Don't come back

       Don't come back

It started with Sophia Loren.

‘I tell you what,’ said Pete Bradley, his eyes drawn to the page as if by a searchlight, ‘I certainly wouldn’t mind...'He coughed.

‘What?” said Rudie. ‘You wouldn’t mind what?’

Pete winked. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you know exactly what I’m talking about.’ He turned the magazine around and held it up to the light. ‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘Fucking lovely. Look at the tit-cleft on that.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Rudie, who was looking around the pub in desperation, searching for any kind of escape route as he attempted to rid himself of the mental image which had propelled itself to the forefront of his mind, feeling sick, as if he’d been made to watch a video of a lion buggering a swan. It made sense, of course, that the worst job in the world would have the worst leaving do. Of course it did he thought, kicking himself under the table - of course it fucking did.

‘You see what I see,’ said Pete Bradley, his face a picture of satisfaction. ‘And any man would say the same.’ He nodded his head, a bobbing display of veins and prominent teeth, and smiled. ‘Any man,’ he said, licking his fat lips, ‘any man in this room. Even the benders.’ He placed the magazine back on the table, keeping it open on the page of Sophia Loren in her bespoke stone age bikini. ‘I’ll keep this here,’ he said, relishing the thought, ‘to remind myself that I’m still alive. I don’t want to stare at your bloody face all night, do I?’

Rudie was holding a green drink which had been bought for him by Big Bob Stains, who had been flashing his wallet about that night like a baton, conducting the drinkers from pub to pub as a maestro before a kindly alcoholic storm, but now only the three remained, leaning against the bar in lieu of falling over. Bob had just gone to the toilet, having successfully negotiated with his legs for ten more yards before they buckled under him for good, the bad decisions of his fifty-odd years written in every heavy step. Rudie was not enjoying the green drink, which was sour and unappealing, but he was enjoying the company of Pete Bradley, the vagaries of whom he had been exposed to forty hours a week for eighteen long months, even less. ‘Yes,’ he said, before Pete had even finished his next sentence, which was something about women drivers, filling the silence between opinions that he had neither asked for or respected. ‘Of course,’ said Pete, finishing an anecdote, ‘she was driving a Nissan Micra. A Japanese car, no less. Made by midgets, for midgets. Explains everything, if you ask me,’ but Rudie hadn’t, and he never would.

Big Bob Stains, who was even larger and less aesthetically pleasing than his name would indicate, came back from the gents with an anecdote, as he nearly always did.

‘Guy in there,’ he said, gesturing with a large arm towards the open toilet door, ‘talking on the phone to his wife, or girlfriend or something, about Terrorists.’

‘A Moslem?’, said Pete Bradley, thoughtfully.

‘Nah,’ said Bob. ‘Normal. Glasses, mind, bit of an accent.’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry Rudie,’ he said. ‘By normal I meant ...’

‘That’s okay,’ said Rudie, remembering that Bob was under the misapprehension that he was of distant African descent. It was probably the name, or the nose, or the fact that Rudie had told him he was black as a joke nine months ago at the Rhyl conference just before the second stripper, the one who’d had bags under her knees, had fallen from the stage and, according to Danny, who claimed knowledge of such things, bruised her labia. Yeah, it was probably that, he thought. More comprehension than apprehension. Fair enough.

‘Anyway,’ said Bob, ‘says his brother’s gone to Syria. Syria! A white man. Imagine that.’

‘They’ll think he’s a reporter,’ said Pete.

‘And gas him,’ said Bob.

‘Or set him on fire,’ said Pete. ‘Which guy?’

‘One in the blue shirt,’ said Bob, ‘yeah, that one, the student.’ He stared at his empty beer glass. ‘Is anybody going to the bar?’

‘I’ll get it,’ said Rudie, grateful for the chance to escape. He began to move forward but was stopped by a form hand on his shoulder. ‘Get Sophia a double vodka,’ said Pete Bradley, pointing towards the magazine which lay on the bar between them. ‘Something premium, mind, like a Smirnoff. She’s getting wild tonight.’ He laughed, compressing a world of amusement into one definite syllable. ‘Ha.’ He looked down at the magazine. He was glowing.

Rudie came back with the drinks, three pints of Amstel and a glass of water to sip in-between poisonings, the unnamed green drink having taken him a little bit closer to drunkenness than he had intended. ‘You forgot Sophia,’ said Pete, still stuck in the same sickly-sweet smile, eyeing the water with the same expression that he would have given it if it had come dressed in pink bows and spoken in a Romanian accent.

