Dead Like You

50

Saturday 10 January

The words on the data unit’s screen in Yac’s taxi read:

China Garden rest. Preston St. 2 Pass. Starling. Dest. Roedean Cresc.

It was 11.20 p.m. He had been parked up for some minutes now and had started the meter running. The man who owned the taxi said he should only wait for five minutes and then start the meter. Yac wasn’t sure how accurate his watch was and he wanted to be fair to his passengers. So he always allowed twenty seconds’ grace.

Starling. Roedean Crescent.

He had picked these people up before. He never forgot a passenger and especially not these people. The address: 67 Roedean Crescent. He had memorized that. She wore Shalimar perfume. The same perfume as his mother. He had memorized that too. She had been wearing Bruno Magli shoes. Size four. His mother’s size.

He wondered what shoes she would be wearing tonight.

Excitement rose inside him as the restaurant door opened and he saw the couple emerge. The man was holding on to the woman and looked unsteady. She helped him negotiate the step down to the pavement, then he still clung to her as they walked the short distance, through the blustery wind, over to Yac.

But Yac wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at the woman’s shoes. They were nice. Tall heels. Straps. His kind of shoes.

Mr Starling peered in through the window, which Yac had opened.

‘Taaxish for Roedean Chresshent? Shtarling?’

He sounded as drunk as he looked.

The man who owned the taxi said he did not have to take drunk passengers, especially ones who might be likely to throw up. It cost a lot of money to clear vomit out of the taxi, because it went everywhere, into the vents, down the windows into the electric motors, into the cracks down the sides of the seats. People didn’t like getting into a taxi that smelt of stale sick. It wasn’t nice to drive one either.

But it had been a quiet night. The man who owned the taxi would be angry with the poor takings. He had already complained about how little Yac had taken since New Year and he’d told Yac that he’d never known any taxi driver take so little on New Year’s Eve itself.

He needed all the fares he could get, because he didn’t want to risk the man who owned the taxi firing him and having someone else drive. So he decided to take a risk.

And he wanted to smell her perfume. Wanted those shoes in the taxi with him!

The Starlings climbed into the back and he drove off. He adjusted the mirror so he could see Mrs Starling’s face, then he said, ‘Nice shoes! Alberta Ferretti, I’ll bet those are!’

‘You a fucking pervert or shomething?’ she said, sounding almost as sloshed as her husband. ‘I think you drove us before, didn’t you, quite recently? Last week? Yesh?’

‘You were wearing Bruno Maglis.’

‘You’re too fucking pershonal! None of your damned fucking business what shoes I’m wearing.’

‘Into shoes, are you?’ Yac asked.

‘Yesh, she is into fucking shoes,’ Garry Starling butted in. ‘Spends all my money on them. Every penny I make ends up on her sodding feet!’

‘That’s because, my darling, you can only get it up when – ouch!’ she cried out loudly.

Yac looked at her again in the mirror. Her face was contorted in pain. She’d been rude to him last time she had been in his taxi.

He liked seeing that pain.