and he looked fit, even in his forties, even after a twelve-hour flight from the other side of the world. But most of all he looked tanned. He had a face that had seen a lot of sunshine. The sunshine seemed to have seeped into his bones, and it made him look like he was having a good life.
‘I’m Farren,’ he said, in a London accent. ‘We’re going to have to get a move on.’
The flight had been late getting in from Bangkok. Most of our clients, if they came in this late, they would be ready for the hotel and something from room service and get down to business in the morning. But not him. Farren had a meeting that night, at a hotel not far from the airport, and his late arrival had made it tight.
I took his bags and he followed me to the car in silence. Some of the drivers try to be their friends. Asking about the flight, moaning about the weather, all of that stuff. I never bothered. I figured that if you have just flown halfway around the planet then you don’t feel like small talk.
I held the door for him and got him settled in the back seat before loading his luggage and confirming the destination. His appointment was at one of those hotels near the airport where you stay if your flight is very early or very late. A lot of the trade at those airport hotels was conferences, seminars, somebody making speeches. Rooms full of people learning something or selling something. And that was what Farren would be doing tonight. He was selling the dream.
‘This temperature all right for you, sir?’ I said, and he nodded, not looking at me. He hadn’t s
een the news. That was fine by me, because when someone recognized my face they wanted to know all about it. But Farren wasn’t interested. The big black car started out of Heathrow, and it was as if we were both alone.
They were waiting for him at the hotel. The room was full. A big air hangar of a conference room in darkness with a podium on the stage, lit by a single spotlight above, and looking like a pulpit with a small bottle of mineral water. All these people waiting for him. Older people, couples mostly, but some solitary men and women too, all of them with some money put aside, waiting to invest, but not so much money that they would never have to worry about it. They did not look rich the way that Farren looked rich. I watched from the back of the room as he walked on stage into the light.
Behind him the wall burst into colour.
It was an empty beach with the sunset on fire. Blue skies and green mountains rising above a swimming pool that seemed to hang in the sky. The image changed, slowly fading into another view, this one of fields full of pineapple trees and coconut trees and palm trees, and after a while that faded too. It was a tropical island, an island in the kind of sunshine that Farren knew, and all of it seen from houses that seemed to be built from air and light and glass. Farren sold property.
But he sold far more than that. There were words on the screen behind him and although the images were constantly melting and changing, the words were always there.
ESCAPE TO PARADISE, it said.
‘This country has let you down,’ he said, and his voice was quiet, and tired, and totally convincing. ‘This country has disappointed you. That’s why you’re here. You have done everything this country asked you to do. You have paid your taxes. You have educated your children. You have been good neighbours. And this country has broken its contract with you.’
I watched the wall behind him. The view from those homes full of clean air and bright space and sunlight without end.
There were no people in the pictures. And there were no prices. But to me it looked like heaven. That good, and that far away, and that impossible.