TAXI STORY
BY
GREG BOGAERTS
I’d lead what is called a sheltered existence my life bound by a strict regime of school, homework, swimming training and practising classical piano, so when school finished all that came to an end. In my early twenties I was lost. I didn’t know what to do; I’d left my job as an articled clerk, then I’d dropped out of university a year later.
I spent a lot of time early in the morning looking in the bathroom mirror, but it was as though something perpetually jarred inside of me making my form a blur in the glass; I couldn’t focus myself. I cut myself bloody every time I tried to shave so I grew a beard to stop the carnage I told myself, but I knew I was hiding behind the red thatch. I looked like Van Gogh, and I wondered how long it would be before I cut off an earlobe or shot myself.
Out of desperation I went and got my taxi licence, and, before I knew it I was spending most of my time on the streets of Newcastle mostly after dark. It was an education of another kind to that found at school, uni or in a solicitor’s office. The verbal abuse of the drunks, the threat of physical violence made by passengers became a rude and rough litany, a form of hypnosis that numbed me and became some sort of survival made.
After a year of it and still being above ground, I started to take a perverse enjoyment in the world of drunks, pimps, whores, rugby league hooligans and those who hated me simply because they’d had a bad night or a bad life. The mad and the sad and the desperate came out after dark in Newcastle. It was a steel-making Dante’s Inferno, but I should have been more wary, I shouldn’t have romanticised the danger, I should have seen the reality for what it was and what it might do to me namely maim me or kill me.
There was a lesson waiting to be learnt and she got into my cab one late afternoon. I picked her up in a house in Merewether Heights; she was old and bent, her hair was grey and bundled up in French rolls on top of her bird-like skull. She spoke in a whisper as if she’d was recovering from throat surgery. Her black carrion bird eyes contradicted the soft pink powdered cheeks.
“Carrington thanks, dear. Robertson Street down the mangrove end.”
I’d made a point of learning all the streets and lanes of Carrington not so much to earn money by knowing where to pick up and take passengers to in the old suburb, but because the place was full of the mystery of the past. It had been the sight of a tent town during the Depression, it had been a hangout for razor gangs after both world wars, now it was a haven for a hidden aboriginal population that only ventured forth under cover of dark and it was a place for transsexuals, drag queens and prostitutes.
I wondered what an old, well-dressed woman was doing going from Merewether Heights to Carro, and carrying a large cane basket she placed on the seat between herself and me. It was as though she was a fairy god mother going to see children, who had been well behaved to give them presents. But there didn’t seem to be many children on Carrington let alone good ones.
The cab rattled over the old bridge; I got a glimpse of the riverbed below littered with rusty industrial waste, I saw the mangroves in the distance, black bars of trunks sunk into deep black mud. Swinging the cab into a back lane I saw the rats and giant mud crabs crawling the black mud ooze, scavenging whatever food they could find left by the receding estuary tide.
A long grey rat, its spine pushing hard against its thin skin rose on its hindquarters, trying to wrest a fish head from the grasp of a crab. I saw the crustacean’s claw flash and heard the rat scream as the pincer crushed one of the rodent’s legs. Blood spattered, the old woman watched, but she sat silent, seemingly unmoved. I drove on, turning the taxi into Robertson Street.
I pulled up at the address, an old miner’s cottage, the windows made blind eyes by heavy wooden louvers. The old lady got out, hobbled up the gutter, swung the gate back with surprising strength and knocked at the door. A young bloke, eyes blurred by booze and others substances opened the door; he was thin and as pale as a Seventh Day Adventist. Smiling a grateful smile he took a small bag from the old woman, placed something in her hand in return and closed the door.
The old lady got back in the cab and told me the next address, a narrow street in Tighes Hill. I eyed her suspiciously as she stared out the window and I drove. She sensed the inspection immediately, whipping around her head like a flathead see sawing its way through a fishing line. Her look was a break-away bush fire of threat.
She cowed me, I looked away.
“Just concentrate on the road, sonny, and you’ll be okay,” she said in a voice as hard as the steel ingots that were still being made at the BHP.
I swung the cab off the Gross Street Bridge and plummeted down the sudden drop of Williams Street. Just before the bridge spanning theThrosby Creek Basin I turned right and stopped at the address, another miner’s cottage.
The old woman dropped off another bag from the basket, but this time she didn’t attempt to hide the money she took from the pie-eyed, bare-foot young woman, holding a baby.
