‘Where to first, mate?’ Ray climbed out of the car and hurried up the overgrown path to escape the rain, which didn’t bother John at all. ‘How many places does she want to go?’
John stopped and in a show of exuberance spread his arms wide as if to indicate vastness. ‘She knows where to take us. Where to start and where to finish. Who will come and who will go. She knows.’
Ray made a second, desultory inspection of the elderly man’s grey slacks, which looked as if they had once belonged to a suit. They were held above his navel by a white plastic belt. A diamond-patterned pullover was tucked into the waistband. A real oddball with an elderly relative. The fare would probably be paid out of a mobility allowance. But he would have preferred clarification on the destinations of the journey and some assurance that the man in slippers had enough money to pay for it. Ray waited for him to catch up on the front path.
‘Yes, yes, she’s in there, waiting,’ the man said, misreading Ray’s yearning for reassurance, while jabbing a stubby forefinger, yellowed with nicotine, at a black doorway. His pullover stank of sweat. The front of his trousers was greasy.
Even now, Ray still came across pockets of the world that hadn’t changed, like this one. These places often reminded him of old films. And for good or ill, he knew that houses were also similar to people. Just as you never really knew what was going on behind a face, you also had no idea what a home really looked like behind the façade.
‘Takes me time to get her up. Taken me an age this year,’ John said. ‘But she is raring to go now, I can tell you. And a lot of people are waiting for us.’
Ray didn’t ask what these people were waiting for because he wasn’t interested. He’d already decided to keep conversation to a minimum. Just get the job done. He wondered if his disgust at the living conditions inside the house was obvious. But then realised that he didn’t care if it was.
The house was cold and smelled of full bins and gas. And something else, like the odour that gathers around thunderstorms. That was as strong as the underlying fragrance of gas and domestic waste.
One low-wattage ceiling light revealed the first room that Ray entered. All of the curtains were drawn. What yellowy illumination existed was sufficient to indicate that John hadn’t taken the rubbish out of his dismal home in a long time.
Following the shabby figure, Ray noted a narrow track had been made in the living room, a path between bulging rubbish sacks and cardboard boxes packed with what looked like old clothes. Perhaps the man was in the rag trade.
Ray peered inside a box. A little girl’s dress and a pair of brown sandals were placed inside pink plastic bags. The evidence of juvenilia in the house inspired Ray to look about himself more carefully. He peered into a second box and was relieved to see a suede coat made for an adult. It lay beside a plastic bag containing a pair of broken glasses and some scuffed men’s shoes.
The second room may have been a dining room once. Any indication of its former function had been obliterated, though, by what looked like a collection of every free paper printed in Birmingham within the old man’s lifetime.
‘I’ll get her out the kitchen,’ John said.
The entrance from the dining room to the kitchen was missing a door. Through the rectangular doorway Ray glimpsed a dark silhouette. It was as small as a child, and soundlessly turned away from a kitchen counter near the doorframe. The motion slipped the figure deeper into the unlit kitchen. John vanished into the darkness as if in pursuit of the occupant. He never switched the light on.
While John messed around out of sight, Ray peered about the dining room. In the background, he heard the old man say, ‘Your carriage awaits, your Highness.’
Ray thought about taking a picture of the room on his mobile phone to show the other drivers at the coffee stand. His anxiety about not being paid swamped the idea. ‘All right in there?’ he asked the darkness. ‘Minimum fare is a fiver, mate.’
‘Yes. Yes. Why wouldn’t it be? A lot of preparation has gone into this evening so we don’t want any snags. And you’ll do a lot better than a fiver too, driver. You will be justly compensated.’ This was said from inside the unlit kitchen with a tinge of sarcasm that made Ray uneasy.
‘Ain’t me that’s not ready,’ he fired into the darkness.
There was no reply.
