Читать книгу Contacts - Mark Watson - Страница 15

At about the time James stabbed the screen to dispatch his news, Karl had been waiting to pick up an important passenger from the SSE Arena, formerly Wembley Arena, and take him all the way to Newcastle. This should be just short of a five-hour drive at this time of night, if he kept to the speed limit, which of course he wouldn’t. Newcastle was a fair old schlep, as Karl was fond of saying – but he was happy doing it himself. There weren’t many drivers he’d trust with a VIP job. There were even fewer these days, without James. And besides, there weren’t many drivers who he’d be happy to see earning the money, when he could earn it himself. Yes, Karl was the boss now, so every journey was arguably earning him money. But when he was at the wheel, he was essentially making money for his own business and then paying himself pocket money from that business. It was like being, as he’d recently said at a party, both the ringmaster and the elephant. It didn’t really make sense because elephants in a circus didn’t get paid, and in fact circuses weren’t allowed to have them any more, but it had gone down well with the table, and the reception sometimes meant more than the truth.

Anyway, you didn’t know how long it was going to last, this job, any job, not even when you were in charge. Not in – as radio hosts were always saying – ‘the current climate’. There were plenty of younger drivers who would have taken this in a heartbeat. Karl had been at the bottom of the ladder long enough. He knew that hunger.

There was lots of it about. That hunger. Some of the young ones would keep going till they fell asleep at the wheel, if he let them. Everyone needed the wedge. The fella who’d replaced James had recently done an eighteen-hour stint, which wasn’t technically illegal, but also wasn’t technically a good idea at all. By the end of the shift, his texts had read as if a dog was walking across the screen. Yes, there were a dozen of them who’d do the big schleps. It was where the proper money was. And some of these gold card clients, like the DJ geezer who was currently in the back of Karl’s car, were also capable of coming out with fairy-tale tips. A footballer had once given Karl a pair of trainers, brand new, and – as it turned out – worth £400. Just handed them over at the drop-off. ‘Do you want these, pal?’ Karl had put them on eBay, and someone had paid the reserve price before he got home.

A story had done the rounds about a female driver – little bit of a rarity, in this industry – who’d got a pop star to Gatwick against a very tight deadline and, the next morning, found ten grand in her account. No reference. No sender name. Just a set of life-changing digits. And she’d gone well over the limit, by all accounts. She could have lost her licence, game over. Or, of course, lost more than that. Someone pulls out at a corner, she goes into the back of them, lights out. But the point was, none of these things did happen. She won the gamble and she won the ten thousand big ones. And that was what you were in this job for.

How many other jobs could you watch money coming in every time you got a text, any time the phone hummed in its little perch on the dashboard? And how many people like Karl, whose dad used to wallop him, who dropped out of school at 16, could have built an app like that? Or rather a whole empire, powered by an app?

Yes, life was sweeter than he’d ever thought it could be. But tonight – tonight, as he and James used to say, had not been the dream.

First: the customer, the DJ, had an attitude on him. He wanted to sleep, in fact he had to sleep, that was his thing. As soon as he got in the back. ‘I have to sleep, mate. All the way, yeah? Wake me up at the hotel, I don’t want to wake up at all till then. At all. Yeah?’ Fair enough, it was late: though from what Karl could make out, the geezer had only been on stage for an hour. You’d think he’d been doing mountain rescue the way he talked, you’d think he’d been doing mountain rescue and working a pizza oven at the same time. Still. Fine. Customer always right. But Karl didn’t have the power to guarantee that the guy could ‘just sleep’ all the way. This wasn’t a magic carpet service. This was two hundred and eighty-two miles of bloody tarmac.

And tonight, crossing even a tiny area of that tarmac had been the ball-ache to end all ball-aches. More than half an hour to get away from the Wembley area. The stadium, the arena, all of it, absolute murder to get away from. If Karl had three wishes, he’d use one of them to set the whole place on fire. Not with people in it; he wasn’t a psychopath. And anyway, the genies couldn’t kill people, could they – at least not in Aladdin. That was one of the terms and conditions. Yeah, wish one would be to tear down this whole area. Wish two, that he’d never given James the job of driving Hamish Elton, so he’d never have had to sack him. Wish three, thought Karl, glancing in the rear-view mirror to make sure the guy was asleep, would be the old ‘infinite wishes’ trick, but they probably had a procedure for that, so that people couldn’t take the piss. Well. Karl wasn’t going to wait around for genies. He was used to working his own miracles. He wasn’t going to fuck about rubbing a lamp when his phone contained the riches it did.

A slalom of temporary traffic lights, hi-vis jackets carving up the roads. Like most drivers in a big city, Karl had long stopped associating workmen with any sort of improvement or even change. He barely saw them as people. He just saw a sort of cartoon figure, a helium balloon with a grinning face on it, who’d come out with a spade just for the fun of it, to make a great big hole where Karl wanted his car to go.

The satnav was already showing forty minutes later than its original estimate. Karl always felt like he was losing a game when that happened; he loved steaming into town ahead of the original time. No, they weren’t looking at being in Newcastle till the thick end of 5 a.m. at this rate. Bit of McDonald’s or something, another Red Bull, turn around, back to London for mid-morning. And that was if it went well. It would be Saturday morning coming back, normally not too bad, but you never knew. If he got caught up on the M1 coming back into London, if there was an accident or something, he might as well stop off and buy a Santa hat for nine months’ time because that was roughly when he’d be back at his gaff.

He sighed as the fake traffic lights stopped him once more and swigged from the can in the drinks’ holder. Karl was proud of himself for giving up coffee, which made you too jittery, but if he was honest he was now equally addicted to energy drinks, which also made you jittery and cost four times as much. Also, he’d overdone it: he would need to piss like a donkey well before Newcastle, at this rate. But never mind. The DJ fella was worth it. The money, transferred by his management, was already in the company’s account. Karl didn’t know much about the man: he hadn’t signed up for the app, as some passengers did, unwittingly granting Karl access to a huge amount of their personal information. But he was obviously a big deal and his management company was worth about ten of these jobs a year. Yep, this geezer – whoever he was – was getting to Newcastle asleep if Karl had to chloroform him and charter a private jet.

When he was driving, the business essentially ran itself. The app, its central nervous system, paired passengers and drivers instantly. Drivers knew to contact passengers directly if there was a problem. In an emergency they could go to Karl’s assistant, Hugo, who was always awake when Karl was asleep or at work. Hugo had psoriasis and it came on like buggery at night, which was a shocker for him but made him perfect for these shifts. In short, it would take what Karl had once termed a ‘double emergency’ before he had anything to worry about at the wheel. Like the one he’d had to sacrifice James for.

So when James’s suicide text slid onto the screen, it was displaced within sixty seconds by four notifications, and disappeared. A year ago, this would not have happened, even with all the noise on Karl’s phone, because anyone on Karl’s ‘favourite contacts’ list was fast-tracked by another app; their messages would stick at the top of his inbox. This allowed him to make sure that his mum, for example, could always reach him when he was out and about. But Karl had had to remove James from the favourites list when he removed him from the job, because James’s pleading texts had made him feel bad. Karl wasn’t in the business of feeling bad; he’d felt awful quite enough when he was growing up – when he lay awake sobbing at night, when he came back with his school report shaking in case it wasn’t good enough.

That was the past. The present was about good vibes. The vibes from James, since he had to leave the company, were not surprisingly less than good. And so the two of them hadn’t been in touch for a few months now, and that record continued as Karl continued towards Newcastle, and James’s train – for the time being, on a similar route – proceeded towards what would be his last ever appointment.