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.
âI MEAN,â says her second driver of the day, âpeople 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 â weâre not talking the minicab boys, of course â with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. I myself have qualifications in ancient writings. I did a course on the Romans and I still find â weâll do a left here, itâs chocker to Cheapside â that Senecaâs writings are a whopping great reserve of strength.â
âSenecaâs bollocks,â Joy mutters.
âHeâs the bollocks all right, couldnât agree more.â
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 heâs 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? Sheâll 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.
âOf course,â he continues, âSeneca remains one of the few popular philosophers of the period. There are many works since in which heâs referenced. Many works.â
âAppears in Dante,â she says, feeling the need to show a little knowledge.
âHeâs in Chaucer, heâs in Dante. Very quotable, like Virginil.â
âVirgil.â
âMy set reading included the old Erasmus edition. Yeah. Found it bloody fascinating.â
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.
âDonât take this the wrong way,â he says, âbut you seem messed up. Is that blood on your shirt?â
âMud.â
âAnd in your hair?â
âMoss.â
âMoss?â
âMoss.â
âI seeâ¦â
Why isnât everyone blowing their brains out? Why donât 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 thatâs little more than a speck of dust, hitches a ride in the wet wipeâs 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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