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 drivers said something and Ben knocked him down.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He called him a hairy ape. I stopped the fight. But – I want you to understand, Reet.’
Rita had to concede the justice of all that. But there was more: Johnston was jealous. ‘Funny thing,’ she said. ‘You’ve never been jealous of anybody. But you are of him.’
He didn’t like this, but at last grinned a little, not pleasantly, and said, ‘Well, I can’t compete, can I? Not with a great hairy ape?’
‘He’s a lot more than that.’
‘Listen, Reet, I don’t care. I’ve had enough of him.’
Johnston’s plan began with taking Ben to shops, good ones, and buying good clothes. No more stuff from charity shops. Buying jeans, trousers, underclothes – that was easy: but those shoulders, that chest, the heavy arms – in the end Johnston decided on a bespoke tailor, and got him shirts that fitted, and a couple of jackets.
‘And what is all that going to cost?’ asked Rita.
‘I told you, there’s millions in this.’
‘Dream on.’
‘You’ll see.’
Next, Ben was taken to a barber. He wished the old woman could see him now: she had said he would look good, and he knew he did. The barber had exclaimed over the double crown, but by the time he had finished who could notice?
Now Johnston took Ben up for a flight over London in a small plane, to get him used to flying. At first Ben’s eyes rolled in his head and he gave a roar of fear, as he looked down, but Johnston was sitting beside him, behaving as if nothing was wrong, and he said, ‘Look Ben, do you see that? It’s the river, you know the river. And look, there’s Covent Garden. And there’s Charing Cross Road.’ Ben took it all in and told Rita about it. ‘When can I do it again?’ he wanted to know.
‘You are going to do it again. In a big plane. Soon.’
And then, she thought, I’ll probably not see you again… She was fond of him, yes, she was. She was going to miss… She permitted, no, invited, quite a few of the extraordinary fucks that were like nothing she had experienced. She knew very well that it was not in his nature that these could lead to tenderness. There was no connection between those short violent acts of possession and what happened even seconds later, when it was as if nothing at all had happened. And yet, once when she had allowed him to stay the night, he had nuzzled up to her in his sleep, that hairy face pushing into her neck, and he had licked her face and her neck. She supposed he was fond of her. He asked if she was coming to France too, but what did he imagine when he said France?
‘It’s the same as here, Ben,’ she tried to explain. ‘There’s a nice blue sea, though. You know what sea is?’
Yes, he did; he remembered going with his family to the seaside.
‘Well, then, it’s like that.