‘I didn’t,’ said Rudie. ‘She’s driving.’

‘So I said to her,’ said Big Bob Stains, returning to an anecdote that he had started and abandoned over twenty minutes beforehand, ‘I said it’s a shame that you can’t see that things have never been - I said, never been better for us, what with the new conservatory and me not messing around with other birds anymore. Well,’ he said with an inglorious wink, ‘the bit about the conservatory is true.’

‘Nice, is it?’ said Pete Bradley, not looking up from the magazine.

‘You’ve seen it, Pete, you spastic,’ said Bob, shaking his head. ‘You were around last week for the boxing.’

‘So I was,’ said Pete, ‘so I was. And what a lovely fucking conservatory it is as well. All glass and wooden bits in-between holding it together, as I recall.’

‘Well, yeah,’ said Big Bob Stains. ‘It’s a conservatory. I mean, it doesn’t fly or do your bloody taxes. It just sits there, reflecting the sun and impressing the neighbours.’

‘Who are all fucking gay,’ said Pete.

‘One is,’ said Bob, evenly. ‘The other guy is just trying it out, I think. I’m not convinced.’

‘So what,’ said Pete, as if to himself. ‘Benders don’t harm nobody. As long as they stay away from kids what’s the difference? I say buy them a bum-cage and let them get on with it.’

Rudie reached for his water.

‘I should really get going,’ said Rudie.

--

‘Fair enough,’ said Bob, who looked dead on his feet, his enormous body creaking with the effort of holding itself together. ‘Me too.’

‘Oh yeah?’ said Pete, his eyes bright and bloodshot. ‘Where have you pair of dickheads got to go?’

‘I have an appointment tomorrow,’ said Rudie, who did not.

‘Appointment?’ Pete had worked in the same office for twenty years, and could not conceive of an existence outside of its profoundly depressing walls.

‘I’m taking Susie shopping,’ said Bob, sadly. ‘It’s her birthday or something.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Pete.

‘Truth-ocks,’ said Bob.

Rudie yawned, and reached for his phone. He was getting out of that office at the right time, he thought, just before succumbing to the great sadness of repetitive tasks and the back problems that inevitably accompany them. Photocopiers? He did not want to be staring at fucking photocopiers beyond the age of thirty, as Pete did, as Bob had before him. He did not want to die on his feet, only to be reborn hourly into a chair whose main feature, other than an orthopaedic lumbar support, was the strange but familiar smell of his own farts and, ultimately, disappointment. Eighteen months was enough. It was time for a change. It was time to escape.

--

‘I’m telling you I’m a big fan, Rudie,’ said Pete Bradley, ‘I’m telling you. So, you just have to believe me, don’t you? Faith, innit, like all that God shit.’ He was slurring his words in a happy fury, his eyes trained on the city centre streets as they crawled by, the Thursday drinking crowd staffing the horizon like red-eyed explorers from another world.

‘Name one film. Just one.’

The taxi driver, who wore a brilliant pencil-thin moustache, turned his head to offer an answer through the small window in the partition but was interrupted by the sudden appearance of a group of men dressed as The Flintstones at the driver’s side window, begging for his service. ‘No!’ he said to the dirty glass in a curious half-whisper, half-shout. ‘I am busy! Can you not see the human beings in my car?’ The men shrugged and shouted abuse, most of which tailed off into the mid-distance long before they thought to move, the next taxi catching their collective eye at as it pulled up across the road, indicators blinking coquettishly. 

‘I said, didn’t I?’ continued Pete Bradley, the outside world now dead to him, ‘The Dinosaur one. The one this picture -‘ he pointed once more to the open magazine, which was only barely visible in the darkness, ‘-is from. Fuck’s sake, Rudie, grow a heart, I didn’t come out tonight expecting a quiz, did I?’ He touched the picture. ‘No, no my darling, don’t cry. Poor Sophia. I always loved her, Rudie, always cared for her growing up, and up and up - if you get my meaning. My dad liked that fucking Zsa-Zsa Gabor. Didn’t hold up as well as Loren - I’m into the darker skin myself, the darker meat - but she looked fucking dirty, didn’t she?’ He laughed, then coughed, then continued laughing. ‘Women like that will do anything to avoid the washing up,’ he said, as if reciting from a big book of immutable facts. ‘Stupid name, mind. Imagine. Zsa-Zsa? Clare-Clare. Susan-Susan. Sounds daft, doesn’t it?. Foreigners can get away with anything these days.’

