dérives

2010-08-02T08:47:00.001+10:00

the bondi tenner

2009-11-19T10:03:00.003+11:00

So on Tuesday arvo I was mumbling around in Bondi, taking some old chap home with his shopping and his beer, when something blue blew along the road in front of the cab. What was that? my fare said. It looked like a ten dollar note, I replied. Go and get it! he said. Shall I? I said. Yeah, go on, mate, spin around the roundabout . . . Well I did, and it was, and it pleased both of us mightily. He got a discount on his fare and I got - ten bucks. I went around the block again, feeling dead lucky, and on the corner of Campbell Parade and Hall Street picked up a cheery couple maybe in their thirties. Going to Clovelly via Penkivil Street, which is a bit of an odd way to go but never mind. They asked me how my day was going so I told them about the tenner; they started laughing like drains. He, Kelvin, was a Kiwi and she, Kim, an Aussie. Not long together and full of love. And laughter. Along Penkivil Street they turned out to be looking for a car and, when they found it there, the story came out. Kim's ex, who left her for another woman eleven months ago, had the day before got the key to her flat from the real estate, gone around there while she was at work, and stripped the place of furniture and effects. Took everything. They'd called the cops but the cops said they couldn't do anything because his name was still on the lease. Why the real estate, who knew he didn't live there anymore, gave him the key is not known. Anyway, they were thinking of a little revenge. She, Kim, still has the spare key to her ex's car and that's what they were looking for in Penkivil Street. Their favoured strategy was to lift the mats and pour milk on the carpets and let it go sour: imagine the stench after the car had been parked twenty-four hours in the hot sun. You'd never get rid of it. I told them about the old sugar in the petrol tank trick, but that of course will ruin the engine. Potatoes in the exhaust, bananas in the transmission, the first of which is really just to give the guy a fright, and the second a means of disguising a problem when you're trying to sell a dodgy car. It was very funny and we had a lot of laughs as we chortled our way through Waverley and Bronte to Clovelly. When they got out Kim said, much as she'd like to, she didn't really think she could sugar his petrol tank; but the milk . . . yeah, maybe. She gave me a fifty and said to make it a twenty dollar fare, even though there was only thirteen or fourteen on the meter. I gave her a twenty and a ten in change; the ten, I told her, was the lucky one I found rolling down Sir Thomas Mitchell Road. Couldn't have gone to a nicer home.

we fall but we keep getting up

2009-10-23T14:05:00.004+11:00

If you're out on the streets of the city at all hours, as I am, you see odd things, some unforgettable. I remember stopping one night about 2 am for a woman crying her eyes out in a gutter in Dulwich Hill. She didn't even register my presence. Another time I saw, in some dark street off the Princes Highway in Rockdale, what I am sure was a murdered man lying on his back on a concrete loading dock outside a warehouse building. That time I didn't stop but soon after passed the cops, sirens wailing, coming to attend to the scene of the crime. And now another one I won't ever be able to banish from my mind. It was maybe three-twenty on Monday afternoon, I was taking a Brazilian au pair and her precocious charge from his prep school in Bellevue Hill to the family home in Vaucluse when I saw, on a foreshore lawn in Rose Bay, in bright sunlight a street person falling as he tried to cross that wide verge into the shade of the fig trees beyond. Just the nondescript clothes gone khaki with age and dirt, the pale builder's smile blinking out the top of his pants and the helpless way he went backwards onto the sweet green grass: as if he would never rise again. All the sad debris he carried scattering as he went down. The Brazilian saw it too, we were conversing at the time, but although we both registered the moment, neither of us said anything about it. Maybe for the sake of the boy, I don't know.

Drunks

2009-10-21T14:58:00.002+11:00

Some days it is as if everyone is drunk - yesterday was one. Or maybe it's just because I tend to wait outside the Tea Gardens Hotel at Bondi Junction where, it seems, the entirety of the considerable Irish diaspora in the Eastern Suburbs goes to water its - their - collective whistle. One boyo I took to Kensington had started the day there at 7.30, drunk with his workmates until 10.30, gone off to pour a concrete slab for the extension of someone's house, then gone back to the pub for the rest of the afternoon: he told his girlfriend on the phone that he'd spent the day drinking beer and driving around in trucks. Another had a bigger story to tell. He was a handsome fellow wearing a blue shirt half undone and giddy-giddy gout over black trousers and boots and, even at a distance, I could see he was shickered. He got in, slurred the name of the street he wanted and then apologised for his drunken state. Y'see, he explained, I just got off being sent to jail for five years and I been celebrating. He lives in Birriga Road, Bellevue Hill where, a few months ago, work of some kind was being done on the margins of the street or the footpath; barriers were erected and parking restrictions in force for the two weeks the work would take. But it was all done in one, whereupon the municipal authority took the barriers away and the residents resumed leaving their cars outside their houses; but the parking restrictions remained. That second week the Grey Bombers swooped and made a mint for the Council. My fare came back from a bad day at work (all these Irish boys seem to be in construction) to find a fellow writing him out a ticket. He protested, to no avail: the parking officer wouldn't listen, told him he didn't give a shit. So my boyo hit him. Hard enough that the officer fell backwards into the street and struck the back of his head on the curb. This is quite a common cause of death in urban conflicts these days, so I guess these two were lucky that the officer, though badly messed up and still in hospital, didn't die. My fare hired an expensive lawyer (he owes seven grand) but, from his description of the hearing, that might have been unnecessary: he got up after the formal part of the proceedings was over, told the judge that he was guilty, was very very sorry and would for the rest of his life have on his conscience that he had badly hurt a fellow human being. He got a two year good behaviour bond . . . and the lawyer's bill. I told this story to another fellow, not drunk, with buck teeth, who was going down to the beach at Bondi, and he told me about a mate of his, a young boxer, who in Glebe one night punched a drunk who would not stop hassling his girlfriend. Same circumstance, the drunk fell backwards, hit his head - and died. The boxer, who was just 24 years old and not drunk at the time, got four years. He had no previous involvement with drugs, but in jail became a heroin addict and, after he got out, died of an overdose. I don't mind drunk people if they are polite: no complaints about the affable chap I picked up late afternoon in Crown Street, about my age and stinking of spirits, whom I took down to a big house in exclusive Robertson Road, Centenniel Park, where Patrick White used to live. A bit later, in The Rocks, where I never usually go, there was a tall young blond woman standing in the street talking on her mobile phone who hailed me and asked to be taken to Cammeray. She was drunk too and sat in the front seat loudly recounting to her friend that day's triumph: her first gig as a news-reader on radio JJJ. When she finished with that friend she rang another and told her the story too, with variations and digressions, including a startling analysis of a friend's marriage troubles. Anyway, once she had finished that second call, she surprised me by apologising for her rudeness and explaining how she was just so excited, she couldn't help herself . . . most people don't even realise, I told her. My last ride was a weird, sober coda to the night. I was trundling back to Rose Bay to end the shift when I saw a taxi broken down on the other side of Old South Head Road, just up from the turn-off to Curlewis Street. Two chubby girls in mini-skirts were lighting up fags and the young Indian driver was on his mobile. I went through the lights, did a U turn at the servo there, and back to see if I could help. The two girls were young pommies from the provinces, totally star struck with Sydney; they told me what happened. The driver had been barrelling up Blair Street towards the intersection and hadn't seen or else ignored the round-about there. He hit it front on at speed, the car flew, the girls' heads jolted up to strike the roof, the back right hand tyre on the station wagon burst with the impact . . . he seemed proud rather than ashamed of his exploit and as I accelerated up Old South Head, heading for the Wylde Bar at the Cross, I saw him start to drive his crippled car, stupidly if slowly, up the hill after me.

last & first ride

2009-09-02T12:22:00.006+10:00

She's Oirish, walks with a frame, has big blue eyes and soft warm hands, is 91 years old and begins working on me the moment she gets in the cab. You're lovely fellah, she says with her hand resting upon mine, which is itself resting upon the gearstick. All you fellahs are lovely fellahs ... so kind to a poor auld woman such as meself ... This goes on for a while and then the pitch comes in: Why don't you turn the meter off, darlin', all the drivers do, it's only six dollars to where I'm goin' ... This is of course an outright lie, which she knows and I know and she knows I know. From the Junction down to Bondi Beach, especially at that time of day, when the schools are coming out, is ten at the least and more likely fifteen. I make my case and leave the meter running; she blithely changes the subject and begins instead to tell me about her life in Dublin, where she lived until she was 75, and her family in Australia and anything else that comes to mind. I do not expect to find myself and herself singin' In Dublin's fair city / where the girls are so pretty ... but that is in fact what happens. Soon enough we pull up outside the chemist just up from the old Astra Hotel, now apartments, where she lives and there's 14.75 on the meter. She takes out a miniscule purse and has a momentary (staged) panic that her money has all gone ... but really what she has is a ten and a five dollar note nestled among the receipts and scrips. Can you not give a discount to a poor auld woman? she wheedles and I can't help myself, I say ten. Orrghh, make it eight, won't you darlin'? she says and I do, I do! Give her two bucks. Scarcely believing my own foolishness. I get her frame out of the back seat, get her out of the front, prop her up on it and she tacks chortling away. I carry on, thinking that, though I'm marginally out of pocket, this way both of us feel good whereas the other way ... would be bad both ways. And maybe I'll have a lucky day ... I do. Eight hours and about $400.00 later I'm powering up Oxford Street on my way back to Rose Bay determined, this time, as I have three times previous, not to stop for that one last fare when two girls, waving frantically, come skittering onto the road from behind the back end of a bus and as I brake one of them spills her mobile phone, an i-phone or a palm pilot by the look of it, almost under the left front wheel of the cab, forcing me to brake harder. They get in. Going to Milsons Point. A blonde and a brunette, both young (20s), both shickered: the heady smell of spiritous fumes in the cab is so strong it makes me feel a little high. Brunette, who dropped the phone, gives it back to Blonde, assuring her it is unbroken. Then she asks me: Do you smoke? I say no and she swears, loud and long and startlingly explicit. A bit later she leans over from the back seat to show me something. I don't really see what it is but gather from what she says that it's a vibrator or perhaps the case of a vibrator. They both have one but it isn't clear exactly where they have them ... there's a bit of chat about battery strength and a few lewd double entendres; they're meeting a couple of lads at Milsons Point railway station and then, who knows. Lots of raucous laughter. You're a really cool taxi driver, says Brunette. And you're Australian. I tell her where I'm actually from and she tells me that her Dad was from Wellington and that the family lived for a while in Takaka. So it goes and soon we're over the bridge and heading down the hill towards Luna Park. I pull up near the railway station and Blonde starts to pay with her credit card ... twenty something dollars. While we're doing the business Brunette starts having a truly horrendous coughing fit, sounding like a 60 year old emphysemic not a babe of 22. When she recovers I say: That's a bad smoker's cough and she comes straight back with: That's not a smoker's cough, that's a frustrated person with a dildo up her arse. I look at her in true astonishment and she smiles back, louche, sultry and also very aware of how sexy she looks. I look over once more after I've done a U turn and am about to head off back up the hill. They are leaning in confab together against a low wall, heads bent, laughing like drains ...

sick sick

2009-08-26T16:20:00.009+10:00

If you hang around the Bondi Junction rank, as I do, you run the risk of picking up people who are so old and ill they're almost a medical emergency in themselves - albeit one that only wants to go home. One afternoon last week I come around the corner to find the rank - unbelievable! - empty but as I roar up to the front my heart sinks. There's a young woman wearing the uniform of a shop assistant (chemist, probably) standing there supporting an old one with white hair and a stick. Well, nothing for it but to be nice. I lean over and open the door, take the walking stick, while the chemist shop girl eases the old girl into her seat. Can you take her? she asks anxiously, her eyes searching mine. She's got money. I realise she's probably done this before and at least part of the relief of her anxiety involves successfully off-loading the problem onto someone else. Yes, I say. Of course. She hands me an address scrawled on a piece of paper. This is where she's going. I glance at it - Bondi. Not far. Can she talk? I ask, but the chemist shop girl is already closing the door. We're just through the lights when she shows that she can. I feel strange, she quavers. There's something wrong with me. I'm so cold. She has vivid blue eyes and, when she lays one hand upon mine, which is resting on the gearstick, it is as cold as ice. Where are you from? she goes on. Will you take me home? I have money. I tell her yes, I will, and where I'm from and then ask her the same question. Sweden, she replies, with a slight drawing up of her body and some pride in her voice; and I see she would once have been a beauty of that imperious Nordic kind. Then the quaver returns: There's something wrong with me ... and so it goes until, as we near her place, somehow her incapacity recedes and she shows herself quite capable of giving precise directions. Once outside the block of units where she lives (alone, she has told me several times) her helplessness returns and grows. She cannot pay but simply hands me her purse, which has about $80.00 in it. I resist temptation and carefully take out a 20 and put back a 5 - it's a 15 buck ride. Evidently she cannot now walk, will not take her stick, but grasps my hands with both of hers and insists I take her up to her flat. This is just what I don't want to happen but ... well ... I guide her to the fence and install her there while I park, turn off the motor, lock the car. We stumble sideways, inchwise, up the path to her entrance and then I see there is a security door. And she can't find her key. I'm not a patient person at the best of times and now I start to lose it. I ring the other bells, 1, 2, 3 until someone answers, and begin to explain the situation. Suddenly I hear this completely different voice, harsh and authoritative, behind me: I don't need help from anybody! The kind neighbour buzzes open the door at the same moment as Greta Garbo finds her key. I can tell from the look on her face that she knows she's made a tactical error and that I will never take her up to her apartment now; but she makes one more attempt to wheedle me inside. When that fails she draws herself up again proudly and, without deigning to use her stick at all, walks off up the hallway towards the lift, or maybe even the stairs.

Increasingly though I've taken to avoiding that rank in favour of the one outside the Tea Gardens Hotel just up the street on the same side. For some reason you wait a shorter time there and also pick up a different kind of fare - less of the shoppers taking their supermarket bags down to Bondi or Tamarama, more of the day trippers returning to homes in distant suburbs. She's one of those, a dignified old woman, beautiful, with tinted glasses perched on a great hooked nose, dark skin and a surprisingly intimate manner. I'm going to Ramsgate, she says. Do you know where that is? I do, but I'm less certain of the way when she says: Can we go by the sea? I want to look at the sea. This plea, for that is what it is, is delivered with a shrug and a certain air of - what? Insouciance? She doesn't think I'll know the way and she can't remember it herself. But her desire to see the sea is a constant and recurs all the long journey until at last we are on The Grand Parade at Brighton Le Sands and the flat blue waters of Botany Bay recede from us into the east. Then she looks out and falls silent. She is Armenian, with Romanian and German forebears on her mother's side; but French speaking and from Egypt, where she lived until we got fed up with the wars and came here. Perhaps it was a mistake. Her children are all grown up; her husband had a bad car accident two years ago and lost a leg, necessitating a move to the house where they live, not by the sea, which she clearly does not like. And now she herself is, as she puts it, not just sick but sick sick; on her way back from visiting one of her doctors: I have many doctors, you see. There is something about her, in her dignity and her beauty and her elegant forbearance, that makes me want to weep; and this feeling grows as we carry on talking about this and that, driving through clotted traffic towards a great bloody sunset over the western plains. She soon picks up that I write and extracts from me my name, which she repeats several times, filing it away in her memory. When I say there might have been Spanish blood on my father's side, because he was dark in that Cornish way, she says that the true Spanish were blond haired and blue eyed and the darkness came from the Moors. Who had certainly visited Ireland and perhaps Cornwall too. And that the original Turks were like that also, until the Arab conquests. And, further, that there was peace between the three religions of the East (she doesn't count Buddhism or any of those, she means Jews, Christians and Muslims) until the influx of European and especially German Jews, with their snobbism, changed everything. They disliked the real Jews, you know, she says. They wouldn't even say they were Jews. They called them Arabs. Plus this: religion is a private thing, it is between you and whoever you think god is. We leave the sea at Ramsgate Beach and she directs me through a maze of apartment buildings back of the strand, then behind a sports ground to a row of nouveau brick houses facing west towards a dark line of she-oaks and paperbark trees - probably a remnant of the lagoon that would once have stood here. You see, she says resignedly, while we reverse back towards a completely undistinguished single story brick bungalow surrounded with bare concrete that she didn't recognise the first time we passed. As she pays me (cash, $56.00) and I write her a receipt, I notice a ring on her right hand with a large purple-red stone, and remark upon it. She looks briefly at it: It's nothing special, she says. A tourmaline. But I like it. I leave her standing precariously, leaning on her stick, looking at that graceless, anonymous house as if at her own tomb.

Ping and the Ponce

2009-08-12T11:53:00.005+10:00

On Monday arvo Peter, the day driver, is late ... I hate this but am trying to control my tendency towards impatience and irritation. When he finally turns up - he's been shopping - I skip the usual leisurely cruise down to Bondi to look at the sea and go instead straight up the Junction. Just before pulling round the corner and onto the rank I see a dapper chap there lighting up a cigarette. He raises his hand and walks quickly towards me, taking two or three deep drags on his fag then throwing it down and climbing in the front. Chinatown, he says and takes out his mobile phone. He's maybe 60, grey-haired, a small, cocky fellow wearing immaculate clothes of an old-fashioned kind: a pink striped shirt, a waistcoat, grey trousers, a sports jacket, leather shoes. A ponce from another era. He has the wheeze of an incipient emphysemic as he rasps into the phone: Get me Ping. Various instructions to do with banking matters follow, delivered in a brusque, even imperious tone. Then he hangs up and calls a mate. You'll never guess who I just saw ... he begins. Your old boss! The story that ensues is one of marital wreck following upon a recently contracted liaison. He built her a mansion in Little Bay but now that everything has gone to hell it's all up for grabs. The pre-nupt. apparently won't stand up in court and anyway, matters soured long before: the day after the wedding she said to him that she was going to have his balls for breakfast. All this is relayed with reeking schadenfreude; then at the end he says: Oh, and by the way, he's still looking to buy a pub. Yeah, 800 ... He hangs up from his mate and calls Ping again to say give that bloke two grand in cash if he's still worried about the cheque clearing. She must have somehow demurred because what follows is a truly vicious explosion of phone rage: I don't fucking know, I'm stuck in fucking traffic, could be half an hour, could be five fucking minutes ... We are not stuck in traffic and never have been; it's a smooth run the whole way. He calms down a bit, repeats the instruction about the two grand then cuts the connection. I let him out on the corner of Sussex and Goulburn, opposite the Star Hotel, and while waiting for the lights to change, watch to see which way he goes ... down Goulburn, across the road, and into that vaguely pagoda shaped stumpy high rise on the corner of Dixon. A little strutting cockerel of man, some kind of shady character, with his money in gambling perhaps, or prostitution, or even, though I think this unlikely, drugs. As for Ping, I have no idea.

lies

2009-08-05T16:44:00.005+10:00

... so Monday was a cruise: I'd accumulated exactly $110.00 worth of dockets, credit card receipts etc., meaning that the shift cost me only the price of a tank of gas ($15.00) and I could keep the rest of the takings for myself. I went out hoping to get as many cash fares as I could and that's how it worked out ... only one person all night paid with a card. It is of course not possible absolutely to determine something like this, but if you avoid the ranks at the big end of town and don't stop for anyone wearing a suit, well, maybe. About 9 pm there's always a lull, I'm up the Junction with nothing going on when suddenly I remember there's a game on at the Sydney Football Stadium that might be ending right about now. Off I scoot down Moore Park Road and the timing's perfect, they're all just starting to spill from the gates. I get hailed immediately and, luck happens, the two blokes are, respectively, a Manly and a Wests Tigers fan. A Fibro and a Silvertail. Manly gets in the front, looking gloomy, and Wests (chipper) in the back; it went 19-18 to the Tigers. Don't look so surprised ... Wests in the back chides me when I react - I live in Summer Hill, which is more or less heartland Wests, but have a soft spot for Manly and thought the game would probably go their way. Not that I really care, it's just an interest of mine. Anyhow. These two blokes are going over the northside, one to Neutral Bay, the other to Manly, and they're like a well-rehearsed comedy routine, with Manly the straight guy and Wests the joker. Are you allowed to wear beanies on the North Shore? he asks. No. What about a bloke in a Wests Tigers jersey (he is) that has a missing tooth (he does)? Are they gonna beat up on me? Yes ... They're so dry that it's amusing for a while in a low key sort of way but soon gets tiresome and I don't really mind when they decide they'll both hop out at The Oaks on Military Road to have a few more drinks. I think I'll call it a night now, but as I'm steaming up Oxford Street intending to take a right into Flinders and on to Randwick to fill up with gas, I get hailed by a fellow outside the Oxford Hotel on the corner there. A ride's a ride and he isn't wearing a suit so I pull over. He's a tall, dishevelled looking bloke with facial hair, quite young, and as he folds himself into the front seat says he wants to go to Double Bay. I see that he's got an i-phone or a palm pilot, maybe a Blackberry, in his hand but don't think any more about it until I hear him say: You're angry with me, aren't you? I nearly jump out of my seat and am about to deny it when I realise he's actually talking into his phone, which is jammed to his other ear, the one I can't see. Then he starts making hand signals at me, that I don't understand, until I figure out that he's telling lies to his wife and doesn't want me to contradict him ... not that I would or could but it's something to do with how soon he'll be home and where we are so, at a very long stretch, that might involve me somehow. Naturally I eavesdrop on the rest of the conversation and am rewarded by hearing him tell her that a guy the Agency (advertising I think) hired only the other day has just been fired because, get this, he has a history OE of stalking super models and the like, people whom he's supposed to be acting for, there are court cases heading his way, they can't have someone like him on board ... so far so good, he gets off the phone eventually and explains again about the lies, he told her we were already in Double Bay when we're hardly out of Rushcutters. The distances and times involved are so small that I think that maybe, like some people I have known, lying is a habit with him that he simply can't help indulging. Then he makes another call: Mate, did something happen with Helen today? he begins. Yeah I think it might be a question of finances. I've been in a meeting for the last two hours and haven't had a chance to talk to her yet but I will, mate, later tonight, and get the full story and call you back ... Dude, for my part, Buddy, you were right on the money, the way you handled the talent, the actresses, you've got the right approach, I'd have you on my team any day, you were awesome, just awesome, so cool, Dude, right on the money ... it is of course the guy who's been fired that he's talking to and he goes on OTT like this the rest of the way to Double Bay. In fact he's still talking when he gets out of the cab opposite the Golden Sheaf, having shuffled me a 20 and a couple of gold coins and accepted a 10 in change. While I head up New South Head to the turn off to Bellevue Road and climb the dark, twisting road, past the somnolent houses of the rich, some of which are no doubt built on lies, while Skip McDonald croons ... these are demon days / can't you see / it's a time of chaos, rage and anxiety ... up to the Junction and on to The Spot in Randwick to fill up and then head home.

strange rides

2009-07-29T16:22:00.005+10:00

Strange Ride One

I'm taking a Korean English language student to the Botany shops ... only in Oz two months, he speaks grammatically but laboriously, with a heavy accent, as we practise conversation all the way down Botany Road. I really need to pee so, after letting him out, do an illegal U turn and go up to the end of the block where there's a pub on the corner. Another cab has just picked up outside and, as I slide into the bus stop, I see an old gent apparently leaning against the pole there. He raises his hand and then, bereft of the support of the pole, gives a slight stagger. Uh oh, I think, he's pissed. Never mind. He's dapper and well-spoken and smells of sweet wine - port perhaps, or sherry. Sporting a black eye that looks maybe two or three days old. Take me to Taylor Square, he enunciates carefully. I think for a moment - and for several other moments during the ride - that he might put his hand on my knee, but he does not. Instead we speak of trivialities, cars and roads, the glare of the early morning sun over Southern Cross Drive as a traffic hazard, the perfidy of governments, as I sweep him up towards what I'm sure, by the time we part, is a hoped-for rendezvous with some as yet nameless and unknown young man whom he will find on Oxford Street. Several times, incongruously, he interpolates swearwords into his otherwise decorous sentences, as if thereby laying claim to a kind of credibility he might otherwise lack; but it just sounds odd. There's a convenient red light at the junction of Flinders and Oxford Streets, he extracts from his wallet a couple of notes, a 20 and a 10, and gives them to me before lurching off happily towards the Courthouse Hotel, where I trust he will find what he is looking for ... and not another shiner.

Strange Ride Two

I've just taken two girls all the way out to Hammondville, by the Holsworthy Military Base near Liverpool ($80.00) and I'm making my long weary way back to town. On Canterbury Road I get a call on my mobile and while we're talking another vacant cab overtakes me and then picks up the hail I'd almost sensed was waiting somewhere up ahead for me. This pisses me off but not for long. The next ride always banishes the disappointment of a missed opportunity and outside the Enmore Theatre a couple is waiting ... rock 'n' rollers, she's a bit Goth, with piercings, and he looks like a refugee from the 1980s, leather jacket, long hair swept back, some kind of hat? She gets in the back and he in the front and says: Take the next left. Station Street? I ask to be sure, because that's a grim little deserted street with nothing much down it. Yes, he says, we're going to Leichhardt. And mentions a street name I don't catch. But I do remember there's a shortcut, a rat run as they're known, down this way. Well, he calls every turn. Every turn! With his winey breath and a sense of ... what, exactly? Satisfaction? Pride might say it better. There's no other conversation but as we cross Parramatta Road he hands her in the back what looks like a packet and she takes it and starts doing something with it. The fare's 10, which brings an exclamation of pleasure from him - he probably does this ride a lot and likes to keep it under a tenner. Anyway, what she in the back was doing is filling out one of those yellow vouchers from a book that people with a disability get - they only pay half the fare, the government pays the rest. She hands the form over to him, and a pen, then he puts it right up to his face and scribbles hectically across the space where the signature goes. I'm tired, I'm a bit slow, it's not until she's got the door open and is helping him out that I realise what it is: he's blind. And he called every turn.

It's like a jungle sometimes ...

2009-07-16T15:04:00.008+10:00

It’s about five p.m. on a Tuesday and I'm trying to squeeze onto the back of the Park Street rank in the City when a grey bomber spots me and starts waving her pad so I scarper, quick smart, hoping against hope that she didn't get my number. That's a $188 fine if she did. I go uptown instead, at least an hour earlier than I normally would, and that's how long it takes to get another fare. Sitting on the (illegal) rank outside the Deutsche Bank building, watching rush hour traffic coalesce then dissolve around me, I listen to the whole of Massive Attack's first album, Blue Lines. It's pretty boring, or would have been if the music hadn't sounded so good: But if you hurt what's mine / I'll sure as hell retaliate … You can free the world / You can free my mind / Just as long as my baby's safe from harm tonight ... When I do get a ride, it begins a roll that lasts the rest of the night and I make more than enough to pay the fine, should I be fined. It's music that keeps me sane out there and I'm starting to enjoy programming the night ahead. Some things work and others don't and that's interesting in itself. The fare from Deutsche Bank is a guy who's recently had a baby, the kid’s been ill, and he’s on the phone to his mother telling her in great detail how tough things are for his wife and himself (mostly for himself); but I’m listening with only half an ear because the other one and a half are engaged with a cd M picked up at the Adamstown Markets recently: Beyond Elysian Fields by Hugh Cornwell, who used to be the lead singer in The Stranglers. The record was made in New Orleans and there’s a song on it called The Story of Harry Power that I know I want to hear again: Harry Power is the guy who initiated Ned Kelly into the modus operandi of bushranging. It might even have been, though Hugh doesn’t think so, a young Ned who dobbed Harry in, which gives a new twist to the old outlaw tale. If an album sounds good on the night, and this one does, I generally let it run through twice; but by the time I pick up in Erskineville, three musos heading to the airport and back to Melbourne after a Sydney gig, I’m listening to one of my staples, Little Axe—the dub version of Slow Fuse, with the LOUD button on so the bass vibrates the shell of the cab. Little Axe is Skip McDonald, a guitarist and bluesman from Dayton, Ohio, who had a pretty good career in the States (he was, with percussionist Keith Le Blanc and bass player Doug Wimblish, in the house band at Sugar Hill Records and all three play on Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five's fabulous 1982 track The Message) before he moved to England and teamed up with Adrian Sherwood and Gary Clail and the On-U Sound System. With Le Blanc and Wimblish, he formed Tackhead; his Little Axe records started coming out in the mid-nineties and I now have four of the five ... just need to find a copy of Champagne & Grits somewhere. Anyway, after dropping off the musos at the airport I'm coming back up O'Riordan Street when, at a set of lights in the desolation of the warehouse district, a young woman hails me from the other side of the road. She's unusual looking, with a thin face and a big nose and very full lips—beautiful rather than pretty—and all dolled up with bags and packages too. At first I think Indian but then I don't know; and when she gets into the front seat and says she wants to go to Edgecliff Station, I don't look at her again. It's instinct—some people don't want to be looked at. I can smell her though: perfume and tobacco and perhaps a hint of some kind of alcohol. She starts rummaging and then does some texting and then some more rummaging, sipping now and again from a bottle of orange juice that might be laced with vodka or the like; but I don't pay much attention, I just turn up the music and start driving really fast through the dark and empty night time streets of Alexandria and Zetland and Waterloo while Little Axe soulfully mourn ... too late … too late will be your cry … It isn't till we're nearly at Edgecliff Station that she tells me that she's meeting a friend there and the friend's the one who'll be paying her fare. This is not a good thing to hear and it starts sounding worse when she calls her friend and her friend is somewhere else. The Royal Oak in Double Bay ... she says to me then cuts the connection before I can get her to ask her friend what street that is in. So I ask her ... I don't fucken know … she snaps. The Royal Oak in Double Bay. How hard can it be? I'm not so much upset at being sworn at as I am amazed: she's Aboriginal. And I hadn't picked it. And anyway there's no rancour in it, she's stressed but not because of anything I’ve done and ... that's just how she talks. She's rolling a cigarette as we go on down the hill to Double Bay and start searching the square of streets at the back of the main drag. She's not exactly apologetic but I can tell she's trying to make amends, speaking a bit more softly though no less vehemently: It's not fucken down here, it must be back up the other fucken way. You know, that pub where they all sit outside. We find it after not very long and she calls her friend again. Nothing happens for a while so, on her advice, I move the car into the quieter street running down the side of the pub towards the sea and it's while I'm doing this that she says: Here he is ... The guy crossing the road towards us is at least twice her age, i.e. in his 40s, wearing a knitted pale green jersey and faded blue jeans; I didn't get what he had on his feet. He's white and probably some kind of petty crim, though I couldn't say exactly what kind. Soon as she sees him coming she gets out of the car but leaves the door open. It’s alright, I got money … I hear him say but all I see are his hands and his midriff, the neat little dark green cotton darns in the paler green wool of his jersey, his small, tight, pot belly, as he pulls a large number of flattened, randomly folded, unsorted banknotes out of his jeans pocket and starts going through them. Fifties, twenties, tens, quite lot of money to have on you. Well, that's alright, once you see money you know you're going to get paid. How much? he asks and I tell him there’s $24.55 on the meter. He fillets a twenty and a five from the stash and hands them over. Nobody says thanks or goodbye or anything like that but, as they walk across the road towards the back bar of the Royal Oak, and I'm turning the car around, I can hear her going off at him ... fucken this and fucken that ... and him going off the same way, only not as loud, back at her. When they get to the door he's a little ahead and opens it as if to go in first; but thinks better of it and stops to let her through before him: just for a moment it looks as if she's going to refuse; then, with a little toss of her head, she goes in, and he does, and that's it. I head off towards the City wondering if it's sex or drugs; and after not very long decide most probably both. Maybe he’s her pimp and she’s done a trick that didn’t work out; or maybe he’s summoned her in to work and she didn’t want to go. Or maybe they’re just boyfriend and girlfriend after all though somehow I doubt it … one of my favourite tracks on the album, Judgement, is playing now so I turn it up and as I climb the hill to Edgecliff and go down the other side to Rushcutters Bay then up again into the tunnel under the Cross, I forget all about them and lose myself in the music … When we see his judgement come again / Ain’t no water to set to sail again … When we see his judgement fall on man / Only fire can cleanse the earth again … ain’t no water … only fire …

small dreams

2009-06-24T16:48:00.007+10:00

Aaaawwwww ... crap! Back on the job. First fare is three Oirish lads whom I pick up at Bondi Beach and take into the City. They look like they've stepped out of a Beano comic, all crooked teeth and lumpy hair but they're sweet, they pay and go. Next fare is another Oirish boyo, a bit of a charmer, who says he's left his wallet at home and wants me to take him back to get it. I buy his story and take him, but he doesn't buy the ride ... a runner. I won't forget his jaunty walk as he pissed off, still talking on his phone to his girlfriend about a plan to sing Christmas songs in the street for money. The rest of the night is shit and I decide that's it, I won't ever do this again. But the car's new, probably the best I've ever driven, and it has a CD player, so I front up again the next afternoon with a few of my fave CDs and have one of those dreamy nights that cabbies (small dreamers) dream of. Nice people pay me and we talk as I drive them where they want to go listening to music that I love in a car that's (small dreams), relatively anyway, lux.

I have forgotten how you only ever get the middle of stories, never the beginning, never the end. That you meet characters but do not read the script. What will happen to the petite blonde nurse who laid her pale cold hand on my hot one, resting on the gear lever, and said her ex was a wally? Her frilly umbrella reminded me of Mary Poppins' and when she got out in Stanmore to collect her five year old daughter from After School Care she said, unprompted, that she might use it to fly away ... like Mary Poppins! I wish her pure uplift when she moves to Cessnock six months from now.