A row of pictures on the dining-room wall were half-concealed by a bale of newspapers, but they caught Ray’s eye. There were three framed photographs. The first was a studio shot of a plump, middle-aged woman. She sat alone and wore spectacles with white frames, and a dress with a white collar. Dated. Another featured a younger version of the owner of the house. John had been better dressed in those days, well groomed too, and he was sat beside the woman at a table in a restaurant. Dead wife, Ray thought without a trace of emotion.
It was hard to see what the middle picture depicted; a painting that gave nothing away beside an impression of black smoke billowing from a section of the scene that was concealed. The smoke moved across a grey sky.
John returned from the kitchen. He wore an anorak with the hood pulled tight around his face. This made him look imbecilic. Held in his arms, the lid tucked beneath his chin, was a cane-work laundry basket, painted yellow. ‘If you get the other side, driver, I think we can manage.’ The lid was secured to the bottom with gardener’s twine.
‘What is . . .?’ Ray started to ask, but didn’t know how to finish.
‘It’s all I’ve got that’s big enough. And it will suffice. Now, you must drive very carefully, you understand? I hope that was explained to you by your operator.’
‘We going to the laundrette?’
What he’d suggested was offensive enough for the elderly man’s face to darken with rage, before he said, ‘Just get the other side!’
Ray felt like he was carrying most of the weight of the heavy basket as they picked a path through the rubbish on the floor of the house. John muttered instructions: ‘Be careful. Careful! That’s it. Careful.’ Whatever was inside the basket was living. Maybe some kind of animal. Ray heard it skittering around inside, perhaps seeking a way out, or a stable surface, in the way that animals do in transit. Probably a dog. Was that what he had seen in the kitchen? A dog? No, because he was sure that what he’d seen had been standing on two legs.
‘This a rare breed or something, mate?’
‘You have no idea of her value.’
‘Ain’t you got no cage?’
John ignored that question.
Outside, after much fussing, the old man clipped himself and the wicker basket into seat belts in the rear of Ray’s car. The vehicle filled with the odour of the old man’s sweat.
Ray climbed into the driving seat and cracked a window.
‘Please close that, in case she . . . it’s cold out, you know,’ John said.
Ray sighed and started the car. ‘Where to, mate?’
‘I have the first address.’
‘Let’s have it.’
The first three digits of the post code, B20, indicated Handsworth Wood, a mostly affluent Sikh area. And the satnav quickly found Somerset Road, a place Ray was familiar with; a long, quiet road flanked by large Victorian houses.
‘A vet’s, is it? Or you breeding her or what?’ Ray asked, while eyeing the cheap yellow basket in the rear-view mirror. ‘Sure you ain’t got one of them carry cases? Can’t be very comfortable for the animal. Dog, is it?’
The old man sat close to the basket and rested one arm across the front as if to protect the cargo if the car should stop suddenly. He said nothing to Ray, and seemed content to grin at the rear-view mirror in a way that made Ray uncomfortable.
‘What is it?’ Ray repeated.
The man’s mouth loosened into a sneer. ‘Maybe you better continue with the role you have been assigned, driver.’ The way he said driver was oddly formal, old-fashioned, with a trace of condescension.
‘Some manners never go amiss, mate.’
‘We don’t want to be late.’<
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Ray wound his window down further and pulled away from the curb.
Ray helped John and his laundry basket to the front door of their destination. He returned to his car and waited a good ten minutes for a new passenger to emerge, as per his instructions; John had told him that a second passenger required picking up at the address. An odd request, but it was another fare. The meter was ticking.
From inside the car, with the windows cracked to dispel the miasma of John’s sweat, Ray smelled smoke.
Peering through the passenger-side window, he spotted a plume of black smoke. The smoke billowed over the roof of the house he was parked outside, before drifting into the sky. The fire must have been burning in the back garden of the house that John and his basket were inside. Over the sound of his radio, Ray was also sure that he heard a sharp human cry issue from the rear of the property. But the shriek was immediately muffled by the laughter of a large group of people. They must have been in the garden.
