Joy by Jonathan Lee

Author:Jonathan Lee [Lee, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

3.05 p.m.

‘I MEAN,’ says her second driver of the day, ‘people will assume a certain ignorance of your basic cabbie. No, no, hear me out. Not everyone. But some. Many. The snobbish or selfish. Whereas in fact I know drivers – we’re not talking the minicab boys, of course – with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. I myself have qualifications in ancient writings. I did a course on the Romans and I still find – we’ll do a left here, it’s chocker to Cheapside – that Seneca’s writings are a whopping great reserve of strength.’

‘Seneca’s bollocks,’ Joy mutters.

‘He’s the bollocks all right, couldn’t agree more.’

His face hangs big and rosy in the rear-view mirror, a pink planet of people seen and people judged. With a twitch of its twenty-five-foot turning circle, an engineering feat he’s already explained in lavish detail, the black cab banks into a thin dark street. Death-shaped cameras are poised on posts. Her heart beats distastefully in its chest. How has she failed at this, the easiest of pursuits, the long falling into nothing? She’ll go to the office, pick up the second tub of pills from her desk drawer, head back to the Heath and see the job through. Maybe buy a knife too, in case she needs it as a fallback, or for killing troublesome squirrels.

‘Of course,’ he continues, ‘Seneca remains one of the few popular philosophers of the period. There are many works since in which he’s referenced. Many works.’

‘Appears in Dante,’ she says, feeling the need to show a little knowledge.

‘He’s in Chaucer, he’s in Dante. Very quotable, like Virginil.’

‘Virgil.’

‘My set reading included the old Erasmus edition. Yeah. Found it bloody fascinating.’

Joy has unclipped her seat belt. She is trying to use a wet wipe on her shoe. The portion of properly swallowed sedative is making this tricky. She has begun to see double of everything: twenty polished pink toenails, four ankles, and two signs about the fouling charge. She may well have to pay if they continue through dizzying backstreets, tyres hiccuping over welts in the road, the whole vehicle inviting her to vomit.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ he says, ‘but you seem messed up. Is that blood on your shirt?’

‘Mud.’

‘And in your hair?’

‘Moss.’

‘Moss?’

‘Moss.’

‘I see…’

Why isn’t everyone blowing their brains out? Why don’t they make bigger wet wipes? With the driver forced to pause at traffic lights she asks him for another one from the glove compartment, and with his face bathed in a red glow which with dreamlike speed becomes amber, then green, he passes it through the perspex window like that Chinese client of hers always gives his card: two-handed. A small fly, one of those that’s little more than a speck of dust, hitches a ride in the wet wipe’s airspace. She claps it dead mid-flight. You kill the things that bug you. The taxi driver is beginning to bug her. She wishes she could get her old driver back, the mysterious taciturn dreadlocked guy who condensed

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