Parataxis

Leslie daFox stood at the edge of the road and flapped his hand in a desultory fashion at the traffic.  As befitted London traffic, it ignored him, and a black cab with its orange lamp lit and the back seat vacant drove past him without slowing.  Slightly behind him, two policemen eyed him with suspicion, and further along the street a gaggle of schoolgirls shrieked suddenly with laughter, causing all heads but Leslie’s to turn.  He waved his hand again, and another taxi drove past.

“I say, Sir, are you going deaf?” asked one of the policeman.  Leslie’s face appeared vexed momentarily, but then he forced a rictus of a smile on it and turned slightly to look at the speaker.  As he did so, he held his hand out as though hoping for a bus.

“No,” he said.  “I assume you’re referring to the screeching that has just occurred down the road?”  The policeman nodded, as did his companion.  “That’s commonplace in London when there are children around,” he said.  “I would have expected you to know that.”

“Sounded like someone being murdered to me, Sir,” said the policeman, a smile spreading across his face.  “Seems to me that you’re very familiar with such sounds.”

A taxi pulled up and Leslie’s hand hit the windscreen.  He looked at it, and then at the policemen.  “Cheltenham Road, please,” he said to the driver.  “Do either of you have any money on you?” he asked the policemen.  They looked at one another, shrugged, and finally shook their heads.  “Then you’re making your own way,” said Leslie.  “I’m fed up with you mooching off me and then asking for the receipt so you can claim it back on expenses.”

“Hey, you can’t leave us here!” said the policeman who’d first spoken, his face becoming animated.  “We’re your bodyguards!  In case you try to mur–“  He cut off is a gasp of air as his colleague elbowed him in his ample gut.  “In case you’re attacked,” said the other policeman quickly.  Leslie got into the back of the cab, closed the door and wound the window down.  “I think I’m safe from the driver,” he said.  “I’ve got enough money for the fare, and that’s probably what he cares about.  See you when you get back.”  He wound the window up as the taxi moved off, leaving the policemen stranded behind him.

“Friends of yours, guv?” asked the taxi-driver.  Leslie squinted at the rear-view mirror but couldn’t see enough of the man’s face to tell if he was smiling or not.

“No,” he said.  “Far from it.  Just… the maddening crowd, I think.  People who simply won’t leave you alone.  I’m sure you must get some of them.”

“What, like taxi-groupies?  Nah mate, we don’t get none of them, the job’s not that sexy.  Though, we do get the likes of them what are getting the cab paid for by the better-off, if you get my drift.  I had a lady, well I calls ‘er a lady but there’s not that many that would, if you get my drift, and she was Russian I think.  Couldn’t speak a word of English, but she’s got the address she’s going to written down on this bit of paper, and she shows that to me instead.  Only it’s not just the name of the hotel, but it’s the room number as well, and the name she’s to give to the desk clerk when she gets there, and you can tell from that that she’s going to be pretending to be someone she ain’t, even if she don’t know it.”

“Right,” said Leslie feeling a little lost.  “She’s a prostitute then?”

“I don’t know that she’s like to be called that,” said the driver.  “You know you get some of them, they basically just go to ‘arrods and hang around the posh bags and shoes and wait for foreign gentlemen to come up and accost them.  Then they cost them, if you know what I mean!”

Leslie laughed, annoyed that he didn’t have a notepad with him.  It had been nearly fifteen years since he’s written a sitcom, but the dialogue from the driver was just the kind of stuff he had trouble with, and it would have been good to get it written down, just in case he had an idea for another one.  Well, an idea that didn’t involve the grisly death of two policemen at the start of it.

“I was thinking more of stalkers, actually,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you do get some of them actually,” said the driver.  “My mate Bill, he’s got one.  She’s a right fruitcake from the way he tells it, she comes in on the Runcorn train you see, into Euston – you know your stations, right guv? – and when she comes out she goes along the rank looking for him.  And you can’t do that, right, ‘cos it’s a line, and the guy at the front’s got the job.  So you can’t just take a random fare like, you have to wait your turn.  So she’ll come and find ‘im in the queue, and then she’ll go and stand at the front of the taxi-queue and just keep letting people go in front of her until he pulls up, then in she gets.  And he doesn’t really want to take her, but now it’s the other side of the coin; ‘e’s at the front, see, and ‘e ‘as to take her ‘cos it’s his job now.”