‘Stupid name?’ said the taxi driver, his tiny moustache moving along on his top lip. ‘You think Zsa-Zsa is a stupid name, little man?’

‘I think ...’ said Pete Bradley, who did not regard himself as being little in any way, ‘that you may have confused me with somebody else.’

‘Were you the man who just spoke?’ said the taxi driver, stopping at some traffic lights.

‘Yeah I was.’

‘Then you are the little man,’ he said, pulling away again, as drops of rain began to fall on the road about them. 'In fact, the littlest man I have met today, and around lunch-time I gave a lift to two actual dwarves.'

‘I am a bigger man than any Polish -‘

‘I am not a Pole.’

‘Or Russian...’

‘Nor a Russian. I am Hungarian, my geographically-challenged friend.’

Pete Bradley shrugged. ‘It’s all the same to me,’ he said, shooting Big Bob Stains a sly smile, ’as long as one of you dumb cunts can manage to turn up on time to fix my sink.’ He raised his hand to give Rudie, who had just noticed that he was unable to breath, a high five.

‘No,’ said Rudie, shaking his head. ‘Just - no.’ He had been dreaming of home for hours now, even if the hot water wasn’t working and Lucy, who was, she insisted, clinically depressed at the thought of turning twenty-five, was always putting things in tupperware.

‘It’s fine,’ said Pete. ‘Every country needs their unskilled workers, their cattle. The Saudi’s have the Indians and their Pakis - nobody cares if they live or die, no-one even gives it a second thought. The French? The Africans, some of them pretty fucking good at football too. We get the plumbers and taxi drivers of the former Commie East. It’s fine. Natural - whatever that Dawkins prick is on about.’

Rudie shook his head.

‘Your friend has the right idea,’ said the taxi driver, carefully negotiating a hen party which had spilled out onto the road, moving seamlessly between states of excitement, rage and retribution. ‘Whatever his views on the matter - and he rides my car in your company so we would have to say that his position is, at the very least, somewhat circumspect - he chooses not to engage with his driver but merely accept the service which I have offered to render to him.’

‘I would like to say...’ said Rudie, but the taxi driver waved him aside.

‘I’m sure there are many things you would like to say,’ he said, ‘but they do not matter now. I will get you all home and then we will be done with all of our saying for the evening. It will quite a relief all around, I would think.’

--

‘Like I said,’ said Pete Bradley, bringing his most disparaging sneer to the party, ‘foreigners - and I use that term without respect - can get away with anything these days.’

The taxi driver coughed.

‘Syria,’ said Big Bob Stains, remembering the man in the blue shirt who he had overheard - or claimed to overhear - in the gents. ‘Look at Syria, and ...’ he thought for a moment. ‘Syria,’ he said again, this time finally, absolutely. 

‘Here okay for you, Bob?’ said Rudie.

‘Ah .... Yes,’ said Bob, happily, pulling a five pound note out of his wallet and levering his body out of the door, Rudie watching him stagger up his driveway, powered through the wind and rain by a combination of gravity, good luck and the kind of farts which can only be attributed to an all-crisp diet, of which Bob was a fierce proponent.

‘Now where?’ said the taxi driver, seemingly unaffected by the quiet dignity of the exit. ‘Which one of you gentlemen next?’

‘I’m closest,’ said Pete Bradley. ‘Market Street, bottom end. Get a move on.’

‘And your friend?’

‘Meridian Place,’ said Rudie, ‘just past the ...’

‘I know where Meridian Place is,’ said the taxi driver. ‘I am a taxi driver, Is closer.’

‘Closer is none of your damn business,’ said Pete. ‘Me first, Market Street first. I’m not taking orders from a Polish in my own country.’

‘Hungarian,’ said Rudie and the taxi driver at the same time. Pete snorted.

‘Perhaps,’ said the taxi driver, turning to Rudie, ‘you would like to get out here and walk? Then I could drive your Hungarian-loving friend home. We could chat for a while, he and I, and I could persuade him of the extent of his ignorance on many matters, many topics.’

‘Market Street, gypsy-tits,’ said Pete Bradley, ‘and step on it.’

‘Oh, I will step on something,’ said the taxi driver, and, as they pulled away from the kerb the door-locks snapped shut, Rudie hearing the click of the mechanism as a tiny, distant gunshot.

