Rag Doll

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.

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

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ...

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 ...

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.