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Thirteen
Sebastian
Beaumont
Extract from 'Thirteen'
It was at around that time that I began to be intrigued
by'Valerie'. She was perhaps in
her late twenties and obviously ill. She travelled
from 13 Wish Road to the Cornerstone Community Centre
on Palmeira Square every Monday and Thursday evening
for her'positive thinking' classes. Her
scent of lavender and citrus was one of those lingering
smells that would surprise me long after I'd
dropped her off. I would get a haunting echo
of it, reverberating somehow as it diminished throughout
the evening.
One of the
things about Valerie that I found shocking was that, although I could see that
she was deteriorating, I was still totally unprepared for the first time I
saw her genuinely, desperately sick. She was helped out of the house
by a nurse, who smiled at me appreciatively when I opened the cab door and
said:'Could you get them to help at the other end? They're
expecting you, and they've got a wheelchair ready.''Of
course,' I told the nurse, whose dark blue uniform made Valerie's
illness seem suddenly, intensely real.
Valerie
herself was as serene as ever. I couldn't think of anything to
say, so she was the first to break the silence. She spoke in a new-whisper.
'Snowdrops
are going to be out soon,' she said.'The shoots are coming
up in the garden. I hope I'll get to see them bloom. They're
so delicate.'
I glanced
across at her, at her frailty, and wondered at how gracefully she could refer
to her impending death.
'Yes,' I
said, and added after a pause:'though I think I prefer bluebells. Have
you seen some of the bluebell woods out towards Haywards Heath?'
'Yes,' she
said with pleasure.'I really think that, in profusion, they are
the most… wonderful colour.'
When I stopped
the cab I said,'Do you know when your class finishes this evening? I'd
be happy to come back and collect you.'
She smiled,
and leaned over slightly to pat my arm.
'It's
okay,' she told me,'Malcolm, the man who runs the course, will
be giving me a lift home this evening. But thank you.'
The next
time I saw her, she had to be helped down the path by the nurse, who accompanied
her in the taxi and who went off to get a wheelchair at the other end. I
got out as usual and opened the passenger door and Valerie took my hand. And,
as I helped her up, her body buckled slightly so that I had to catch her round
the waist. She was emaciated, and clutched at me slightly as she righted
herself, and she smiled with gratitude and said'Thank you'. I
looked at her, just looked at her, as the nurse came down the ramp with a wheelchair
and whisked her away.
I was never
asked to collect her again.
A couple
of weeks later, the subject of Valerie came up when I radioed Sal at the office,
to order a return lift for the fare I'd just dropped off. Sal was
one of the night staff in the radio room and had often allocated me the Wish
Road job. As it was a soporifically quiet evening, I knew she
wasn't busy, so I chatted for a while and then asked,'Oh, by the
way, Sal, do you remember that sick girl who used to go to the Cornerstone
Community Centre? Did she die? I haven't picked her up for
a while, and I just wondered.'
'Doesn't
ring a bell, Stephen,' she said,'where did she live?'
'13
Wish Road.'
And
then Sal said the words that would change everything.
'But
Stephen,' she told me,'there's no such address. Wish
Road doesn't have a number thirteen.'
I stared
at the hand set.
'Are you sure?'
'Yup,' she
told me.'Sorry I can't be more helpful, Stephen. This
one hasn't come through us. Are you sure she wasn't one of
your private clients?'
I drove
to Wish Road, mystified by Sal's assertion that there was no number thirteen. But
she was right. Someone had been sufficiently superstitious to make sure
there wasn't a number thirteen. The odd numbers went: 7,9,11,11a,15
17… There was no thirteen, and number 11a was a totally different
house from the one that I'd been visiting all this time to collect Valerie. It
was a plain building, from the fifties probably, with a built-in garage that
had a brand new metal door painted white and a small garden, full of roses. Number
13 had been a standard 1930s semi, with diamond-leaded windows and peeling
green windowsills in need of a lick of fresh paint.
If the house
I'd been collecting Valerie from wasn't on Wish Road, where was it? I
felt a curious feeling of horror at this thought, because it seemed so bizarre
and impossible. Okay, I would agree that I've led a sheltered life
and because of that, I can accept that there are some things I haven't
experienced. But houses that disappear?
My first
reaction was to assume that I must have been waiting in an adjacent road, mistakenly
thinking of it as Wish Road. But no, Wish Road was beside Wish Park,
and there – as I looked round – was the tree whose shade I'd
so often parked beneath as I waited for Valerie's bookings to come through. And,
though Sal had said so casually that it must have been one of my private clients,
at this stage in my taxiing career I had no private clients.
I sat at
the wheel of my cab and logged the computer onto'manual', so that
I was off-system, and sat looking at 11a Wish Road and thought, What does
this mean?
And then
I remembered. The driver. Phil. Who'd said those enigmatic
words to me when I'd talked to him about my oddly altered perception
when I was exhausted.
What had he said?'Don't go there.'
He'd
known something.
I radioed
Sal once more.
'Is
Phil on this evening?' I asked her and, when she told me that he was,
I drove back to Boundary Road and staked out the office. I parked up
by the Audi franchise near the tennis courts, where I could be inconspicuous,
then logged out and waited. If anything was guaranteed to make me feel
strange, it was sitting in my cab in silence as the calm of the dead of night
settled precariously around me. The only sound was that of the engine,
which I would run every now and then to keep the cab warm. It seemed
that I had to wait an incredibly long time, but it can't have been more
than an hour or so before I saw Phil park up and go into the office. I
got out of the cab, crossed over, and followed him in.
He was by
the coffee machine as I came down the corridor.
'Hi,
Stephen,' he said,'coffee?'
I nodded
and he pressed a button on the machine and I watched the desultory trickle
of coffee dribble down into the brown, ribbed plastic cup.
'Quiet
night,' he said.
'Phil,' I
said,'I'm glad I bumped into you, because I wanted to ask you
something…'
He glanced
at me questioningly as he passed me my coffee.
'Something's happened,' I said.
He saw my expression, raised his hand to silence me
and said,'Don't tell me. I don't
want to know.'
He was glaring at me. I was so surprised
by his reaction that I was speechless for a moment.
'I can see,' he said,'that you've crossed the threshold. I
did it once or twice in my early days as a driver. A lot of drivers
who've done the night shift have come pretty close to it, though most
of them will deny it. One or two that I've known over the years
have dabbled in it. But I've only known one person who really tried
to find out about it. A good friend of mine.'
'What happened to him?' I asked
'He died.'
© Sebastian Beaumont 2006 |