What about the Kiwi joker I take to the airport to catch a flight to Melbourne so he can have his cancerous prostate removed? We have both, in another life, been at the same rugby game: 1961, Athletic Park, Wellington, when the French played the All Blacks for the very first time, in a howling southerly, and the result was 5 - 3. Kel Tremain scored the winning try feet away from where my Dad and I sat on cold benches in front of the swaying Millard Stand. The joker with the dodgy gland was six and I was nine. He, a corporate high-flyer, says he's 54, he's single, he's had the time of his life every day of his life. I haven't been sitting on the sidelines with the oranges. I've been out in the middle, mixing it up with the big boys. His talk is all bravado and he does not seem to know that, with each sentence, he is constructing an obituary.

Or the dreadlocked, out-of-girl I pick up outside a pub in Charing Cross. I don't like men, she enunciates carefully through foam-flecked lips. They want to touch my body and I don't like that. Take me somewhere where there's dancing. I'll give you money. Dancing? In Bronte near midnight on a Monday? I take her up to the Bondi Junction shops and try to let her out there. She won't go. I do a uee and make the same offer on the other side of the street. No, she says. This is a horrible place. My shift is ending, I should do more but I'm weary and there's another cab parked in front waiting for a fare. Perhaps ... ? Otherwise, the police station. You awful man, she shrieks. I'll never speak to you again! I don't ask for the fare but, later, find a $2 coin on the back seat and the longest, thickest false fingernail I've ever seen lying broken on the floor.

Outside the Colonial Centre, 52 Martin Place (tho' we're actually in Phillip Street) I get talking to another cabbie. His name is Zaheer and he is a poet. I've briefly met a friend of his, the writer and journalist Mohammed Hanif, recently at the Auckland Festival. Their wives are from the same part of Pakistan. Zaheer writes in Urdu and Punjabi, he also speaks Arabic and is learning Persian. Publishes in magazines in India and Pakistan. An inheritor of an old tradition. Mindful of that too. He is resisting pressure from friends to make a collection, he feels he isn't established enough yet.

This turns out not to be because he is doubtful of his writing but because he has to work his way out of a financial crisis ... he was detained by Australian immigration authorities a few years ago and sent to a detention centre (Villawood). Then he was deported, and it took him two more years to get another visa into Australia. He ascribes this calamity to the dodgy advice of a migration agent, which I can well believe. The upshot is, he has a major debt to pay - I think the sum was $15,000. How you do that on a cabbie's meagre wage? Nor do I discover exactly who he owes it too. However, another legacy of the Howard government's malignant reign is that so-called asylum seekers must pay the costs of their own detention, so perhaps that's the reason. There's a bill before Parliament right now that seeks to overturn that Kafkaesque rule.

Zaheer's poetry has not yet been translated into English, probably because he has not found anyone to do it for him. Poetry in Urdu and Punjabi is, I gather, highly formalised so it probably isn't an easy task. I am telling Zaheer that there must by a university in Australia where the languages are taught when we are interrupted by a very tall, extremely elegant, young black Englishman in a suit exiting the building and coming towards my cab. I neglect to get Zaheer's address, or to give him mine. I trust that we will meet each other again some other day. He is a modest man, unassuming, without bitterness and also without fear. He tells me a line of a poem he is yet to write, about two rivers in his country, one a river of lovers, the other of poets. Their confluence. Small dreams, bigger than the world.

wrong side of the tracks

2008-10-30T16:52:00.001+11:00

Where I live is bisected by the railway line, the Great Western, that goes all the way to Perth. Some days I see the Indian Pacific pulling through Summer Hill station at about 3 pm - a long silver train that might have a truck or two of new cars or tractors behind the eight or ten passenger carriages. Naturally I always want to jump on it but it doesn't stop here and anyway I don't have a ticket. It's probably cheaper to fly. Certainly faster. My trips are more local. Today was good. I went out in the misty rain at a few minutes after eleven and bought a Croydon return for $3.60. Actually I got off at Ashfield, to return some library books - 4 Asterix, 1 Alexander the Great, 1 Paraguay. I always scan the new books rack for interesting titles but today, nada. As I was going out a woman behind the desk hailed me. That was unusual, librarians usually only do that if you're breaking some rule; but she wanted to talk about my umbrella. It's a 'pard umbrella and she's a 'pard fanatic. Even has 'pard candles. I couldn't really imagine what leopard skin candles are like but there you are: the rich tapestry of the quotidian. I was actually on my way to buy a Bible, which was exciting in itself. The New Testament in the New English Bible version. I'd found it Monday ($9.00) in a 2nd hand shop in Croydon called AB Books but had asked the guy to hang on to it while I investigated the possibility of an Old or a volume that included both. The Old, found on the internet, arrived by courier this morning so naturally I was keen to get the New. It wasn't until I got home that I realised that neither includes the Apocrypha, which I may have to get next in a separate volume, I don't know. I've wanted to own the New English Bible for quite a while now, because that's the version that Colin McCahon used for most of his text paintings from about 1969 onwards. His wife Anne gave him a copy. There's two second hand bookshops down there, just past the Ashfield pool where I swim, and I'm always likely to visit one or both while the endorphins are still percolating through my system. I bought the New off the old English hippie guy, said hello to his wife who might be stroke-impaired, but didn't stop in at the bookbinders ... he is an American but for some reason I always think he's Dutch and last time I was in there he had an assistant wearing a yarmulke so there must be a Jewish connection. He, the American, came out here in the 1960s or perhaps 1970s with a whole collection of contemporary American poetry, some of which is still on his shelves - he was a Charles Olson fan; perhaps he'd lived in Worcester. Anyway I kept on walking up to the shops on the wrong side of the tracks at Croydon which are an enduring fascination. There are all sorts of strange fly-by-night businesses here in the shadow of the Presbyterian Lady's College . . . an art gallery that has exhibitions on the wall but is never open ... some artist's studio across the road with street windows you can look into to see the works in progress ... a school teaching make-up for film and TV ... various disreputable looking lawyers and accountants offices ... an old-fashioned watch-makers that is also never open ... a place painted shocking pink where they make cakes but not for sale to the public ... some kind of Greek hall from 1915 that still operates but as what? This is Edwin Street where an epochal battle took place a little while ago as a brothel at #93 sought legality and was bitterly opposed by local residents and businesses. Far as I know it still operates, without the appurtenances of legality but with the stunning publicity the case gave them. Round the corner is, to my mind, the strangest building of all: a classic old deco brick pub from the 1930s that has been made over as a facility of the aforementioned Presbyterian Lady's College up the road a bit. I always want to blunder in there for a drink until I realise I've never seen a pub this clean ... oh, well, I have a Bible in my bag and a train to catch. I go down onto the station to wait, reading, to pass the time, a bit of Revelations: Behold, he is coming with the clouds! Every eye shall see him, and among them those who pierced him: and all the peoples of the world shall lament in remorse. So it shall be. Amen.

Take me now ...

2008-08-18T17:52:00.002+10:00

I have a good old friend recently returned to Sydney after quite a few years away. Without going into detail I can say those years were not easy for her, not easy at all - now that she's back perhaps things will improve, who knows. Anyway some of us put on a dinner for her Saturday night but in the end she couldn't come - a major cleaning blitz at her new place led to an attack of sciatica so that was that. When I heard she wouldn't be going I thought, just for a nano-second, that perhaps I shouldn't either. The sore throat I'd had for a couple of days hadn't got any worse but it hadn't gone away either. But off I went and had a great time, only to find, on leaving, that the sore throat had turned into some kind of inferno which made breathing unlikely and speech impossible. I was walking home from Marrickville at about 2.30 am through surreally darkened and beautifully deserted streets and all I could think about was lozenges. Picked some up at the all night servo on the corner of Wardell Street before staggering the rest of the way to Summer Hill. Well. I've had sore throats before, who hasn't? Never had one like this though. All day yesterday I thought of what my friend says when the question of aging and all of its indignities comes up. Take me now! she says and laughs her silvery laugh. The fact that last week I had a check-up and all of my results came back disappointingly normal seemed beside the point: I could hear my train a-comin' ... The perhaps comical side of this is that I'm off to NZ for ten days on Thursday, during which time I'll do a few readings: how do you read without a voice? How do you even go to the bank? Thought of pushing a note across the counter, then thought better of it. Sometimes, on random occasions, I open my mouth and attempt speech: nothing comes out that anything except a toad would respond to. Call me toad, then. And take me now.

Peculiar Human Race

2008-08-11T14:33:00.007+10:00

This particular story begins last week when my younger son Liamh calls me and asks if I want him and his bro Jesse to spend next Sunday with me or can they go on the City to Surf? Takes a while to work out what this means but in the end I do. We arrange that they'll come here for the weekend as usual Friday arvo and then early Sunday morning I'll take them into the City to rendezvous with their Mum and a few other people so they can do the run - or rather, for their group, the walk. I don't really want to surrender the Sunday with them but nor is there any tiny part of me that wants to join the race to Bondi ... so ... Saturday I call their mother to confirm the arrangements for Sunday and find out that she's sick, a headache or something, and isn't going. When the boys hear this their faces both fall and Jesse almost starts to cry. Funny the way they always look like their mother when they cry, is that because they've seen her do it when they've probably never seen me? Even tho' I like to think I'm a New Age Guy and can, and do, cry ... ? Anyway, I say - knowing it's stupid, knowing I'll regret it - that'll I'll go with them. Smiles all round and we fall to the happy work of planning. Next morning we cram into the carriage of the 8.02 to Central along with various athletic types with their Numbers and Uniforms and Water Bottles and Heartbeat Monitors and Portable Entertainment Systems. They look weird in amongst the hungover Goths and other Party People sagging on the seats all mascara and sweat-stained after their night out dancing. There's even a guy dressed in red as some kind of super hero reading the Sunday paper and he's not a party person, he's going in the race. Apparently dressing up is one of the things people do ... we get to the Archibald fountain in Hyde Park a bit before 8.45 and stand around with the all sorts that we'll be walking to Bondi with ... two people dressed as FEET (a right and a left) with an escort of Ninjas, for instance. A couple of ANZ ATMs. Someone done up as a Purple Star who at one point takes the costume off and lies by the fountain panting even though it's a chilly morning and the cloud hasn't burnt off yet. She's a bit chubby and is with the Starlight Foundation. Our party of about a dozen, it turns out, is representing BDSRA - The Australian Chapter of Batten Disease Support and Research Association. I know nothing about this beyond the fact that my kids have been doing a bit of collecting for charity in Pearl Beach with a fellow named Philip. I meet Philip, who's in his thirties perhaps, a paediatrician at Newcastle Hospital and a tireless campaigner in support of those who have Batten Disease. You always wonder about adults that your children hang around with so I take a good look at him. He's personable and friendly enough and reminds of an over grown kid himself. That's clearly how the other children relate to him - my two, a 12 year old called Cody who had a brother who died of the disease, another about 9 called Cameron. Philip's parents are there, he's like a big kid with them too. Also Cody's mother Vanessa, she has a sweet face and reminds me of my friend Jean from Norfolk Island whom I haven't seen for years. A couple of blonde women who might be mother and daughter. I smile at them but somehow fail to introduce myself. It takes bloody ages for our 'race' to start, we sort of mill around for a while then queue with literally thousands of others outside St Mary's cathedral while some loud smarmy voice through a vast PA tries to ginger us up for what's ahead. Even before we reach the start line this voice tells us that the first of the runners has already crossed the finish line at Bondi, 42 minutes after the real race began at 9.00 am. Oh well, doesn't matter, we finally reach the corner of Park and William and we're off ... ! Straggling down the main drag towards Kings Cross. First thing I notice is the trail of garments littering the road - Paradise for Hobos, Jesse shrills and it turns out he's right. One of the traditions of the race is that you discard your over garments as you run and the Smith Family follows up later and collects them to give to the poor. This is not the only litter trail of course, there are the plastic bottles and plastic cups, millions of them and then there are all sorts of other strange things. Liamh finds a tiny running shoe, about an inch long, and each of the kids manages to souvenir one of those reflector / lane divider things set into municipal roads to guide traffic. I like looking in the tarseal for the things that have become trapped there - coins, keys, a padlock, the tines of a metal fork, a defunct watch face. It's actually quite fun to be swinging along the highway where usually only the vehicular traffic goes, the wrong way through the tunnel under Kings Cross and on down the hill to Rushcutters Bay. Funny people though - every dagg you never saw is out today with their dream of an athleticism that, for most of us, our lumpy bodies can do nothing but deny. There's a couple ball room dancing the whole way, that looks tedious beyond belief but they seem determined to stick it out. There go the ATMs. There go the FEET with their escort of Ninjas, it seems to have something to do with a podiatry clinic. There's a Viking all in black with two women in lycra bodysuits as an escort, I can't work out what that's about. I hear a sound like birds twittering and four Japanese women dressed as Geisha go by with running shoes instead of geta showing incongruously on their feet below their kimono. Philip is collecting for Batten Disease along the way, he likes to have a kid or two attending when he asks for money so we keep stopping to importune the rich partying on their balconies in Double Bay and then again in Rose Bay. At the drinks stations the gutters literally flow with Gatorade, something I never imagined I would see. Coming up Heartbreak Hill on the other side of Rose Bay we are ambushed by an offensive - in both senses - group of twenty-somethings working for RSVP, the dating agency. They have water-soaked sponges in the shape of purple hearts that they try to stamp you with. I avoid them by heading for the footpath but Liamh finds one of the purple hearts on the road, sneaks up behind me and gets me between the shoulder blades. That white long sleeved cotton T shirt I've kept pristine for about a year now will never be the same again but the kids are so excited and having so much fun it'd be pointless getting angry. And anyway I don't feel angry. Somewhere round about the top of Heartbreak Hill, we look back and see the vehicles that are bringing up the end of the procession and realise we are running just about last. I don't really care but Jesse suddenly starts to feel competitive. He forges ahead, loops back once to check in with me and then says he's going to speed up for good now. Off he goes into the distance before I can say anything about a rendezvous point. We're only at about the halfway mark, which seems unbelievable given the state of my feet and knees but it's true, there's the 7 K marker. I've kind of used up my store of conversation with Philip, his eyes glaze over when I tell him a bit about what I do and then, later, when he says so long as you're not making things worse and I quote First Do No Harm ... back at him, we reach a wordless agreement to walk the walk not talk the talk. Vanessa I get on much better with but at a certain point, and I remember this from my brief career as a teenage cross-country runner, a sort of grim determination takes over every other thought and emotion and you just keep on keeping on going. By the time we turn from New into Old South Head Road and then into Military Road I'm suffering from pain in my hips as well as feet and knees and starting to fall behind. Liamh loyally keeps me company for quite a while, we chat about this and that, mostly how tired we are, and then he says, oh, I think I'll catch up with the others now and off he goes too. I can see them all ahead for a while and then, and I don't know when this happens, I can't. By now the weather, which has been fine and cool for most of the walk, is starting to pack up, you can see long ragged brown-grey clouds raining over the City and darker ones above the beach ahead. By the time I'm plodding down towards Bondi, with about two kilometers to go, it's raining, lightly at first then more and more heavily. Cold wet rain. I've got a denim jacket in my bag so I put that on but what about the kids? Their hoodies are in my bag too and suddenly I realise I don't know where either of them is. I'm not worried about Liamh, he'll stick close to Philip and Vanessa and will be fine - but what about Jesse? As I come round the bend in North Bondi and see the beach spread out before me I feel the first twinge of panic: the place is in absolute chaos. Thousands of people are leaving the actual beach, either because they've completed this dumb race or else because it's rained on their picnic/sunbathing/posing or whatever. Most of the participants in the race have fled to the other side of the road to get under cover of the shop awnings there while the brave or foolish few continue in the designated corridor for runners. I've forgotten my pains now, I don't care about the rain, I want to find my kids. Coming along Campbell Parade I overtake Vanessa and Cody and Cameron and she tells me yes, Liamh's ahead with Philip but no-one has yet seen Jesse. I keep company with her for a while, just as well, because I think the queues for the buses up Bondi Road are the finish line when it's actually down the other way by the old Bondi pavilion. Vanessa tells me that, although she's Sydney born and bred (Terrey Hills, in the north west) she has never been to Bondi Beach before. I congratulate her for walking here the first time then forge ahead to find my boys. You go through three barriers but I don't know what any of them are for except that at the last one you can get a medal but I don't bother, it seems as futile as trying to get money from the two bedraggled ATMs standing forlornly back there, too wide to go through any barrier. Bona fide participants in the race are issued with an electronic device that they attach to their shoe and this has to be detached too. None of us has one of these apart from Jesse, who's travelling as someone called Matthew Love, a boy who couldn't come for some reason. That'll make for nice complications if he really is lost. Just beyond the third barrier I see someone waving frantically, it's Philip and there's Liamh standing with him. In the flood of (partial) relief I finally track down a resemblance that's been nagging at me all day - what Philip looks like is a Teletubby though I'm not prepared to go any further and try to work out which one. I go over. Seen Jesse? I ask as casual as I can. No. Vanessa and the others, I tell him, are just coming. So that's good. I put Liamh's hoodie on him and check if he's okay. He is. I look around: where do you start? There's a lost boy, about Liamh's age or younger, walking around crying. No-one's taking any notice of him and I think, I would, but I can't, I have to find Jesse first. There's no sign of him. We discuss the desultory rendezvous point, McDonalds at Bondi, that we made before setting out but I can't remember if Jesse was a party to that discussion or not. Anyway he doesn't know Bondi and I doubt if he'd go there. What I think he'd do is wait at the end, wait exactly where we are. So why isn't he here? We've been standing around for about ten minutes, not really knowing what the hell to do, when he saunters up as if he's just got back from the loo or something. His new #5 haircut all starry with raindrops. I've been on the bridge, he says, looking for you. I'm not in the least bit angry, just relieved ... really, really relieved. Apart from everything else, I haven't emptied my bladder since leaving home at 7.45 and the pressure is beginning to make my balls ache. There were queues at all the portaloos along the way and I simply refused to stand and wait. So off we go, all four of us, Me and Jess and Monkey and the Teletubby, to the line of queueless portaloos past the long Gatorade stand covered with full plastic glasses of yellow liquid looking exactly like urine. Staring down at the bizarre and unseemly human waste in my receptacle for a very long time, I think what strange and uncomfortable people we are, how meaningless our rituals, how false and hollow our enthusiasms, how meretricious our wants and insatiable our desires. But I forget all about that once I'm done. The sun's coming out, the green-blue water of the ocean is beautiful, my kids are found and they are just so proud of the medals around their necks that there isn't anything else to do but praise and celebrate all the way home. Later we hear that someone, a 26 year old man, collapsed and died about 200 metres from the finish line.

Cut Price Mirror Sale

2008-08-06T11:52:00.001+10:00

Mark Young's extraordinary Otoliths imprint is this month publishing a collection of shorter prose pieces of mine, most of which have appeared here or at one or other of my two other weblogs over the last year or so. The collection is available at a reduced price until the book goes officially live at Otoliths - if you want to get in early, go here:

The Evolution of Mirrors

Weapons of Young Destruction

2008-07-15T11:49:00.008+10:00

My friends are coming back from Cambodia on Friday and then I will return to them the car they so generously lent me for the year they've been away, so I book it into European Motor Works in Rozelle and this morning drive it over there for a full service. The guy looks like a Sumo wrestler and has a voice that reminds me of the stone crusher that used to make gravel out of river stones a couple of doors down from where we lived in Burns Street Ohakune but he's jovial enough and is perhaps an honest man too. I leave the car with him and decide I'll walk into the City over the Anzac Bridge to pick up a couple of Sidney Nolan books from the library in the Customs House at Circular Quay. It's a beautiful morning, not cold at all and everything is sparkling as I go by the old power station at White Bay that's been derelict as long as I can remember. As always, I'd like to climb the hurricane wire fence and explore that massive industrial ruin but I don't, I just check out the grove of banana trees growing improbably amongst the weeds in there and pass on, remembering briefly the party at Graham Street, just there across Victoria Road, where in 1987 I met the mother of my children. The White Bay Hotel is closed as well but I do recall when it was open and also the old woman who always used to stand on that corner selling newspapers. There was a song about her. Long long ago, before they built the Anzac Bridge aka the Ironing Board, which I've walked over once before with my kids. Just a few months back. There's dusty trucks coming out of the huge concrete silos which used to belong to the Wheat Board and maybe still does, I don't know. Lots of building going on down there. Pigeons and gulls on the old Glebe Island Bridge and what look like tugs or barges moored alongside and I try to remember what the company was called that used to ply these waters in their green and brown liveried boats ... Harbour Lighterage. All those new cars on the flat wharves and, yes, they are about 80% white. The bridge is so high, so wide, so handsome that it gives me a lift just to be up on it on such a gorgeous morning. A motor scooter passes on the footpath, a few bicycles whizz by, there's a fellow fixing a puncture just by the statue of the Digger. When I'm about halfway over I notice that the old buildings that used to be squats, though derelict, are still there on Bank Street and a sudden vision comes to mind of the seated Buddha I saw sitting down there on a sunny wall one day. There's a Buddha at the mouth of the bay ... I wrote but that's all I recall. There's the green mound where the Bone Char Mill stood with its piles of bones. There are the three palms planted next to the Pyrmont Incinerator: it's gone too but a photo of the shadow of those palms on the north wall will be on the cover of The Evolution of Mirrors when it comes out in a few weeks or months, I'm not sure exactly. Someone is reading a book while riding an exercise bike in the bowels of the big apartment block they erected in place of Burley Griffin's magnificent folly. Funny, I used to lament the passing of these edifices but now, today, like a new emotion, I feel that it's enough that they exist in memory. Thread my way through Pyrmont which is also full of ghosts of buildings and of people I used to know. Passing Paternoster Row I wonder whatever happened to Wayne Tallowin who used to live down there. He was a tearaway guitarist in a band I used to work with, they fired him because he wasn't good enough but I always liked his playing. He sold me a bike once, stolen from Sydney Uni by a gang of Pyrmont street kid thieves he knew. It's solid yuppie territory now. There's the street where a couple of Pommie sailors did a runner on me one night when I was driving a taxi. There's the pub where they used to have topless waitresses, at which I once picked up two guys who had a cardboard box with canaries in it - one of them escaped into the cab and I caught it and took it home and then let it go again. I remember it flying away into a sky as blue as this one is. It's in Miller Street that I pass the first band of Christians, big solid Polynesian boys from one of the islands, maybe Tonga. There's more on the old Pyrmont Bridge, one party stopped, the other walking past them: they both cheer then ask each other where they're from. Then they Hurrah! again. I'd say the United States and Japan or Korea respectively. More Islanders, this time girls, at the City end of the bridge; and up in town there are roving bands of them everywhere, grouped together by nationality, some of them wearing uniform jackets or the same hats. A group of Latinos in red and green, a beautiful girl smiles at me and I'm so startled I almost forget to smile back. I remember that cretin is said to be derived from Christian but the thought seems unworthy. They're like sports teams going about in their groups of ten or fifteen. Italians, Mexicans, Africans, even a bunch of Kiwis, they wear blazers with Tihei Mauri Ora stitched under the breast pockets. Outside the QVB I see a 2 dollar coin lying on the ground and pick it up: a lucky day! Feel like I should give it to the fellow selling The Big Issue outside the Supre store that used to be Gowings but I don't want to read The Big Issue so I don't. Lenny Henry at the State Theatre, he was really funny on Good News Week the other night. Going up Pitt Street Mall I see that half one side of the street is now a building site and there's nobody much around in the darkened cavern of the street. Come out of the murk into Martin Place and there's another band of cretins having their photograph taken in front of one of the public monuments there. They are all wearing stupid felt cowboy hats and are so uniformly blond and blue-eyed I think they must be Aussies ... but then this thin blond blue-eyed older woman in denims comes up to me and asks if I'll photograph her with her group, she has an accent so they probably aren't Aussies after all. I take the pic and hand her back the camera. Where are you from? I ask. She dazzles into a smile and says Germany. I nearly say something about the Nazi Pope but think better of it and give her a pat on the arm instead and say auf Wiedersehen. Her face wrinkles into comic surprise and then the dazzle comes back: auf Wiedersehen! And so it goes, I'm thinking about Apollinaire now, and then about Frank O'Hara and then, outside the back of the Customs House, I see the scooter that passed me on the bridge parked up beside a waiting taxi in the alley there. That's strange. Both the Nolan books are on shelf which makes me really happy, there's also a book of NZ Painting that I leaf through, looking at every image, before leaving the building and going across to Circular Quay to catch the train back to Summer Hill. The quay is awash with cretins of all descriptions, hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, with their lumpy bodies and funny hats and invincible cheerfulness. I remember someone saying that the last time they staged something like this the City ran out of condoms and then I see a headline in The Australian where silly old George Pell is telling us we must populate or perish, presumably so we can outbreed the Muslims and the heathen Africans and the Asian hordes. I'm sick of them all now with their self-conscious cheeriness and unctuous smiles, I just want to look at Sidney Nolan. His Inferno frieze, painted in the Chelsea Hotel in about '64, inspired in the first instance by Robert Lowell's version of The Trojan Women - wow! It's amazing. Some of the Gallipoli paintings which I've never seen even in reproduction, so dark and foreboding, pale or roseate faces coming out of a sort of clotted khaki miasma. In the other book there's a quote from Cynthia Nolan: We live on a thin crust over a bubbling mass of molten lava and the fuel of hell. What's marvellous is that, in spite of everything, we're alive. Do you understand? To make up for the suffering of the living, there's the joy of life. She became a suicide but still, what a good and brave thing to say. That'll do, I think. That'll get me home.

loot

2008-04-13T11:20:00.007+10:00

Outside the Nelson Hotel in Bondi Junction, as I'm dropping off, two fellows wave from the other side of Oxford Street, where the bus depot is. Tall, maybe 40s, wearing jackets without ties. They're agitated, or perhaps I should say excited. One in the front, one in the back. Ebley Street. A short trip. They immediately start discussing the fare with each other, as if it is a matter of great moment, but I already know it's only about five bucks so I don't pay that much attention. Don't even really look at them. At one point the bloke in the front takes a five dollar note from his pocket and hands it to the bloke in the back. I know the way but Front Street Guy insists on directing me, wrongly, and we end up at a left turn only a couple of blocks from where they're going. They're tetchy as they get out, but do me, or her, the kindness of drawing to my attention a young woman waiting on the other side of the road. They go, she gets in, we drive down to Elizabeth Bay. It's dusk. She's in the back. I pull up in Ithaca Road, opposite an apartment block I once lived in, turn on the interior light. As we're doing the exchange I see, improbably, that there's a wad of banknotes on the front seat. Fifties. I know at once that it's a least a grand. You'd think maybe I'd be happy but in fact what happens is my heart sinks. Oh no ... I drive down to the end of the street, where they've blocked off access to the sea for some urban renewal, turn around, park, and under the curious eyes of a woman waiting on a neglected corner (already I'm paranoid), count it up. Twenty fifties held together by a single rubber band. Funny how the loot shrinks once you've reckoned its finite dimension. Has to be a drug deal or similar. Who were they? Amateurs, I think, not serious players. They were so dumb about the ride. He must have spilled the wad when he took the five from his jacket pocket. Anyway. How would I ever trace them? How would they ever trace me? No way they would have noted the taxi number, they were too distracted. So. Put the money in my wallet then change my mind and slip it in the small bag I use for car keys, food, authority card, cigarettes. The zip is broken. I'm driving through the back of the Cross, trying to fix it, with the wad between my thigh and the seat. Confused. Why does money bring with it guilt? By this time I'm outside St. Vincents and I still haven't sorted myself out. At the lights on Oxford Street, a pretty young Asian girl climbs in the front seat and wants to go to Redfern. How's your night? she asks and, I can't help it, I tell her the whole strange tale. She's very sweet, perhaps she's a Buddhist, anyway, alive to the karmic implications that bother me too. She's a waitress in a cafe, has just worked seven day's straight, this is her day off, she spent it window shopping and having coffee with a friend. Tried on a $600.00 dress and made believe she owned it for the several minutes she wore it. She sympathises with me! Sydney is such a curious and beautifully serendipitous town sometimes. After that I try out the dilemma on several other fares. An Irishwoman, moving house, with lots of bags, wonders if I might give it to the police. Nah, this is NSW, they'd probably just keep it for themselves. A cute young thing from Perth suggests I give it to her. A drunken lawyer, also Irish, commends me for having saved any number of innocent babbies from corruption by drugs. She gives me her card and invites me in for a drink. This is in North Bondi. I feel weird every time I go near the area where I picked up and dropped off the guys whose money it was - what if I see them again? It can happen. After a while I realise it was probably The Cock and Bull they were going to; plenty of deals go down there. They must be spitting. After that the whole night becomes provisional and peculiar, I don't know why I'm doing this, or what I'm doing ... alternative scenarios run me ragged. I go home early. Count the money again. Hide it. Next day, I change its hiding place. Ring a couple of cabbie friends. One says: Half your luck, mate! Spend it on on your kids. The other advises against giving it to the Taxi Company (it never occurred to me to do that) but recommends the police option. Apparently after three months, if no-one claims it, they give it back to the finder. Yeah, right. When I start driving again, about two o'clock, I resume my straw poll. A student, a young woman, says I should open an ING account and give the interest to the homeless, while keeping the capital for emergencies. She likes this idea more than I do. Later on, in George Street, I pick up a dishevelled Persian man who is a talker. He's a dental technician, he's made plates for Rene Rivkin, whom he liked a lot. They killed him, he says. The media, everyone, they killed him. He tells me the fate of Walter Franklin, dental technician extraordinaire. It's quite a story. He's a Nietschian and a Zoroastrian. A vehement man. He expounds The Holy Yes and The Holy No. Kafka chose The Holy No, he says mysteriously. I like this guy, so I try out my dilemma on him. He says it's too little money for a gun so, yes, probably it was for drugs. What you must do, he goes on, is hide it away somewhere, just keep it, until the next time you see them. Then you will say, I have your money. Just before he gets out, he adds: There is no peace in this world, it is all struggle. Whether you decide yes or whether you decide no, it is struggle either way. There is no peace. I don't ask any more passengers after this, I let him have the last word. The night is even scrappier than the one before, I don't make any real money, and go home early again. My local bottle shop is still open so I drop in to buy some wine. There's one on special, I've tried it before, from the Margaret River, it's not bad, so that's what I get. It isn't until I arrive home and take it out of its paper bag that I look at the label and see what I've bought. It's called: Catching Thieves.

some mother's son

2008-03-30T12:35:00.005+11:00

Friday night, about eight. Or Eight-thirty. After a busy few hours I hit a lull. Drive up George Street, which I usually avoid, towards Circular Quay. Cabs are copping hails all around but I seem to have become invisible. Then, just past Wynyard Station, an arm. He ducks behind some mail boxes on his way to the car so I don't get to check him out properly until he gets into the front seat beside me. First impression, of a young clerk or some such, is completely wrong. In fact I don't know who this person is, he escapes all my casual categories. He is young, early twenties perhaps. Grossly over weight but in an unusual way - he seems lumpy, with strange protrusions all over his body, rather than the more typical rolly polly gathering of surplus flesh at the waist. The skin of his face is mottled purple and brown, and also seems afflicted by that same lumpiness. He's clutching two enormous bags of McDonald's takeaways and wants to go to Botany Road in Mascot. That peculiar odour or stench fills the car and my heart sinks. Is he going to eat all the way to Mascot? I don't think I can stand it if he does. It's not that I'm hungry myself, rather the opposite - I've just eaten a homemade sourdough roll with cheese and salami and tomato on it, followed by an apple, a crisp Fuji. Anyway, we're going round the block so I can head south again, he's sneaking a chip or two from one of the bags and I'm thinking, I don't care, for twenty bucks, it's not worth it. You're not allowed to eat in cabs, I say. Why don't you hop out, finish your meal, and catch another cab afterwards? I slow down next to one of the blue benches at the bus terminal but he isn't interested. No, no, he says, seemingly in a panic. I won't eat ... Then, abruptly, he goes to sleep, or seems to, with his eyes closed and his head leaning back against the headrest. Those huge greasy bags in his lap. Must have been the stress of possible eviction, I suppose. We mosey on down George Street, and towards the bottom he wakes up. I hear the furtive rustle of his fingers in the brown paper bags and then, slowly at first, but then shockingly fast, he begins again to eat, his head tilted to one side, tearing at the buns like a famished animal tearing at meat. He crams handfuls of chips into his mouth as well then, periodically, pauses to fumble in his pocket for his wallet. I realise that he's been doing this compulsively since he got in the cab, fumbling for his wallet I mean, which usually signals an anxiety about paying. He has money though, I've seen the corner of a fifty dollar note poking out. We're going down Elizabeth Street now, through Surry Hills and into Waterloo and suddenly I can't stand it any more. Listen, mate, I say, I told you, no eating in the cab, ok? Just put it away and wait until you get home, alright? I realise I sound quite stern, I'm using the voice I use to tell my kids off. He reacts in the same abject way as before ... sorry, sorry ... crumpling up the tops of the bags and replacing them on his lap. I feel bad but I feel good as well, or at least, relieved. There's only one further piece of conversation, when he mistakenly suggests I should be turning into O'Riordan Street, not Botany Road. Then the ride is over. Or is it? He can't find his wallet. He's getting really distressed. He climbs out of the cab and I turn the internal light on. There are woody chips all over the floor and he starts to sweep them out onto the road with his hands. But no wallet. I look across his seat, spy a corner of yellow paper poking up on the other side and reach across to pluck it. It's that fifty dollar note I saw before, damp and slightly greasy from his fingers. Is fifty alright? he says, beseechingly. Is that enough? There's only eighteen and a bit dollars on the meter but I, cravenly, feeling really awful - but why not? - say, Yeah, fifty dollars is fine. I look over into the back seat and there, on the floor, beside another chip container, amongst more spilled chips, is his wallet. I give it to him. And the chip container. Thank you, he mumbles, thank you ... as if I've done him some huge favour. He shambles off into the night and I roar away myself, almost weeping at the spectacle this ruined person has made of himself, while also trying to rationalise the implications of my own predatory behaviour and at the same time clear the clammy, disgusting, miasmic atmos in the cab by opening all the windows and driving at speed through the dark and deserted streets of Zetland. But it can't have worked because my next fare, a thin-lipped, stitched-up-looking, possibly Kiwi, lawyer's receptionist who I pick up in Flinders Street, halfway to Mosman says: I've got to get something to eat. Can you pull into the McDonald's on Military Road? To the drive-through. She manages not to eat her Super Cheeseburger Meal or drink her Coke until after I drop her off but again I have to try to clear the car of the Macca miasma and it isn't until I'm hailed by a genial drunk holding up a lamppost in Crows Nest and ask him that I'm finally sure that I don't smell like a travelling advertisement for malign, malnourishing, horribly addictive shit burgers and salty chips made out of woody grease.

