Angela Gosebourne
I need to talk to you.
‘You and everyone else, sweetheart,’ he said, flinging it at the wall.
REGULAR LONDONERS
Although she insisted on trading in her car for a new one every January, Beverley almost never drove in London, preferring to take black cabs wherever she went. They were quicker, more convenient and she liked the screen that protected her from having to make conversation with the driver. She had read somewhere that Stephen Fry had purchased his own black cab, even passing the Knowledge in order to be allowed to drive along the bus lanes, and she’d thought it rather a good idea, but didn’t have the energy to remember so many thousands of street names herself, particularly when she had no intention of ever visiting any of them. She was familiar with the West End, of course, and Hampstead, Kensington and Belgravia, but avoided all the mysterious places that lurked menacingly, like malevolent suckers, at the end of each tentacle of the Tube map.
Today, however, she found herself driving along the eastern side of Hyde Park in the direction of Edgware Road or, rather, stuck in a convoy of dozens of other cars, buses and taxis.
‘You’d think they could set up another lane,’ she said, shaking her head as she stretched her neck, trying to see further along the road to what the hold-up might be. ‘For people like me, I mean.’
‘And what kind of person are you?’ asked her ghost, who was seated in the passenger seat with a shoe box on her lap, into the lid of which a series of holes had been punched earlier by Beverley, using a fork and a stabbing motion reminiscent of Norman Bates when he surprises Marion Crane in the shower and has no intention of simply handing her a loofah. The action had utterly terrified the box’s occupant, who had not experienced such extraordinary violence since the Polish–Ukrainian War of 1919, and he immediately took comfort in the presence of three After Eights.
‘I pay an awful lot of taxes, dear,’ replied Beverley. ‘As does George. And this car isn’t designed to stall. If there was an extra lane, say, just for those who could afford it, well, I’d be happy to pay whatever charge was imposed. Driving seems to me the only form of transportation where everyone, from the well-off to the hoi polloi, is thrown in together with no possibility of separation. Who are all these people anyway? What are they doing on the roads at this time of the morning?’
‘Just regular Londoners, I expect,’ said the ghost, who had been dragged away from her second day of writing in what Beverley had claimed was an emergency.
‘Well, speaking as a mother, it’s a huge inconvenience,’ she sighed, pressing her hand on the horn for twenty seconds, hoping this might move things along. In the car in front, a small boy, aged no more than six or seven, turned around in the back seat and gave her the finger. ‘Did you see that?’ asked Beverley in outrage. ‘Did you see what he just did?’
‘Perhaps he thinks that blowing your horn won’t make things move any faster,’ suggested the ghost.
‘Why isn’t a boy of that age in school anyway?’ asked Beverley, ignoring this remark.
The line of cars began to move at last and she pressed her foot on the accelerator, inching forward so the front of her Audi and the bumper of the Prius ahead were practically kissing. When the lights turned red once more, she uttered a profanity and pressed the horn again. This time, the little boy raised himself in the back seat, lowered his trousers and presented her with his bare bottom, wiggling it back and forth in great delight, and she looked away.
‘If I had a child like that,’ she said, ‘I’d drown him. I would, I promise you. I would hold his head down in a bucket of water, and there isn’t a jury in the land who would convict me.’
‘I imagine they might find one,’ said the ghost. ‘If they tried hard.’
‘You know what your problem is?’ asked Beverley, sensing the sarcastic tone. She was already suspicious of the ghost, who had delivered some more pages earlier that morning, featuring a character having her first period while her family were skiing in Verbier, drops of blood spilling into the snow, which, in the ghost’s words, ‘it drank up quickly, the ice becoming increasingly vampiric with each womanly expulsion from Natalya’s womb’. Beverley had read the passage in disgust and sent a terse email in reply, pointing out that, as discussed, the women in her novels did not menstruate, nor did they urinate or defecate. At a push, they could blow their noses, but only if they were seated in a doctor’s surgery at the time and the doctor in question was a handsome, single man with a large fortune, a dead wife, an adorable toddler and a broken heart.
‘What?’ asked the ghost. ‘What’s my problem?’
‘You think that people like me, wealthy people, should behave like everyone else and be treated like everyone else. We don’t, we can’t, and we shouldn’t be. We’ve worked hard for our money, we give an inordinate amount back to fund the essential services that keep this country running, and, in doing so, we deserve to have our lives made a little easier. But instead, we’re let down at every turn. Let me give you an example. When I fly to America, say, naturally, I go first class and am taken in through the first-class security lane, and a few minutes later I’m in the British Airways first-class lounge. Bliss. The bubble opens and welcomes one inside. But between the two, there’s a good ten minutes’ walk. And during that time, I am stranded among the economy- and business-class passengers, in their shorts and their too-tight T-shirts, drinking beer at eight o’clock in the morning and already getting into fights with each other. Don’t you think there should be a separate area for me to walk through? I’m paying good money, so why should I have to mix with the everyday folk?’
‘Like your readers?’
‘Like my readers. Exactly. I wrote a letter to The Times on this subject last year and, inexplicably, they didn’t publish it. I assume it must have got lost in the post.’
The traffic moved forward again and, to Beverley’s relief, the little boy’s car took a different route to hers, turning left as they approached the Marylebone Road crossing.
‘It’s not that I dislike the poor,’ continued Beverley, warming to her theme. ‘Indeed, one is grateful for them. After all, if there were no poor people, then, by extension, there would be no rich people. We’d all be the same. Like in one of your communist countries.’ She sighed. ‘How is Ustym Karmaliuk, by the way? Is he doing okay?’
The ghost lifted the lid of the shoe box and looked inside. The tortoise was resting its head inside an After Eight wrapper.
‘I think he’s asleep,’ said the ghost.
‘Is he breathing?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Put your finger to his throat.’
The ghost did as instructed.
‘He’s breathing,’ she confirmed.
‘Good. Let’s not wake him. He’ll only be cranky later if we do. Anyway, what was I saying?’
‘Something about how disappointing it is that, in 2021, there’s a spoilt, privileged and entitled upper class who, because they’ve somehow stumbled into money despite lacking intelligence, compassion or any sense of decency, think they’re superior to hard-working men and women.’