strange rides

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.

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It's like a jungle sometimes ...

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 …

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small dreams

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

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 ...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

photo by C. Garth Thompson

stupid dumb bastard

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

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

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.