Bloody tears flow

2008-03-16T14:11:00.008+11:00

A cab-driving friend is off to NZ for ten days so he asks me to drive his shifts for him. He's got a new boss, Alex, who was his old boss, years ago, and thinks that it might be a good idea for me to work for Alex too. I'm running out of money so I say yes. Then I learn that the balance of an award, not due until June, can be paid early. It's too late, I'm committed. Then Alex rings up and says I can have the car for the whole weekend. I don't want to but he's very persuasive and there's the future to consider ...

Near Central Station I pick up a big guy wearing shorts, with suitcases. He wants to go up to the Country trains, he's going away somewhere, doesn't know where. He'll decide when he gets there. Half way to the trains he changes his mind, wants to go to the airport instead. Maybe I'm on the run, he jokes. You don't look stressed enough, I say, but I wonder. He doesn't even decide which terminal to go to until he sees the signs outside. T2. Virgin. Maybe he's been reading The Diceman I think but he doesn't look like the kind of guy you could have that sort of conversation with. Affable but sort of ... disinterested.

Somewhere in Bronte, about 8 pm, I pick up a young bloke who looks like a chippie. He's talking to another fellow outside an office building in a quiet suburban street. Turns out this was his counseller, he's been at an out patient's clinic, five weeks ago he quit a $1000 a day coke and alcohol habit. $30,000 a month, he says. Lost his business, his job. Lost everything except his wife and 7 month old son. We talk about addiction, its various and destructive parameters. When he gets out I steal a look at him. 29? early 30s? He doesn't look old enough to have been so badly down. And five weeks is such a short time. I fear from him but what can I do? Good luck, I say. It sounds like a hopeless thing to say.

On Oxford Street, about midnight, I'm hailed by a big bald guy wearing only blue shorty pyjamas with some kind of figure on them. This looks like a totally weird situation, what with all the clubbers and revellers milling around outside the Burdekin, but it isn't, he's actually hailing me for his friend, a diminutive Irish woman from Galway with one of those soft, lilting voices that make you want to weep with joy. Shorty pyjamas goes back into his apartment building and I take her up to the Cross. Her partner is a writer, she says, he's trying to finish his book. He's changed all the names but everyone will know who he is, she says, he's such a funny man, so wicked in his descriptions and he doesn't spare himself, either, to be sure. I envy this man back in Galway with his unfinished and perhaps unfinishable book.

It's the next day, Friday. I pick up a startling beautiful Swedish woman in Bondi. Tall, blonde, blue-eyed. She's dressed in a blue checked shirt and white shorts, as if going hiking, but she wants to go to the Establishment Bar, where the Corporates go to unwind after their week of money-making exertions. I'm dropping her off in Bridge Street when a woman hails me. Then she spends ages in conversation with some guy in the street who wants to come too. At the same time someone's trying to get me to open the boot but I don't, I don't know who he is. Turns out he's her husband to be and the other guy just a blow in. All three get in. The blow in is drunk and stupid and loud but he's only going a few blocks. Soon as he gets out the Bridenista starts in on her husband to be. The wedding's soon, they've spent a grand on invites, which the Post Office has gone and lost. So they have to email everybody. She's in a state of high anxiety, verbally precise, unstoppable, unremitting. He fields her demands with quite incredible good humour for about nine-tenths of the ride then starts to lose it. She doesn't stop. I'm thinking: this is clearly a mistake, they should call the wedding off but manage not to say so. They're going to Harold Park raceway of all places, to the trots. We get there, he pays, skedaddles, I breath a sigh of relief - but she doesn't move. She sits in the back, applying her mascara. I want to say something cutting to her but I don't, I wait, finally she goes, and I decide to head down to Glebe Point for a smoke. On the way I see someone I used to be with, she's walking home, she seems ... different. There's no way I could stop and say hello. I realise I'm not handling the stress as well as I think I am.

Then, much later, there's a woman who tells me in gory detail about her nephew in Auckland who died of bone disappearing disease, it's super rare, one in a billion, your bones are just consumed from within, he went in 8 months from a normal 17 year old kid to a wise old man of 18. None of the wounds from any of the treatment, exploratory or surgical, ever healed. She moves on to her husband's heart attack, Good Friday, two years ago. He survived but she's not sure if she has. She works for News Limited. I don't know what I'm doing she says, again and again, I'm right back where I started from. I tried something else but it didn't work out. I've never worked for anyone except Rupert. Cracking wise, but with a tremble of tears in her voice the whole time. Nobody knows, she says, how to spell the names of the celebrities who obsess us. It's her job to check but every time she does, half a dozen alternatives pop up on Google.

On the Bondi Junction rank, Saturday arvo, two kids, maybe immigrant kids. Well turned out but no-one will take them. I'm about the fourth guy they ask and I say yes. Got any money? I ask. The one in the back holds up two fives. They're going to Cooper Park in Double Bay. I think a footie game but no, it's a fight. A fight!? Yeah, a year 8 against a year 9. Their guy is the year 8 and they reckon he's going mash the other guy. I ask if they use gloves? One says yes, the other no, but it's clearly going to be a bare knuckle scrap. What about a referee? If one falls down to the ground we pick him up, that's it, the kid in the front says. These kids are spooky - about twelve or thirteen, they already talk like twenty-five year olds, they got the language, they got the attitude. The gang are gathering by mobile phone, at the tennis courts. I tell them about my father, how he boxed at Uni, hung onto his gloves but never fought again. He teach you any moves? Punches? I say no, he was non-violent. Huh, says the kid in the front. Like it was an option only an idiot would take. When we get there, there's $5.50 on the meter. Can I just give you five? the kid in the back says. I say to the one in the front, who's little and thin and feisty: Don't get hurt. He grins and says: Nah ... I watch them walk away - the little one has such skinny legs it's heartbreaking. About the age of my elder son. But he doesn't need my concern.

Bondi on a blue afternoon looks like a future city. J. G. Ballard territory. Some doomed hedonism that still has decades to run. I pick up two Americans on the strand. Rich people, a young woman, an older man. She's been showing him the sights. He's Jewish, a New Yorker, sounds just like Woody Allen. That same self-deprecating humour. He launches into a long story about how his roommate at College was one of the guys who wrote Friends. A bad actor, a failed screenwriter, a loser. Somehow they came up with the Sit Com idea, which this guy, in the back, says they stole from him. Or at least, stole the title from him. His surname is Friend. That's where they got it from. He riffs on this for ages, without rancour. He's very funny. We're in Darling Point by now, I'm dropping off the woman at an apartment building but she doesn't know the address. She calls her friend. It's not Darling Point, it's Darlinghurst. I say: You said Darling Point but she says no, she didn't. Definitively. But without rancour. The rich are different from you and I.

I get into a fight with one of three young women I pick up in Leichhardt. It's about nothing but the air is suddenly full of poison. It's stupid and it's my fault, I've broken my first rule, which is never lose it with a fare. Two of them are okay but the third is really nasty. She's enjoying the bad feeling, it brings out some instinct, not just to triumph but to utterly annihilate your opponent. I manage to shut her up, at least insofar as I'm concerned, but for the whole ride to Darling Harbour I can feel her, right behind me, breathing hatred onto the back of my neck. When they get out she makes a big play of noting down the taxi number on her mobile phone. She'll make a complaint and the truth of the situation, whatever it is, won't enter into it. I drive off into the City but I've lost it, lost the vibe, lost my way, lost, lost ... been driving for three nights now, it's only 9.30 on Saturday, I could go for another five hours, make another three or four hundred bucks, the cab's mine for the whole of tomorrow (that is, today) for nothing, I could make a couple of hundred more but I just can't work out how to do it. I drive around aimlessly for a while then find a park in Castlereagh Street, pull over, get out, light a smoke. Then I realise I'm right outside the Church of Scientology. Jesus this is where I've ended up. My engrams are about as low as they can go. This is not a Tom Cruise moment. I see another lost soul mooching down the street, he peers in to the front office of the C of S but it must be closed, he can't get in. This is too sad. I decide to finish the cigarette in the car but I peer in myself as I'm leaving. An impression of yellow and brown, of curling pamphlets in wooden holders at the front desk. It's like looking into the 1950s. Not the 1950s I grew up in but the mouldy ScFi version I used to read about in the 1960s. Suddenly I can't tell the future from the past. Or either from the present. A feeling of complete horror comes over me. I remember what the I Ching said earlier today: Six at the top means: Horse and wagon part. Bloody tears flow. I'm shaking when I get going again, only just keeping horse and wagon together. Two blokes climb in the back at the lights, they look like gangsters but they're not, they're just ... blokes. George Street looks like Sodom and Gomorrah moments before the cosmic ray descends and vaporises everything. I drop the blokes outside the QVB and head over the Westlink to the carwash. I'm gone.

east is east & west is west

2007-09-26T10:19:00.000+10:00

Course things happen all the time when you drive a cab, & I'm always thinking, I must put that on the blog ... but then something else happens & I don't. Now I'm going to take a month off so there won't be any more anecdotage here for a while. Not that there's been much recently. But here's one, lucky last.

Was coming up Bathurst Street into the City late afternoon when a fellow hailed me on the corner of George Street. A working man, maybe in his 20s or 30s. He asked me how my day was & I said Fucked. Some cop had just written me out a ticket for stopping on a No Stopping zone. That's about a $180 fine, so the shift was gone. This bloke worked for a furniture removalist, knew all about cops & their stupid ways. So we had a good old whinge together.

He was going to Bondi, where he was living, but he actually grew up in the western suburbs, in Five Dock. I asked him how he liked living in the eastern suburbs? He said: It's fucked. I hate it. Hate the people. Then he told me this story. He was calling up a friend, a girl who was a friend, not his girl friend, to ask her if she wanted to come over for a root? He knew her well, knew she would not mind if he put it to her that way, bluntly, I guess; but next thing, he gets a tap on the shoulder from a woman standing behind him, who admonishes him for speaking in that manner in a public place.

Where were you? I asked. In a fish 'n' chip shop, he said.

apec-cectomy

2007-09-06T10:22:00.000+10:00

Years ago I underwent a gruesome dental operation called an apicectomy (= a surgical procedure designed to remove infection or other pathology from around the end of the root of a tooth). Now, whenever I hear the acronymn APEC (about 10,000 per day at the mo'), I'm back in that dental chair having my jawbone scraped. I fainted under the anaesthetic and, coming back, had a weird out-of-body experience that almost compensated for the violence done to my jaw.

APEC, from the cab-driver's point of view, is a bit like the Y2K thang was: a lot of fuss in the lead up but, in the event, nothing much. Because there's a lot less traffic, and because there's clearways all through town, you can actually drive the streets like you used to be able to do here, oh, twenty years ago. Plus, lots of cabbies have taken the week off, so finding work is not a problem. I've been meeting my quota by nine or ten at night, at which point I joyfully sign off and go home. And avoiding the obscenity at the top of town, where cages have been built to keep the people a safe distance from Our Beloved Leaders.

Was home and hosed Tuesday night almost before Dubya's cavalcade came in from the airport. Yesterday, in the arvo, I picked up three sailors at Bondi Junction and took them up to their base in Randwick. Halfway thru' the ride the one in the front seat, who was eating spicy sausage sticks, mentioned casually that he'd met GB that day. Bush and Howard had been to the military base at Garden Island glad-handing the troops, as they are wont to do. What was he like? I asked. He was ok, the matelot said. He was pissed. His wife was nice. I said: He didn't bring his wife. Oh, well, said the sailor, the bird he was with then. Was she black? Nah. Cute though. I woulda given her one.

Earlier, dropping off three Hong Kong journalists at the Convention Centre in Darling Harbour, I got into a snip with a cop. There were barriers everywhere but a gap in the place where you usually drop off there, so that's where I stopped. This rozzer tapped on the door and made a wind-down-the-window sign. I complied. You can't stop here, he said. It's not a taxi stand.

This begged two questions: one, you're actually not meant to drop off on taxi stands, they're solely for picking up; two, the Chinese journo's were in the process of heaving themselves and their gear out of the cab, plus paying the fare, as we spoke. And they wanted a receipt. Was multi-tasking, change, receipt etc, with this cop whining in my ear: Are you listening to me? Listen to me. If I see you again, I'll write out a ticket. I'm thinking of writing out a ticket now. A bus had pulled up behind me, I knew the guy wasn't going to write out a ticket. I was empty, I could go ... except for him. I looked at him. He looked at me. With hatred. And defeat. He tapped again on the door and I scarpered.

Later on in Double Bay, some guy in a four wheel drive, thinking I was responsible for a delay in his very important life (I wasn't, it was an old lady illegally parking her Mercedes) called me a shit-box cabbie. Well, I was driving a shit-box, it was 1660, the worst cab, bar one, in Bob's little fleet.

Much later, about nine o'clock, I was hailed in King Street, Newtown by a rather svelte, handsome chap who might have been a bit Asian. He opened the back door then stood in the street, calling to someone across the road: Get in the car, Joanne. Get in the fucking car. I craned my neck, looking for Joanne. There was a girl in the door of the hardware store wearing trainers and a checked flannel shirt. Probably not Joanne. And then, further down, standing on the curb, an elegant woman dressed all in black. That was Joanne. And she wasn't getting into the cab.

The bloke told me to start the meter (I already had), then yelled out at her a few more times. She ignored him. He said: Ok, goodbye Joanne, and got in the cab. Chuck a uee, mate, he said. Waited for a break in the traffic and did. We pulled up next to the Joanne, he opened the door. A slight hesitation, then she got it. Tall, very thin, almost anorexically so. Blonde. American. She had a low voice and she was furious. With him. They were going to Merrylands. Where their marriage would end, either tonight or tomorrow morning, by the sound of it.

Mostly they sat in stony silence. There was Weird Folk on the radio, I turned it up. A bit of Karen Dalton. Blues on the Ceiling, kinda perfect in its way: I'll never get out of these blues alive / I'll never get out of this crazy blues alive ... Karen croaked. Joanne was delivering a few home truths: You treat your family like shit, she said. You have to learn to be truthful with yourself. Otherwise it's over. He was defensive, embarrassed, yet still brutal. Shut the fuck up, I heard him say. I wondered if she was afraid of him. Wondered if he was, or could become violent. The answers seemed to be no, no, and maybe.

It was a horrible ride. I couldn't help thinking of the last time I did it, with a drunk Montenegrin with no money, shadow boxing and shouting obscenities. What is it about Merrylands? We got there at last, pulled up outside the marital nest. She said: Would you mind waiting for a few moments while I get a couple of things? He said: Well, you pay him, then. She said: No, you pay him. And went. There was a beat. Alright I'll pay him, the guy muttered. How much is it? The meter had just turned over to fifty. Fifty bucks, I said, forgetting about the tolls. He gave me a fifty. Do me a favour, mate, he said. Just go, will you? Then he got out as well.

I waited. The meter was still running. Should I reset it or what? What was the right thing to do? I wasn't sure. After a while I turned the car around, switched the engine off and waited on the other side of the road. There was a better view of the house from there. A brick villa, recently built. Lights on in all the windows. Thought they were probably arguing but couldn't hear anything. No blows, or cries. Thought that if she'd really wanted me to stay, she wouldn't have got the guy to pay me. Thought I could wait out there for a long time, and nothing would happen. Thought ... it's none of my business anyway.

In the end I just drove away.

anonymity

2007-08-24T20:11:00.000+10:00

A precise relationship with money is both a condition and a lesson. Perpetual. And ... intermittent. Last night, needed another $20.00. Never mind why. Was on the stand at Park Street, after 10 pm. One more ride, I thought. Two blokes from Melbourne, going up to the Travelodge in Kings X. Ten, max, probably less. It was seven. Drove through the strip, hoping I wouldn't get hailed. Hookers standing in the road, dealers, spruikers, punters, desperados everywhere. Just like me. In Wolloomooloo, pulled over for a stitched up looking fellow. Going to West Pennant Hills. Sixty bucks, maybe more. He was drunk. I demurred. You're just not fucking interested, are you!? he snarled, and slammed the door again. Well, no. On through the City, my usual haunts. Nothing. Market Street. Outside the QVB, a young chap, polite. Epping. Forty, fifty bucks. Didn't want to go to Epping. He was OK about it. Could see, up ahead, a couple, waving, frantic. Try them. Already a whiff of the familiar. Pulled up, thinking, yes, know these two. He was the younger brother of an old friend. A thirty five year old friendship. But we fell out, couple of years ago. Have seen each other since but the intimacy has gone. The brother is a public figure. Union official. Lefty. Heard him on the radio, just the other day. We've had Christmasses together, we've got drunk in each other's company, a few times. I looked him in the eye as he piled in the back seat. His wife after him. He didn't know me. Didn't look at me. Not really. Drunk, not wrecked. Functioning. There was a moment when I could have said, hey, it's me. Didn't. Weird. Heard all of their conversation, in the back, knowing far more than they would have thought I knew. Mostly about their kid. The logistics. Busy lives. She was going to have to pack two identical suitcases next day. One for the red car, one for the blue. Felt myself drifting, further and further out ... into anonymity. Nobody. Own fault. Coulda been someone, coulda been me. Going to Leichhardt, a tricky route, had to confirm it with him. Surely he'd know me now? No. Dropped them off in Catherine Street. He was very sincere, the union guy standing up for the working man, doing the right thing. Impeccable. I should have felt terrible but I felt ... nothing. Nothing that $14.80 wouldn't fix. Pulling into the servo, the radio offered a job to Padstow. Thirty, forty bucks. Didn't take it. Gassing up, a fellow came out with a pie and a drink. Going to Peakhurst. Ditto. Guess I just wanted to go home. Just wanted to be ... me. Not the cabbie me but the other one. This ... one.

Hallelujah I'm a Bum

2007-08-24T13:49:00.000+10:00

One night last week I saw, at about 8.30 pm, on the busy corner of William & Palmer Streets, a fellow stretched out fast asleep on his back. He wore a beanie on his head and the nondescript clothes of a clochard. Next to him was an empty champagne glass and next to the glass was a bottle of champagne, whether full or empty I could not say. Next to that, tied up by a ratty piece of string to the hurricane wire fence overlooking the motorway, was his little dog, a silky cross. Waiting patiently, a little anxiously, for him to wake and their peripatesis to continue.

Driver's Docket

2007-08-15T12:10:00.000+10:00

Was taking some fellow from Alexandria to Rozelle when the job came through. He was telling me about how he'd had a stroke during a kidney biopsy taken to try to work out why he had high blood pressure, when all the time it was sleep apnoea that was to blame. Now, as a result of the stroke, he was half blind and couldn't remember as many of the 5000 characters of Chinese writing as he used to. So I didn't clearly focus on the job and it was only when the operator called to ask if I had the details that I realised it was one of a kind I hadn't done before: payment by driver's docket.

It was a doctor's rooms up on Darling Street. No-one outside so I left the car in the street and went in. In the corner of the waiting room was a gent in a beret who looked like a Scotty. He was painfully slow, coming out of the room, along the corridor, out the front door, into the street, into the car. Various irate motorists bellowed on their horns but I felt justified in holding up the traffic by the evident disability of my fare. He took his time, too. Just before getting in, he pointed at the facade of the building across the road. There was a figure carved out of white stone at the apex of the arch, silhouetted against the evening sky. Who's that? he said. Athena, I replied, wondering if it was in fact her. Humph, he said. She has the attributes.

I've only got one leg and one hand and my wife's just left me, he announced when he was settled and we were on our way. With a kind of grim satisfaction. She's sick of looking after me. Says she wants some time to herself. There was a pause. It seemed I needed to say something. Where'd she go? I asked. To her brother's, he said. She comes back every morning to cook my breakfast and spends the whole day looking after me then goes home at midnight. She does more for me now than when she lived with me.

He was Irish not Scots and had recently returned from a visit to the ancestral home. It was everything you'd expect of Ireland, he said, describing a castle 350 years old from which the dust had never been cleared. Cobwebs hung from floor to ceiling and in the library the leather-bound, gold-spined books were thick with grime. My wife's a librarian, he said. She's going back to clean up all those old books. Worth a fortune. I looked sideways at him. He was expressionless. After she finishes leaving me, he said. When we've got the place set up so I can look after myself. It's not so hard. Mainly just things like tying my shoe laces. Things that need two hands.

Turned out he was a writer. Had been to Duntroon, the military academy, and had fought with the South Vietnamese Army - the ARVN - as an adviser during the Vietnam War. That's what his next book was to be about. Bryce Courtenay came to me, he said, and asked if he could write it. I said no. He said, come on, Michael, I'd do a better job than you. No, you won't, I said. Yes, I will, he said. I'd write it as fiction whereas you'll probably write it as non-fiction. Fiction outsells non-fiction ten to one.

He expatiated for a while upon the marketing genius of Mr. Courtenay then said: He gave me this book of his to read. Called Smoky Joe's Cafe. Wanted to know what I thought of it. I read it and told him I thought it was a load of rubbish. Not just the factual errors, the whole thing, he had the whole thing wrong, Vietnam wasn't like that at all. Well, next thing I know, I'm in a bookshop and it's on the best seller list! Everywhere I went, Smoky Joe's Cafe, a bestseller. It's still a load of rubbish though.

As with the news about his wife, this was delivered without acrimony, as of a curious fact about the world that I might or might not take notice of, as I wished. Was he aware of how amusing he was? I wasn't even sure of that, though reflection suggests he must have been. Anything I contributed to the conversation was listened to intently and then he went on with his tales as if nothing had been said. Telling me about the genealogy of his people and a graveyard out at Mudgee where many of them are buried.

I suppose I have to sign something, he said when I pulled into the drive of the house in Cremorne. He wrote M McDermott in a firm, rather ornate hand then began the labour of hauling himself out of the car. Was there the ghost of a smile on that otherwise grim mouth as he shuffled around the front of the car? I don't know; by then, I was busy giving the details of the fare to the operator, so I could get back from her the docket number, so I could get paid.

"A Cabbie's Life hangs by a Thread"

2007-08-13T11:50:00.000+10:00

photo by C. Garth Thompson

stupid dumb bastard

2007-07-19T11:47:00.000+10:00

Last night I made one of those mistakes that, in this job, can be so costly. I'd earned my target amount, was gassed up, logged off, rolling through the Ashfield shops on my way back to base when a fellow hailed me ... and I stopped. Soon as I saw him lurch against the door as he tried to get in, I knew; but by then of course it was too late. My problem had become, how to get him out again. Parramatta, he said, rolling the rrrrrs and clipping the tttttts, like a Russian. He was about as drunk as you can be and still stand, or sit, upright. Clutching his phone. He made a call, speaking in his own language, which wasn't Russian, to a woman on the other end. Shouting, rather. The only word I knew, repeated several times, was taxi. He was trying, I realised later, to get her to agree to pay the fare at the other end. Didn't sound like she agreed. He finished the call then lurched over in my direction, trying to grab my arm. Shouting something. I eluded him by leaning away. He left his hand clasped on the back of my seat for a while. Forgotten, probably. What nationality are you!? That's what he was roaring. I told him. He couldn't process the information. You're not a wog? he dribbled. And then: You're white, like me. This seemed to be a satisfactory outcome. I asked him his nationality. Former Yugoslavia, he said. From Montenegro. A morlach from the black hills perhaps. Probably Serbian was the language he'd been speaking. He subsided into an alcoholic stupor as we drove up the Parramatta Road. He smelled sweet, as if he'd been drinking some peach or cherry or plum liqueur. Once we were on the M4, all of a sudden, he started bellowing and shadow-boxing. Get Fucked!! he yelled, very loud. Several times. Then he'd subside and sigh in a melancholy way. But he knew the way, he wasn't that drunk. I realised he probably didn't have any money when he started mumbling that he'd give me his phone number, I could call him tomorrow. By then I just wanted to get him home, get rid of him. I was driving too fast but I didn't care. My other worry was that he might try to grab the wheel. His directions, when they came, were slurred and shouted at the top of his voice. He could easily have become violent. Once we left the M4 he started saying I could come round to his house the next day for the money. I didn't want his address, I didn't want his phone number, I didn't want ever to see him again. We got to the street, pulled up, I stopped the meter, switched the light on. It was about forty dollars. He sat. You can get out now, I said. Where's my change? he said. There is no change, I said, because you haven't given me any money. You can get out now. I switched off the motor, kept my hand on the key in case it was me who had to bail. Suddenly he turned pathetic. What I doing? he said. Get out of the car, I said, the third time. I dumb, stupid bastard, he said. Stupid dumb bastard ... at long last he started to move. It took him an age to get out and he nearly fell as he tried to shut the door; then he almost jammed his fat fingers in. I watched him shamble off up the street, then started the car, chucked a Uee and left. It was about ten dollars in fuel and tolls to get the sad fuck home and me back to base, so I guess he left me out of pocket thirty bucks or so but I decided not to care about that. It was better just to be free of him. Later, when I was having a bite to eat, just as I set the wine glass to my lips for the first sip, that sweet disgusting odour of cherry brandy or whatever it was rose up and I was almost sick.

a whizz in the graveyard

2007-07-13T17:14:00.001+10:00

There are very few places in the City where you can pee outside. I've seen a cabbie stopped in a lay-by on Southern Cross Drive peeing against a wall in full view (well, he had his back turned) of the enormous traffic shifting by; I've seen bottles of pee left in the dunny at Teacher's Car Wash, suggesting some drivers do it on the run; and I myself have peed in some strange places, including once against one of the north pylons of Sydney Harbour Bridge. Usually I go to a pub - the Hero of Waterloo in The Rocks is a favourite, so is the Criterion on Park Street - or a Servo somewhere. The other night in Bondi I parked the cab confidently around the corner from one of my usual spots only to find the pub - what was it ever called? - no longer exists.

Last night I was in South Coogee, having dropped a young woman off at Maroubra Beach (and refused the pizza she wanted to give me), when I saw a bat fly through a row of big old trees like macrocarpa and thought: Yes! Here! I was busting, as the kids say. Parked the car and got out, only to be confronted by a working man going home with his duffel bag over his shoulder (it was late, 11.30 or so, and I was sure the street was deserted.) He was too tired even to look at me, so I scooted on towards the first tree.

Up the slope behind it was a wooden gate, leaning open, with what looked like a field behind it. In a field behind a gate is of course better even than round the back of a tree, so I climbed up and went through into ... a graveyard. It was the Randwick Cemetery in Malabar Road, I've seen it heaps of times up the other end, from Arden Street, but hadn't realised it came down this far.

There was the cold stillness you find in graveyards, the tipping stones, the land rising up towards a brief, carious horizon, beyond which the far stars trembled against the black. It was like suddenly entering another dimension, where the coordinates we use to navigate the streets and houses, people and their dreams, had vanished and all that was left was space and time and the tough grass and weeds that grow over stones. It was a distant corner I was in, old, disused and out of some vestigial feeling of respect, probably misplaced, I tried to memorise the names of the people upon whose bones I was peeing ... gone.

I left that place with a shiver and, though not exactly disquieted, I did notice I drove rather less recklessly and haphazardly than usual as, having decided not to seek any more work that night, I made my way back to base.

Don’t let the sound of your own wheels / drive you crazy

2007-07-11T12:04:00.001+10:00

Most nights out driving I forget what happens almost before it has happened ... then there are those other nights when it seems possible to remember everything, even those things that didn't quite happen ...

Thursday, when I pull into the Park Street rank at the beginning of my shift, a small round woman with a large head climbs into the front seat and a vaguely familiar, raffish fellow in a black trilby hat gets in the back: this is Stuart Shepherd, artist, stalwart of Red Mole days from New York in the 1980s. We belong to different eras of the Moles but crossed over once, in 199o, at the Belvoir Street Theatre here in Sydney during The Book of Life, which Stuart designed and appeared in, and I did the sound for. He's making a film with Amy, his friend in the front seat and a self-taught artist. The film is Amy Goes To Sydney and when I see them the next day at the Art Gallery of NSW, they are off that evening to the Newtown Hotel to interview some drag queens. Saturday, they visit a palmist in The Rocks before winging back to Wellington.

I take them up to where they're staying at the Challis Lodge in Challis Avenue in Potts Points and then pick up a radio job from Victoria Street to the City. A mother and daughter come out of the small hotel, heavily laden with gear and looking exasperated. Turns out the daughter is booked on a train to Queensland and they've been waiting an hour and half for a cab to come to the back entrance of the hotel. On the way to the station, I fill the daughter in on the vagaries of Silver Service, the allegedly elite branch that gets offered all the radio jobs first, and how many of the drivers just will not do short trips. Gradually she de-stresses and when, on Wentworth Avenue, The Eagles come on the radio, singing Take It Easy, she starts singing along. That's nice.

On the stand at Country Trains, the guy handling the taxis tells me that the roadworks are because the station is leaking in the heavy rain we've been having. There's a fellow there with a docket, wanting to go to Gordon, but he has to wait for the actual cab he's booked, otherwise Railcorp won't pay out. I try half-heartedly to convince him to go with me until I find out that the Bridge is jammed. The high winds we've also been having have blown part of a maintenance shield off the roof of a train, bringing down wires near the South Pylon and closing lane 1 ... the chaos will go on for hours so I'm very happy when a nurse from Moruya with a cabcharge form asks me to take her to Cronulla. She's a very nice woman, but reticent and a bit hidden the way country folk sometimes are. We discuss the right age at which kids should get mobile phones these days, she has a 12 year old and a 10 year old, both boys, and girl twins who're nearly 7. When she hops out, just for a moment, she turns full face towards me and smiles, and she's beautiful.

On the way back up Southern Cross Drive, outside a pub in Waterloo, I'm hailed at the lights by a couple of refugees, drinkers for sure. She's Polynesian and sits in the back and doesn't say much; he's an Aussie with one of those craters of the moon faces. Somehow we start talking about the American ship, the Kitty Hawk, that's in town after the exercises up in Queensland, and that leads onto Vietnam, where this guy served. In a transport and supplies division. He tells me various things I didn't know, for instance that the Army sent conscripts up there and kept most of their regular forces at home, and that most conscripts served for less than one year so that the Army didn't have to pay them a pension afterwards. In the midst of it all, completely unconscious of the reference, he says: I was only nineteen ... and I almost lose it.

They get off outside the Criterion in Park Street and, immediately, another couple get in, he in front, she in back. They're French and there's one of those weird and wonderful moments when I hear their language without being able to recognize what it is ... before it settles into something more familiar though still strange. He's wearing a black and white striped shirt and though a bit shambolic and overweight, has Gallic charm in spades, that elegance and insouciance that always makes me think of Apollinaire. He tells me the taxi drivers in Paris are the worst in the world and that Sydney's, by comparison, are high class. When he gets out to go and buy some wine I say to his companion that he's a very charming man and she agrees. She's older than him and the cask of wine he brings back is for her. I like these people very much.

Down the bottom of Devonshire Street I'm hailed by a woman going home from work, she lives in Wolloomooloo and knows an intricate way to get there but that's where the Kitty Hawk is tied up and I know it's hopeless. On the way I tell her about the French couple until, in a laneway between Riley and Crown, she gives up and decides to walk the rest of the way. Leaving me stuck in horrific traffic, not just sightseers for the ship but cars trying to get into the Harbour Tunnel because the Bridge is still jammed. I do a couple of cheeky manouevres and am rewarded when a young woman, an art student or something similar by the folio she's carrying, crosses through the traffic and gets in, wanting to go to North Bondi. She's English and seems ok at first but gradually some kind of class thing enters her voice and I feel bound to shut off.

After dropping her off I go up to the Junction and pick up a couple of Irish boys, from Waterford, and take them up to Randwick. They say Waterford boys love the Craick and will go on until there's not another man left standing. When they tell me that some Aussie in a pub told them he hated them because he hates all the Irish, I tell them I like the Irish and round the fare down to an even ten bucks. I spin around outside the Royal and go back up Belmore Street where I'm hailed by a young woman with a plastic rubbish bag full of what looks like, and is, washing. She's talking on her mobile phone and the conversation goes all the way to Edgecliff where I drop her off in Glenmore Road at a brothel I haven't noticed before. Her conversation with her friend, another sex worker who's left town for some unspecified location, is intermittently fascinating but I'm not going to try and write it all down now, it'd take to long and there's money to be made.