--

‘Out.’

‘This isn’t where I live,’ said Pete Bradley, by now not sure whether to be slightly worried or extremely angry.

‘No,’ said the taxi driver, ‘it is not. You are very observant, my friend. You have that great attention to detail which is true of all of your people.’

‘Where are we?’ said Rudie, looking out over what looked like a deserted industrial estate, the rain by now falling in steady streams which swallowed the dark horizon in a rising mist.

‘You are not anywhere at all,’ said the taxi driver. ‘It is your friend here that I have transported to his final destination. You have merely been along for the ride. Now, get out, both of you - but especially the fat one.’

‘Final destination?’ said Pete Bradley, sweat glistening in the moonlight. ‘Spooky twat, here. What am I meant to do, shit myself?’

‘You can do what you like with your arse, my friend - your pants are none of my business. I only meant that I leave you here, exposed to the elements. No charge. Just get out of my car.’

‘Listen,’ said Rudie, ‘if we could only ...’

‘What we could have achieved is long gone,’ said the taxi driver. ‘’Could’, as a concept disappeared a while back, I am afraid. It is rare that I hear such nonsense than I hear from your friend this evening. He is an olympic-level idiot, this one. Zsa- zsa - a stupid name? Does he not know this woman, this beauty, was Miss Hungary in 1936, back when such contests meant something to people?’

‘No,’ said Pete, ‘I did not know that about the particular whore.’

‘And as for Sophia Loren ...’

‘I suppose you’re Italian as well?’

‘I do not need to be Italian to be repulsed by your attitude to Italian women,’ said the taxi driver. ‘Besides, they are more than capable of disrespect on their own terms, our Mediterranean cousins, what with their wandering eyes and fixed expressions of desire.’

‘I’m not walking home from here,’ said Pete. ‘It’s fucking miles.’

‘Well I am,’ said Rudie, pushing at the door, relieved after a moment or two to hear it unlock and then swing open, the taxi driver having released the mechanism at the front of the cab. He stepped outside and braced himself against the rain, which was not as heavy as he’d expected, and the wind, which was far worse.

‘I'm going fucking nowhere,’ said Pete Bradley, his voice rising along a well-worn pitch of self-pity. ‘This is a new coat. Suede! I ain’t getting it wet for no Polish cunt.’

‘Hungarian,’ said the taxi driver, ‘and neither am I, Poles and coats notwithstanding. I will not hurt you, my friend, I will not lift a finger, but I will not take you one inch further in my car, which is something that I pay for every day with my hard work but also my common decency.’

“Well, I ain’t budging,’ said Pete, planting himself more firmly into his seat and making himself heavy, in the way that dogs do whenever a bath is suggested. Rudie, exasperated, slammed the door shut behind him, hurrying across the uneven ground for the relative shelter of a bus stop that he had spotted in the middle distance. After a minute or two he reached the spot and looked back towards the car, the headlights still visible but the two men lost to the darkness of its interior.

--

Rudie walked the eight miles home in precisely one hour and fifty-six minutes, stopping once for a piss (by the railway line, a place where his urine could hardly have been said to have had a negative ecological impact) and twice to tie a shoe-lace - the single knots he favoured not holding up too well in the prevailing weather conditions, which were mostly bloody awful. By the time he got in Lucy was fast asleep, the depth of her high-pitched snores telling him that she’d had a busy day and could do with every single minute of rest, so he decided to pass out on the sofa, a half-eaten Cheese sandwich by his feet as an offering to the Gods of Calcium, or the Cat, whichever one got there first.

His phone rang at 9.30am.

‘Rudie?’ It was Big Bob Stains, no more or less alive or alert than he had been at closing time or whilst struggling through the rain toward his front door.

‘Yes,’ said Rudie, as coherently as he could manage. ‘This is him.’ 

‘Oh good - you’re safe. Did Pete get home okay last night?’

‘I assume so. I left him arguing with that taxi driver in an industrial estate just off the A27. Walked home myself. It was pissing down.’

The line went quiet. ‘Bob?’

‘He hasn’t made it in today, is all,’ said Bob. ‘And he bloody loves Fridays n’all, what with the breakfast club and everything. Tried his mobile a couple of times, straight to answerphone. Pretty unusual for him, especially when that piece from Head Office is due to swing by.’ This was true, for Pete Bradley liked get in early whenever Belinda Sanderson was scheduled to make one of her occasional morale-boosting visits to the branch, following her wide, swinging hips and trim calves around the office with the practised eye of a predatory beast on a far-away plain.