“Right,” said Leslie, feeling a bit bemused.  “His job.  Right.”

“He said she was undressing in his cab a week ago,” said the taxi driver.

“Is she a Harrods’ prostitute too then?”

“Nah mate, she’s a stalker, right?  You’ve got them prostitutes on the brain, ‘aven’t you now?  I shouldn’t’ve said anything, you’re goin’ to be a goer, aren’t you?”

Before Leslie could answer the taxi driver slammed on the brakes, and Leslie was thrown forwards.  Having forgotten to put on his seatbelt, he ended up on his knees on the floor of the cab, one hand stretched out and breaking his fall.

“Sorry about that, guv,” said the taxi driver.  The taxi turned tightly, and Leslie held his ground for as long as he could, and then fell over.  “That’s Bill’s cab there in the side-street –“ the cab lurched and they turned again, “– oh and bloody hell, that’s Bill….”

When Leslie clambered back on to the seat and looked out of the window, he saw that they’d pulled up behind another cab, whose driver was sprawled half-in and half-out of the window, and looked very stabbed.

“Oh no,” he said, with deep feeling.  “Not another murder.”

Rainy day

It was missling; that fine rain you get before it turns into a drizzle when the water's really just hanging in the air and making you wet by making you walk through it.  The taxis were on strike, the drivers holding out for the right to smoke inside their cars.  On days like this, when the world soaked through your raincoat and ruined your shirt before you'd reached the end of your garden path, you could understand their sorrows.  They were all huddled together under the porch of the convenience store, sharing roll-ups and stories about who they'd had in the back of their cab and what they'd do when Taxicab confessions came and asked them to be the star.  Their placards were propped up in a corner, the poster-paint they'd used to make them starting to run and render the text illegible.  The taxis were all queued up out front, blocking the bus-stop, all dark and empty and accepting no passengers.
They spat on me as I walked past.  I considered spitting back, but my mouth was as dry as a nun's knickers, and I was already too wet to notice a little more.  When the bus roared past, unable to stop and making good time as it aquaplaned its way down the road, it sprayed me with a sheet of dirty water thrown up from the surface of the road and I felt a little colder.
I walked down the street with a policeman's gait; slow and steady, saving energy for when I'd really need it.  I'd spent four weeks wandering around behind coppers on the beat learning that walk and being stopped repeatedly by them; apparently it's suspicious to want police protection so badly that you're willing to hang around with police officers.  I knew when I'd cracked it because they started ignoring me, assuming I was one of them but in plain-clothes, undercover.  I'd never be one of them; they wouldn't let me on the force or even into the Specials.  Even rats have standards in this town.
I passed the bus, tipped over on its side and its windows all smashed, a tyre exploded and scattered in rubber fragments across the road.  Dazed people were sitting on the side of it, having just crawled from the shell, pulling themselves from under fatter, more concussed people.  The driver was already sheltering in a doorway, lighting up a small cigar, a cigarillo as my Honduran father would have said.  My French father would just have sneered that such a thing would be considered worth smoking, and my Ecuadorean father would have tried to convince the driver to share.  My mother was a generous woman and I'd had many fathers, sometimes even for long enough to learn their names and well as their nationalities.
Car horns honked like lost seagulls, trying hopelessly to get past the bus.  There was half a lane left, and the oncoming traffic wasn't surrendering their advantage.  The roundabout at the top of the road was just visible from here and the queue of traffic coming towards the stricken bus was just starting to reach it.  When the roundabout seized up all hell would break loose; it controlled access to too many places on both sides of the river.  I allowed myself a difficult smile, feeling the scabs on my chin break open and start weeping; the underground system had an entrance up at the roundabout and maybe this was the way things were supposed to go.  I tramped onwards, hearing my shoes get wetter and wetter, squishing and splishing through puddles that only appeared when you stepped on the irregularly-laid paving slabs.
I'd just reached the underground station when the thunder rolled and the clouds broke and the rain changed from being invisibly present but inescapable into a solid wall of water that hit me like a hod-full of bricks.