‘Not the weather for a barbecue,’ he said, in an attempt at humour, and as a tactic for drawing out some information from the new passenger, after she’d shuffled to his car and settled herself in the rear seat. ‘Lot of smoke back there. What’s it, bonfire? Festival, like?’
The ancient Indian woman in the rear never answered him. Once she and her Samsonite suitcase had been installed in the rear of the vehicle, she had merely passed a piece of paper between the seats. Printed in capitals was an address Ray recognised in Handsworth, near the park. He wouldn’t need the satnav.
As Ray pulled away, he glanced through the passenger-side window. There was a space between the house and the equally vast neighbouring property. The sound of laughter, and now applause, at the rear of the house continued. Ray assumed that the scream had been part of some Asian festival or tradition. The people who had initially crowded about the front door to welcome John and his laundry basket were all well-heeled Sikhs, as Ray had expected them to be. Though their smiles and greetings were warmer, and more excitable, than he’d expected to see on any face after the arrival of a little scruffy man with a pet inside a laundry basket.
During the journey to Handsworth Park the elderly Asian woman never looked up from staring at her withered hands. She held them together on top of her lap. Bonfire smoke had caught in the folds of her sari. Ray suspected that she didn’t like him.
Ray parked outside a large semi-detached Victorian house, across the road from Handsworth Park – the address requested by the old Indian woman. A middle-aged white couple appeared in the doorway before Ray applied the handbrake. They came into the street to help the elderly woman out of Ray’s taxi.
The couple looked alternative yet fashionable. Ray recognised the type; they’d migrated into Asian and West Indian neighbourhoods because the big houses and long gardens were half the price of the houses in Moseley and Kings Heath. Two older children, both boys with long hair, skipped around the Indian woman’s case as if Father Christmas had arrived.
The mother held a toddler in her arms. She came out to Ray’s car. Without looking him in the eye, she said, ‘We need you to take another passenger. She’ll be out shortly.’ She handed a twenty pound note through the window.
When Ray slipped a hand inside his jacket pocket to find change, she said, ‘No, no, keep it.’
‘You sure?’ Ray said. ‘That was only a fiver’s fare.’
‘We need you to hang on for a few minutes. You know, keep the meter running.’
Ray shrugged. ‘No problem. You need a hand with that case?’
But the woman had already turned away and Ray could see her husband lifting the Samsonite case over the threshold of the house, with the help of his eldest son. The husband never looked at Ray either. The elderly woman was already inside; she had been in a hurry to get off the street.
More perplexed about his work than he could remember being in some time, Ray waited another ten minutes for the next passenger to emerge from the Handsworth Wood house. And while he waited, he heard another desperate wail, which he guessed was human; a cry cut short by the burst of a firework, howling and shattering, before sprinkling sparks above his car.
Ray alighted and looked at the sky. Glittering vestiges of the firework dispersed into the cold black air. He could smell smoke. Wood smoke and meat cooking.
The door of the house opened and shut quickly behind another elderly woman. She pulled a tartan-patterned shopping trolley on little wheels. Her association with the family was almost as incongruous as that of the elderly Asian woman whom he’d dropped at the address. Maybe the new passenger was a cleaner and the family wanted Ray to drop her home now that the party had started and her work was done.
There was much laughter and applause and excitable shrieking coming from the children at the rear of the house. Someone shouted, ‘I don’t believe it!’
The woman who’d come out of the house stood on the doorstep and pointed at the shopping trolley. ‘Give us a hand, please, driver.’
Ray collected the trolley. The top of the bag on wheels was tightly secured with the elasticised cords usually employed to attach objects to roof racks. The trolley was heavy. When he carried the baggage from the porch to the pavement, the contents flopped against one side of the case. Whatever was inside then seemed to kick itself upright.
‘Party they’s having, is it?’ he asked his new passenger.
‘Once a year you’s gets your chance. This year mine come round,’ she said, but didn’t elaborate. A cloud of black smoke rose from the rear of the house, then billowed over the red roof and dispersed into the darkness smothering the park.