‘It’s not my problem,’ said Rudie. ‘I’m out of there now, Bob. Free.’ 

‘He likes you, Pete does.'

‘Well I don’t like him.’More silence.

‘He was an arsehole last night.’

‘Booze,’ said Bob, ‘accentuates his anxiety.’

‘It’s more than that,’ said Rudie. Anxiety indeed. ‘Well, less than that. He’s an arsehole plain and simple. I know rugby boys who’d find him too much.'

’Different captains for different boats,’ said Bob, in an odd tone. 

‘What does that mean, exactly?’

‘That we’re all different.’

‘Well just say that, then.’

There was another pause, a gulf of silence that passed between them over the telephone line, made of guilt, and doubt, and stupidity.

‘Okay,’ said Rudie, unsure whether his irritation, which was considerable, was due to dehydration or duty. ‘I’ll go and check up on the fucking prick.’

--

His departure from the house was delayed by fifteen minutes - the Cat, having won the race for the half-eaten cheese sandwich, had decided to celebrate by throwing up all over the hallway carpet - and Lucy had placed a weeks worth of post on the bike saddle, necessitating the kind of frantic envelope scanning that is almost endemic in men and women of a certain income, half-expecting to find a final demand from a creditor in every other neatly word-processed threat.

It was a dark day, he thought, making his way past the old Steelworks, which were now a cinema complex, and the even older cinema, which was now an Artisan Brewery, its severe typeface rising over the deserted high street like an uninvited alien cloud. The rain continued to come down in torrents, painting the streets a shade greyer than normal. He began to sober up by the second mile, and worry by the third. Where was Pete, he wondered, racing through his memories of the night before? Surely ... no, he would be at home, and had simply been overtaken by his hangover. Life was like that. Predictable. Dull.

Pete Bradley had lived alone (‘alone with my wrist’, he always said, grinning upward through his gums) on the second floor of a block of flats on Axminister Drive, an ugly pebble-dashed building which looked as if it had been born into shadow. Rudie rang the bell. No answer. He tried again and the curtains of the ground floor flat twitched in response. ‘He’s not in,’ said a small voice.

‘No?’

‘Not since yesterday.’

‘Okay, thanks.’

‘Don’t thank me,’ said the voice, adding thoughtfully, ‘I hate the piece of shit.’ 

‘You do?’

The curtains twitched once more, and the voice was gone.

--

‘He’s not home,’ said Rudie, imagining for a second that he was piloting a mountain rescue helicopter. ‘I’m calling off the search.’

‘Oh,’ said Big Bob Stains. ‘Right.’ 

‘So I’ll be seeing you.’

‘Right.’

‘And thanks for last night. Really, it was nice of you to arrange something for me.’

‘No problem,’ said Bob, haltingly, and hung up.

Rudie got back on his bike, and, after looking back once more at the curtains of the ground floor flat, which remained still, began to cycle up Market Street, following the main road North in the direction of home. Even his neighbours hate the twat he thought, at first with scorn and then something approaching pity, realising for the first time that it was not just Rudie himself who had been trapped in the gravity of Pete Bradley for the last eighteen months but that Pete himself was also a victim, unable to escape himself for a moment whether at work, rest or play. He thought then of the taxi driver, the proud man with his pencil thin moustache and broad shoulders, and wondered if Pete had gone too far for the hundredth time in his life, only this time, perhaps ...

He stopped, thought, carried on, stopped for a second time, thought again (this time whilst shaking his head sadly, as if drunkenly ordering the kind of mayonnaise-drenched burger he knew could only bring great disappointment) and changed direction.

--

The car was still there, half cloaked in the astonishing downpour, the industrial estate deserted - perhaps permanently, Rudie could not tell. The shutters of an empty unit hung half-open and rattled with the impact of the spray as he sped past, being careful to avoid the potholes which served his imagination as improvised ponds, discarded fast food wrappers passing for frogs and lily pads in equal measure.

’Shit,’ he thought, although he also said it, being alone and, by any standards, considerably shaken by the continued presence of the taxi which appeared, from a distance of fifty metres or so, to be deserted. He swung off the bike, far more casually than he intended, then made his way to the rear passenger side door, the one he’d exited from in such a hurry only about ten hours ago, and pulled on the handle.