At the north end of Glenmore Road you have to turn left and I'm soon stuck in traffic on William Street, cursing myself for not going the other way up to Oxford Street; but, again, by being cheeky I get through quick and make it to the Criterion for a pit - or piss - stop that I badly need. There's no cabs on the rank and as I get out two Indian boys come over and ask if I'll take them to Blacktown? Sure, I say, running inside. I doubt they'll still be there when I come out but they are, so I do take them to Blacktown. I've never been out that far before last night, when I took a young guy to Doonside, a ninety dollar fare, but these chaps want to go a different way and it's only about sixty-five ... still, it gets me out of town long enough for the chaos to be sorted out before I return and I find their soft voices, talking Hindi in the back seat, soothing.

I get a hail coming back on the Great Western Highway, a bloke I take to be a Maori but who is in fact some kind of Asian. When I remark on the coldness of the night, he shrugs and says he works in a cool store. He has a peculiar odour, not unpleasant, and after a while I identify it as the smell of chook ... maybe it's a chicken cool store he works in but I don't ask, I just take him home to Merrylands then ride the M4 back to the City. The chaos has cleared but there's still no cabs on either of the Park Street ranks and an unseemly clamour as those waiting jostle, not for me, but for the guy pulling in behind me. My fare's a dyke who spends the trip to Alexandria talking to her girlfriend on her mobile phone. Her girlfriend is far away, maybe in Canada, I don't know. I love you too, she says.

Head back into town and get hailed in Pitt Street by a young Asian couple who want to go first to Marsfield, then to Epping ... it's a good fare, forty or fifty dollars, just what I need this time of night but for some reason I don't want to go. It could be that I'm light on gas after the Blacktown epic, I'm not sure. Anyway, spooky as it sounds, on the Anzac Bridge they discover that she's left something - wallet? mobile phone? - behind and he wants us to go back. She says no, no, but he wears her down and in Rozelle I do an illegal U turn and take them back to the exact spot I picked them up, corner of Pitt and Liverpool. Am unsure if they'll want me to wait but no, he peels off a ten and twenty, says just give him five back and off they go into the night.

Two blocks up I get hailed by a group of American sailors going back to the Kitty Hawk. They look about fourteen and don't say much. I ask about the exercises up in Queensland but the guy in the front says no, they just came from Guam. Then he asks me how to get to Taronga Park Zoo, I tell him, and he says ... that's where the Steve Irwin memorial is, right? I'm dumbstruck ... all this way, to our great City, and it's Steve Irwin he wants to pay homage to? This kid from upstate Pennsylvania? Even the sight of the carrier looming above us all grey and sinister, with its batwing jets folded up on the flight deck, fails to shift my incredulity.

I don't wait around there for another fare even though there's plenty of milling around going on, I scoot back up to the City and find a South African who's going to Mosman. Don't trust Jaappies, they're volatile and emotional and can turn nasty, especially the Suits, so I'm very circumspect and professional and, good-oh, there's no trouble. Afterwards I figure I'm nearly done, but instead of taking the Westlink I go down George and pick up a young Scandinavian woman with her eyes enormous behind her spectacles and take her to Ultimo. She gets off in a very obscure part of town, behind the Powerhouse Museum and I notice a street I've never seen before, Sistrum Street. I watch her unlock a massive metal gate then walk up a ramp then I'm on my way, home James, and don't spare the horses.

... but on Parramatta Road at Camperdown I'm hailed by a joker wearing a leather jacket and holding a kebab upright in a bag so I pick him up. He's a Kiwi, from Hawkes Bay via Christchurch, quite drunk and with a bad stutter. Young, in his twenties. We chat about this and that and gradually, especially when he realises I'm from NZ too, his stutter gets less. All the time he's holding his kebab bag upright like it's the Olympic torch or something and when we get to where he lives, Palace Street, Ashfield, he doesn't know what to do with it while he's getting his wallet out, so asks me if I'll hold it. This is of course unwittingly comic but I keep a straight face, holding up his kebab while he fumbles for the money, then handing it back to him. I ddddidn't want to spill the sauce, he says and goes off into the night with his sauce unspilled. And so do I.

A Broken Nail

2007-06-29T10:07:00.000+10:00

It was rush hour. Five to six. Was empty, stuck in traffic, outside the American Express building in Liverpool Street when she caught my eye and began to negotiate pavement and gutter and roadway so she could catch my cab. The lights changed as she was opening the door and she seemed a bit flustered, what with her bag and her umbrella and her fashionable coat. Then something happened, I didn't know what, she exclaimed in dismay and opened the door again, looking down ... Broke a fingernail, she said, holding up her hands. They were small and brown and the nails were very long, all except the one on the middle finger of her left hand, which had gone. She wore many expensive looking rings but the settings were unostentatious, as graceful as herself. I imagined her palms, rough, pink, perhaps a little cracked, though I couldn't see them. I like the touch of rough womens' hands, I don't know why. Are they your own? I asked. Cheeky, but I felt at ease with her: she was amused and amusing and so why not? Of course, she said. I wouldn't wear false ones. She was looking at her hands, murmuring: Take two or three weeks to grow back ... if I could have found it I might have glued it back on. I said something to the effect that scrappling in the gutter for a fingernail is not a good look and we moved on. She was going to The Establishment on George Street, was late, hence her rush, hence the broken nail. I started telling her about the smart and funny girls from ACP I'd just dropped off in Surry Hills, their minute dissection of the appearance of a work mate who wore false eyelashes this long ... individually applied. She gave a brief shudder and said she preferred to be as she was. There's something about perfect beauty that's soulless, she said. I like my crooked nose. I looked at her nose, in profile, it didn't seem crooked to me. Her face was as attractive as her hands, quick eyes, a slightly sardonic curve of the lips that she'd reddened so they set off her dark skin. I mentioned the Persian carpet makers who deliberately weave a mistake into the pattern because perfection offends the gods. She laughed. Yes, and when we try too hard we make mistakes anyway. I should be more zen. We were halfway up Elizabeth Street now. It was gone six o'clock, the hour of her date. Que sera, sera, I said and started to discuss the best route from here on. Hmmm, she said. Good thinking, 99. That meant she'd watched the same TV in her youth as I did, we must have been more or less of an age. You don't have a phone in your shoe, do you? I asked. No, she said, just as well, because I might put the stiletto through my cheek when I was answering it. In this delightful banter the brief minutes passed and soon we were pulling up outside The Establishment, a luxe and well patronised corporate drinking hole. It was just ten past six. Oh, she said, I can be fashionably late. We did the business, she paid, natch, with an Amex card and said yes, she would like the receipt. Then came a moment of silence. I was waiting for her to get out but she didn't move. The moment lengthened, we were as if stilled, sitting in a cone of silence. What was going on, did she not want to go? And then she said: Are you going to give me the receipt? I'd printed it out but neglected to tear it off; so entranced perhaps. Did you think I was waiting because of your lovely company? she asked, making it at once a compliment and a rebuke. No, I said, I just thought you were composing yourself so that you didn't break another nail, getting out. And then we laughed and off she went to join whatever lucky person she was meeting.

people like us

2007-06-06T11:09:00.000+10:00

Took a Chinese woman down to Earlwood, she got in the back seat outside the Criterion in Park Street then, at the corner of George, said she wanted to sit in the front. Well, do, I said, so she did, before the lights changed and we were on our way. She was tired, she worked in stockbroking, had spent the day translating figures from one currency to another, one screen to another. We didn't talk much, though front seat travel generally means an inclination towards conversation. I liked the way she smelt, which isn't always the case with front seat passengers: a light perfume beneath which her own body scent lingered.

Afterwards I wandered up through Undercliffe to Marrickville and there, at a bus stop, in the murky evening light, were two obviously half cut disreputables roistering. There was a vacant cab in front of me, which they didn't hail, so I was a bit surprised when one of them stuck out a hand for me. A moment's decision: to stop or not to stop? Trouble or no trouble? Should I ... hit the anchors. They took ages to actually get into the cab, one in the front, one in the back. The one in the front had a khaki beanie pulled down over his ears, the dirt of decades etched into the skin of his face, only two or three front teeth left in his mouth. Fellow in back was older, almost dapper by comparison.

They're going to the Coopers Arms in King Street, Newtown. To get pissed, which meant, in their estimation, they aren't yet. That tells you something, because I think they're properly shickered. How long ya been driving a cab? asks Beanie. I think, and in the moment of thought, he answers for me. Too bloody long, eh? he says and sniggers. Guy in back says: Never catch me driving a bloody cab, too bloody dangerous ... Beanie: Ever been jumped? I look at him, he laughs. Don't worry, he says, we're not gonna jump ya. I say: I know you're not.

Fact is, I haven't ever been jumped though I might have come close to it a couple of times. It's hard to judge the seriousness of a threat that isn't made good. I never thought these guys were going to try anything, on the other hand, they were the kind that could easily have turned nasty if the wrong thing had been said. Now Beanie's unravelling a long cab-riding story that is designed to show his bona fides. He'd once caught a taxi from Sale in country Victoria to Melbourne. The fare was eight hundred dollars, and he offered to double it with a tip. His folks gave the cabbie a sit down meal, either before leaving Sale or upon arrival in Melbourne, I can't work out which. Cabbie refused the tip at first but Beanie forced it on him. Musta cost me three grand, that trip, he muses.

Meanwhile Dapper, sitting in the back, is keeping up a running commentary, which basically consists of contradicta: everything Beanie says, he disputes. If Beanie says he's generous, Dapper says he's mean. If Beanie pretends to wisdom, Dapper says he's thick as pigshit. If Beanie says ... this is done without malice, indeed, with high good humour, so he's chuckling widely between the insults. I'm fifty seven, he says at one point, apropos of nothing at all. He's forty three. See? See? Perhaps he meant together they made a hundred. Beanie ignores him. He's still talking about jumping cabbies, looking toothlessly sideways at me and grinning. Don't worry, mate, I won't jump ya, I'm gonna tip ya. Dapper says: He's a miserable bastard, he won't tip ya.

There's twelve dollars on the meter when we pull up outside the Coopers Arms. Beanie scrabbles in his pockets for a bit, he's got quite a lot of cash loose in there. He comes up with a ten and a five. Thereyagomate, toldyaI'dtipya. He shakes my hand. Dapper leans over from the back seat, he shakes my hand as well. Helluva job you got, mate, he says, I'd never drive a bloody cab, have to put up with people like us ...

easy come, easy go

2007-05-29T10:57:00.000+10:00

Picked him up at the back of the Cross, it was maybe five in the afternoon, he was talking with another guy on the other side of Ward Avenue, near Kellet Street, just lighting a cigarette, when he hailed me. I was half wondering if he'd want to keep smoking in the cab but it had gone by the time he climbed in the front seat. Big guy, wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans, sneakers. Chains hung from his belt. He looked like a drug dealer from a German movie. Once in, having told me where to go - Kent and Napoleon, in the City - he took off one shoe and started pulling large denomination banknotes, fifties and hundreds, out of it. I used to keep my money in my sock, I offered. I'm just sick of being robbed, he said, taking off the other shoe and pulling out more money. Softly spoken, genuinely polite, feet not too smelly ... carrying about two grand, one in each shoe, although it was hard to tell exactly and I didn't like to appear too curious. Once he had the notes smoothed out and in his wallet he started fussing with plastic bags of coins; then did some stuff with his mobile phone, changing the SIM card I thought at first but perhaps not, perhaps just re-programming it now the day's hustling was over. As we neared his destination he started fiddling with the coin bags again, getting the fare ready, and dropped something down the side of the seat. Scrappled away down there for a while. I could turn the light on, I said. He stopped looking instantly. Easy come, easy go, he said. He paid in coins, the exact amount, then sloped off into the gathering dark. Much later in the shift, on the Park Street rank, I remembered he'd dropped something and went to look. I found it on the floor beneath the back seat. It was a five cent piece.

bookends

2007-05-24T10:30:00.001+10:00

Since the Haberfield base closed, I've been walking to and from Croydon each day I work. Takes a bit longer and it isn't quite as nice a walk - no bat shrieks in Ashfield Park, no rosemary at the War Memorial - but it's still okay. I go through the back streets, past suburban gardens where chrysanthemums and dahlias grow, until I reach the traffic arteries again. There, yesterday arvo, as I went to cross busy Milton Street against the lights, I saw a book with its pages fluttering in the middle of the road.

Scooped it up as I passed, it lacked both front and back cover but all the matter of it was there. A sampler, from the 1990s, one of those books a publisher puts out which anthologizes bits and pieces from other books they're promoting. A selection from Ruth Park's Playing Beatie Bow was included, it's a time travel adventure set in The Rocks now and a hundred years ago. They were all Australian authors. I placed it carefully down on the corner post of the brick fence on the other side of the road and carried on.

Origin night, I was expecting it to be busy, with mean or boisterous drunks but it didn't quite turn out like that. Traffic was bad early and I broke one of my rules and became exasperated ... calmed down after a while. Later, when the game began, an eerie quiet descended on the City, people all over town glued to their TV sets. As soon as it ended, just after ten, the radio went crazy. Worked a bit longer than I usually do on a Wednesday, mopping up punters on the inner city outskirts then headed back to base.

I was walking home down Liverpool Road, that part where the Ashfield shops are mostly derelict, before you get to the top of the rise and go down the other side to Summer Hill, when a woman stopped me. I've been seeing her round a bit lately, perhaps she's a street person or a resident of one of the homes that sprinkle the area, I don't know. She looks Polynesian but could as well be Asian. Anyway.

Excuse me, sir, do you have the time? she said. I looked at my watch, angling my wrist to catch the dial in the ambient light. It's midnight! I said, somehow delighted to see that it was so. Oh, she said gravely. Twelve o'clock, on the dot. Afterwards, I had to look back to see if she was still there, walking away down the otherwise deserted street.

an archangel slightly battered

2007-05-23T13:07:00.000+10:00

He got in, with difficulty, into the back seat, on the Bent Street rank. I thought it was because of the slope or maybe I was too far from the curb: it was a time of chaos, rush hour, cabs sliding in and out of the traffic all over the place, horns sounding, deathwish pedestrians hurling themselves into the roadway. A gentle voice, a dishevelled suit, a vaguely East European look, a bit battered: Polish, probably. Castlereagh Street, unusually, was jammed up. We discussed the best way to get to Stanmore. I liked his attitude, it was without anxiety; instead of trying to stress me out, as so many fares do, he was actively calming me down. That's rare. At the corner of Liverpool Street, when I thought of turning right, he said softly: You can do that ... so I did. It wasn't until then that I took a good look at him and realised his right arm was sticking upright, at ninety degrees to the elbow, in a cast, one of those blue, modern, epoxy resin jobs. That's why he had such trouble getting in, I should have helped him. No, no ... he said. So I asked him how it happened and he said, a taxi hit him. He was on a motor scooter, in Redfern, the cab made a right turn in front of him, knocked him off onto the road, he broke his wrist. Three weeks ago now, most of the soft tissue damage had healed but he still needed to wear the cast. We chatted on down Parramatta Road and, in the course of the conversation, he mentioned another accident he'd had, this time on a push bike. How many accidents have you had? I asked, as we turned into Bridge Street. Six, he said thoughtfully. No, must be more like eight. Yes, about eight. I was incredulous. All on bikes? I said. Yes, he said. Push bikes and motor cycles. I looked in the rear view at his open, honest, slightly lugubrious face. And, when your arm's better, are you going back riding? He became almost animated. Yes, he said, of course. Why not? I could think of a few reasons, but didn't say them. When we'd stopped in Gladstone Street, and he was looking through all his many pockets for the cab charge docket he'd filled out earlier then mislaid, I told him I liked his attitude. He nodded, smiled sadly. Thank you, he said. It's all the accidents you see ... taught me ...

Two More Characters

2007-05-09T09:06:00.001+10:00

Hospitality Girl

First job Monday arvo, off the radio, Leichhardt to Granville. I M2, get the word to start the meter, find the flat. No sign of life, I go and knock on the door. A voice calls from inside: Sorry, I didn't get text message, won't be long. I wait. She comes out eventually, young, plump, Chinese, dressed in pink. First thing she does is ask if I have a rubbish bag? She's cracked the seal on a bottle of cough mixture, which she drinks over the next five minutes or so. I ask if she's ill, she says no, this is like ... red wine. Sweet-natured, a bit scatty, chatty ... wants to get there quick, she's late for work, we banter back and forth about this, speed, traffic, time. Has a curious habit of timing the trip on her mobile phone but she's way out, I've been keeping an eye on my watch, we've been going far longer than she thinks. She's from the north but grew up in the south. Was studying medicine but gave it up for hospitality. As we stop-and-start along busy Parramatta Road she starts to sigh. Says she's carsick. That she has a headache. I suggest she open the window a little, she does. I show her the map, so that she can see how close we're getting. She's looking a little flushed now, a little bruised. Finally we get to the place and turn off. It's a very short street full of garages and warehouses and I'm wondering where on earth in this mess she works ... until we pull into #10 and I see the pink and blue neon lights burning in full daylight, the sign saying OPEN 24 HOURS. There's a brief, not acrimonious contretemps over the fare, I round it down to forty dollars and she hands of over two twenties, quicksmart. There's a guy loading a truck who leers at her as she passes, pausing at the industrial waste bin to throw out her empty bottle of cough mixture before disappearing inside.

Old Digger

Raised a stick for me in Philip Street and then limped, without hurry, across the road in front of the car. Going to Killara, had his own route, would show me. His wife was going blind, otherwise he would have stayed after the meeting for a few drinks. I'm slow to realise that it's the NSW Leagues Club I picked him up outside of, he was a first grade player before the war, on the wing for Balmain, and has spent the whole of the rest of his life working for the game. Been fifty times to NZ, been all over the world. Tells me about his daughter, died of cancer, all the places he took her in the last years when they knew it was hopeless. Walked over Sydney Harbour Bridge as kid when it opened, in 1932. At one point I start to say something about a book I'm reading but he cuts me off. Don't have any time for books, he says. I read 14 books on the ship coming back from the war and I haven't read another one since. That was enough for me. What kind of books were they? I ask. All kinds, he says, airily. Novels and that. I'm thinking that he must have been returning from Europe or North Africa but no, he was in New Guinea. Two and half years. Was at Wewak, East Sepik River province, where the Japanese surrendered in 1945. Shot a twenty-two foot python up there one day. Shows me with his hands how round it was. Spent one night sitting up to his neck in water, after a river flooded. Now he's telling me something about a right hand turn that he always takes, only you can't do it at rush hour, it's against the law. We come to the turn, just back from the Pacific Highway north of Chatswood, and there's no traffic approaching so I do it. He chortles at that, he's very happy, we're going the way he's gone for fifty years. We're friends for life, or as long as the ride lasts. You wouldn't read about it, he says. You wouldn't read about it.

some characters

2007-05-03T21:00:00.000+10:00

Sand Castle Girl

Picked her up on the Bondi Junction rank, tall, leggy, young, with an unlit rollie in her hand. She was from Rye on the Victorian south coast, in Sydney for a month with her father, their business was sand sculpture. Had just made her first visit to Bondi Beach, could not believe the way a thousand eyes checked her and her accessories out as she walked down the strand. A lovely mixture of wide-eyed innocence and all-but-unconscious sophistication. Gave her the black Bic lighter someone had left in the cab.

Archaeologist / Accountant

In Riley Street, going to Presbyterian Lady's College in Croydon for a Parent-Teacher evening. He was an uncle, his niece would be reviewing career options. Soft-voiced, understated, highly ironical, had trained as an archaeologist but ended up working as an accountant. Said he still didn't know what he wanted to do with his life, even though he was passing fifty. Just ... to stop working. Was he gay? Did he have children of his own? Hard to say ...

Red-haired Boy

On a street corner in Petersham. Going to the ABC building in Ultimo. The red hair was shading towards pink and certainly not natural. A radio producer, he did a talkback show that started at 10 pm. Handled all the technical aspects, screened callers, managed delays ... told me a joke: Advisor to Bush: Mr President, today's kill figures in Iraq are: twelve Americans, three British, one hundred and seventy Iraqis and one Brazilian. Bush's face puckers up. Long pause. How much is a Brazilian? he asks.

Chinese Car Hunters

In Pitt Street, City. Going to a bar in Chatswood. A young couple, about to get married. She was enamoured of cars and wondering which kind he would buy her? Nervous of her prospective mother-in-law. Totally materialistic in a completely unselfconscious way. English not so good, she must have grown up in China. He, monosyllabic at first, I thought perhaps he spoke it less well that she did. Not at all, he was Australian Chinese. Don't worry about my mum, he said.

Party Girls

Corner of Redfern Street. Two blondes in little black dresses, going to a party in the City, a bar next to the Hilton. Chatting about the peccadillos, and worse, of the stars. Their drug habits, their compromised immune systems, their high class despair. One said: I've brought my camera, so if Nicole Ritchie starts snorting coke, I'll photograph her.

Marrickville Pair

In King Street, Newtown, going to a block of flats in Marrickville. Vaguely gothish. A couple, not long together. She from Melbourne. He: This wedding ... in terms of style, how would you rate it? She: Zero. The wedding was in Brisbane; she'd been asked to speak at it. The bride a friend of hers, the groom doesn't like her. The bride visits her in Melbourne then spends the whole time fucking this other guy; the groom doesn't know but clearly suspects something, hence his dislike of this girl. I don't want to go, she said, I won't go. Clearly, she would.

Cardiac Technician

A radio job, Summer Hill to Camperdown. Just round the corner from where I live, a pretty, serious young Indian woman. Going to the RPA. You a nurse? I ask? No. Cardiac Technician, she replies. I just got home, now I have to go back. Heart attacks don't wait. Me: I couldn't do that. She: Somebody has to. She didn't want to talk any more after that, obviously preparing herself for the op. At the hospital, I pull up at Emergency while she goes in to get the cabcharge docket. A curious delay, given the urgency of proceedings. I leave her to her higher purpose.

Bro

He's standing at the bus stop outside Sydney Uni in City Road, his arm out. Big guy in a baseball cap. Two cabs in front of me both make to stop then swerve away at the last moment ... so I get him. He's Aborigine, that's why they wouldn't take him. Fucking wogs! he says as he gets in the front seat. Articulate and very angry. Not interested in anything I have to say, just wants to get his message across. Used to rob cabbies when he was young, for fun, but wouldn't do it now. Hates priests and judges. Despises those who treat him with prejudice, enjoys getting right in their faces. When we stop down a dark street in Balmain, he pulls out a sheaf of fifty dollar notes, pays the exact amount then slopes off up the hill through a park.

Tap Dancing Round the World

2007-05-01T13:07:00.000+10:00

There's a fellow who tap dances on a board at the corner of Park and George Streets, perhaps the busiest corner in town. Have never stopped to watch him but often glimpsed him as I drive by: he looks good and, so far as I can tell, dances superbly. Plays fine music. Always has a crowd. Sometimes a woman with him who looks after the music and the money. One day I saw him dancing with his board balanced on top of the small rectangular column, about a metre and a half high, where the electronics for the traffic lights are.

Last night I was idling third on the rank a block back from there, at the corner of Park and Pitt, when he knocked on my window and asked, very politely, if I would take him to Waterloo? He'd chosen me above the two cars in front because I was driving a wagon and he had all his gear with him. We put the board flat in the back, then he stowed his music machine - compact, wheeled - in the back seat and got in the front next to me.

I complimented him on his act. He thanked me. I said I'd seen him dancing on the utility box, he said he had to stop doing that because it affected the operation of the traffic lights. He was reserved, well-spoken, a black American. From San Francisco. I mentioned that I'd lived there once, we talked about different parts of the city. His neighbourhood was the Tenderloin and, no, the Tenderloin hadn't changed from when I was there. Was doing a world tour, would go to Japan next but, at the end of it, after two years away, he would return to UCSF and complete his degree. In political science. You make enough to buy air fares? I asked. You'd be surprised, he said.

He lived in a new, quite flash, apartment building near where Waterloo shades into Zetland. When he came to pay, he pulled from his pocket a sheaf of notes, all of them fifties - several hundred dollars. He found the fifteen dollars for the fare in amongst some notes of smaller denominations in another pocket. As I pulled his dance-board from the back, I asked him if it travelled with him or did he find a new one in each new place? He looked gnomic at the board, which I saw was modified, or customised in some way, metal eyes had been sunk into the ply.

I like this board, he said. I think I'll keep it with me for a while. Thank you, sir ...

Anzac Day

2007-04-26T16:42:00.000+10:00

I don't like Anzac Day. Never have. It scares me, the violence inherent in the commemoration of war, the sentimentality that masks the violence. I remember in the early 1970s in Auckland there was a fashion amongst us for going to the Dawn Parade, dressed in our army surplus great coats - a sure provocation to the old soldiers who would certainly become enraged at what they saw as a calculated insult. And perhaps they were right.

I remember another Anzac Day, 1987, here in Sydney, at the Caledonian Hotel, where I lay awake all night listening to my enemies, two brothers, plotting, as I thought, to murder me. I could hear their voices echoing through the disused shaft of the old dumb waiter, that came all the way down from their barricaded hideout on the top floor to my basement room in the servant's quarters. I fled that place as soon as it was light, and never went back, or only to get my things.

So driving on Anzac Day felt like ... a risk. Nevertheless I needed the money and so decided to do it. The day was grey and wet, the streets gloomy and deserted. I took a man and his shopping home and then an aged Englishwoman, with her son and daughter-in-law, to the airport. She was going back to the Old Dart. In the City, all the ranks were full and none of them were moving, so I drove around until a tall fellow with a chest full of medals whistled for me in Castlereagh Street.

Going to Mosman. Well-liquored and quite pleased with himself. Had a wonderful time. Told me that the marches are getting bigger, not smaller, as the old diggers fade away: made up of Reservists, Territorials, Home Guard and the like, many of whom have never seen action but remain besotted by the military and all it entails. The romance of war. Couldn't find it in me to like this man but was polite enough to him. He too was flying to Europe the next day.

Not long after, back in the City, on the Park Street rank, I picked up a skinny fellow with more medals than his thin chest could hold. His head was poked forward on his neck and he had an improbably large nose. He said he'd had an amazing day and told me why: he'd been a regular soldier, had served two tours in Vietnam, and during the second was part of an ad hoc unit formed by a field commander to fight alongside the SAS in special operations. They drove light armour and were extremely successful - he apologised for using the phrase kill ratio but said it was current at the time and theirs was very high.

Well, after two months, the unit was disbanded and, subsequently, when members of it applied for war pensions and offered as support this part of their service record, the Department of Veterans Affairs denied that the unit had ever existed. So these guys had just embarked on a process of organising some proof that they had existed. They'd had a reunion that morning during which they'd met, and spoken to, an ABC journalist. One of their proofs was a strange meeting between this guy and his brother, a conscript, who'd been at an artillery base in Vietnam when the lost patrol, the light armour unit, rolled in at 3 am. That kind of thing, he said, can't be faked.

I dropped him off in Rose Bay and answered a radio call to the Eastern Suburb's Rugby Club, where the two-up game had ended, the buffet was trashed, everyone was going home. Took two blokes up to the Four in Hand in Paddington, where two big young woggie fellows got in. Expensively dressed and unremittingly foul-mouthed, indeed abusive, about the woman who was joining them. Of course I've heard blokes go on like this before but they generally stop once the woman appears ... not these guys.

She, a blonde, came pirouetting across the road to the cab and they started in on her immediately in a way that was brutal, shocking, vile. And she took it! Even gave a little bit back but couldn't really compete. They had met that afternoon at the Randwick races; she had (her words) gatecrashed their party. That must have been why she was beholden to them; why they didn't care. What is a 'spit roast'? I almost don't want to know.

The worst thing about rides like this is the punters generally try to enlist your support: the blokes wanted me to validate their stream of insult and innuendo, the woman wanted me to defend her. Not long before we pulled up at King Street Wharf she asked, in a tiny, little girl voice, if they wanted her to go? There was the merest pause then they both said Nah, you fuck, you can stay ...

Then there was a couple having a fight, then some gross young men who, despite the protests of the woman they were with, whose father was cooking for them, insisted on stopping for kebabs on the way to the barbie ... had to pick their mess off the seats and the floor afterwards, wondering why I didn't just leave them at the kebab shop ... didn't go near The Rocks again, nor any pubs, but you see things anyway:

Four or five sailors fanning out into four or five empty cabs stopped in traffic outside the cinemas on George Street just as a violent brawl breaks out. A cop car pulls up opposite, two female cops run through the traffic and hurl themselves into the melee, which rolls into the street ...

At the other end of George Street, later, another sailor collapsed in a gutter while another woman cop bends over him, trying to haul him upright. In a clinch, they stagger then fall together into the street ...

I'm taking a young woman, starry-eyed with the romance of war, from Summer Hill to Surry Hills when we stop at the lights outside The Rose in Cleveland Street. There are three people swaying there, too drunk to know the cab's engaged, too drunk to realise I've only stopped because the lights are red. They begin to lurch towards the car, I roll the passenger side window down to tell them it's not on, then one of them disappears, falling onto the road and, who knows, under the wheels of the car?

Her friends, a man and a woman, scarcely less drunk than she is, drag her upright and get her back onto the footpath. For some reason they have both her arms raised in the air and appear to be lifting her skywards. Owww! she screams, you're hurting me! as the lights go green and I accelerate away. There, about two blocks on, I see two people recklessly riding shopping trolleys down the footpath, out of control, likely to hurtle into the roadway at any moment ...

Much later, at the end of my shift, I've just dropped off at the airport and am heading back to base through Erskineville when I'm hailed outside the Kurrajong Hotel. They're going my way so I take them, to Annandale. A young couple, drunk, but not offensively so. How's your Anzac Day? the boy asks. I've escaped with flesh wounds, I reply. He giggles. I'm maimed, he says, Fucken' maimed. There's a pause. Anzac Day's supposed to be about all these things, he says. But it's really just about drinking. Drinkin' fucken' alcohol. 'S'a good thing too ...

In Serendip

2007-04-22T13:23:00.000+10:00

Sometimes driving a cab can feel like living as a tick on the body corporate, the way some journalists live on the body politic ... when you've engorged enough cash / blood / venom you drop off and go home until next time. But, not always. The other night I was driving up towards the Coca Cola sign at Kings Cross with a taciturn Englishman in the cab when the radio offered me a job: Darlinghurst to Milsons Point. It was between six and seven in the evening and the bridge, I knew, was jammed because of an accident or a breakdown in the tunnel earlier. I'd spent the last hour and a half trying to get away from the gridlock at the north end of town so it was clearly counter-productive to accept a job like this. Except: the job was in Womerah Lane and I used to live in Womerah Lane. I hit the #2 button, accepting, and was then astonished and delighted to see that the street number was 71 ... my old house! She was a very nice young woman - if being in your thirties is still young, which I think it is - and we chatted happily for the duration of what turned out to be a far longer ride than it would usually be, going over the bridge to Luna Park. Where she was attending a work function. I won't go into the detail of the conversation, beyond saying how fascinated I was to learn what has happened to that house and the neighbourhood since I left it (in 1995) and how intrigued she seemed to be to learn something of the back story of where she and her husband and daughter now live. It reminded me of what I love about this city, and even, sometimes, about this job: the tangled, genial, half buried but always excavatable sense of community that exists here. And the way that community is both intensely contemporary and resonantly historic.

The Dream Taxi

2007-04-12T09:53:00.000+10:00

He was standing on an erk in Erko, a long hair, with pony tail, waving, not frantically, rather amused that, dreaming, I hadn't seen him. He climbed in the front seat and said if I hadn't stopped he would have phoned for me. Wanted to go to Chelmsford. To pick up a mobile home. Chelmsford? I said. Yeah, he replied. A long ride. I knew you’d be pleased. They were digging up Wilson Street, one side of the road only, so I had to go carefully through there. Where in hell was Chelmsford? Way out west? In London? On some other planet than ours? There was too much blue on the map, as if it segued from Horsham into the Fens. The sky darkening by the minute and water rising. We were lost in Darlington, lost in Golden Grove, without a destination. Locomotive Street flashed up on the computer screen but that was no help. Something was tugging at a forgotten corner of my mind. Deep sleep therapy. A man called Hart, with complications after eyelid surgery, pumped full of barbiturates by Dr. Herron and kept comatose for two weeks. He was never the same again but at least he was alive to work his griefs, for thirty years, inconsequentially, through the courts. Mr Hart had now to sue Cashman and Partners, solicitors, for negligence. They cited a precedent that upheld advocates’ immunity from such charges and extended said immunity to the preparations for a court case by solicitors. They had never put medical evidence of Mr Hart's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder before the court. Why did this long hair want to go there, I wondered? It was in Pennant Hills, 2 The Crescent. Why? When I get my mobile home, the man was saying, I'll be able to sleep anywhere. Imagine my dreams! At Lake Mungo. In the shadow of The Olgas. In a red gorge of the Bungle Bungles. I was feeling grim now, it was a long way to Pennant Hills, it was getting darker by the minute and I still wasn't sure we weren't in London. Dr. Heron, I said, dredging the name out of the murk. You are Dr. Heron? No, he said, looking troubled. No, no, not at all. My name is Heart. My relief was indescribable. I settled back into the seat. Oh, well, that's alright then, I said. I'll take you to Horsham Downs. The taxi accelerated through the rising waters, throwing up sheets of silver spray. Reflections in the slick wet streets made garish cathedrals of light. Underground, all over the City, sleepers awoke.