“Greenway Street Wickham next, thanks, lovie,” the old lady told me.
It was a good fare; two hours after picking her up her basket was empty and she instructed me to take her back to Merewether Heights. I had enough money from the one job to go home if I wanted.
I stopped in Hickson Street, Burwood Beach far below the steep cliff, the coastline running in half valleys south to Sydney. Her house was a three-storied brick and tile job. Hang gliders skittered close to the façade.
“Fucking nuisances,” she spat.
She paid the fare and gave me a tip of twenty bucks; more than a little unusual because Novocastrians don’t give tips anytime or anywhere. The bloke who trained us to be taxi drivers had been asked by a rookie cabbie whether cabbies got to keep all of the tips and not give a cut to the owners. The trainer’s reply had been that you didn’t have to worry about that because the only tips in Newcastle were Shortland Garbage Tip and Redhead Garbage Tip.
“Give me your phone number. I’ll ring you when I need you. It’s a good fare and there will always be a tip at the end of each journey,” she said.
I looked bemused and her anger flared, the woman refusing to believe someone might no co-operate or not do what she commanded. Again I backed down and agreed.
Over the next eighteen months I picked her up once a week usually Friday and we did the rounds dropping off plastic bags, collecting money. I learnt not to ask questions, and to speak only when she spoke to me which was hardly ever. I wondered about the house on Merewether Heights, but it didn’t take much to work out that she lived there from the earnings she made delivering illicit goods to her customers.
How she came to be involved in running drugs was beyond me and that in itself made her a figure of mystery to me. I came to look forward to the fare, the romance of the illegality of what the old woman was doing and how I was by association part of a subterranean world.
Occasionally she made me deviate from the usual route. The address was in Georgetown behind the Lamp Works, and whenever she knocked on the door of the house a giant Samoan answered. Money changed hands, the huge man nodded as she instructed him about something.
After one such visit she got back in and saw the inquisitive look on my face.
“Curiosity killed the cat, sonny. Even you should know that even if you’re still shitting yellow. Just to wipe that stupid look off your face, I use him when someone welshes, doesn’t pay or is late paying. They’re always punctual the next time after Mick has gone to see them. And one more thing, you might think that you know it all because you’ve been driving me around, but you know fuck all,” she said, her eyes sparkling hard gems of malicious glee.
After that she spoke to me more often, but it was always to tell me I should go back to university to finish my teaching degree. The streets of Newcastle were no place for me, she said.
“But I don’t belong in school and certainly not in a staff room with the other teachers. I’ve been there and done that,” I told her.
“You’ve been there, but you didn’t finish it. Far better you sit in a nice clean safe staff room full of morons who call themselves teachers because they know a little more than their students than perish out here. Better to pretend you belong there than play act belonging with me” she said.
“But I’m part of your set-up. You depend on me,” I said.
Her laugh was a barbed wire steel star caught in her gullet.
“You’re nothing, sonny. I can replace you in a second. You’ve lost your sense if reality, that’s if you ever had one. What I do isn’t a game. It’s not something you play at and get excited by because you think it’s cool, an adventure that makes you different from the rest of the staid Novocastrians. What I do isn’t some form of revolution and defiance. It’s nasty, people get killed and that might happen to you. I think you’ve served your purpose so I’m cutting you free for your own good.”
I protested loudly, but she ignored me, got out of the cab and disappeared behind the steel gates of the monolithic monstrosity in Hickson Street.
I went back to uni and finished the degree not so much because I wanted to or because I understood it was a safer thing to do, but because I was convinced the old woman was the embodiment of wisdom, that somehow her life amongst the small time criminals of Newcastle had endowed her with a sagacity that was of a type superior to any form of knowledge found in a class room, a lecture theatre or any office of the commercially competent.
Once, on my way home from school, I saw my replacement driving the old woman in his taxi, but soon after his photo appeared on the front page of the local rag. He’d been found murdered, his throat cut, the body slumped in the cab.
I drove my car to Hickson Street; the windows and doors of the house were open, the inside stripped bare. Outside, sitting on the top of a pile of household debris was the old woman’s basket. It was empty. I never saw nor heard of her again.
* * * *
I’ve been teaching at the same school in Newcastle for twenty years now. I move anonymously amongst the other teachers and students. I’m part of the furniture; I’m like another piece of graffittti scrawled by a student on a class room desk.
It’s only in the past two months I’ve started to steal. I go through the purses the female teachers leave in the staffroom. I only take small change.
END