‘There he bloody is,’ said Pete Bradley, who was slumped back in his seat. ‘Usain bloody Bolt, taking off through the wind and rain like a fucking Eskimo searching for his favourite hat. Look at him, Csaba. Bloody drenched. Idiot.’

The taxi driver, who was lying across the two front seats, laughed noisily.

‘He’s still -‘

‘Just snoozing,’ said Pete. ‘It’s been a long night.’

‘It certainly has. What the hell happened, Pete? Why ... why the fuck aren’t you at work?’

‘It’s raining,’ said Pete Bradley, as if that was the most obvious answer he could give. ‘I said didn’t I? New Jacket. Suede. Classic cut - rare, too bloody rare. Two hundred and fifty quid, mate, two hundred and fifty quid. I’m not made of money, am I?’

‘You are an asshole,’ said the taxi driver. 'That much is true.'

‘Shut it Csaba,’ said Pete.

‘Csaba?’

‘Csaba Hadjn,’ said the taxi driver, not moving from his prone position. ‘I would shake your hand, but I cannot be arsed.’

‘Nice one,’ said Pete.

‘Why didn’t you call in?’ said Rudie, trying to inch a little further into the cab to escape the rain, which showed no sign of easing.

‘Why do you care?’ said Pete. ‘You left.’

‘Big Bob Stains called me,’ said Rudie. ‘He’s extremely worried about you, He’s got enough to think about with his own health, too.’

Pete held up his phone. ‘Battery ran out,’ he said. ‘Fucking iPhones.’ 

‘You haven’t got an iPhone, Pete.’

Pete shrugged. ‘Csaba’s an Arsenal fan,’ he said. ‘Imagine that.’

--

‘So,’ said Rudie, ‘to summarise, you two have reached something of an impasse.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Pete.

‘As I understand the word,’ interjected Csaba, ‘and I suspect that I may understand it rather better than him, yes, you are correct. Of course I will not touch him, for fear that I would catch idiot, but I will also not drive one inch further with this beast in my cab.’

‘And I’m not leaving this car,’ said Pete, to nobody in particular, ‘until I’ve received a full and frank apology then - and only then - been driven directly to my front door. This man - even though he knows his football, I have to admit - was hired to do a particular bloody job, and I have a mind to help him see it through, the daft Polish twat.’

‘This is our joke, now’ confided Csaba, ‘for he knows fine well that I am Hungarian. He is playing at the bigot, I think, for his own amusement.’

‘Fuck Off,’ said Pete.

‘Even his insults have less venom than last night,’ said Csaba.

‘I’m tired you twat, that’s all.’

‘Haven’t you needed the toilet, either of you?’ said Rudie.

‘I have been twice,’ said Csaba, happily, ‘once for number two. I simply locked the car up and when I got back taunted him with my relief.’

Pete shrugged. ‘Iron bladder, me,’ he said, ‘I’ve got hours left before I blow,’ but Rudie thought that he looked in considerable pain, as if concerned with passing a bowling ball.

‘So we’re stuck?'

‘You may be stuck, but I’m perfectly happy,’ said Pete. 

‘Aye,’ said Csaba, in weird imitation of an accent that Rudie could not quite identify, but thought might have been Scottish.

--

At Pete’s insistence Rudie hadn’t called Bob back on the Friday morning, his reasoning being that Csaba, who after all was an Arsenal fan and as a result lacked moral fibre, would have given up by midday and agreed to drive him home, leaving Pete able to sort it all out with his bosses after a shower and a round of toast, although not necessarily in that order. Rudie, who hated hangovers as much as he hated daytime television (which was to say a quite considerable amount) went back home and engaged in both, alternating between states of shallow sleep and semi-conscious self-hatred as a succession of orange non-entities flooded both the screen and his dreams with unprecedented levels of mediocrity, a great majority of them baking, or talking about baking, or thinking about baking less.

At eight o’clock in the evening he awoke on the sofa to find Lucy asleep next to him, the Cat eyeing them both suspiciously from his usual spot in front of the television, and decided, by virtue of now feeling completely rested, to ride out to the Industrial Estate and see how the two strange men were getting on, if in fact they were still there at all.

He need not have worried. ‘What is that smell?’ he said, opening the cab door, Csaba’s horrified expression telling the story long before Pete had stopped laughing long enough to answer, more amused by the fact of his bodily functions than he had any right to be, his suede jacket now propped behind his head as a pillow, it’s relative rarity and considerable expense now apparently less of a concern.