Rag Doll

2007-03-26T14:14:00.001+10:00

One day last week as I was driving down the hill into Double Bay, heading west, I saw spreadeagled, face down on the road, a rag doll. It was tall with striped pants and orange hair. Arms out either side. I swerved to avoid running over it but you could see that plenty of other drivers had not. How did it end up there? Whose familiar was it? Did some child drop it crossing the road or did it fly out a car window? Did someone throw it from the balcony of one of the tall apartment buildings flanking the street? Did it fall from space?

It revived or perhaps recalled my greatest fear while I drive: that I might hit a pedestrian. Don't really worry about hitting, or being hit by, other cars even though, on any night, you might have half a dozen narrow escapes. Probably that's something to do with the metal skin you're all encased in. Whereas pedestrians ... it's the thought of metal hitting unprotected flesh, allied with the fact that pedestrian behaviour is becoming more and more casual, to the point where people now commonly step out into the road at any old time, even when the trafiic is flowing and the lights are against them.

Last week my nightmare almost came true. I'd picked up a fellow in the City and taken him out to the University of NSW for his daughter's graduation. She'd studied Chemical Egineering and was already working out north of Mt Isa. He was a former member of the board of the Film Finance Corporation, an interesting man who found out, I realised as I drove away, much more about me than I did about him. It was about 6.30, before daylight saving had ended. I was coming down High Street towards Anzac Parade, with the setting sun directly ahead of me. The combination of low light, downhill trajectory and dust on the windscreen made visibility almost nil. Like driving into a golden haze, a swarm of dusty light.

I was probably driving too fast, as I tend to do when I'm thinking about other things. Suddenly I saw, out of the haze, a young woman stepping in front of the car. Hadn't even seen the pedestrian crossing she was using; and she, with her ipod on, certainly hadn't seen me. In fact, I don't think she ever did really see me. I slammed on the anchors, praying the car would stop before sending her plumpness flying into meat. It did, just. And she carried on, oblivious. As I did, a bit shaken, a bit trembly, and much slower. For the rest of the shift I kept getting flashbacks: both her form appearing out of the haze and then, overlaid or perhaps immediately sequential, the rag doll spreadeagled face down on New South Head Road.

2007-03-15T14:07:00.000+11:00

Some nights are like that, they just whizz by. First ride, a taciturn rich kid going home to Mosman, actually Beauty Point, or was it Quaker's Hat? From nearby Central Ave, another laconic rich kid, off to Brookvale to pick up his - or more likely his parent's - car. On the way back, at Spit Junction, a pregnant Asian woman, going to the QVB. Whew, that's the first hour, about 70 bucks worth. Lawyer's rates! Well, not quite. At the rank in Park Street the Taxi Council guy tells me how a woman, earlier in the day, tried to get cab 666 to take her to Newcastle. For nothing ... a lawyer clutching two fat ring binders gets in and asks to go to Lane Cove. He's spent a dreary afternoon at the Equal Opportunity Tribunal representing someone in an apartment building dispute. I tell him that the serial complainer in this building has just given her notice, to everyone's relief, and we chat happily on all the way there. Cab 1660, which I'm driving, shows vacant even when engaged, so you're offered a lot of radio jobs. I take one from Lane Cove to the City and am just about to look in my directory for Apollo Street when someone climbs into the cab. He's going to Wolloomooloo. The Ford dealership in Riley Street. I abandon the job from Freedom Furniture and take him there. Back up to the rank at Chifley Square, it's moving, a businessman going to the Airport and thence to Melbourne with property deals, it sounds like, under his belt. Airport jobs are tricky, especially this time of day, you earn $25-30 but it can take half an hour there, another half hour back to town, ruining your hourly rate. Never mind, ten minutes before six I get hailed at the corner of Pitt and Park by an English chap who quips, when I ask him which way he wants to go to St Leonards, via London. He's a scream, tells me stories about growing up there with West Indian kids in, must be, the 60s? Something weird is going on in North Sydney, there are people hailing cabs everywhere. Turns out the trains have failed, there's one stuck on the line north of Wynyard, another just south of Milsons Point, some problem with the electrics, the Bridge is out, chaos about to ensue. A young Chinese couple going to, where else, Chinatown. She's in a hurry, for a doctor's appointment, but the Bridge is jammed. They are very funny, trying to guess where I come from: South Africa? Ireland? Singapore? Tasmania? Gaul? They don't get it and I have to tell them. Turns out he was born in Peru, or rather, his father was. They're sweet and I find myself wondering if she's pregnant and hoping so ... George Street is gridlocked but a young woman crossing through the stopped traffic hops in the cab and asks to go to Concord. This is brilliant, it means I can get out of town, perhaps until the madness is over. From Concord, a fare to Burwood, from Burwood to Strathfield, Strathfield to Burwood, all little rides but no waiting and no traffic jams. I can't believe the din the birds are making as they roost in the plane trees outside Strathfield Station and then I'm astonished to find they are not, as I thought, starlings, but rainbow lorikeets ... hundreds of them. In Burwood Road another young Chinese couple, with shopping, hail me and want to go to Parramatta. They have very poor English and show me the address written on the lighted blue screen of a mobile phone. That's great, I think, further west, even if I do have to go back empty. But, just coming into Church Street, the radio offers me a fare to Waterloo. Waterloo! Fifty bucks, just like that, to go where I'm going anyway. I'm sort of pale with anxiety as I negotiate the one way street system looking for 2 - 12 Macquarie, jobs like this get snapped up real quick by rogue drivers but no, he's there, Simon, a Korean boy who works for AMP. Wants to go via UTS in Broadway to pick up his girlfriend. Very friendly, with a stoved in face and a hectic laugh. Lived in Equador when he was young and tells me about trout fishing in a lake in the crater of an old volcano. The air so thin they couldn't get their rice to boil right. The girlfriend is studying to be a solicitor, she's in the library with her law books, a smiling woman with a big head, very curious pair, these two. In both looks and attitude. It's sixty bucks by the time I let them go, even though I forget to add on the toll money for the M2. I could go home now, but I don't, I drive into town to see what's happening, which is nothing much. Two drunk guys who work in advertising climb in the cab just when I'm thinking of parking and having a pee in the Criterion. They think they're funny but they're not, as I make clear, so they stop trying and return to planning a party they're going to have. He's socially adept, he won't want to come to a party given by his ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend, one says, he won't want to meet the guy who's pounding her now ... let them off in Shirley Road in Crows Nest and wonder if I should make a break across the Bridge for home now, but decide instead to take one more fare. George Street, a blond, young, she's going to Rozelle. Afterwards I mosey down to Norton Street in Leichhardt, just in case I find someone going west like I am. Hailed by a woman and two men, they say ... Parramatta. That's another forty bucks I hadn't counted on even if, and I do, I come back empty, it doesn't matter ... my wallet's full. And it's only half past ten. And the weekend.

Killing a Chinaman

2007-03-11T20:22:00.000+11:00

The other day I did what I suspect a lot of cabbies do, but I never have before. Was driving up College Street, past St Mary's Cathedral, when the radio offered me a job: Art Gallery of NSW to Darling Point. Nah, I thought. Fifteen bucks? Nah. I hit reject. Then, seconds later, thought: Well, why not? I'm here, they're there, there' s no other cabs going down Art Gallery Road, maybe I should. So I did. They were three old ones, two women and a man. Probably had been viewing the Archibald, as many individuals and organisations, surprisingly and old-fashionably, do. We were back on College Street, heading towards William, when the old gent said: Look at all those red lights. You must have killed a Chinaman. Somehow, in the instant, the thought of the Chinese, the image of all those reds, fused. Is that specific to red lights, or just generally about bad luck? I asked. Bad luck, he said. You must have killed a Chinaman. Heh, heh, heh. Well, I said. I haven't killed anyone. I'd remember. Heh, heh, heh, the old gent chuckled. I checked it out with a couple of fares later in the evening. One, a fellow from Adelaide I took to the Airport, said he knew it well but didn't use it so much any more, because of political correctness. He told me the meaning of Bush Baptist (someone who goes bush on Sundays, while everyone else goes to church) and also a long complicated story about Twaddle having a meaning to do with chemical detritus. Still haven't sorted that one out. The other was a Pom I took to Woollahra. O my goodness me, he said. Well, well. No, I haven't heard that one before. Dearie me. Killing a Chinaman, eh? That's too bad.

Ghosts of Sunning Hill Farm

2007-02-25T10:47:00.000+11:00

Yasmar is Ramsay backwards. It is, the guide says, a classic Georgian townhouse. Intact, though literally crumbling, in its original gardens. The wings where croquet and tennis were played excised to make a children's prison. When at last we are allowed to enter, hairnets on our heads under hard hats, the little girl who ran so cheerfully around outside begins to cry and cannot be consoled. It is the sadness in the air, it's the ghosts—not those of Ensign Bayley or Simeon Lord, nor the Ramsays and Learmouths, nor even Albert Edward Grace of Grace Bros. and his wife Selina, called Gypsy—but the ghosts of the young perpetrators, excised from their quite possibly dysfunctional families and incarcerated here after the war. They creep out of the walls like damp, they hang from the architraves, they linger in the pissy smell rising from the fireplaces with their elegant, Edwardian, wooden surrounds. They are thick in the bathrooms out back where the stables were, the girls' decorated with absurd pink and yellow sixties flowers, the boys' painted a vile orange. Thick as the webs of orb spiders in the weedy kitchen garden. The house at once so grand and so small, double doors opening in the hallway entrance to make a diminutive ballroom. Here the Court Sessions were held, here the children were condemned to whatever period of incarceration was to be theirs in the unseen, 1980s cell blocks behind the brick walls either side of the garden with its teardrop rose garden and rare exotics. Beautiful glass, asymmetric, bizarre, a mid-Victorian chivalrous fantasy out of Burne-Jones perhaps. As if Haberfield were the demesne of some knight errant who would right all future wrongs. Where did they sleep? The old ones, I mean, the house seems to consist only of living rooms. Greek revival, the hand-out says. 1856. Sandstone blocks, flagstone verandas with cast-iron posts, a Welsh slate roof. At the top of the hill, where my taxi base is now, stood Dobroyde House, the original Ramsay seat. They were big in the Linnean Society. They supported the Australian Museum, founded plant nurseries for the Garden Suburb. They're all buried in the family plot at St David's churchyard over in Dalhousie Street. Out front, in the heat and bustle of Parramatta Road at midday on a Saturday, you can see how the gardens were laid out, after the style of Queen Victoria's designer Louden, so as to hide the long, low, house from view. Now there are hurricane fences to confine those institutional ghosts, wailing still and forever in the bright sticky air as I mumble off down the hill towards Bland Street.

Whalan was an explorer too ...

2007-02-22T20:57:00.000+11:00

If there is a god of cab-drivers - & despite my alleged secular humanism, I can't help but think there is - it's Hermes. Who is also, appositely, god of thieves. And much else: He was seen to be manifest in any kind of interchange, transfer, transgression, transcendence, transition, transit or traversal, all of which involve some form of crossing in some sense. This explains his connection with transitions in one’s fortune - with the interchanges of goods, words and information involved in trade, interpretation, oration, writing - with the way in which the wind may transfer objects from one place to another, and with the transition to the afterlife. It's a responsibility, I guess, but the insouciance of the god is an aid here, you can always drive off in search of the next soul wanting to be transmigrated. Sometimes I can feel the wings on my heels, or rather, the buds of them pushing against the leather uppers of my shoes; but other times I have feet of clay. These things worry me probably more than they should but, hey, it's confession time: last week I picked up a gay man from Melbourne at a hotel in North Ryde and took him to Annandale. He was a nice fellow, a bit detached, a bit abstracted, but good company and we chatted amiably all the way to ... well, he said Nelson and it wasn't until I'd dropped him off and was racing away down the street that I realised I'd left him in ... Trafalgar. It was only a block west of where he should have been & he had the number of his friends to call, but I still felt really bad. Like I should have gone back. And told him. And didn't. Last night I did something worse, I picked up two kids on Parramatta Road who were going to the Wentworth Hotel in Strathfield. The image of that pub floated before my mind, I said yeah, sure, I know where it is ... and off we went. The way young kids (I mean late teens, early twenties) talk these days is like a foreign language to me, they don't move their lips much, so I only understood about a quarter of what they were saying. One was a sporting star, he'd been to a tournament in Paris, tennis I think. Why they were going to a dreary pub in Strath I couldn't work out but took them there anyway. Looks dead as, doesn't it? said the sport's star in the front as I pulled up outside. You sure this is the Wentworth? I peered out, looking for the name I'd seen so many times from the train window. Couldn't find it. Yeah, I said, swiping the kid's debit card and relieving him of twenty odd dollars. See ya. It was as I drove away that I saw in my mind's eye the sign I couldn't find: Whalan's Hotel. Oh, shit. Taken them to the wrong place. Their faces wore the same dubious yet oddly docile look of the gay man's outside the house in Trafalgar Street. If the cab driver says so, it must be ... if Hermes says ... did I go back? And tell them that, not only had I taken them to the wrong place but didn't have a clue where the right one was? Like shit I did. I sped off to Parramatta Road and scooped up two extremely drunk Irishmen - only understood 1/16th of what they said - and took them to the City. For a discount. That was guilt, I suppose. Four dollars worth of guilt. Later, checking my directory, I found there's a Wentworth Hotel, probably fairly smart, in Homebush, a couple of suburbs past Strathfield. Perhaps that's where the kids were headed. Perhaps they made it ... god only knows.

Politics

2007-02-08T15:16:00.000+11:00

There was a huddle of, oh, about twenty people on the rank at Chifley Square, with the wind blowing in intermittent hard gusts and sudden showers skeltering down. I pulled in, the bloke at the head of the queue got in the back of the cab and said: Balmain. I paused, looking at that disconsolate group. Wonder if there's anyone else going to Balmain? I said. Don't care, he replied. Later I looked at his cab charge docket. He worked in the Premier's Department of the NSW government.

Behaviourals

2007-02-07T12:16:00.000+11:00

So I'd just dropped off the second of two Russian women who'd been in town shopping, at Vaucluse, & was hanging off the end of the Bondi Junction rank, when a young fellow bent into the window & asked if I could take him? Course you're meant to direct these kind of fares to the head of the rank but nobody ever does unless it's someone just going around the corner ... & this fellow was going to the airport. He was from Armidale. Down for the day to see a specialist. About Workcover, Accident Compensation, whatever it's called. I've had a few of these, & their stories are always interesting, so I asked him what kind of work he did? Mental Health carer, he said. How do you get injured doing that? I asked. You get the same kind of head sickness as the head cases you look after, he said. And so unfolded his tale of woe. It began a few years ago with a patient who suicided. He was very close to this man, had cut him down twice, nursed him back after an attempt to blow his head off with a gun ... he'd seemed alright & then he'd heard his ex-girlfriend had found a new lover. Sat up all night drinking then did it. Now, over this last summer, he'd been afflicted with other patients blackmailing him, threatening to do the same if he went on holidays. One girl, after he returned from the holiday he did take, had in fact slashed herself, but not fatally. But what had really pushed him over the edge was the break-up of his own relationship. He felt there was something odd going on between his girlfriend and her uncle and, as he said, pushed her & pushed & pushed her until she confessed she'd been in a sexual relationship with him for the past five years. He'd said it was in the past & the person he loved was her, now, but she wasn't able to end it. She had left him. Who's the uncle? I asked. A sixty-two year old barrister, he said. Who had been grooming her since she was a child. Has a history of this kind of involvement. It had compromised his, the barrister's, relationship with both his sister and his daughter, though it wasn't clear if these had become sexual liaisons as well. This man is smart, & operates within the law, for instance waiting until his niece was of age before seducing her. As he was talking, he several times swept the dashboard top clean of dust with his hands. Sometimes he rubbed his face. He was telling me all the things he'd told the psychiatrist he'd just seen, but I had the feeling that I was more sympathetic than the shrink had been. He didn't know if he was going to get the time & money he needed or not. When I asked him if he was to return to nursing when he was well gain, he laughed. No way, he said. I'm going back farming. There was a distinction he made that interested me: between people he called Behaviourals & those with a genuine mental illness. The former are fucked up / spoiled / abused / neglected ... but not mentally ill. Highly manipulative. They were, by the sound of it, the reason why he was getting out. As we pulled up to the Terminal he told me some good news, about his sister's baby girl, two days old, that he'd seen on this trip to Sydney. Hope you're gonna be OK, I said, when he got out. He cracked a smile. Course I will, he said. Shit happens, right? You get over it. Thanks, mate ...

je ne sais quoi

2007-01-25T10:31:00.000+11:00

Yesterday afternoon, about 3.15, at the bus shelters in Cremorne, just before you go onto the Bridge, I picked up two women. They were going to the City, to Goldfields House in George Street. As we barrelled down towards the Coat Hanger, I was overcome by an acute nostalgia, so intense I felt like weeping, or perhaps shouting out loud. One of the women in the back seat was wearing the same perfume that Julie Till used to wear, a scent I don't recall noticing even once since the last time I went out with Julie. Huntly, circa 1967. We were both in the 5th form, hence, fifteen. Julie was in the Commercial stream and I in the Academic, so we were not class mates. Can't remember now how we got together. She was gorgeous and I was head over heels with her. We only went out a few times, to dances to which her father would bring her in his car and then pick her up again afterwards. I don't think we ever kissed. I have two photos of us together, one, rather formal, from a school dance at Huntly College and another from a dance we went to at the Huntly Leagues club one Saturday night. In this pic we are leaning together with our heads resting against each other, smiling like young lovers do. I think it was after that dance that I ended up (how?) with a tiny white lace handkerchief of hers, redolent, for months afterwards, of that elusive perfume. Our affair ended strangely. It's a small town story that I never got the full gist of, but here's what I know. I'd arrived at Huntly College halfway through the year previous, and in my fourth form class was a boy called Peter Mildenhall. He was short, tubby, with a bullet head, a farmer's or a miner's son, and very proud of his position as top of the class. Somehow, without ever really wanting to, I sparked his enmity towards me. It might have been because I was the Headmaster's son; it might have been because I was good at English and Maths and challenged his position. Anyway, he took against me. Somewhere out his way, west of the town, lived another guy, Glenn Hugill. He was older than us, a second year fifth at the time of which I write, our fifth form year. Glenn was big and dumb and a bit scary in the way of big dumb guys. He and Peter teamed up. Peter had a small blue Ford Prefect that he used to drive around in; I, most nights if I wanted it, used my mother's red and white Hillman Imp. Around the time Julie and me were going out, I started noticing that, whenever I went anywhere in the car at night, Peter Mildenhall's blue Ford Prefect would unfailingly appear in the rearview mirror. Peter driving, Glenn in the front seat next to him. They must have had me staked out; they followed me everywhere. It was weird, because they never said anything, never did anything, never referred to their game at school or any other time. Likewise, I never I told anyone about this. But it was sinister. And alarming. At some point - and I can't remember how I learned this - I was given the information that Julie Till and Glenn Hugill were cousins. And it was at this time, without any explanation whatsoever, that Julie stopped being my girlfriend. She just ... stopped. Leaving me heartsick and with only those two photos and that tiny embroidered handkerchief with its trace of perfume which gradually, over the months, faded. I never knew what it was called; I almost asked the women yesterday; but in the end ... didn't. Julie, I heard much later, got a job in Hamilton as a secretary. She would have married and probably has children. She was a farmer's daughter from out Te Kauwhata way. Auburn hair that she wore short. Plump. Very white teeth. Lovely skin, quite dark for a Pakeha. Brown eyes. A touch of Spanish or Italian perhaps. We never had that much to say to each other but for some reason danced beautifully together. To the Sapphires, who later, after the Beach Boys got big in Huntly, changed their name to the Surfires. It's peculiar now to think that I may never know the name of that perfume ...

money to burn?

2007-01-24T09:59:00.000+11:00

Sunday I set off with my kids to take them back to the Central Coast. It was hot, 39 degrees, so we went to Strathfield Station by way of the Ashfield pool, for a swim. Trains on that line are reliably air-conditioned so that was OK. We played I Spy until Hornsby, when the train, unaccountably, stopped. A bush fire at Kuringai. We waited through several announcements, until told the train would not be proceeding at that time, but returning to Sydney. A burgeoning plume of dirty grey smoke about a kilometre north. Jesse, my older boy, was convinced it had been deliberately lit; turns out he may have been right. Couldn't contact the kids' mother by mobile phone, so we wandered off into a vast shopping mall to look for something to eat. Turned out the F3 was either closed or so jammed up it would have taken hours to effect the handover by car, so me and the kids took a later train back to Strathfield. Next day their mum came down, again by train, & collected them. Got a call about midday, Liamh, my younger boy, saying they only got as far as Hornsby & had again been stopped. They were waiting it out in the Hornsby RSL. I went off to work. Texted them about 4.30, learned they were on a very slow train, just past Berowra. They would have got home at maybe 5.30 or 6.00 that evening. Around that time, after a desultory couple of hours, was hailed by two people in Macquarie Street. Going, they said, to the ferry at Palm Beach. Trying to get back to the Central Coast. They lived at Kilcare but commuted to the City to work. Couldn't figure out what kind of thing they did. Well, we set off on what is one of the longest rides in the Metropolitan Area. You can't go any further north than Palm Beach & still be in Sydney. They were calling all sorts of people on their mobiles, making arrangements. At Dee Why, a friend who'd gone ahead to Palm Beach called in: Don't come near here, she said, there's forty bus-loads of people waiting, a three or four hour turn around. A brief confab, then they asked me to turn around. Booked themselves in to the Swissotel in Market Street. Then the question of fresh clothes for work tomorrow came up. They'd have to buy them. Myers in the city closed at 6.00, it was way past that now; but the one at Bondi Junction stayed open to 7.00. Okay, Bondi Junction it was. The ED was jammed up as far back as the Harbour Tunnel so we crawled all the way to Moore Park. I let them off outside Westfield Plaza at the Junction. There was $107.00 on the meter, which they paid up without a murmur. Sorry I didn't really take you anywhere, I offered. That's okay, she said. Thanks for the ride. He'd worn dark glasses the whole time. Perhaps they worked in the entertainment industry.

Beautiful Lies Just A Klanger

2007-01-15T14:34:00.000+11:00

Last week I came into work to find Italo, the Ecuadorean, returned from holidays, beckoning to me. What's you're last name? he wanted to know. I told him. He beamed. I have seen a review of your book! he said, In the Sunday paper. I will bring it. Next day, sure enough, when Italo finished his shift and I was waiting to start mine, he had with him the Spectrum for the 9-10 December last year. It was a hot day. I was standing under a tree opposite the base with my mate Garth, our boss Bob and Bob's wife Stella when Italo came over with the newspaper in his hand. Do you know who Stephen King is? he asked, showing us all a picture of the man when he was very young. Garth and I shrugged and looked at each other: Yes. But Bob and Stella evidently had never heard of him. Probably what Italo wanted to do was, having had us identify SK, turn triumphantly to the review of Luca to show what kind of company it / I keep. Didn't work, but he showed the review anyway. Stella took it off into a shady spot on a wall to read while the four of us chatted idly on. It was, of course, the mean-spirited Herald review which I had, until that moment, succeeded in avoiding seeing in the print version. The sub's heading was dreadful, the stuff of nightmares, but I felt strangely remote. Garth already knew that it was the review from hell, so he kept his mouth shut. Bob appeared to be struggling with the notion that one of his drivers was also an author. As for Italo ... such a sweet man, he was so proud, almost as if he had written it himself. The fact that it was a bad review meant nothing to him. Later he told me that his son has just given up his day job to devote all his time to his band, The Valentinos; at which point I was able to say that I knew of them, having heard them quite a bit on the radio, mostly in the days when I used to listen to FBI. It was hard for me to imagine Italo and his wife going to gigs at the Annandale Hotel, but that is what he told me they have done. His son is interested in Mariachi music, and, more generally, in introducing Latin beats into the psychedelic dance mania The Valentinos play. Later, just before I went out to drive, Stella handed the paper back to me, but I have no idea what she, a Chinese woman not long away from Shanghai with only average English, made of the review and did not really feel like asking her. As for me, I had to endure a miserable night (money-wise) in the cab with the baleful review at my elbow, like some almost laid ghost come back to haunt me again. The reviewer - may his bones be tossed by jackals in the Empty Quarter - lives in Dubai.

2006-12-31T22:41:00.000+11:00

So I was at Summer Hill station earlier today, waiting for a train to the City, when a woman in blue jeans & dark glasses came up to me & said: You look like a distinguished sort of fellow, can you tell me how to get to Chelmsford Street, Newtown? I did, & said, & she sat down & we fell to talking. Pulled out a pack of Winfield Blue so we shared a smoke as well. She was going to see a friend in Newtown & tomorrow was off for 40 days in Thailand. Never been out of the country before, though she'd been all over it. Had a ticket to Bangkok & one night's booking in a hotel, would wing it from there. Up north, she said, to try to recover a sense of what life is. Really about. Kind of raw, a straight shooter, wild, funny, sad, not without optimism ... from Wagga. Later we found out we're both cab drivers! That was peculiar. Swapping modus operandi as the train shuffled from Lewisham to Petersham to Stanmore ... in Wagga, you record every fare on the meter & print out the total at the end of the shift. The driver gets 41% of said total, the owner/operator, 59%. You get a lot of redbacks, she said. In two and a half years she thought she'd probably thrown about a dozen people out of her cab. Something I've never done in Sydney. And, if my boss took sixty percent of what I took I'd hardly make anything. We're under the bootheel down in Wagga, she said. It was one of those conversations that could have gone on for a long time, we were that easy with each other ... This is your stop, I said, in the brief night of the overbridge. We'd both taken off our dark glasses by then, we'd introduced ourselves to each other: Kathy Hartweg (sp?), German she said. We shook hands as she left. From the lower level, I saw her give a small, poignant wave as she walked past on the platform, even though our eyes couldn't meet again. She to Chiang Mai, perhaps, I to see the Paddy Bedford show at the MCA:

through the looking glass

2006-12-16T13:54:00.000+11:00

Been trying to clarify a feeling I've had for a while, which is to do with the way that driving a cab somehow increases the curiosity I feel about the nature & appearance of this City. On days off I love to ramble down any old street, any old where - so long as it's one I've driven down. Not an onerous qualification, because you find yourself driving down most streets in the CBD & the inner city at some time or other. It's a through-the-looking-glass feeling, I think: in the cab you view things from a point of view that is anonymous, global, voyeuristic, detached. You see all sorts of goings on but only at a remove. You feel like an omnipotent observer in a moving Panopticon. What you don't see is much detail, & here I mean both physical detail of buildings, shops, footpaths & so forth as well as the human detail of possible or actual interactions with people casually met in the street. This somehow makes the experience of mingling in the street much more enticing. I don't experience people in the street as alienating or alienated - quite the opposite. I'm avid for contact, even of the most fleeting sort, & Sydney being the louche, informal, anything goes kind of place that it is, such interactions are available anywhere, anytime. And, at the same time, it is, like any City of several hundred years age, so intricately, comprehensively & randomly layered that the built environment is itself full of interest, full of surprises, replete with interactions of a different kind. I wonder if, without the functional alienation of driving, I would still feel this equal & opposite degree of intense engagement?

A Cossack Rambler

2006-12-12T18:28:00.000+11:00

Hell - Bob cancelled my shift today, leaving me with half my rent ungathered. He rang back about two hours later to say he'd found a car for me to drive but by then I'd gone off on another track with what remained of the day, so I declined. I was over in Newtown looking for the new Little Axe record, Stone Cold Ohio. Driving to Newtown reminded me that, last time I went that way, last Thursday, I got a puncture. Had seen a rug shop in Stanmore, pulled up, did a U-ee, parked, went in. When I came out the back left tyre was almost flat. There's an old-fashioned garage over the way that I'd always wanted to visit, so I went there to reinflate the tyre. But the valve was shot, air was hissing out as fast as it went in. I persuaded the grumpy proprietor to get his man to change it for the spare then carried on to Camperdown. Next day I went to my local guy, Pierre, to get the tube replaced. While he was doing it, drove back to Stanmore to buy a bamboo rug I fancied. When I came back, a fellow who lives in my street was there, waiting for Pierre to give him the pink slip for his classic 1960s Rambler. I've often watched him shuffling up and down the street, he has a peculiar, small-stepped gait, like someone moonwalking in slippers. We chatted while we waited. Turns out he's a Greek from Russia. Grew up in Russia, was educated at a Russian school, speaks the language. Remembers the Nazis rounding up all the Jews in the town and taking them away. They were the first, he said. Later he went down to Greece and later still, 1950, came to Australia. Best country in the world, he observed, a common remark here. When he was in Russia he learned Cossack dancing and it was in a dancing competition here in Sydney that he won the money with which he bought the green Rambler! Wonder if that's why he walks like he does?

blinded by the light

2006-12-07T10:56:00.000+11:00

Weird night last night. Don't think I've ever before worked a shift where I haven't got out of the cab even once ... how did this happen? Hard to recall. Started late, drove into the City, the rank at Park Street is empty except for a gaggle of fares waiting but as I pull in a guy steps off the curb outside McDonalds & hails me. The Taxi Council bloke on the rank wagging his finger at me as I go. The queue-jumper's in real estate & wants to go to Rose Bay. Has his mobile phone switched to speaker, which irritates me 'cos its crackle interferes with some cool jazz on the radio ($18). Then I'm offered a job from Rose Bay to Hunters Hill ... whoa! Three chubby teenage girls wearing hardly any clothes. They spend the first half of the trip in the back seat reviewing the weekend's activities on a mobile phone. Then the Mum of one of them rings in & insists her baby go home immediately. Baby gets out at Town Hall to catch a train back to Bondi Junction. One of the others is pleading on her phone with some boy to meet her in town that evening; she gets the sulks afterwards. Traffic is awful, all night. At a servo in Hunters Hill, Chazza casually slings me two twenties & four dollar coins - where do these kids get their money from? - just as I'm offered a job from Hunters Hill to Ultimo. A Catholic boys school, St. Josephs, literally round the corner; except the guy, a teacher now doing admin in fact wants to go to Kensington. Maybe he's the wrong guy, I don't ask. We discuss the vagaries of State versus Church education all the way ($34) ... back in the City, Elizabeth Street is jammed up but, sneaking along on the inside in the bus lane, I'm hailed by a grim looking woman who wants to go to Artarmon. Takes half an hour just to crawl to the Bridge but she's fine about it ($47). Approaching Artarmon, I'm offered a job to the City from Onyx Road. Used to live in a road called that in Pearl Beach. She's a woman my own age, perhaps, going to a party at the law courts in Liverpool Street. I only have a social life at Christmas, she offers. I don't have a social life at all, I say ($33). Back to Park Street, where I pick up two smart young woman & take them to a pub in Paddington. Their conversation is in every respect the kind of talk you hear from the Masters of the Universe at the Big End of Town, so I guess they are Mistresses of the Universe. No idea what line of work they're in ($12). After that ... Park Street to Coogee, a quiet woman, going home from work, there's been a race meeting at Randwick today so its a crawl up Anzac Parade & Alison Road ($25). On the way back, in Belmore Road, I pick up a startlingly beautiful young woman carrying evening clothes in a plastic sheath, going to work in Darling Harbour. Her make up as thick as a Geisha's only it's brown, not white ($20). Outside the Imax, as she leaves another woman arrives, she's going to Balmain ($18). I head back to the City, thinking there'll surely be a chance now to stop on a rank & stretch my legs but I'm hailed on Bathurst Street by a stolid young woman who wants to go to Kirrawee, way down there in Sutherland Shire. It's gorgeous to drive out under the sky at sunset & we get all the way to the lights at President Avenue before I have to stop the car, even once. She's a Kiwi too, it turns out, from some tiny little town on the Canterbury Plains. Winchester. Likes it here but her husband can't get steady work ($55). Barrelling back up the Princes Highway I score another radio job, Rockdale to the City. A young Chinese couple who sound very sweet, chatting to each other softly in Mandarin in the back seat ($27). Drop them off in George Street, head back to Park, thinking now, surely ... but it's still empty of cabs & crowded with people. Another woman, she wants to go to Clovelly ($25). As I'm turning from Oxford Street into Flinders I have a moment of complete disorientation that is very scary. For an instant, I can't tell where the road is & at the same time have the illusion that I'm heading straight into a line of traffic that's coming towards me, fast. This is when I realise how tired I am & that I have to either take a break or finish the shift. Somewhere out in Randwick I'm offered a fare to Maroubra but I think no, that's enough, it's not even ten o'clock but I've made my $200.00, I'm going home. So I do. Walking back through Ashfield Park, with the fruit bats screeching & dropping fragments of figs from the trees, I'm amazed at how quickly the stiffness goes from my legs. Almost, but not quite, like being young again.

meditation piece

2006-11-30T12:19:00.000+11:00

OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR

(written on the left hand wing mirror of taxi 1821 & intermittently visible during daylight hours)

alcohol & nicotine

2006-11-28T13:38:00.000+11:00

Bernardus' post over at Maelstrom reminds me I've been meaning for a while to say something here about addiction ... b-but what? The day before I went back driving this time, in July or whenever it was, I deliberately went and bought a packet of cigarettes. This after not smoking for the previous six months or so. Or only smoking casual OPs. Why? It was something to do, I now think, with a feeling of failure associated with going back on the road. This failure allowed me an excuse for self abuse, perhaps. Masked as indulgence in a pleasure. In the same way a disappointment, as much as a success, suggests alcohol as an agent towards, or away from, that emotion.

