Ben sat with his passport in his hand, reluctant to give it back to Johnston, and looked under his deep brows at them and knew it was him they had been quarrelling about. In his family they argued about him all the time. But more than by this angry atmosphere, he was being bothered by the many odours in the room. It smelled of her, the female, but he did not mind that, it was what emanated from Johnston that was making him want to fight or run away. It was a strong, dangerous male smell, and Ben always knew when Johnston had been on the pavement downstairs, or listening on the stairs, to keep a check on Rita. There were a variety of chemical traces in the air, as sharply differentiated from human ones as traffic stinks from the meat smells coming on to a pavement outside a takeaway. He wanted to get up and go, but knew he must not, until this business was settled. Rita was trying to stop Johnston from doing something.
Rita said to Johnston that he should try and get Ben a job, and ‘look after him’.
‘Meaning?’ said Johnston.
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I can’t stop some bloke tripping him up on a dark night or pushing him under a bus. He upsets people, Reet. You know that.’
‘Perhaps he could be one of your drivers?’
‘Oh, come on, you’re dreaming.’
But now Rita took the passport from Ben, and said she would look after it, and put it into a drawer. Down they went to the cars, which were inserted here and there among the ordinary parked cars.
‘Get in,’ said Johnston to Ben, opening the door. Ben looked at Rita – Is this all right? – and she nodded. Ben got in behind the driving wheel and at once his face was all delight, exultation. He was thinking of the great glittering roaring accelerating motorbikes that had been the one joy of his life, like nothing else he had known. And now he was behind a wheel, and could put his hands on it, moving it this way and that. He was making a noise like Brrrr, Brrrr, and laughing.
Johnston pulled Rita into the scene with a hitch of his shoulder, so she was standing right by the driver’s seat. He wanted Rita to see, and she did.
‘Now turn the key, Ben,’ he said.
He did not point the key out to Ben, but Ben’s face turned to Rita, for instructions. Rita bent in, touched the key.
Ben fiddled with it, turned it, turned it off as the machine coughed, turned it on, so the car was alive, but grumbled and coughed and died. It was a rackety, cheap third-or fourth-hand car, belonging to a driver who was in between prison sentences for stealing cars.
‘Try again,’ said Rita. Her voice was actually shaking, because she was thinking, Oh, poor Ben, he’s like a three-year-old, and somewhere she had been foolishly believing that he could learn this job. Ben’s hairy fist enclosed the key, and shook it, the car came alive, and now Ben began a pantomime of shifting gears, for he knew that that was what you had to do. It was an automatic.
‘Now,’ said Johnston, leaning right in, and pointing to the lever. ‘I’m going to show you what to do with that.’ And he did, again and again. ‘You squeeze these little side pieces together – see? Then let the brake go – now do it. Then, be careful, watch to see if a car is coming.’ All this was silly; Ben could not see, could not do it. He was making his fist close up tight, watching Johnston’s hand, pulling his hand back and then putting it forward near the brake, but he wasn’t really doing it, because he couldn’t. As Johnston had known.
Rita was crying. Johnston straightened up from the window, and opened the door, and said to Ben, ‘Get out.’ Obedient, Ben got out, not wanting to; he wanted to go on sitting there playing at being a driver. Then Rita said to Johnston, ‘You’re cruel. I don’t like that.’
She went into her doorway, not looking at him or at Ben. Johnston pretended to find work in his cubbyhole, though no customers had turned up, and Ben followed Rita up the stairs.
It was better up there now Johnston’s powerful odours had gone, leaving only memories in the air.
Rita said to Ben, ‘You don’t have to go anywhere, if you don’t want to.’ She sounded sulky, offended, but that was because she was angry at having cried. She did not like showing weakness, and particularly not in front of Johnston.
‘Sit down, Ben,’ she said, and he sat on the chair while she painted her face to hide the marks of tears. Then she made up her eyes again, to look enormous, with the black and green paints. This was so customers would not notice her face, which was not pretty, but pale, or even white, because she was never really well.
‘Why does it say I am a film actor?’ asked Ben.
Rita simply shook her head, defeated, by the difficulty of explaining. She knew he did not go to the cinema, and was able to put herself in his place enough to know that reality was more than enough for him, he could not afford to complicate that by pretence. She did not know that it was the building itself which frightened him: the dark inside, the rows of seats where anybody might be, the tall lit screen, which hurt his eyes.
In fact she had been impressed by Johnston arranging with ‘his friend’ to have actor on the passport. Actors did not work all the time. They were often idle. She had actors among her customers: to be out of work was no crisis for them, though it might be a worry. Ben looked out of the ordinary, but you expected pop stars and actors to look amazing. No, it was a brilliant strategy. In a crowd of film people or the music scene, Ben would not be so conspicuous. But what was Johnston up to? She knew it could be nothing good.
And yet something had to be done about Ben. It was late summer now, but soon it would be autumn, and then winter. Ben had twice been moved on from his favourite bench by the police. What was he going to do in winter? The police knew him. All the homeless and down-and-out people must know him. Probably Johnston was right: Rita had not been to France, but she had been to Spain and Greece, and could imagine Ben more easily in a tapas bar, or a taverna, than a London pub. But Johnston wasn’t concerned for Ben’s well-being, she knew that.
That night, late, when her last customers had gone, and the minicab drivers had gone home, when it was more morning than night, and Ben was crouching in a doorway in Covent Garden, she asked Johnston what he intended for Ben, and when she heard she was angry and tried to hit Johnston, who held her wrists and said, ‘Shut up. It’s going to work, you’ll see.’
Johnston planned to make Ben carry cocaine – ‘A lot, Reet, millions’ – across to Nice, not concealed at all, but in ordinary holdalls, under a layer of clothes. ‘Don’t you see, Reet? Ben is so amazing the narks will be trying to figure him out, they won’t have time for anything else.’
‘And when he gets there?’
‘Why should you care? What’s he to you? He’s a bit of rough for you, that’s all.’
‘I’m sorry for him. I don’t want him to get hurt.’
This was where, in the previous exchange, the word ‘bars’ had arrived. ‘Bars’ were imminent again.
‘He couldn’t manage an aeroplane, he couldn’t manage luggage, what’s he going to do in a place where people don’t speak English?’
‘I’ve thought of everything, Reet.’ And he detailed his plan.
Rita had to admit that Johnston had thought of everything. She was impressed. But suppose the plan did succeed, at the end of it Ben would be alone in a foreign country.
‘I don’t want him hanging around here. People notice him. The police want an excuse to close me down. They don’t like the cabs being here. I keep telling them, you may not like us, but the public do. I could keep twice the number of cabs busy, if we had parking space. But they are just putting up with me and waiting for an excuse. And Ben is like a big notice saying, “Here is trouble”. And I’m scared of him starting another fight. One of the