‘You people are mad,’ he said.

‘I’m fine,’ said Pete, ‘I keep telling you.’

‘I will give him no water,’ said Csaba, drinking from a large bottle of squash that it turned out he kept in the glove compartment, ‘I will talk with him about football, yes, but I will not nourish his stay in my cab for one moment longer by means of cup or bottle. He will leave, yes, and then he may drink again.’

‘Why don’t you just drive him home?’

‘Impossible.’ It was as emphatic a statement as any man had ever made. ‘I say - impossible.’ He drew Rudie near. ‘Besides,’ he whispered, ‘I am now out of petroleum.’

‘What was that?’ said Pete.

‘Nothing,’ said Csaba, ‘only the wind, creaking through the bones of my sole source of income.’

--

‘You could simply throw him out. Get in there, pick him up and ...’

‘I do not believe in violence, my friend. Oh yes, I believe it exists, of course, but I do not subscribe to its application, whatever the cause.’

‘Surely you have some friends who could help?’

‘There is no Hungarian mob in this city, if that is what you are implying,’ said Csaba. ‘And the assumption that I would be in cahoots with them if there were is highly racist. Why do you think I do not believe in violence, a lack of opportunity  If I were Turkish, I would surely believe in such a thing. I would have the back-up, for one.’ He laughed. ‘I am joking on that,’ he said, ‘I think.’

--

Big Bob Stains had been by that morning, to see for himself.

‘Fucking Bob,’ said Pete, his voice crackling somewhere at the back of his throat. ‘On the lords day n’all. I think he’s losing it, Rudie, since he gave up the fags.’

‘It is incredibly dangerous to give up smoking,’ said Csaba, gravely. ‘I say that once you start, you cannot stop. It is very much like the Mafia in that regard, I think.’

‘Are you going back to work?’

‘You may as well ask him if he is changing into a dress,’ said Csaba, ‘for all the good it would do.’

‘You look yellow, Pete’ said Rudie, who was missing a perfectly boring Manchester derby and one of Lucy’s near-beef casseroles to lean into the stationary vehicle and commune with the diligently insane.

‘I am no coward.’

‘Literally. Yellow.’

’That is just the light,’ said Csaba. ‘Falling on his racist dimples.’ 

‘Poofter,’ said Pete, but not without affection.

--

‘I am becoming quite fond of him,’ said Csaba, his thin moustache now partly obscured by the stubble that had began to form around it, ‘but if he is to die in my taxi, then so be it. This is the way of the warrior in every culture, I think, although I admit I have not heard of any great battle fought in such a restricted arena.’

It was now Tuesday afternoon, and Pete Bradley had resorted to drinking his own urine, or rather, sucking it up from the floor of the cab when he was sure that nobody else was looking.

‘Just leave,’ said Rudie. 'Stand up and walk away. Please. For the sake of everybody.’

‘No,’ said Pete, with some difficulty. ‘This ... this is a matter of principle.’ He would not let Rudie call the police on pain of - well, that was never quite made clear - and Csaba, similarly, would not countenance the involvement of law enforcement on any level. ‘When you are from where I am from,’ he said, with rare menace, ‘you hope that the worst they are is incompetent.’

‘Hear, hear,’ said Pete, who had begun to pass in and out of consciousness. 

‘I really think he may be dying,’ said Rudie.

‘I am sorry for him,’ said Csaba, ‘but I am also sorry for myself. I have lost much business, these last few days. My wife, she is eight months pregnant, and is expecting me to pay the rent, in cash, this evening, as the landlord insists. Sadly, it does not look as if this will be possible.’

Rudie was appalled. ‘But it is possible!’ he spluttered. ‘Absolutely possible, if you’d only ...’

‘Do the sums,’ said Csaba. ‘He will not be dead by this evening.’ He looked out over the empty industrial estate and the world that lay beyond it, the evening sky for once untroubled by rain. ‘I am proud of him, though,’ he said, somewhat wistfully ‘for he has shown me that you can rely on his word, even if I do not agree with his horrible views, which, being a man of both heart and brain, I find abhorrent. I must say, though, that I admire that level of belief, even as I am terrified by it.’

Rudie did not know what to say. ‘I do not know what to say,’ he said.

‘Then say nothing,’ said Csaba. ‘He is a proud man, and does not need to be disturbed by such trinkets as words and thinking.’

He closed his eyes.

‘Don’t come back,’ he said.