Chinese medicine associates diseases of the lungs with disappointment, of the liver, with anger. I remember saying this to my father once. He, a slave both to alcohol and nicotine for much of his adult life, gave me one of those bald looks that used to make the kids he taught quiver in their shoes. That's interesting, he said. Remarkably, he gave up both addictions towards the end. I was impressed by the fact that, when he stopped smoking, he left half-filled packets of Black & White, his last brand, lying around the house. He seemed to stop drinking with the same ease, observing, without fuss, the house rule in the old people's home he spent his final months in: a glass of sherry once a week on Wednesday mornings, otherwise, nada.

Like him, I've been a smoker and a drinker all my adult life. But recently, after a conversation with my son, I decided to experiment with not smoking while driving. The context for this was a desire to test my pathetic conviction that cigarettes helped to get me through a shift. Well ... guess what? The pains I suffer in my legs from long hours sitting at the wheel are about ten times less acute if I don't smoke through a shift. Call me naive, but I was so astonished I worked through a shift smoking to see if they got worse again. Yes, they did. It's the effect of cigarette smoke on the circulation I suppose. Furthermore, the headaches I vaguely ascribed to inhalation of exhaust fumes - they're not nearly as bad either. Plus, I sleep better without the artificial heart accelerant that cigarettes also are.

Now, alcohol. I'd been in the habit of having a few glasses of red wine after finishing a shift. When I say a few, I mean two or three. Half to three quarters of a bottle perhaps. Helped me sleep, I thought. Helped me wind down. After I stopped smoking on the job, I also tried not having these few relaxing glasses of wine. Again, the effects were immediate and obvious: better sleep, better digestion, feeling better when I woke up in the morning. I held to this regime until Monday night, when there was a bottle with a bit in it left over from the weekend. So I supped it that night with my supper. Well, d'uh. Though it was less than what I used to drink, I felt even more dreadful next morning.

Everyone knows, I guess, that when our habituation to the toxicity of the poisons we voluntarily take wears off a bit, they strike with greater force. Smoking and drinking, in other words, is like a kind of anti-fitness, the more we do it, the better we are at withstanding these toxicities. Recall John Birmingham writing in one of his books (the one about marijuana, I think): I wasn't fit, but I was piss fit. On the other hand, that urge to damage yourself through intoxication runs so deep as to be almost unexcavatable.

In my own case - and I'm not sure if this is general or not - I think it arises in part from a desire to hurt myself which, in turn, comes out of disappointment or shame or anger; but it isn't only that, because there's a pleasure in the effect as well, especially with alcohol. Tobacco is slightly different, because (recent experiments have convinced me) it only becomes pleasurable once you have managed to re-addict yourself. Another peculiarity is the relationship between these two drugs and stress. Both are seen as de-stressing agents and yet both in fact act to increase physical stress. The same might be said of anxiety: alcohol and nicotine, it seems to me, don't so much relieve anxiety as answer it with the physically induced anxiety their consumption brings.

So what am I saying ... ? Perhaps I'll keep away from the cigarettes for a while (it's hard for me to say forever), and I'll certainly refrain from alcohol on the days / nights I drive. But I don't think I'm quite ready yet to swear off it altogether. I'll probably continue to, as they say on the labels, enjoy wine in moderation: which means, of course, that I will also continue to stray onto the path of excess now and again.

PS The title comes from a Gary Clail song, the chorus of which goes: Like alcohol and nicotine / The truest lovers there's ever been ...

Little Johnny Jackboot

2006-11-14T10:20:00.000+11:00

Saw John Howard last night. Was idling on the rank outside Chifley Tower when I noticed a gaggle of TV cameras opposite, on the corner of Phillip & Bent Streets. Didn't think much about it until, a few moments later, saw them backing up the street towards the entrance to the Wentworth Hotel, filming a lone figure striding towards them ... accompanied, at a distance of a few metres, by several slim young men in dark suits and trailed by a young woman. It's always a bit of a shock when you see in the flesh someone so familiar from media images. Rather more thickset, even bullish, than I imagined. A big head. Something strange about his body, as if the torso isn't properly articulated with the hips, making his walk seem a little ... parodic, perhaps. Like an animated leggo man. Couldn't help thinking about the Prime Ministerial penis tucked away in whatever kind of jocks he wears. And the Prime Ministerial goolies too. Because the walk spoke of power I suppose, of patriarchy too, of a kind of refusal to countenance opposition of any kind. Apparently he's bothered by the way cartoonists draw him as a little man, how he's known to many as Little Johnny; but I've always preferred the long version of that one, Little Johnny Jackboot. It was, in an (un)expectedly chilling fashion, amply confirmed in this sighting.

halve your luck

2006-11-02T10:31:00.000+11:00

Had a grant application turned down this week. The baleful letter was waiting for me when I returned from work Monday night. Means I will have to spend the summer driving, not writing - unless I can work out a routine that allows me to do both. Which I may have to do. Some projects fall apart when they are rejected, others gather strength. This is one of the latter, and I still feel the funding body - which shall remain nameless - should have supported it.

Their rejection form letter includes this curious advice: … projects that are funded have to fit into specific priorities. Projects that don't fit into the project funding priorities may still be very good ideas ... Huh? What specific priorities? Are applicants allowed to know their nature? How do they differ from the specific criteria we have to meet? Or are they the same? It would seem there is some impenetrable bureaucratic mysterium ... I got quite angry about this and drafted a letter but, on the timely advice of a friend, didn't send it.

It was peculiar how, when my light at the end of the tunnel went out, luck also deserted me. It suddenly became much harder to turn a buck, right when the bucks I turn are the only ones I'll get for a while. How cruel seeming ... I've never met a cabbie who didn't believe in luck, just as I've never met one who can explain how it works. You're lucky .... or you're not. That's it. And yet, in my own case, I notice that, if I'm lucky, I tend to feel that it is richly deserved, but if I'm unlucky, it seems unfair, malign, as abritrary as negative funding body decisions.

So I struggled through Tuesday and Wednesday, taking five and ten dollar rides here and there around town, working twice as hard and earning half as much as usual. Last night I was so far behind I thought I'd have to give up and go home when, outside the Sheraton on Elizabeth Street, I was hailed by a man who wanted to go to St. Ives, way up on the leafy North Shore, at least fifty dollars worth, maybe more. Enough, anyway, to make my pay in and still have a bit to spend over the weekend.

A South African. Businessman, late fifties or early sixties. Quite drunk. He told me where he was going, and also that I would have to take his baby-sitter home after dropping him off; then made a call on his mobile phone. Inveterate eavesdropper that I am, I soon realised he was talking either to his mistress or his girlfriend. Not just the flirtatiousness, the boasting too. You get a lot of this: men on their mobile phones boasting how much money they made that day. There's something about the gloating tone they use; something, paradoxically, mean about it. Something truly offensive. I guess most of us now know that the economic system we use rewards all that is base in human nature: experiencing the triumph of these qualities in raw, individual form day by day, or rather night by night, is one of the least happy parts of the job. I usually listen, forensically, for the detail; but this guy was so revolting I tuned out.

Well, we get to St. Ives, and he pays by credit card, and says I should add on fifteen bucks for the extension to the fare when I take Callum, the boy baby-sitter home. I did something I've not done before - I added on twenty instead of fifteen, pushing the fare over seventy dollars. He was drunk, he didn't want a receipt, and although there was a bad moment when he tried to sign the docket - the pen didn't work - I don't believe he noticed. Callum was a sweet young man, taking him up to St. Ives Chase added only six or seven bucks to the fare, so I was away with a decent tip. It was only a matter of five bucks, nothing to him, but, petty as it sounds, I was delighted to have ripped him off.

Of course I then got lost. I get lost every time I go to St. Ives which, by night, is a strangely sinister place, like the set for a horror movie: intermittent white light, dark trees, large, hidden houses, expensive cars hissing by to some midnight rendezvous. I always think Stephen King when I'm up there and perhaps that's why, unsettled, I get lost. And so, unaccountably, I turned down a radio job to Avalon, my hand hitting the Reject button before my mind had truly engaged with the information. Then the radio, as if in revenge, tried to bully me into doing a local job at Turramurra. Hell.

Got out of there eventually, the Pacific Highway was closed at Chatswood, a bad accident, so I fled down Fullers Road, through Ryde, to Five Dock and home ... still thinking about luck and what it is or isn't, what it does or doesn't do. If I'd accepted that hail on Bridge Street instead of pulling onto the Bent Street rank for a smoko ... ? If I hadn't gone up to the Caltex servo on Rose Bay looked for a fare that wasn't there ... ? If I'd lived my life differently ... ? Would I still be occupying this lowly station ... ?

we listen to the radio ...

2006-11-01T11:44:00.000+11:00

Could NOT do this job without the radio, it's my lifeline out of the phantasmagoria. For a while my default setting was FBI, 94.5 FM but they play too much Thrash, Rap & Hip Hop for my taste. When the testosterone overload kicked in I'd go across to 2MBS FM which, apart from a touch of Jazz & the ever reliable Stormy Monday, plays mostly Classical. Then I happened one afternoon to pick up a DJ from 99.3 FM - it might have been Johnny Deep himself - & he told me to try his station. I did, & I like it, but the signal is too weak & fades to crackle & hiss anywhere but the top of town & the lower North Shore. Now I've settled on the eclectic 2SER FM which, this week, as their featured album, has been playing the amazing C.W. Stoneking - check this guy out, he's extraordinary. A lot of music that I like, these days, is hard to source: Deep House, Trance, Drum & Bass, remixes of various kinds, often don't have proper credits or, if they do, prove more or less untraceable unless you're some kind of fanatic. My other preferences ... Reggae, Dub, Soul, Blues &, well, anything, really, if it sounds good. Another discovery this week: Joanna Newsom, who, when first heard, I thought was CocoRosie. An American, born in Nevada City, based in San Fran, only 24 years old. A harpist & proponent of a kind of music called Psych Folk. The psych folk are my folk ... she's definitely worth a listen. Now I'm trying to think of the name of the group that sang the song I've quoted from in the title. Not the Dixie Chicks' Long Time Gone but a tune by an English (I think) New Wave band from the late 1970s. I seem to recall hearing them one night in 1979 at the Hot Club in Philadelphia but their moniker ... escapes me ...

The song isn't Elvis Costello & the Attractions's Radio Radio either, though for a mo' I thought it might be. While on the subject, but, how about this?

Cab 1660 ...

2006-10-28T20:56:00.000+10:00

which I've been driving the last few nights has a flash new computerised meter that, when you have a fare on board, shows the location you're driving through on the screen. Was stuck in traffic on the Cahill Expressway, approaching the bridge, where you do a 360 degree turn through a cutting chipped out sandstone, with a crew of film people going to a screening in Neutral Bay, when I happened to glance down and saw that we were in ... Gallows Hill. Stayed there for quite a while, maybe ten minutes. Time to think. Gallows Hill? Why was that still somewhere you could be? One of those buried places, a vestigial location whose name, for some reason, survives. Turns out you can still order flowers to be delivered to Gallows Hill, though I don't know of anyone who lives in, or goes to, or leaves that place. Essex Street is its more usual nomeclature. I had just been talking on the phone to a producer who suggested we meet next day at Guillotine, an editing suite in Redfern, so my neck still felt a little vulnerable. Later on I found that the no-mans-land on Oxford Street between Paddington and Bondi Junction is called Mill Hill. Ghost sails turning where the Reservoir now is, just above Victoria Barracks. I thought of White City, which I also drove past (or through), the other night, explaining to my fare why that name persists when all else that used to characterise the place has faded. Nothing to do with tennis. In a review by Peter Ackroyd of City of Disappearances, a book edited by Iain Sinclair, I read this sentence: What is the White City? A question I will try to answer elsewhere. It was a relief to quit Gallows Hill and join the roar of the traffic on the bridge, but also a sadness, to be leaving a place that no longer is, yet was, briefly, once more, and perhaps not again, if equivocably, inhabited.

night on earth

2006-10-26T13:24:00.000+10:00

Dark figures leave the lighted towers & move towards the line of waiting cars. None of the drivers knows who they will get, where the ride will take them; yet the mystery, inconsequential as it is, is soon solved. Will you be going to Moorebank with a dark-eyed fragrant passenger in the back seat? Or ferrying some Suit with a testosterone hangover to Manly? Or Bondi ... yes, Bondi, couple of skateboarders, one of whom spends the trip outlining, in great detail, the plot of a short film to the other. Shot by shot, scene by scene. They think it's hilarious but it sounds dull to me. Juvenile. What do I know? The most jaded people in the world, a film producer once told me, is who you have to interest. I never thought I would become one of these, but there it is, here I am. Can't be bothered looking for more work but, inevitably, I get hailed in O'Brien Street, a fare back to the City, back to the very rank I just came from. Is he American or English? What is she going on & on & on about? Why don't they just shut up ... dark figures leave the lighted towers & move towards the cars. No-one knows where they will be going & who they will take there. The mystery, inconsequential, will soon be solved. Shot by shot, scene by scene, the phantasmagoria unfolds. No-one is watching, no-one paying any attention, this is just another Night on Earth, exactly the same & totally different from every other. Norton Street, Leichhardt. An Irishman. That rarity, a silent Irishman. Aye.

a bad run

2006-10-12T16:56:00.000+10:00

On the rank at Farrar Place I did something I haven't done before: I refused to take a fare. This earned me a spray from a righteous cab driver further back on the rank - Let others do the shit work while you take the cream, is that it? he snarled. Good on you ... - and I drove off to the Airport with a sharpish Suit in the back wondering if I had offended the gods of cab driving. Things went well for a while and then they didn't. I was out in Coogee when I picked up a radio job to Woolloomooloo. Except the very drunk old guy at the Leagues Club in Carr Street was actually going to Waterloo. Waaar-loo, he dribbled, not Waaara-loo. He'd been at a funeral, burying his best mate and he was maudlin. Not a problem so much as a distraction. While he knew what he was saying, I mostly didn't. He was a big guy, and bumped his head each time he got into or out of the cab, which he did twice, since he had to stand up to reach his wallet. Traffic was intense because of a football game at Moore Park so I thought I'd avoid the worst of it by sticking to the western side of town. No use. I picked up a couple of junkies outside the George Street cinemas, going to Circular Quay, and together we inched up the car-clotted street while they alternately whinged in the back about the fare climbing on the meter and boasted about the bargains they'd got that day at Paddy's Market. They even tried to book me to take them to the Herbert Street Clinic the next day. By the time we got to Bridge Street, I could have killed them - and then I nearly did. They poured a vast amount of silver coins into my hands and started to climb out of the cab. There was traffic everywhere and I was being harrassed on all side by horns. I was so keen to get away that I took my foot off the brake before they were completely out. Hey watcha doin'?! Tryin' to kill us? An aggrieved whine. I told them my foot slipped. A young dude climbed into the car a block up the street and asked to be taken to Moore Park. We crawled up the Eastern Distributor and then out of the tunnel into Moore Park Road. The guy debated whether or not to get out there or nearer to the gates and settled on the gates. That meant, to save him walking a hundred metres or so, I had to sit in stalled traffic for another half hour or so. I tried to assuage my impatience by smoking an illicit Gadung Garam under the eyes of the cops marshalling the cars. Back in Elizabeth Street, a young man smelling sour from alcohol climbed in the back seat and said he wanted to go to Edward and Vine. What suburb? I asked. I don't know, he shrugged. You're the driver. He was surly and insolent like that, going out of his way to make things difficult, so I did something I hardly ever do, I took a slow way there. Edward and Vine's in Chippendale, it's a block from the first house I ever lived in in Sydney. As we neared I tried to confirm the address with him. Is that what I said? he said, bored. I can't remember. When I stopped on the corner and turned the inside light on he said, apropos of nothing at all: Are you from the Netherlands? No, I said, I'm from New Zealand. Are you? Yeah, via Chicago, Illinois. He paid with a twenty and then insisted I count out the change to the last ten cents. I'd get slapped for not tipping if this was New York City, he said when he had his change. So, tip me, I said. We were hating each other by then, the atmos was really mean. People don't tip over here, he said. It's included in the price. This isn't true, most cash customers tip, even if only by rounding up the figure to the next dollar, and I was quite certain he knew this. I bit my tongue, waiting for him to go; and drove back into town feeling like a dead man ferrying damned souls across the river into hell. But a Chinese couple hailed me on George Street and asked to go to the Sheraton on the Park, they were decent human beings, and after that things picked up again.

Ministry of (un)Sound

2006-10-11T14:03:00.000+10:00

Last night I was in Surry Hills when I got a radio job, 355 Riley St. to Rose Bay, someone called Sammy. I was just around the corner so was there in no time. A kind of dock or loading bay that has been turned into a small theatre, with stage and curtains and lights and all. A blonde was vacuuming the stage. Anyone here call a cab? I asked. She just left in one, the blonde said. Shit! I said.

About five hours later, up in Darlinghurst, two young groovers hailed me and asked to be taken to ... 355 Riley Street. There was an Event there: the launch of a new album by Ministry of Sound. I told them my tale ... her name was Sammy, I said. Sammy? one of them replied. Yeah, I know Sammy, she works for Ministry of Sound. Tell her from me ... I began then thought, ah, fuck it. Let the groovers groove.

Change

2006-09-27T10:25:00.000+10:00

There's a ritual at my taxi base. It's called Change and refers not so much to small denomination coins as to large notes. Every day when I go to work, I take with me an envelope in which is my work sheet and my pay-in (the hire of the cab for 12 hours) from the night before plus, if I'm lucky, the rest of the credit card receipts or cab charge dockets. The balance, if it's more than the pay-in, is the Change. The wife of my boss, Chinese Bob, sits at the wheel of their car in the service station forecourt with, among much else, an envelope full of banknotes and a plastic bag of coins. She redeems the change, invariably handing over the largest notes she can to make up the amount. She loves giving out, in descending order of importance, hundreds, fifties, twenties, tens, fives, gold coins, silver coins. Italo told me that her name is Estrela, which is also, coincidentally, the name of the love of Antonio da Nova's life in Luca Antara. Estrela, who's Chinese as well, used to worry about the small amounts of change I'd be getting. I would tell her it was partly because I sometimes cash in the cab charge receipts down at Five Dock, so I can go home with actual money in my pocket, but first she didn't believe me and then she couldn't understand why I'd sacrifice the small percentage (2%) they charge for the service. One afternoon she asked me if I'd ever had a $300.00 night. I said no, and she smiled sorrowfully and shook her head. Lately things have improved, making her happier on my account, which is sweet. And then, last night, I did have a $300.00 night. Not only that, but I was home before midnight. I'm looking forward to telling her today.

People just kept cliimbing into and out of my cab, though that doesn't necessarily mean you make a lot of money. But then, outside the Casino in Pyrmont, I had a windfall. Two blokes, one in a suit, one not, hurried across the road and waved me down. The one in the suit got in the front, his mate in the back. Wide boys. They were going to an address in Botany to get a document signed; they wanted me to wait and then take them back to Crows Nest. It was about nine pm and they were sweating. As we sailed down Botany Road, they nervously discussed the prospects. They didn't know the house they were going to and they didn't know the bloke they were meeting, either. There was speculation about the possible dangers they might face. They were under instructions to view the bloke's driver's licence, or passport, or something. He wouldn't send you anywhere dangerous, the guy in the back reassured the guy in the front. I'm glad you're coming with me, the guy in the front said. I was dying to know what it was all about but didn't like to ask. The guy in front changed the radio station and turned the music up real loud. The guy in the back navigated, using my street directory. We were on a mission. It was exciting as well as nerve-racking.

When we found the house, a small brick cottage on a corner next to a highway, with a little reserve called Arthur Park opposite, the suited one left his jacket on the front seat and said I could lock the cab if I wanted to. They said they'd be about ten minutes. I leaned on the bonnet of the cab, smoking a Gadung Garam, looking into the windy darkness, intermittently illuminated by white lights, very near the shores of Botany Bay. No-one around, hardly any traffic either. I was wondering if I might hear shots or shouts or furniture crashing over. It was a lonesome part of town. The windows of the house were the antique brown of rattan blinds lit by dim lamps from inside. Then the door banged, and the voices were loud but cheerful. They piled back in and we took off, real quick. I made an illegal U turn so we could go back up via Southern Cross Drive and the Eastern Distributor and then through the Harbour Tunnel to Crows Nest. They talked about the bloke, who, it turned out, didn't have a driver's licence but did have a birth certificate. They talked about the place ... a shithole, they said. How could a bloke who commands $2.3 million live like that? This sequed into a story the guy in the back told, about a unit in Abbotsford he rented off a mate. The mate had lived there eighteen years and never cleaned up. Before this guy moved in, he scrubbed the carpets with a wire brush and took away four garbage bags of rubbish from off the floors alone. But, and this was the point, his mate had paid for his new unit in cash. Half a million. So, squalor doesn't necessarily mean poverty.

As we came up to the Falcon Street exit the guy in the front said that I must think they were doing something dodgy like a drug deal. I said, yes, I was curious. Turns out it was property, a place in Byron Bay that would go to auction at eleven this morning if the contract wasn't signed. A cash deposit of $100,000 had been made and the document was the guarantee for the rest of it. Where's the hundred grand? I asked, looking around hopefully. In a safe place, he said, and laughed. I dropped them off outside the Crows Nest Hotel on the corner of the Pacific Highway. There was about 70 dollars on the meter plus $7.50 in tolls. The front guy handed me a green hundred dollar bill and asked for fifteen bucks change. And a receipt. I wrote the cab number on the receipt and told him he could fill the rest out himself. He was happy about that. Said he'd put maybe 102. They both thanked me as if I really had been the driver of the gang for a half hour or so. While I was resetting the meter, another bloke came out of the pub, crossed the road and got in. Lewisham, he said. Later I took a young Asian woman home from work, all the way from William Street in the City to Lugarno, another 70 dollar fare. The whole night was like that. Change.

2006-09-26T12:18:00.000+10:00

Farting in taxi cabs is a largely undiscussed and thus far wholly unresearched subject. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is real and can have unintended consequences. Suspicion may become mutual between cabbie and fare and still the matter is seldom, or never, raised. My own feeling is that there should be a tariff on all releases of hot air in confined spaces, howsoever expressed, though there are of course practical problems in the realisation of this ambition. A vexed question, to which there is no obvious answer. Winding down the windows sometimes helps.

some sydney street names

2006-09-21T11:14:00.000+10:00

Aloha Street, Mascot

By The Sea Road, Mona Vale

Curt Street, Ashfield

Done Street, Arncliffe

Early Street, Parramatta

Fur Place, Rooty Hill

Goodchap Street, Surry Hills

Herb Greedy Place, Marrickville

Ice Street, Darlinghurst

Joy Street, Gladesville

Kia Ora Arc, Double Bay

Little Darling Street, Balmain

Modern Avenue, Canterbury

Nulla Nulla Street, Turramurra

Orphan School Creek Lane, Camperdown

Powder Works Road, North Narrabeen

Quirk Road, Manly Vale

Runnymede Way, Carlingford

Sunning Place, Summer Hill

Tram Lane, Randwick

Universal Street, Eastlakes

Vicar Street, Coogee

Woolloomooloo Walk, Sydney

Xenia Avenue, Carlton

Youth Lane, Burwood

Zig Zag Lane, Crows Nest

( ... have driven down, or past, most if not all of these streets at some time or other ... )

2006-09-21T09:46:00.000+10:00

The lurid, late afternoon western sky invites thoughts of apocalypse. Is the sun closer or bigger than it used to be or is that just how it seems? A great black winged shadow moves across the glass face of the Stamford Hotel at Airport Central. I am so wrapped in thought that it is a moment before I register the impossibility that a bird this size, bigger than any eagle or albatross, actually exists. Am I so delusional that I'm starting to see pterodactyls? It's only just before the lights change that I see, towards the top of the tower, a small dark pigeon fly past the expanse of convex blue-green glass and into the cerulean beyond, leaving its mirror maze image nowhere except in the back of my eyes.

* * * * *

Fifty black-robed men come round the corner of Spring and into Gresham Street. An orchestra? Delegates to a Magician's Convention? No, I can see in the ambient yellow light a gleam of ivory white at every throat. They are priests or ministers of religion. There is something both gay and collegiate about their passage down towards Circular Quay, like kids on an excursion. At the rear, unnoticed, unattended, limps a bulky older man, also robed and dog-collared, with a tartan scarf flapping from his shoulders, trying vainly to catch up with the crow-black gaggle ahead of him.

* * * * *

Outside a late opener, two women are thinking of stealing a taxi while the driver is in the bottle shop. They are trying to entice the drunk young man across the road into joining them on their journey to the end of the night. What is the cabbie doing, buying booze? Why has he left the women alone in his car with the key still in the ignition? Did they offer him some tryst, some midnight liaison that requires alcohol and cigarettes as well as willing bodies? I want to know the answers to these and other questions, but not enough to get involved. The lights of Annandale, the birthplace of Mr. Sin, Abe Saffron, who died aged 86 last week, dim and fade behind as we accelerate down the hill towards the Great Western Highway.

2006-09-20T11:53:00.000+10:00

Sometimes at night above the Harbour Bridge or the massive pylons of the Anzac Bridge, hundreds of seagulls gather the way moths do about an outside light ... tossed like fragments of paper rising from a fire, or like dust swirling in an updraft. In the stark white glare of the lamps they can seem like bits of light themselves and I wonder what attracts them there? It's always too noisy at road level to hear, but I imagine them skirling and screeching as they dip and turn and scatter about the delusive sensors that they perhaps mistake for navigational aids in the ineluctable darkness of the City.

total recall

2006-08-31T10:20:00.000+10:00

is of course impossible but that doesn't stop us trying. Last night was my final night driving for a while, so I thought I'd try to remember every ride ... went ok at first but there always comes a time when events overwhelm the apparently simple desire to record and recall. Pick up my first fare on Broadway, a cyclist and his manager. The cyclist talks about his legs. His manager talks about sports promotions. After I let them out at Martin Place, a few metres up on George Street there's a very out-of-it young woman yelling into her mobile phone and waving hysterically for a cab. I ease past her, something I hardly ever do, and am hailed immediately by a fellow in a suit with a battered leather briefcase. Manly he says then doesn't speak again for the entire journey. Blond, blue-eyed, English or perhaps South African, he looks like a dissolute Wehrmacht officer. Legs crossed, hands clasped on his knee, wrapped in some cloud of unspeakable sorrow. Coming back through Mosman, I score a radio job from HMAS Penguin. A sailor called Ben, going to Maroubra. He's having his wisdom teeth out and has just had a consultation at the Naval hospital there at Middle Head. He's been in Timor - you didn't see much - and thinks he's probably going to Iraq next. He's an electrician off HMAS Kanimbla, a helicopter capable amphibious transport ship. An impenetrable silence descends when I ask what he and his mates think about the death of Private Kovco. It'll go on for years, is all he'll say. There's been an accident on the bridge, traffic going north is backed up for kilometres. Doesn't bother us, we whizz down Southern Cross Drive and soon I'm heading back empty to the City again. It's only just after four and already I've made $90.00. Around about this time, or a little later, someone is run down and killed by a train in the tunnel between Central and Town Hall stations, on the Illawarra line. Passengers in the train behind have to get out and walk back to Central in the 45 degree underground heat. The City is thrown into chaos as commuters try to get home by road. I take a young Asian woman with a limp to a doctor's appointment in Hunter's Hill, she's so nervy that when someone toots me as I change lanes in front of him, she nearly jumps out of her seat. Coming back, I pick up a Macedonian woman in Bathurst Street and take her to Bondi. She's thin as a rake, with a great beaked nose, lustrous eyes and a bowed, generous mouth. A nice person. We chat happily together as we scoot away from the madness. In Macedonia, the cabs are 1980s Ford Lasers with the door handles and window winders in the back removed, there's no air and everybody smokes and yells and it's hopeless ... There are so many people looking for hails in the City it's ridiculous. On the corner of Oxford and College Streets I stop for a woman who's going up to St Vincent’s hospital to see her sister. She has visited her every evening after work since she was diagnosed with leukaemia late last year. Today her sister, after a bone marrow transplant, thinks she can eat so my fare is taking her a pear she bought at DJs. She's from New Zealand, an Aucklander. She doesn't think her sister's going to make it, she has that look ... I ignore all the frantically waving people on Liverpool Street and make my way up Pitt to Park. There's no cabs on the rank and a desperate huddle at the head, but I need cigarettes if I'm to survive the night, so I leave the car and buy a packet of Gudang Garam from the African in the convenience store. Three people pile into the wagon, they have luggage, they're going to the Airport. It's a multiple hire, they're a couple and a single guy, they don't know each other so, by rights, they should each pay two thirds of the metered fare. I tell them this and then say I can't be bothered enforcing the rule. The single guy in the front seat tells me that, on his way in from the airport last Sunday, his taxi driver fell asleep at the wheel. They stopped at some lights and when they went green, the cab didn't move. He had to lean over and wake the cabbie up. An old chap who drove at snail's pace anyway. When we get to the Virgin Blue terminal, there's 23 bucks on the meter but the guy writes $35 on the cab charge docket. I smoke an illicit cigarette, my first of the day, on my way back up O'Riordon Street to the City, where I'm once more besieged by hails. I get a young businessman going to Oyster Bay, at the southern limit of the metropolis. I can sit back and relax as we wind down towards Brighton Le Sands on the shores of Botany Bay. He's a Pom, he has a cold, his wife doesn't want to talk to him on the phone so he calls some mates instead to arrange boozy weekends in London and Paris. I can't work out if he's in music or sport and in the end decide it doesn't matter. This is where I start to lose it ... remember smoking another fag as I barrelled back up the Princes Highway into town, but what happened after that? Took a young woman to Central Station, the Country Trains, an Eastern European guy from there to the Casino, picked up in Pyrmont, a chef getting off work who was obsessed about the greasy smell he carried like an atmos around him and reckoned he wants to buy my car ... let him have my mobile number but doubt he'll ring. His grandmother gave away his deceased grandfather's '67 Chrysler Valiant with only 23,000 on the clock and the plastic still on the seats and he hasn't got over it yet - Steve, the chef from Adelaide, I mean. I took two people, one after the other, to Moore Park, a fussy woman and a fat American. Took a nice bloke to Potts Point ... might have gone any number of other places but I just can't remember now where, or if, they were. Much later, I sit for about three quarters of an hour on the Park Street rank outside the Criterion Hotel, watching the passing to and fro of the night people, until a sad Irishwoman who's been sitting on a nearby bench eating some kind of bun she bought from the McDonalds across the road, stands up wiping her fingers and, leaving the paper bag and the stained wrappers to blow away into the gutter with all the other detritus of the day, climbs into the back seat and asks to be taken to Lane Cove West. After that I go home.

Easy Street

2006-08-25T16:24:00.000+10:00

An ibis flies between the towers, looking anxious and out of place as it glides down towards Hyde Park. Two Arab cabbies are doing standing jumps onto the round, fixed metal pillar where you're meant to drop your cigarette butts and your ash. The tubbie Indian from the cab behind mine smiles and says: They happy, they making good money. It's about, oh, 9.15 pm on Tuesday. I think. Could be Wednesday. The Park Street rank in the City. Outside the all night convenience store, in the bright white light, a kid in a green school uniform and an adolescent in torn jeans and T shirt are kicking an undersized soccer ball around. One of the happy Arabs decides to join in. All three of them start kicking the ball with what seems like excessive enthusiasm. It skitters past the legs of passers-by then cannons into the bags of rubbish piled outside McDonalds, spilling coke and hamburger mush onto the footpath. Everybody laughs. I'm thinking about Easy Street. I told the Ambassador there was one in Randwick but, although I've seen the street sign flash by, I've never actually worked out where it is. I crush the last of my Gudang Garam out into the free standing ashtray and get back into the cab to check in my Sydway. Turns out there's two, the other one's in Rozelle. But, this is disappointing, the Randwick one has been eaten by the Prince of Wales Hospital and is now entirely contained within the insititution while the other, in Rozelle, is a service road running between White Bay and the Glebe Island container terminal. Does this mean that nobody actually lives on Easy Street anymore, I'm wondering, as I move my cab up the front of the rank, point as it's called? What a shame. What a fine address to have, either in Randwick or in Rozelle. I see someone in the rearview mirror walking towards me with that oddly determined gait people have when they're going to catch a cab. I can only see the midriff, the tops of the legs, a suit, can't even say right off if it's man or woman. A woman. I have an absurd premonition that she'll ask to be taken to Easy Street. She's Scots and wants to go to Bondi, Francis Street ... that's fine. The kid picks up his greasy soccer ball and looks around for someone else to play with. The ibis will be splashing in the Archibald Fountain by now. Or maybe it's down at the ponds in the Botanical Gardens. The Scottie is pregnant and spends most of the trip on her mobile phone, calling people back home to tell them how Junior's getting on ... s/he's 23 cms long! Also relates in detail some fairly arcane vaginal exercises learned in a class, which her husband refuses to help her with. Insert two fingers and rotate, she hoots. Maybe their kid will live on Easy Street? Now I've got lines from Tom Waits in my head, the song from Small Change called The One That Got Away:

The jigolo's jumpin salty
ain't no trade out on the streets
half past the unlucky
and the hawk's a front-row seat
dressed in full orquestration
stage door johnnys got to pay
and sent him home
talking bout the one that got away

could a been on easy street
could a been a wheel
with irons in the fire
and all them business deals ....

rugger buggers

2006-08-22T08:25:00.000+10:00

Was idling yesterday afternoon on the rank at Chifley Plaza - where stands an enormous cut-out of Our Ben, shot full of holes as his dream of a light on the hill - or maybe just rusting - when a giant of man came out of the government building that stands there. He had an aura and he was looking around as if he expected to be recognised. Jesus, I thought, it's Phil Kearns! And it was. Unfortunately - or perhaps not - I was one back from point, so he took the cab in front of me. Seconds later, another rugby player, as I thought, climbed into the front seat of mine. An expensive suit, a loud tie, the build of a 2nd five eighth, as they used to be known, rather than a front row forward. Going to Randwick. I asked him which way he wanted to go, because it was rush hour and it pays, literally, to implicate the fare in the chosen route, especially if you're likely to end up stuck in traffic together. He didn't mind. He wasn't au fait with Sydney traffic, he said, since, these days, he lived in Rome. What took you to Rome? I asked. I'm the Australian ambassador there, he said. You don't look old enough, I offered. I'm 52, he replied. What do you say to an ambassador? I wanted to ask him how he got the gig but it seemed too much like effrontery. I wanted to ask him about what a National Party staffer told me last week, that John Howard has a near perfect understanding of the dark underbelly of the Australian psyche. I would have liked to have heard a bit more about the fallout from the Andreotti affair that Peter Robb wrote about in Midnight in Sicily ... we talked of other things. Going up Oxford Street, his palm pilot rang with one of those old fashioned black telephone off at the hook rings. There was a brief discussion about the appointment of an honorary consul somewhere then we went back to talking about this and that. Via the Italian-Australian match at the (soccer) World Cup, we got on to rugby. Yep, I was right, he'd been a player. Knew his stuff. He said the Aussies can't win the (rugby) World Cup next year because their forwards are too young and their backs too old. But that the All Blacks will have to watch out for the French. You only want to play the French once, he said. When he got out in St. Marks Road, there was an odd hesitation between us. I had the sense that there were things he would have liked to ask me as well. But I'll never know what they were. Meanwhile, Phil Kearns was halfway to Mosman, driven by a perhaps oblivious, dour Pakistani with jihad pamphlets in his glove box.