‘Another pet in here?’ Ray asked, nodding at the trolley as he wheeled it across the pavement to his car. ‘Sure it’s legal to have an animal inside? Can it breathe?’
The woman said, ‘It’s all I got and she don’t mind.’
He dropped the woman and her shopping trolley off at an address in Sandwell Valley. The large private house had high walls and was close to a large farm open to the public. Like the elderly Asian woman, his passenger did not speak during the journey until its conclusion. ‘Here, here it is. This one, it must be,’ she said, as Ray pulled up outside. ‘I can’t wait to see her,’ she added.
‘Who?’
Judging by her gleeful expression the woman was too excited to answer. She clambered out of the vehicle, groaning. She’d been utterly indifferent to the person who drove the vehicle, the person responsible for her safety and a vital component of her enigmatic schedule. Nothing new there.
Ray wheeled the tartan-patterned trolley up to the white house. It banged against his leg and he heard the scrape of what he imagined were claws against the trolley’s lining. The trolley also reeked of smoke. Ray left it outside the front door and returned to his car.
And so the curious nature and sequence of his afternoon and evening’s work continued. He’d already made forty quid and was on a roll, but his curiosity about his passengers and their cases was beginning to stifle his delight at the abundance of work. So he decided to be more assertive with the next passenger, an elderly black man.
Ray helped him position a large holdall in the rear of his car. A brass lock secured the end of the bag’s zipper. The interior of the car bloomed afresh with the fragrance of cold air and wood smoke.
Ray cracked his window wider. ‘Where to, mate?’
‘He say he gonna be here.’ A piece of paper was passed between the seats.
Ray frowned. It was the first address, where he’d picked up that weirdo John, with the cane basket, at the edge of Hockley.
In the rear-view mirror, Ray studied the man behind him. The passenger met his eye without blinking, but with a stolid, unfriendly, obstinate, and somewhat entitled expression.
Ray glanced at the bag set beside his passenger. It was the type of canvas sports bag that teenagers favoured. It had West Bromwich Albion’s badge at one end. ‘Baggies fan?’ Ray asked, to defuse what he felt was an inexplicable tension.
‘My son,’ the man said, and looked out of the window.
Ray drove in silence, but struggled to keep his mind on the road. Just as well he knew them so well. ‘Not being funny, like, but do you mind if I ask you a question?’
As if he hadn’t heard Ray, the passenger never moved his head.
‘But I pick your mate up at this address that we are going to. And he gets in the car with his pet in a basket. And then we go to another house and another house, and each time it’s the same thing. I pick up someone with an animal, I think, in a bag. So I’m guessing you’ve got one in there too, yeah? So what’s it all about, yeah? Cus I am clueless.’
The man remained silent for a while. He just stared at the buildings they passed as they neared the city centre. Ray found it hard, from his repeated glances into the rear-view mirror, to read the passenger’s mood, though he intuited a grave sadness in the man’s eyes whenever the headlights of a passing vehicle flashed through the car.
‘Life is full of repetition,’ the man eventually said. ‘Same bad things keep happening.’
The statement mystified Ray. Nor was it information he felt capable of responding to.
‘You all right, mate?’ was the best he could do. ‘Ain’t none of my business, but I’m just wondering out loud what you’re all doing. Curiosity, like.’
‘You realise it’s not just you. There’s others who been through the same thing.’
‘What like? You talking about John and that Indian woman, and that old dear with the shopping trolley?’
The man looked up from his morbid self-absorption, but never spoke.
Ray pushed. ‘I’m talking about the others, like? With the bags that I been picking up here, there and everywhere?’
‘Here, there and everywhere,’ the man said and then sighed. ‘I don’t know them. Only met John once.’ He pinched his fingers in his eye sockets as if he were stopping tears.
As his curiosity became discomfort, Ray looked forward and drove through the dark within his own silence. The next time he spoke he’d pulled up outside the house in Hockley. ‘Fifteen pound.’
Before You Wake Page 4