... queens ride in it ...

2006-08-11T09:29:00.000+10:00

Twenty Rides & a Love Note

The Curator of Cambodian Art at the Denver Museum, name of Bunker, she looked like a cross between E Annie Proulx and Madelaine Albright and walked with a limp. Art Gallery of NSW to Sydney University.

A Japanese psychologist who specialised in coaching trauma victims giving evidence at criminal trials. A small, extremely alert, birdlike woman who said that Recovered Memory Syndrome does not exist in Japan. University of NSW to the City.

A Czech-born, German speaking, Swiss orthodontist here for a conference. We talked about that variety of homesickness which does not know where home is. City to Darling Harbour.

Two drunken Russian mafioso who'd been at the opening of a boutique in Double Bay and spent the ride to the City discussing recalcitrant employees and amenable strippers.

A Saudi man with three beautiful daughters and one son, whose wife rode on ahead with the boy in another cab, here with his family on holiday: a man of grave courtesy, impeccable manners and the air of a slightly weary prince from another age than ours. City to Glebe.

A mother and daughter, seemingly identical apart from the difference in their ages, 'of Middle Eastern appearance'. I could not tell if they were Arabs or Jews and didn't dare ask. City to Brighton le Sands.

Two Prison Architects from Melbourne who were extremely stressed by the manifold demands of their work. City to the Airport.

A chaotic, Botswana-born IT guy, a White African; we discussed, among other things, marijuana cultivation; he loved Australia but missed his adrenaline fuelled youth, when each day was an improvisation and the stakes life and/or death. He left his keys in the car, but it was a radio job so I remembered the street number and posted them back to him, resisting the temptation to address the envelope: Botswana Bwana. Newtown to Rose Bay.

A large, long-haired man of indeterminate occupation who'd worked for 25 years, on and off, in Chile. Very well informed about both banking and politics but veiled, veiled ... Darlinghurst to Brighton le Sands.

Two half cut Crim/Businessman picked up outside a car yard on Parramatta Road. They were going to a pub in Balmain but, when they realised ‘Jean’ would not be there, changed their minds and went to the Airport instead, along the way hatching nefarious schemes to eliminate rivals and defraud governments.

A Spanish girl with a broken elbow and wrist, sustained when she hit a speed bump while simultaneously riding her pushbike, texting a friend on her mobile phone and attempting to apply balm to her lips. She was delirious with morphine but her friend got her home. RPA Hospital in Camperdown to Marrickville.

Two young smarties on their way to a Christina Aguilera album launch. One of them said he had that very day discussed farting on set with Toni Collette; they other was involved in the buying and selling of pearls from Broome. Glebe to Kings Cross.

Two aging, serious music fans who'd been to hear the Arctic Monkeys at the Enmore and meticulously deconstructed the gig on the cab ride home. St Peters to Kogarah.

Two drunken young men who'd just cleaned up big in an illegal poker game. Though they were het boys, they spoke to each other like lovers as they planned further clean-outs. St Peters to Paddington via Surry Hills.

A garrulous Irish IT guy who spent the first part of the ride abusing the government and the second, after I'd been stopped by the police for speeding, abusing cops. As they wrote out the tickets (there were two, I hadn't filled out my worksheet properly) I found myself explaining the derivation of the word 'fiction'. City to Potts Point.

A woman and a man who'd been dining out together and were now going back to his place for a tryst. She called her husband and children as we drove along, setting him straight on details needed for the Census form and reassuring her kids that she loved them and would see them in the morning. Crows Nest to Bellevue Hill.

A Dancer with a little-girl voice, wrinkled hands, grey thighs, and pink feathers at ankle and wrist. She inadvertently left a perfumed feather behind on the front seat. Surry Hills to Kings Cross.

An obsessed Film Director (is there any other kind?) who meticulously summarised her day's emails for the benefit of her monosyllabic boyfriend, grunting in the back seat; it was about the financial shenanigans of her Producers and the deals they were or were not making with some crooked German financiers. They were looking for a writer but I managed to keep my mouth shut. Darlinghurst to The Rocks.

A couple of stock brokers who never said where they were going: I had to work it out from their conversation with each other; one, an American, rhapsodised about the $330.00 worth of fatty tuna he ate in a sushi bar in Hong Kong; he was making a special detour on his next overseas trip so he could gorge himself there again. City to Bondi.

The Head Caterer at the NSW Houses of Parliament, a big, beautiful Fijian man called Joseph. We spoke about Fiji and he knew every place I’d been there, some of which are very out-of-the-way. Invited me to come and dine at Parliament with him one day, and bring my sons. Macquarie Street to Kogarah.

On Wednesday when I took over from the day driver, an Ecuadorian called Italo, he showed me a love-note a fare had given him and said: This taxi has holes in the floor, but Queens ride in it ...

memory city

2006-07-26T11:39:00.000+10:00

Whizzing round town at night as I do, I'm always passing by sites that hold memory traces: houses or flats I've rented, rooms where I've made or unmade love, places that held parties I was at, places where friends, now dead or departed, lived and laughed or suffered. The other night I drove past a house in Bondi Junction where, in 1981 or 2, having being hailed by a bloke up on the main drag, I picked up a woman who was in the the throes of a severe asthma attack. They were Greek, and he did not come to the hospital with me, I don't know why. I drove her hectically up to the POW in Randwick as she curled forward in a ball of breathlessness on the front seat beside me. Convinced she was dying, I ran shouting into Emergency, where they gently took me aside as they lifted her into a wheel chair and carried her away. I never found out what happened to her, thin and grey and alone as she was; but when I returned to the cab, there was an enormous plastic bag sitting on the floor and in it, a purse containing a single five dollar note: the fare. There are dozens of places like this for me in Sydney, some intimately connected, others, like this one, only randomly significant. Sometimes I feel as if I am abroad in a vast memory city, half fantastical, half real: those places that have changed irrevocably, as so many of them have, are no less strange than those that appear, like this house does, exactly as they were a quarter of a century or however long ago it was.

Blue Monday

2006-07-13T11:35:00.000+10:00

Going back to work hurt so bad. The first night, the radio network refused to sign me on. I was, they said, suspended and had 9999 hours to serve before I could be unsuspended, or perhaps cut down. Radio work is, or can be, the icing on the cake, and it's also your connection into the larger cab driving world, you get messages, you can call the network base if you have a problem, you exist. It only took a phone call to fix it, and I made that Tuesday morning.

Tuesday night my cab broke down. I'd taken a fare out to Newington, which is what they call the village from the 2000 Olympics, now transformed into a kind of Stepford Wives type suburb. I got a radio job from Telstra Dome in nearby Olympic Park, a fare to the City, a prize. But the car would only change gear with the greatest reluctance, you could hear the belts in the transmission stretching and lurched before they engaged.

I parked outside Gate L and, in amongst the interplanetary grandeur and vast folly of the deserted stadia and environs, under brilliant white arc lights, made a series of all but futile calls to my boss - a dead spot in the mobile phone network I guess. The fare never showed, some other cabbie had somehow snaffled it, I had to limp back to base and pick up another car, which took an hour out of my night, or about fifty bucks, not counting the lost fare to the City.

Wednesday ... was Wednesday. It was as if I'd never been away. Running on cigarettes and pain killers, coffee and adrenaline, chewing gum and kebabs. As if, somewhere in me there is a cab driver who can be conjured up with a few well worn moves, or routines, some doppelganger, some other or familiar. He took over, and I sat back, spending most of the evening re-writing an old film treatment in my head.

the phantom phockers

2006-05-22T21:26:00.000+10:00

Ever since I moved into this building about 18 months ago, I've been intermittently aware of a couple nearby who like to engage in energetically vocal sex, usually, though not always, on a Saturday night. I call them the phantom phockers, because I've never been able to work out who they are and where their serenade comes from. Well, not any more. This Saturday night just past, they engaged in a truly extraordinary session - not being an aural voyeur, or auyeur, I won't go into detail - which in the end I simply could not switch off from and ignore, as previously I usually have managed to do. I had to get up, make myself a cup of chamomile tea and read a chapter of George Bataille's Blue of Noon, just to calm down. I ended up leaning on the window sill staring up at the night sky, and it was then I realised that they were not, as I had always imagined, in the next door building but in this one! From there, it wasn't hard to work out who exactly these two are. I must say I was surprised, but there you go, people are surprising. I'm not going to say any more about them, that would be indiscreet. But ... I know.

The Impossibilities

2006-05-12T12:47:00.000+10:00

There is something about the City in the early evening that is productive of an intense melancholy—perhaps because, for one who spends his days at home, at the computer, or in the local area, to get on a train at 4.45 and ride into town is to reverse the pattern of most daily journeys ... coming up the stairs from Town Hall Station into the fading afternoon, I find George Street full of smartly dressed office workers hurrying away from their places of employment towards their homes or to assignations with friends or lovers. The lights are just coming on and I am reminded, as always, of the cities of my youth, particularly of Wellington which, in my late teens or early twenties, seemed replete with all the possibilities in the world. I used to sally forth at this time of day with the feeling that I might meet any of my literary heroes, any of the queens of my imagination, during a stroll down Willis Street and into Lambdon Quay. Or that, at a table in Barretts Hotel, the secret of the universe would be revealed to me, most likely at the bottom of a glass of something or other. To roll out into nighttime streets several hours later, on our way somewhere else—probably Macavity's, a restaurant named after the mystery cat—was to embark on another odyssey into the further reaches of possibility, even if what actually happened was only a drunken stumble up Plimmer Steps to the Terrace or, if it was still running, a cold ride on the outside of the Cable Car to Kelburn ... it isn't that I don't still feel a leap of the heart at the chances that might come my way as I go down Druitt Street and into Kent, looking for #400 where, on the 11th floor, the book launch is taking place; rather it's that, even with my sense of expectation intact, I no longer believe in infinite possibilities the way I did then. And perhaps that sense of the infinite was itself a mere index of youthful vigour, youthful ignorance ... ? Perhaps, too, it had its own melancholy, arising from my fear of exclusion from the all I wanted to be part of? Then, I did not know that most lives are made out of the humdrum, that even grand passions lose, over time, both their grandeur and their passion, that most of what we do, we do over and over again. At the launch I feel, as I have always felt, younger than everybody else in the room although, if I look carefully around at those I am among, I have to acknowledge that this is my generation and we are all pretty much of an age. Later, I don't go with the authors and publishers to dinner in Chinatown, preferring to catch a cab with a friend over the Anzac Bridge where we settle for a coffee at her place. Later still, having said goodnight to her, I'm rambling up Darling Street in the direction of Victoria Road, since I always like to walk a bit before looking for a ride ... and then, although it's not late and I'm not drunk and nothing's really happened, suddenly the potentials do return in all their infinite variety and I feel, just for a moment—but how long is that moment?—that all things are possible, even the impossibilities.

re-dérive?

2006-05-06T17:33:00.000+10:00

Have neglected this site lately, a whole month has gone by without a post. Partly this is because there doesn't seem to be a clear distinction between here and my other place, although for a while I was reserving this one for journeys of various kinds and the other for, I don't know, speculations? Sometimes everything seems like a journey, at others, nothing does. Anyway, the point is, this site might soon return to its original purpose since, today, I completed all the formal tasks necessary for the renewal (for three years) of my taxi driver licence. I haven't actually got it yet - I have to have new photos taken and send off the relevant papers with a $120.00 fee - but within a couple of weeks I should. Then, if I can persuade myself I'm desperate enough, I might start driving the odd shift. One a week, maybe. Easing into it. Like that ... shudder ...

2006-04-01T12:07:00.000+11:00

One p.m. or thereabouts, I'm looking askance at the makings of the pastrami sandwich I was going to be making for lunch when the phone rings. It's Miro, she's in Annandale and wondering if I'd like to meet her at that Thai place in Rozelle we've been to before. We indulge in a bit of banter about the name ... Thai-ed Up? Thai-ed Down? Thai-ed in Knots ... before agreeing to meet imminently. When I ask her how long it will take her to get there she says, mysteriously, eight minutes. I jump in the car and drive over, certain I know exactly where to go, mildly excited because the other day I saw a 2nd hand shop in that strip I'd never noticed before and thought I'd check it out soon. Ah, serendipity.

I get there, find a park on the main drag, cross the road towards the Thai place I can see a couple of blocks up, thinking I don't recall any of these shops, have I ever walked along this street before (irrelevantly almost-echoing one of my least favourite songs from My Fair Lady, which I watched most of the other evening)? The Thai place doesn't look right either, it's a fairly tatty takeaway shop with just a few rickety tables, full of Friday lunch-timers cramming - where's the red velvet? The Buddha? The incense? I have to walk up to the next block and then back down the last one before it dawns on me that I'm in completely the wrong place. I remember Miro saying roundabout, saying kebab place on the corner, there's nothing like that here, although that old theatre looks interesting ...

I tear myself away, jump back in the car and drive across Victoria Road to Darling Street where, two or three blocks up, I see the real place ... and catch a glimpse of Miro sitting pensive and elegantly alone against the wall. She doesn't see me driving by but, after I park where we parked last time and am walking up the side street, my mobile rings and I'm able to say I'm just about to walk through the door ... afterwards she says she's going to Gleebooks to buy the new biography of Truman Capote and I say I'm going to the Haberfield Library to pick up an old one of Anna Akhmatova but I don't or not just yet, I go back to check out the 2nd hand shop.

There's a ragged 1994 Melbourne Street Directory in which I look up the name of a street I've been writing about, surprised to find it's not called Emerald Way after all, but Emerald Hill Place. This leads to a quandary I still haven't resolved: do I revise towards fact or do I maintain the inadvertent fiction? How did I make the misattribution to begin with? Fading sight, internet maps? A pristine Everyman of Rimbaud's Poems, with no clue as to who the translator was. Another Everyman, Dylan Thomas's Collected Poems, appropriately battered, and I pick it up with a pang. I've never got over lending my hardback Collected to a film maker who was doing a documentary about photographer Max Dupain, which somehow necessitated her borrowing my Dylan Thomas to lend to him. Max died, the film was never made, the book disappeared and despite many opportunities, like this, to replace it, I never have.

Downstairs is a kind of cellar where I have to bend double to inspect a range of curiously wrought, ugly 1940s furniture, cheap and nasty, and anyway I already know I will leave the shop empty handed. It's about three p.m. now, a sunny/cloudy afternoon, quite warm. The theatre is an old cinema, the interlocking T R (or R T) stands for Theatre Rozelle (or Rozelle Theatre), it's being remodelled as apartments. I realise that what attracts me to this block is its about-to-be-renovated dereliction, plus it's just up the road from the major location for the film I'm meant to be writing but haven't quite got around to yet, through absorption with my book. I can see the grounds of the old psychiatric hospital ahead, where the road bends, I haven't looked at it from this vantage before, it gives me a thrill.

The Catholic primary school next to the Haberfield Library has been having a cake stall, the streets are full of Italian mothers and children with extravagant sweets in their hands or mouths. There are posters on lamp posts for the forthcoming Italian elections (in Italy) because for some reason (some) people in Australia can vote. But the Akhmatova bio looks dull, it's one of those books that uses poems-as-narrative, plus the pages are yellowed and I simply can't bring myself to borrow it. I return to Summer Hill by the same route I used last year when I was a cab-driver, going home at one or two a.m. with my right sock full of 20 and 50 dollar notes and a great longing for a drink and then to sleep.

hyperthymestic syndrome

2006-03-26T20:40:00.000+11:00

Funes, the Memorious?

2006-03-23T19:45:00.000+11:00

Today I saw the Hartog plate. I felt nothing.

Not true. I felt the corrosion of a history of words.

from the dark side

2006-03-18T18:12:00.000+11:00

Went to a class today at the Sydney Taxi School as part of the requirements to renew my licence. It's interesting to spend a day in a room full of Turks, Bangladeshis, Chinese, Iraqis and so on, especially since these classes are fairly perfunctory so far as actual learning is concerned. Or, the learning consists more of listening to stories than it does absorbing information. You always end up talking about security issues in a group of cab drivers. One guy had a shocker to tell. He was driving in the St. George area, in the south of the City, not long after the Cronulla riots. It was one or two in the afternoon. He was hailed by a woman with bags, pulled over, popped his boot, got out to help her with her bags. As he was bending down to pick them up, he was set upon from behind by two or three guys - he wasn't sure how many, because they knocked him half conscious (with some kind of, again unknown, implement) then started kicking him when he was down. He surmised it was a racist attack because he heard the abuse they were shouting as they hurt him, calling him a wog. This guy had recently been stitched up after an operation to his stomach - they undid that. He had to have his nose rebuilt. He still has a bruise under one eye, three months later. He doesn't know how he got home but assumes that he somehow drove. His wife took him to hospital. He can't work and he said his kids start to cry if they even hear the word taxi. And this happened to him, with malice aforethought, purely because of his appearance. He said he looked around as he got out of the cab but saw no-one; the police later suggested the guys waiting were hiding under a car (!) Don't know what his background is, he didn't say. Perhaps Turkish, his friend, next to him, who knew the story, was. The guy taking the class said he looked Italian. I just thought he looked like an Aussie. But, no. But, yes.

QVB

2006-03-17T14:01:00.002+11:00

Luca Antara, the book, tarries a while in the QVB, because, when I first came to Sydney, that's where the Public Library was. I was interested in telling a brief version of its history but as I was in New Zealand when I wrote that section, I got my material on-line. Now, preparing the Notes on Sources, I find that there is a book about the Grand Dame. The Queen Victoria Building 1898-1986, by John Shaw with photos by David Moore (among others), was written at the initiative of architects Stephenson & Turner, who carried out the restoration of the building in the 1980s. Lovely book. One of its glories is the archival photographs, which are not restricted to the building itself but cover many aspects of Sydney's CBD down the years. I was fascinated by the pictures of arcades, most of which were demolished before I came here. The Imperial Arcade, which resembled a theatre set; the Victoria Arcade, with its elliptical glass dome; the Royal Arcade with its Roman and Florentine echoes. Only the Strand Arcade now remains, along with the QVB itself which, although it is a free standing building, has many affinities with arcade buildings, for example, its glazed barrel vault roof.

I can't remember now where we'd been - perhaps to a concert or a gig - I do recall one night, late, wandering with my then wife into the newly restored QVB, which was wide open, brightly lit and vastly empty; this was before the shops had been tenanted or opened. There was distant music coming from the upper levels. We walked into each other's arms and waltzed together along the tiled floor of the promenade known as the Avenue. This floor slopes, there's a slight hill running down Market Street towards George Street, probably the old bank of the Tank Stream, and the makers of the building followed that fall. I'm no longer sure either if it was the same night or another - probably the same - that, climbing the stairs we found, on the top-most level, a function or celebration of some kind going on. Passing across the floor we encountered Barry Humphries, so shickered he could not stand up, being escorted, like an ocean liner by tugboats, by two gorgeous young women from one revelry to another. Or perhaps from revelry to bathroom.

After finishing the book I went and had another look at the QVB, and at the Strand Arcade. Beautiful structures, beautifully restored (Stephenson & Turner did the Strand as well), yet I couldn't help feeling a slight pang of disappointment. Why? I think it's just the dullness of the use they are put to, at least from my point of view. I can remember being absolutely fascinated by the arcades in Auckland in the 1970s, because of the strange variety of shops, businesses and other organisations you found there: erotica, philately, obscure foreign friendship societies, fortune tellers, dance academies and who knows what else. Whereas now what you find is the relentless shininess of contemporary consumer culture. Many wonderful things are there which you can buy if you want, but something else is lacking, perhaps aura, perhaps grime, perhaps a whiff of the disreputable. The QVB replaced the George Street Markets and was built as a market itself. In its early days it attracted palmists and mind-readers along with teachers of music, art and dance. Now mostly what you find are handbags, hand lotions, hand made chocolates. It'd be an awful confession to say that I preferred the QVB derelict and that isn't quite what I mean. I just wish there was less shininess, more texture, some fluid and chaotic tactility there.

RuneScape

2006-03-13T18:20:00.000+11:00

Had a good time with my kids this weekend. Or, should I say, they had a good time with me? Partly it was because Jesse's friend Monty came over Saturday night for a sleepover. Kids like being in a pack, even three is better than two. At one point we went over to the local park for an hour or so. It was early evening; tennis on the courts, skate-boarders and bike riders on the skate-board rink, smaller kids on the equipment and the littlies in the fenced off playground; a soccer game featuring, I noticed, two of the guys from the local liquor shop. At one point Liamh, who's obsessed with them, found a stash of sticks behind a tree on the far edge of the park and enlisted the other two in a game. I watched it from a bench on the other side, far too far away to hear anything or see detail. They were big, robust looking sticks, thick and long; but the boys seemed to be using them not as weapons but as ... I don't know? Wands? Their movements had an hieratic quality, they held them gesturally and moved them slowly through the air. It looked like a dance and went on for quite a while, quarter of an hour maybe. Then, all of a sudden, they laid them down (behind another tree, for later perhaps) and came tearing back across the park towards me. As we were walking home I asked what they'd been doing. Orrh, said Jesse, We were playing Runescape. He didn't expatiate and I didn't ask. Runescape's huge among the kids and it seems like a different sort of game from the usual shoot 'em up, bang 'em down. My boys don't play it here much because it requires a PC for its full range to be available and I'm on a Mac; when they do I'm impressed by the contemplative air that comes over the flat. One day this weekend I watched them build a canoe and sail it down a river. Another time, I recall Jesse telling me he knew how to fletch arrows. He described the process in great detail and then allowed that, yes, they were virtual arrows. This is a game where groups form and play against/with each other; some of these groups are very large and, it goes without saying, they are multinational. I'm intrigued ... but not as intrigued as I was by the stick game I saw across the park the other evening.

Once on Chunuk Bair

2006-03-10T11:08:00.000+11:00

Am I getting sentimental in my old age? The other morning, just after I woke up, I felt the need to check some geographical details with respect to the Gallipoli peninsular. I was trying to understand the precise relationship between Lone Pine, Chunuk Bair and the Nek. Also, which were the troops that took the first, and the second, though only briefly, and were slaughtered in their hundreds at the third site. Was it simply the sound of the names in my head, on my tongue, that blurred my eyes, so that I could not read the words on the page? It was strange to lie back on the pillows and feel the tears running down my cheeks - why?

badman

2006-03-05T09:52:00.000+11:00

As anyone who has ventured there knows, Ern Malley Alley is a hall of mirrors, an infinite regression, a world of answers without questions and questions lacking answers. You go there at your peril and if you will be so bold or so foolish, you need allies: a sense of humour, an unimpaired sceptical sense, what Keats called negative capability ... anyway. Something I hadn't quite considered when I entered the labyrinth was that I would be dealing with my father's generation, obvious as that might seem. He was born in 1920, the second of three brothers. Ern Malley was born in 1918, the 14th of March, Einstein's birthday; James McAuley in 1917, Harold Stewart in 1916 ...

Another thing I did not anticipate is that I would find myself wrangling with the ghost of Don Bradman (b. 1908). How did this happen? Well, partly it's simply local history: the boy from Bowral made his first century in Sydney grade cricket just down the road from here, at Petersham Oval (there's a plaque), which means it's at least possible that Ern, who grew up in the area, was there that November day. Partly, too, it's because if you read Australian history between the wars, you simply can't escape the Don. He is ubiquitous. So that, a few weeks ago, I went to the Ashfield library and brought home a couple of books, one of which, written by an Englishman as social history as well as sporting biography, was so good that I read it cover to cover in a matter of days. Now, coincidentally, I've just watched the second instalment of a two part television documentary on ABC, which covers the same ground as the book and even interviews its author. So what have I learned?

Well, it's an emotional minefield. And very personal. My father loved two sports, rugby and cricket. He'd played both, with some skill, in his youth, coached school teams while he was teaching, later on spent a lot of time listening to games on the radio or watching them on television. I inherited these enthusiasms from him and maintained them during his long decline partly so as to have this neutral common ground where we could always go when we talked. Now he's gone I don't know why I keep them up because the actual sporting culture as it has evolved, mostly disgusts me. That's one thing. The second thing is the intimate relationship between Australian life and sporting prowess. Much has been made of the fact that Bradman's prodigious feats as a batsman began during the Great Depression and that for many people living in penury and misery, he became a kind of secular saviour ... this strange contract, between sporting success and the pride of individuals in themselves, is not confined to Australians but they - we - are certainly paragons in its expression. As an expat New Zealander who is an Australian citizen, I express this fanaticism in reverse, taking no pleasure in Australian wins and great delight in their unfortunately rare losses. Weird, huh?

But, Bradman. The great hero of the common man, and a common man himself ... except he wasn't. He was a protestant in a land of Irish Catholics, a teetotaller in a country of drinkers and drunks, he played the piano and listened to classical music, in the evenings after a day's play, instead of celebrating with his mates, he'd go to his room and write letters or read books. And get an early night. He was also a Royalist in a culture that at least fancies itself to be 'naturally' Republican, he earned his living as a stock broker and wasn't above taking financial advantage of circumstances when he could see a way to do so - when, in 1945, his boss in Adelaide informed the Stock Exchange he could no longer meet his commitments, Bradman had taken over the office and hung his shingle out within 36 hours of the declaration, apparently with the consent of the receiver. In some of this, he shows a character not unlike that of my paternal grandfather, who was all of those things: protestant, teetotal, royalist, businessman, devious, a sporting fanatic - and Australian; most of this description also fits the present Australian Prime Minister, John Howard (I don't believe he is teetotal). The other thing the three men - Bradman, my grandfather, Little Johnny - have in common is their ruthlessness.

As we know, sport is a surrogate for war and despite all the waffle about playing the game, you can't really engage in it without a determination to win. Afterwards you may fraternise with your opponents but while the game's on you have to be prepared almost to kill. In our peculiar culture, that analogy with war does extend to business and to politics, but with this difference: the wins and losses are real, there are real victims, real casualties, real deaths. Bradman's extreme ruthlessness as a cricketer, later as Australian captain, was mostly visited upon the English, whom he took great delight in humiliating howsoever and whenever he could; but there was no contradiction with his Royalism or his Empire Loyalism, because it was just a game. For precisely the same reason, sport/war is a very bad analogy for business and politics, but pervasive nevertheless. Watching Little Johnny bask in the approbation of the local version of the great and the good during his ten year anniversary celebrations made me realise that he has a conscience white as the driven snow, as they say, most likely because he's left all that behind on the playing field. Watching the obsequies for Kerry Packer, that superlative sporting man, the other week led to the same conclusion. For these kinds of people, the end does justify the means and the end is, in the end, very simple: to win.

My father set himself against his father and attempted to live an ethical life; it ended in alcoholism, loneliness and despair, with one of his few consolations, the rugby or the cricket on the TV or the radio. This doesn’t mean that he made the wrong choice and nor is it sufficient to ascribe his fate to that choice: of course not, there were a lot of other factors involved, which I can’t go into here. But it was a conscious choice: the poetry he wrote in his youth he abandoned in order to dedicate himself to a form of social action which would make a real difference to peoples’ lives and in this he was remarkably successful; the visits he sometimes got from those he had taught were another of his consolations.

Ern Malley didn’t have to live with the consequences of his dedication to poetry, though both James McAuley and Harold Stewart did. Sometimes I imagine Malley as a kind of Anti-Bradman, feckless where the other was conscientious, ironic rather than sincere, profligate not abstemious, raucous not calm, unsporting, twisted, decadent, sardonic, rude … but of course he wasn’t an Anti-Bradman so much as an Anti-Everything: everything, that is, that could not be fitted into the world view of two gifted yet resentful men, both self-hating, one of whom became a Catholic conservative academic, the other a scholarly Buddhist monk. As for Bradman, he lived to a ripe old age and was, so far as one can tell, kind to his old opponents - but never forgave his enemies. I understand John Howard is a great hater too.

Houses of the Poets

2006-03-01T15:51:00.000+11:00

It's never quite clear to me what is to be gained by going to look at houses where known people were born, grew up or at some stage lived, which doesn't mean I don't sometimes do it. At the very least, I suppose, there is subsequently a memory trace where before was either a blank or something imaginary. Which isn't to say the imaginary isn't preferable, only that it will in most cases recede before the real. Anyway ... having learned from Michael Ackland's book Damaged Men the addresses of the houses where James McAuley and Harold Stewart grew up, and realised they are both within a few kilometres of here, I went today to look at them.

52 The Crescent, Homebush, McAuley's home from the mid 1920s until he left home during WW2, is a small brick Victorian villa in a now leafy street running parallel to the main western line just down the road from the Homebush shops. It's shabby and neglected now, it looks like it's rented out, but it was probably far more prepossessing and indeed, straight-laced, when it belonged to the McAuley family. Jim's Dad was a successful real estate agent which raises the question as to why he kept on living in this rather small house in this rather grim suburb with its stockyards and its abbatoir; on the other hand, according to Jim, he was a rather grim man.

Although McAuley remembered the scent of wisteria, there's now a small frangi pani tree outside the window of the bedroom next to the front door, which may have been his: At night he watched the dancing shadows created by the lights of passing trains on his bedroom walls and dreamed of unknown destinations, Ackland says. The most startling presence in the street is an enormous Gallipoli Pine growing behind the house, one of the largest I have seen. McAuley, born in Lakemba in 1917, may have come into the world contemporaneous with this tree and I took its sombre presence as a sign that he still haunts the neighbourhood.

Chowringhee, where Harold Stewart was born in 1916 and where he grew up, is or was at 31 Tavistock Street, Drummoyne: a short, also leafy street, running up hill from Drummoyne Park with its green oval, not far from Five Dock Bay. All three streets crossing Tavistock are now major traffic arteries so the area does not have the quiet gentility it did when Harold lived here. His father, who was in India until his early thirties and spoke fluent Hindustani, was the local health officer.

The house at #31 presented the same drab exterior as did the McAuley residence, though it was clearly a much larger place. However, it seems to have been divided at some point into a makeshift duplex; the name plate, if there ever was one, has disappeared and I did wonder, since the other half of the duplex was #33, if I had the right house. Perhaps the street had been renumbered at some point?

This is what Ackland describes: Tavistock Street was shaded by camphor laurels and small gardens set off the entrances to most of its serried brick houses. The drab exterior of the Stewarts’ home accorded ill with its exotic Indian name ... and its tastefully presented interior. A large rear veranda afforded easy access to a modest oasis of calm, with fernery, fish pond, vines and a spreading apple tree, while Marion (Harold's sister, younger than him by nine years) remembered home-life as characterised by ahimsa, or non-violence of thought and deed.

There was a bullish looking man in a large 4WD parked outside #31 with the talkback radio turned up loud in his cab and he gave me the leery eye when I turned the car around and parked across the road to get a decent look at the house, so I didn't hang around for long. Ackland also writes: ... in the 1920s the future poet could still wander along dusty, unmade roads lined with gumtrees and post-and-rail fences, reminiscent of country towns, and shimmering water was always close at hand.

In contradistinction to the grimness of McAuley's bedroom (ordered and impersonal, its furnishings kept to a minimum with a bed, dresser and bare walls), Harold's served as study, art studio and music room ... the bed, which doubled as a settee when friends called, had a deep blue coverlet shot through with muted gold thread and [the room] contained a large desk, ample library, music stand and gramophone, as well as a small table for displaying art works — making it the prototype of his successive dwellings.

The strongest impression I took away from both houses is perhaps paradoxical: they each in their different way reminded me of the house at 40 Dalmer Street in Croyden, Ern Malley's sister Ethel's house, where the imaginary poet spent his last few imaginary months. This house was, as they say in fact, owned by Harold's sister, the aforementioned Marion ... the other thing I glimpsed, though only in passing, was the uniformity of these lower middle class western Sydney suburbs between the wars, with their rows and rows of near identical houses made of liver coloured brick, their pubs and corner shops, their bare streets where the trees, if they had even yet been planted, had scarcely begun to grow.

2006-02-26T18:37:00.000+11:00

This site is allegedly a year old today tho', not really, because the first few posts appeared on the sister site & were moved over here later ... b-but it is a year since I got my taxi licence (for the third time!) & thus time to renew it again. Because I'm not driving at the moment that can be done in a fairly leisurely manner, still costs about 500 bucks however, which I don't like paying, specially because I don't really ever want to drive a cab again ... on the other hand, common sense tells me that, things being as they are, precarious, I can't really afford not to (renew my licence I mean). Will probably run out of money not long after this financial year ends (June 30) &, unless something else comes along, how else am I going to make the rent? pay for the kids? feed my habit(s)? ... ah, yes, sometimes I really do wonder how much of this money anxiety I feel is constitutional, how much circumstantial? Would I still feel insecure on 500 grand a year? Some of my happiest times have been when I've had nothing blah blah blah ...

QE2

2006-02-19T09:58:00.000+11:00

Last week two nights in a row, at the same hour, I went to the Dendy Cinema at Circular Quay to see a film. The first, the premier of a short I'd been invited to because I'd been speaking with the producer about another matter; the second, the opening of the IndiVision Screenings for this year - I was a participant in the IndiVision Lab last year. Neither film was quite satisfactory but that's not what I'm here to say.

I always prefer being early to the movies so I caught the train about 5.15 and was at the Quay by 5.45 for a 6.15 screening. There I was, ambling along, in no hurry, intending to stop in at an art shop where you can reliably see lithos by the likes of Chagall and Miro and Dali and Bonnard, when I look up and see this:

She was moored in West Circular Quay and took up the whole length of harbour on that side, seeming as long if not longer than the bridge, which kind of grew out of her bow. A few lights on, a few idle figures lounging on her decks taking the evening air - they were all David Niven types in white cravats to me, smoking Sobranes - while hanging below her funnel, bizarrely, was a hand written banner saying DO NOT APPROACH CLOSER THAN FIFTY METRES. For terrorists, I guess.

Big old ocean liners always make me think of Fellini's Amarcord, the night scene where the characters row or wade out into the water to see one passing by, like a space ship from some wonderful, perhaps alien civilization whose planet you might one day be lucky enough to visit.

Thursday was hot and then about four the thunderheads rolled in, with a spattering of big fat drops which, by the time I went to catch the train, had turned to steady though not hard rain. The train must have travelled with the cloud because it was raining as well in the City, which had been clear when I left - I can see it from my balcony. I don't mind getting a bit wet, I was enjoying it and anyway, there's a covered walkway from the Quay to the Toaster and the Opera House and the QE2 was still there, looking more like this:

though rather more beautiful in the after storm light. I knew by now that she was departing for Melbourne that night and could already see a thin thread of diesel smoke drifting from her funnel. I was hoping that after the movie was over we might be lucky enough to see her steam out - that would have been something. The film, from Israel, was an inconsequential tale about a unit of girl soldiers patrolling Jerusalem which somehow managed to be trivial and claustrophobic at the same time and, instead of ending, just stopped. The last shot was interminable, two girls on one motorcycle riding through the city with, for some reason I will never know, the word KIWI written on each of their helmets.

It was dark by now, we stood around in a roped off enclosure in a bar area under the Opera House as canapes and wine waiters circled and networks got worked. I was with a director friend and she was with an actor friend and none of us could raise much enthusiasm for working the nets so, just as they served trays of boxed stir-fried beef noodles, we left and ate leaning over the rails looking at that fabulous apparition which, while it was smoking more than it had been, did not look like leaving before we ourselves wandered off into the night.

So she's gone now but, if I'd got around to the other side of the Quay in daylight, I might have seen something like this:

Rowe Street

2006-02-07T16:32:00.000+11:00

For a big city, a world city as it likes to think itself, Sydney does not have a very good Public Library. This probably reflects the way the municipality is divided up, the Sydney City Council has jurisdiction only over the CBD proper, the adjoining inner city suburbs are administered by other councils; most of the suburban libraries are rather better, if not bigger, than the Central one. I haven't bothered rejoining since I came back here to live a year ago and in fact didn't even know where it was any more, until yesterday.

I was going to see an exhibition called Memory Lane : Recollecting Rowe Street. Rowe Street was a short narrow street running between Castlereagh and Pitt Streets, just south of Martin Place in the City. It was like an Arcade without a roof and featured shops you didn't find in other parts of town. At one end was the grand Australia Hotel, at the other, the Millions Club (dedicated to population growth); in between you could (in the 1950s and 60s) buy chic hats and dresses, espresso, avant-garde pictures, banned books and modern furnishings. It had been that way, a little piece of Bohemia, at least since the start of the 20th century, when the former literary editor of the Bulletin, A. G. Stephens, and artists Lionel Lindsay and Antonio Datillo-Rubbo rented garret studios on the street.

The exhibition, on the first floor at the recently restored Customs House at Circular Quay, didn't amount to much : three glass cases of displays of wares from those chic and arty shops plus a dozen or so photographs made over into large wall panels. Interesting enough but it wasn't quite what I was expecting. The New Customs House is open plan and there was a lot of conspicuously leisurely lounging around going on, which I found distracting I guess. Never mind.

It was as I was leaving that wing where the exhibition was that I saw a high tech, bright red counter at one end of the floor and realised it was a library I was in ... the Sydney Public Library, made over to look as much as possible like a bookshop - one with hardly any books it it. Fiction A - L seemed all that there was; and the copy of The Situationist City lying casually on a table nearby was asking to be - not stolen, picked up and taken away. I resisted that particular temptation and went up to the next floor to explore, looking for the rest of the books.

They were there, on Floor Two, and seemed somewhat rehabilitated from the sad and tatty collection that used to be housed in an office building behind the Town Hall, and before that in a room in the otherwise derelict Queen Victoria Building. I inquired about re-joining and was relieved to learn my name was no longer on the database - there had been some anomalies in my borrowing behaviour in earlier years - but startled to learn that there is now a joining fee of $11.50. The help was either ignorant or terminally rude, I couldn't decide which. Well, I will join, I guess, sometime ...

Getting back to Rowe Street, most of it was demolished in the early 1970s to make way for the MLC Centre, about which the less said, probably the better. The bit they didn't destroy still exists, a numb and bland service lane running behind the Commonwealth Bank Building to the back of the MLC and the Theatre Royal. I did like the epigraph for the show, from Baudelaire : The form of a city changes more quickly, alas, than the heart of a mortal.

2006-02-02T20:39:00.000+11:00

Two 14 year old girls have been arrested for this murder. Cousins. They were detained by Transit Police for fare evasion at Strathfield Station. They apparently had done another robbery (with a knife?) and attempted several more between the murder of the cabbie and the incident at Strath. A witness to the pre or post of the murder said one of them was of Polynesian appearance. That is congruent with the TV images, although everyone (= family) had their heads covered, getting in and out of cars. Can see I'm going to have to stick with this story.

2006-02-02T15:45:00.000+11:00

Elias Kopti, a general manager at South Western Cabs where Mr Hormozi worked, said Mr Hormozi was a "risk taker" who would take on passengers other drivers avoided. He said Mr Hormozi preferred to work the night shift and was well known for accepting any available passenger. "He never chooses his fare - he'll pick anyone up," Mr Kopti said. "He was a risk taker. He will pick up all the junkies." Mr Kopti said this was despite Mr Hormozi being robbed at least 10 times, three at gunpoint, during about 20 years of taxi driving.

Sydney Morning Herald, 2.2.06

Youbert Hormozi

2006-01-31T21:10:00.000+11:00

Today I set in process the things I need to do to renew my taxi driver licence. It will take a few months and cost half a grand but I feel I must keep that option alive, even though I've not had to earn money driving for the last six months and won't have to for the next six either. Was disconcerting to turn on ABC news tonight and see/hear the top story was about a disabled cabbie beaten to death last night at Canley Vale in the south west of the City. He seems to have been an unlucky man, having been in trouble several times before - we don't know what it is that makes some people vulnerable to this kind of violence while others escape the dread consequences of being out and about in the big shitty late at night. The boss of his network said: The guy is not really healthy because he had a stroke on his left side ... he was a lonely man actually, he was living on his own, and he was a very simple man. He was robbed at gunpoint a few times and he was still going on working because he had nothing to do but drive cabs. His name was Youbert Hormozi. He was 53 years old, Iranian, separated, with two children. He lived in Summer Hill.

wondie

2006-01-30T15:29:00.000+11:00

After the Chinese New Year party on Sunday me and Liamh drove to Strathfield to catch the train to Woy Woy. On the platform a madman in a stained suit with missing teeth thrust his face right up to mine enunciating soundless words accompanied with florid incomprehensible gestures. When we got on the train, Liamh was still clutching in his hand the red envelope he had been given at the party, with a golden ship on the outside and a gift of money within. On the two seats opposite were a young man and a young woman; he, thin and dark with a narrow beard running from the centre of his bottom lip to his chin, cried out when he saw us: That's one of those lucky envelopes, isn't it? Did you get it at Darling Harbour? No, I said, we've been at a friend's place ... He was exuberant and charming and the conversation between us continued intermittently for the rest of the hour's journey to Woy Woy. Sometimes his girlfriend wanted a cuddle, sometimes they conversed together in low voices, sometimes he stared out the window; most of the rest of the time we talked.

He lived at the top of the ridge above the quarry at Wondabyne, in a camp where he had a tent, a fireplace and a stretch of open ground that he cleared himself in the Brisbane Water National Park. The tent was recent, he'd inherited from someone who had, he said, gone down the river with a hole in the back of his head; before that, he'd lived in a cave where quolls ran over his body at night. Wondabyne is just a trainstop on the Newcastle line where it winds up the western shore of a long inlet off the Hawkesbury River called Mullet Creek. No roads go to Wondabyne, there are no shops or public buildings of any kind, just the sandstone quarry and a few dwellings, most of them on the other side of the water and accessible only by boat. This guy had been there six months, since last August, waiting until a house came up, though he never said exactly what that meant.

His routine was, to get up every morning and come down the hill to the station and catch a train into town. He'd spend the day in the city - doing what, he never said, beyond mentioning that he asked people for money and when he had enough, ten dollars, he'd use that to get a feed - then catch another train home. That morning he'd been late and had run down the hill in his boxer shorts carrying his clothes in his hands ... until brought up short by a brown snake, one of the most poisonous reptiles in the world. This one, he said, didn't want to move, not even when he poked a stick at it, so he'd had to wait. It was too early to go home today - Sunday, 5.30 or thereabouts - so they were going up to Woy, to a mate's place, and would go back to Wondie later. He'd light a fire, to keep the dogs and bad spirits away, and be fast asleep by ten.

Climbing up to the top of the ridge in that country isn't easy. I haven't been in the bush above Mullet Creek but I've wandered all over the Hope Range, on the northern bank of the Hawkesbury just east of there, and it's the same kind of terrain. Basically all those ranges consist of three massive tiers of sandstone, like three giant steps. It's generally impossible to go straight up, you have to go along a diagonal and even then there's a lot of scrambling over crumbly outcrops to do. This guy reckoned he could make the four kilometre climb in about forty minutes in the dark, using the flashlight on his mobile phone for guidance; he said he could come down, like this morning, snakes permitting, in eight minutes.

We talked about the fires that burned through a lot of that country on New Years Day, reaching the ridge next to the one he's on before the change came through; about the wild dogs that haunt the National Park; the varieties of snake, both venomous and not, you find up there; other wild life, like the extremely annoying brush turkey and the sweet and affecting Echidna, a monotreme like the playpus, covered in spines ... he has a cross bow, with a licence, with which he once shot a Big Red, that he butchered and gave to his mates in Woy for their dogs: dogs love kangaroo, he said. I was left unsure if he also has a gun, because when I asked him he said he didn't have a licence for one and left it at that.

His only problem was with the old bloke who lives in the house next to the quarry, who wants to move him on. He said: the only thing that'd move me on is if he killed me ... and ... he's not going to do that, I said. Earlier I'd heard him telling his girlfriend that because he was half Aborigine the land was half his anyway, that's why he felt he had a right to live in and off it. Just before we entered the last tunnel before Woy he pointed out the deep green pool at the very tip of Mullet Creek which some old white guy had shown him, where you could fish for mullet and blackfish and bream and always come back with something. Ate so much fish I'm sick of it, he said as the train flashed out of the light and he turned his attention back to his dark and silent girlfriend.

The Marco Polo Motel

2006-01-19T16:00:00.000+11:00

The new screenplay I'm about to start drafting opens in a room at the Marco Polo motel, a real place just a few blocks from here on Parramatta Road. I chose it because of the name, of course, but until yesterday had never actually been there. I walked over in the misty afternoon rain, weather I find so much pleasanter than the dry heat we were having in the last days of 2005. The motel is big, oblong, set back slightly from the road, four or five storeys high, built, as some prisons are, around a central courtyard which is also a carpark. It's made out of brick, not quite blond, not red either, some umber in between colour. The office is on the right just as you go in. There was an overweight person sitting on a bench outside whom I took to be a woman because of the size of (her) breasts; only later did I realise he was a bloke and they were man-breasts. Walking into the office was like walking into a John Waters movie. Tiny, it was, and full of people. The first one I saw was a woman straight out of the early 1960s: stark white pancake make-up, inches thick, black bouffant hair so lacquered it looked like one of those plastic Beatles wigs, black slacks, slip-on shoes: a classic Widgie look. She smiled at me and I saw with a shock that she was about seventy years old. There was a child, whom I never quite saw, and then another woman swam into view, with the same make-up, the same hair, the same black slacks and slip-ons. Except she was twenty or thirty years younger. There was also a big bloke with a piece of carved greenstone round his neck, working at a computer and a dapper older gent with a sly insinuating smile which was the result, I learned when I spoke to him, of oddly fitted false teeth. All of these people were swirling around the tiny space, all talking at once; and then suddenly the room cleared and I was left with the younger of the two widgies. I explained that I was thinking of booking a room for friends coming to stay from London and she gave me two electronic keys to view a couple of rooms. It always shocks me, when I haven't been in one for a while, how small and mean motel rooms are. These were umber brick on the inside too, cell-like, with the bare minimum of space, the tiny bathroom, the double bed you have to edge around to get to the window, the garish bedspread, the ubiquitous TV ... out the window was a desolate view of the back yard of a business where rubber dinghies and aluminium runabouts called Tinnies were made. There was nothing to look at, nothing to see, and I felt disconsolate, trying to fit the activities I had imagined for that first scene into such a miniscule place ... back to Reception I went. There, the little bloke with the false teeth was behind the desk and the big bloke with the pounamu was still hanging round the computer. We got talking ... they were all New Zealanders: the guy with the false teeth was married to the elder Widgie, the younger was their daughter; the big bloke was a guest, over from Hokitika. We talked about the South Island, because Teeth was originally from way down that way, from Riverton, west of Invercargill. Well, it was pleasant enough and I was soon on my way, back through the rainy streets ... there's no way I can use the actual location for the motel room scene, although the carpark is interesting, but my dilemma now is, can I use the name? If I hadn't have gone in there I'd have no qualms but now, having met the owners, having looked a little way into their lives, I feel implicated, I feel unsure ... I don't know ...

The Rio

2006-01-14T10:30:00.000+11:00

On the corner of this and Smith Street is a Medical Centre, owned by someone my friend M calls the Little Mogul. He's a Portuguese who also owns and operates the pharmacy in Lackey Street, above which M and her partner J live. He also owns a fair amount of other real estate in Summer Hill. Above the Medical Centre is a pathologist's office. Next door, is Francois's International Hair Salon. Francoise, who surely is not French, parks his car, a silver Holden Astra, at the back of my building. He's a big, gloomy man who looks like he comes from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean. Next door to his establishment is the Rio, a milk bar. Next door to that there's a bespoke tailor, a cafe - Muse - with a photographer's upstairs, Ellen's (trissy) Interiors and Flowers, a mysterious, always shuttered office which purports to belong to a courier business, then an art gallery that shows oddly retro art, the kind of thing I used to see in Art Society exhibitions in Wellington, New Zealand, in the 1970s, when it was already old-fashioned. (This is a real connection, since one of those 1970s Wellington artists, Shay Docking, has been exhibited here in Summer Hill.) Then a plumber, a garage, a laundry (Nice & Clean, it's called, run by a Vietnamese couple with two young children; I get my washing done there) and finally an orthodontist that advertises mouthguards in any colour you choose. The first two buildings, which include in their frontages all the businesses mentioned as far as the plumbers but excluding the Medical Centre, are old (1893) two storey brick constructions, with residential apartments upstairs. I never see anyone coming or going from these residences, nor have I ever seen anyone on the balconies or at the windows of what look like spacious and probably quite elegant apartments. With one exception - the Old Man who runs The Rio.

I don't know his name. I've never spoken to him. M told me he's from Eastern Europe, probably the Balkans, probably from what used to be called the former Yugoslavia. White-haired, slow-moving, intent, I see him sometimes moving round his shop when I pass by. The Rio is a classic 1950s milk bar, not the kind with tables to sit at, the kind where you used to buy your sweets and drinks, your milk-shakes and ice-creams, over the counter and then go somewhere else to consume them. It's painted blue and white on the outside, the paint is old and tacky, the signage ancient. Sweets, Smokes it says. In the window, cut out pictures of novelty ice creams pasted onto a piece of styrofoam. Some tattered silver tinsel frames half the glass. An Australian flag in one corner. There are coloured stars stuck here and there. Inside, large bottles of soft drink are placed at intervals along the shelves. The shop, which is always half-dark, has a high counter along one side, and on the shelves behind it, more wares are placed at careful intervals. A step leads up to the door that goes into the room behind the shop. The Rio opens regularly each morning except Sunday, and stays open until the early evening. It is usually empty of both customers and owner. In fact, apart from the owner, I have never seen anyone in there at all.

I've only been into the shop once myself. It was last summer. I had my sons with me and two colleagues were visiting to talk about a screenplay. One of them had her two children, older than mine, with her. So there were seven of us, three adults, four children, going to get ice creams. A bell rang as we entered the darkened shop. We stood at the counter, waiting. Nothing happened. No-one came to serve us, there was no sound from the back room, no movement. We stood. Waiting. It was as if we had stepped into some other time, perhaps a January afternoon in 1958. It was endless. Nothing kept on happening. Eventually, we left and went across the road to the shop on the other corner, a mixed business run by a Chinese couple, Tom and Tina, and bought our ice creams there.

J, who has lived in Summer Hill for longer than I have, says the Old Man buys his supplies in bulk from the local Franklin's supermarket. He is of the opinion that the Rio is not really a shop at all, but an art installation. That makes sense from one point of view, but is it the point of view of the Old Man? No-one knows. M has another story about him. She observed, one Christmas morning a few years ago, a large group of people of all ages crowding into the shop and then upstairs where the Old Man lives by himself. They were his extended family. The sound of celebrations continued for most of the day. He takes such care of his business, eccentric as it is. He works hard at it, if by work we understand the attentiveness that he surely gives it. The time we stood waiting for the ice creams he had decided not to sell to us, I never for a moment thought that he did not know we were there. I could feel his presence in the back room, monitoring us, waiting for us to go. That I haven't gone in there again is, I think, out of respect. I think that's why none of the locals go in there. Yet the Rio is always open.

Iron Cove

2006-01-06T13:37:00.000+11:00

Christmas Day, we (my sister, her daughter, my two sons, me) had a picnic in Callen Park, which is a former 19th century estate re-invented as an insane asylum and now uneasily poised between three functions: the rump of a psychiatric hospital, housing mainly dementia patients, in ugly mid-20th century buildings; an Art College in the beautiful old sandstone edifice of the original asylum; and public land, used mainly by exercisers and their dogs. The NSW Writers Centre is also to be found there, an adjunct to the Art College.

We sat under an old elm tree at the edge of a playing field with an arm of the sea across the open grass arena. There were a few other picnickers around, and, behind us, in the nearest building, we could hear a Christmas party going on, with table tennis being played by kids on a veranda. When I went over there with my elder boy to find a bathroom, these people turned out to be a large extended family of Spaniards, some of whose members were perhaps employed as nurses in the institution.

It was hot and dry and, after lunch, I thought we might perhaps go for a swim. Me and Jesse and Liamh ran over the spiky grass, jumped a ditch, crossed the road and then went under trees down to the water's edge. There's a low sea wall running all along the eastern shore of Iron Cove. We took off our shirts and climbed down using the gaps between the sandstone blocks as foot and hand holds. So far so good. But the sea bottom was rocky and uneven and almost every rock encrusted with oyster shells, some live, others broken open and razor sharp.

I carried Liamh out, trying to find a path that Jesse could follow into the deeper water but somehow we both got cut: me with a series of parallel grazes along the top of my left foot just back of the big toe, he with a short deep slice right in the meat at the head of the same toe on his right foot. As we all three drifted out into the bay, Jesse was cross, blaming me for his injury. It wasn't that serious, more bantering, as we decided to swim, not for the island in the middle of the Cove, but to a point east of where we were.

Then he said (dog-paddling and spluttering): Unlike you, I know my purpose in life, and I value it.

Wha ... ? I was silenced. What the hell did that mean? He's just turned nine.

Subsequently we made it to shore and inspected our wounds, which weren't too bad. His reminded him of those devices in which you swipe credit cards and mine, though superficial, produced far more blood and so looked a lot worse than his did. Then an obliging dog came along and both boys started throwing sticks out into the water for it, which it expertly retrieved. I went back to the picnic.

Later I asked Jesse what his purpose in life is?

It's to show my father that I'm a serious person, he said, silencing me again.

hopes

2006-01-02T16:12:00.000+11:00

New Year's Eve had the bright idea of walking the kids down to Ashfield Park where, from Ormond Street running parallel on the eastern border, there is an improbable view of Sydney Harbour Bridge, around which the annual fireworks display is concentrated. Having discovered they were not interested in Elvis (there was a re-run of the excellent program Classic Albums on TV), at about 8.40 we gathered up our sparklers and went out. It was a balmy night, heavy with the scent of frangi pani. We crossed Liverpool Road and went up Pembroke Street to the park, to find an amazing scene in progress. Ormond Street was packed with people who'd had the same idea as we did ... and the playground in the park adjoining, the one presided over by Mary Poppins, was packed with children, lithe dark shapes swarming in and over and around the equipment. The crowd was about half Indian and half Chinese, with just a sprinkling of Anglos and one or two Polynesian families. I was surprised by the number of Indians, only because in Ashfield itself I'm less aware of their presence than I am of the Chinese and Polynesians. Anyway, it was a very nice atmos, about as far from the usual boozing, boasting and brawling as can be imagined. The fireworks display itself, at that distance, was as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope: perfect, far away, miniatures. The much vaunted heart on the bridge we could not see at all, or perhaps that went off at midnight, whereas this was the nine o'clock kid's show. After it was over, we lit up our sparklers, giving one to a small Chinese girl of about two who had perhaps, from the way her eyes shone, not seen one before. Then my boys dispersed among the great crowd of other children. Jesse soon linked up with a Polynesian kid called Dillon, then they were joined by a chubby Chinese boy and started roaming round in a gang; while Liamh tagged along when he could, with frequent visits back to home base for reassurance. I was sitting up on a bank on some grass under a tree when a young Indian couple with two kids came and sat down nearby. I'd been watching the father helping his son onto the flying fox, just as I'd been helping mine a few minutes before. He made a greeting, I replied, saying I hoped 2006 would be a good year for him. He laughed. I've been hoping that for ten years now, he said. For me, it's longer than that, I said. That is what we live on, he went on, hopes, and laughed again. His wife, who was plump as he was thin, gathered her sari around her. Their children were small and it was time for them to go. We hung around for another hour or so I guess, before ambling home again. It was such a calm, happy, even joyful, occcasion. Pure joy, like you don't often find.

the cinemas of summer hill

2005-12-15T20:06:00.000+11:00

All over the inner city of Sydney, and especially in the inner west, you find derelict cinemas or ghosts of cinemas. In Petersham there's one that was a skating rink before it closed down; in Haberfield there's another that is a supermarket, at least on the ground floor; in Enmore they saved theirs and it's now a classy venue for music, drama, comedy. Both next door Ashfield and Summer Hill had several cinemas but these are all now ghosts.

The Victoria Theatre was built on Lackey Street, #16-20, around 1911; it was first known as the Rugby Theatre but this name only lasted a year. Before that, as early as 1905, films were shown in the Methodist Church. The Victoria was an odd though not untypical structure, its arched façade, in the only surviving photograph, looks more like a bridge than a theatre, and the screen was initially at the street end rather than the other. This changed just after the war, when it was extensively remodelled. Victoria Pictures, which was always connected with Marrickville to the south and east and was owned by the (probably Lebanese) La Hood family in the 1920s, did not survive the advent of the talkies.

In 1929 building began on a new Summer Hill Theatre at #1 Sloane Street, on the other side of the railway lines from here. The architect was Emil Sodersten and his folly has been described as Spanish baroque frivolity derived from Hollywood; in some views it looks as much arabesque as baroque but it was certainly Spanish in inspiration, with a kind of galleon's poop looming at the front, with the statue of a naked goddess in an arched alcove within.

The Summer Hill Theatre, aka the Grosvenor Theatre, opened in October, 1930. It was one of the largest, if not the largest, cinema in NSW at the time, with seating for 2043 people. Most of the plaster work had been done locally, in Newtown: … extravagantly ornate & eclectic … soaring façade with protruding upper section intricately carved in filigreed plasters … Gothic arches & embellished columns … proscenium and side walls with false boxes, large carved urns and columns ... gargoyles and imitation leafwork … from a dome in the ceiling hung an enormous chandelier, removed ‘for safety’ during WW2 & never put back …

In contemporary photos, looking eastward from Ashfield towards the city, you see this bizarrre, extraordinary palace floating on the skyline. None of the photos I have seen are in colour but I assume it was ochre-coloured, or perhaps, like Petra, rose-pink. The interior was remodelled in 1939 (Gunga Din played at the Gala Opening), and during the 1950s, Cinemascope was installed.

But, like so many other suburban theatres, it did not survive the coming of television. The Grosvenor closed in 1959 (last features: Sheriff of Fractured Jaw and The Heart Within) then lurched, re-opening and closing, through the 1960s. Late in that decade it was used spasmodically to show foreign language films (Bergman? Fellini?) before going dark forever in 1969. It was demolished the next year and the site remained vacant for 15 years. Now, there is a low, oblong, glass box on that corner with, I guess, offices within.

Both of these cinemas are commemorated, if that's the word, in a rather crass mural on a wall in Lackey Street opposite where the Victoria used to be. What's poignant to me about this mural is that it wouldn't be there at all if the 19th century Department Store owned by C. Hodgson & Co., General Importers, that used to stand in that section of the street hadn't been demolished for a carpark, also in the 1970s. There's now an attempt at a park where it used to be, used mostly by the local drunks and druggies and residents of the various halfway houses in Summer Hill.

It's curious to reflect that both the Grosvenor and Hodgsons missed their moment by just a few years. The sensibility that would have valued and preserved them hadn't quite developed by the time they were knocked down but, only a few years later, their loss was felt with intense regret. Me, I try to rebuild them in my mind every time I pass and other times as well; there are days when I come out of the tunnel under the railway line and truly am surprised the Grosvenor is not there where I imagine it to be, a dream palace in which palatial dreams are entertained.

neighbours

2005-12-15T15:43:00.000+11:00

The doorbell rang last night while I was watching Donnie Darko on dvd. Wasn't expecting anyone so answered it with some trepidation. My next door neigbour is hypersensitive and has sometimes knocked me up late to complain about my stereo, my TV, even my children ... no, it was Philip, an English guy, a song-writer, who lives in the next building. He was asking me to join him and his son for a Christmas barbecue, which was a kindly thought. We had a drink and the conversation turned to G, the hypersensitive. Philip told me she has complained to and about every other resident in this building and also some of those in the adjoining building. She writes letters to the Real Estate about our several sins. I was, how shall I say, relieved? Yeah, relieved. It's not just me. G is a classic grievance-monger, you can see by the way she walks that she holds a grudge against the whole world and is always seeking targets against which to discharge her spleen. Live and let live, I say. I've tried to accommodate her, moving the stereo into the study, sometimes not playing music when I want to, keeping it turned down low when I'd rather have it loud, missing dialogue on the TV because it's so muted ... but when she started screaming at me that it was my fault that I had children, something snapped. I'm not, simply not, going to shush my kids for her sake. They're country kids, they're exuberant, they laugh alot, they prefer to run rather than walk down and up the stairs - what's wrong with that? What kind of misery wants to suppress childrens' joie de vivre? Besides, they're only here every second weekend. Now, having heard what Philip had to say, I don't care any more ... today I moved my stereo back into the sitting room, where it belongs.

sign on the corner

2005-12-15T11:38:00.000+11:00

For the last week there's been a sign propped up against a lamppost on the corner of this street, Morris, where it meets Smith Street, just opposite the main drag, Lackey Street. An old, frayed, oblong piece of plywood, it has painted on it For Sale, $200 and a mobile phone number. Several times it has fallen down into the gutter or flat onto the footpath, each time someone has picked and propped it up again. But what is for sale? The sign itself? The telephone pole? Or something else? Each time I pass it I'm tempted to ring the number, just to satisfy my curiosity. Until today ... when I saw that it has migrated up the street to where the rubbbish bins stand outside the wall of the medical centre that occupies that corner. Does this mean the sale is over? Is it too late to solve this particular mystery? I feel something has been lost, something perhaps that never was ...

Coledale & Beyond

2005-12-13T14:05:00.000+11:00

A friend was over from Auckland for the weekend so on Sunday we decided to take a drive down south to see mutual friends living in Coledale. On the southern edge of Sydney is the Royal National Park, beyond which is a narrow coastal strip beneath a towering scarp. Along this strip is a line of small towns, some of them built where coal mines were, which have, over the years, joined up with each other to make a kind of extended semi-urban strip. Usually when I go down this way I like to cut through the National Park and drive down the strip from the north but Sunday, at the last minute, something made me veer away from the turn-off at Waterfall and continue on down the freeway. It wasn't until we'd gone over the Bulli Pass, down the scarp and driven up the strip from the south that we realised something was up. There was bunting and balloons outside many of the shops and businesses, lots of roadside stalls, brass bands playing, a generally festive atmos ... but not that many people. When we arrived at our friends' place they explained that today was the completion day for a two and a half year long project to replace a narrow stretch of cliff-haunted road with an elegant off shore raised highway structure called the Sea View Bridge. The old road was so vulnerable to rockfall it was closed every time the rainfall gauge went above 20mm and there was a local legend that surfies who wanted undisturbed possession of their beaches used to piss in said rain gauge to make the closures happen. Ten thousand people were alleged to be walking across the newly opened bridge, hence all the excitement further on down the line. But already, at about 1 pm, it was clear the promised bonanza was not going to occur. How could it? Anyone who walked the bridge from north to south wasn't going to keep on walking the extra ten ks or so to Coledale; they were either going to walk back to their cars or catch a return train back or further down the line. By late afternoon, as we returned from a stroll along the shore, the kids at the roadside stalls were looking disconsolate, while the locals gathered in the beer garden at the RSL looked increasingly, though not aggressively, pissed. They'd thrown a party and no-one had come. When my friend and I came to leave, we drove north in the hope that the bridge might still, or already, be open, but no, it was all heavy machinery and officiousness. Later we passed by the turn-off to Cronulla unaware of the race riots in full swing down there as Shire locals defended 'their' beach by insulting and beating innocent fellow Australians just because of they way they looked. And later still ate at a pub in Newtown then had a night cap in the Zanzibar round the corner, still unaware that not far to the south and west, armed gangs were roaming the streets randomly bashing both people and cars in retaliation for what had been done at Cronulla that afternoon. Just south of Coledale is Thirroul, where D H Lawrence lived for a while in the 1920s and wrote his novel Kangaroo, the title of which does not refer to the big marsupial but to a fascist leader of an organisation based upon the New Guard. It's possible, as I mentioned a few posts ago, that John Howard's father was a member of the New Guard. Whether that's so or not, Howard's instincts are fascist and his methods entirely unscrupulous. He attempted in the 1980s to gather electoral support by denigrating Asians in Australia and has spent much of the last five years shoring up his postion via a subtle and not so subtle series of measures designed to bring White Australia together behind him in opposition to Muslims, or People of Middle Eastern Appearance, or Arabs or ... well, anyone who's not us. His immediate response to the riots in Cronulla was to refuse to make a statement. When he did, the next day, the point he chose to emphasize is that Australians are not racist and that this is not a racist country. Why? To reassure those that perpetrated the outrages on Sunday, and those that support them, that he is still their man and that the things that were done there were done in his name too. Most people here think that what happened on the weekend is only the beginning and that the long hot summer that is beginning will be riotous and bloody. The wistful, decent, neighbourly folk of Coledale and beyond might be lucky to miss out on more than just a few sight-seers coming over the Sea View Bridge.