Eileen

Her speech impediment makes it hard for me to understand her. You have to listen hard. In her late sixties and having spent, many years locked in her own home, away from the frightening outside world. She is now going to shows and taking part in community excursions, making friends. She pointed to a balcony on the second floor of the flats, on it, she grows herbs and flowers and especially strawberries. She loves strawberries. As we pull up to the entrance, she stutters violently and shakes and I hold her hand and ask what is making her so upset. Her neighbours spit on her herbs and strawberries from the next-door balcony, they pour beer and stub cigarettes into her herb pots. Laughing. Shouting. Poking fun at her speech. She hears them from her living room cackling like hyenas. She struggles to tell me she is being bullied. She is looking to move to a chalet type bungalow, small but with a small garden and this lit up her face. I watch her wave the electronic key at the door and it buzzed open. I sit outside, furious, watching and willing the hyenas to come out, Eileen is already on her balcony scanning her little pots and quickly disappears back in again. There is nothing I can do but stare up at the dirty net curtains of the hyena’s lair. I reluctantly leave. I am a working man and have to go to my next fare who is now wondering where I am. I do go back, slow to a crawl, sometimes park and look up. Today everything looks fine. Maybe I’ll pop back tomorrow. Maybe.

The Extremely Agitated State of the Short Distance Driver

I’m rather...

Annoyed that I told you to put out the cigarette, but you had to have the last drag in the cab, inhaling deeply like it was your last breath and blow it in my face, you’re smiling at the rebel in you that’s saying “Hey dude! I just dumped my shit on you! Ha!” Cunt

Angry that you think that even when you are politely told to please not eat in the cab, you think it’s “The thing” to carry on eating and deny you are even doing it. Permeating my clothes with the smell of your deep fried and reheated meat, my workspace stinks, my twelve hour imprisonment in this three square yards of tin and plastic. Fuck you and your wet greasy mouth and fingers that you have just wiped on my seats.

Disgusted that pumping your girlfriends pussy with your fingers is ok for me to watch, smell and hear. You feel the smug master of your moment over a female and me, the fateful me that is meant to be grateful. Bastard. I don’t want to touch your gonorrhea’d shilling.

Incredulous that your cursing and wildly gesticulating diatribe and droplets of spit hitting my face, my open mouthed face, my trying to reason with you face, all the while drinking in your projectile spit. Why? It’s costing you fifty pence too much. Your £400K house is nice with great kerb appeal as I sit outside it, grateful for any money at all for my work, my £5.70, my time, my fear. You strut away like a gladiator, walk away you imbecilic fool, I am less of a man now, another bit of me chipped away, humanity draining job of mine. I dream. Daydream in the dead of night with rain and fog as ever-constant companions. The indicator ticking away my soul. I dream of killing you. For fifty pence, yes, killing you, thinking no more of it and having a cup of tea as my prize. Fuck you for making me feel this way. Fuck you to hell.

You make me feel dishonest, my betrayal of mind, my betrayal as my phallus reacts to your grinding in your seat and fumbling at my crotch. Your breasts ample and willing to give, you’re playing the game, I don’t want to play the game and feel your anger of being rejected. My own being has betrayed me. My mind thought about it, even willing me on. My life could have been in tears. Your wetness can fuck off, I hate you for making me betray my path of love for my beloved, guilt ridden still for casting away your willing temptation. My bastard erect betrayed me. Fuck off whore, wife of another, teacher of children. Fuck off.

I won’t thank you for making me tearful. Your wife soon to depart with ovarian cancer eating away, with itself not caring that its own cancerous demise is coming soon. I won’t thank you whilst you pour your tear sodden grief into my soul. I sit with you and hold your hand. My mind is blessing you and your children. You should not have gone out to be cheered up. 

You shouldn’t have gone out at all.

Confessions of a Cab Driver Part 3: Through The Night Darkly...

 This is not a work of fiction...

I know all about you... Yes you! You're the one reading this aren't you? You're the one that walked on by when I was being beaten weren't you? Surely you must remember when the crowd from the pub that were drinking a toast to their dead father, came out and kicked me under my cab? Ooo! how many men and women was it that beat and kicked me and my fellow cabby from another daddy? Twenty five? Thirty? yes really! That many! Don't you remember?

Or remember the time when you were peeking out of your curtains to see a lone cab driver being hacked at with a large kitchen knife by your neighbour, I KNOW you remember that one! Because you told me about it months later when you got in my cab, and laughingly recalled the scared Cab driver running down the road. I must admit you was a bit shocked to learn I was that Cab driver, but... how we laughed eh?

"He acknowledged my right to clean lungs, y'now, the ones he was gonna tear out of my chest, yes, those ones..."

Still shaking your head hmm? Maybe this will jog your memory. Do you remember when that father and two of his sons dragged me out of my cab and threatened to kill me? What was that for? Umm...That's it! I remember now! They did it because I missed their turning by a whopping margin of about ten metres, thankfully for me they were going on holiday that weekend and the father was persuaded not to gut me because that meant him missing the family vacation, Oh! Now you remember! Haha! I still pass by your door on the odd occasion, y'now, the one you hid behind.

You SURELY must remember this? Remember when the customer got in and head butted the dash? You were right outside pointing at him, remember? I calmed him down and drove him to where I thought was his home, you saw him crying outside your house didn't you, a couple of your friends had a look as well, good thing I drove off then, you may have had to witness when he had me in that judo type hand and neck hold, and watching me cry out in pain would have brought more of your friends to the window to have a look I suspect hmm!


Didn't finish there though did it? He took me to a further four houses, my hand and neck in this constant painful hold, funny? You were there at each one, listening to his cries, screams and ranting at you over his times with his family in the house where you now live. I was the only person that that heard that he was going to kill me when we stopped, AND felt the tendons in my hand and my neck, decide that they couldn't take much more pain, was only me though, wasn't it?


I remember you in the police car, I didn't see your face, but I'm sure you saw me, I was the one flashing you when he had his head in his hands crying, you must have had something more important to do I'm sure, maybe my eyes didn't have enough fear in them yet...


Ooo! how long was I gone? An hour and a half-ish? I ended up in bexhill in a back street outside your flat don't you remember? The time had come to kill me I was being told, but not without him having a fag first, he asked me if he could smoke in the cab, I have no idea why I said no, but I did, maybe when your worn down enough you just want it to end. courteously, he acknowledged my right to clean lungs, y'now, the ones he was gonna tear out of my chest, yes, those ones...


He had one foot on the ground and one in the foot-well when he lit his fag, It was at the exact moment I also floored the accelerator, he bounced off my cab and two other cars like a pinball before finally rolling to a stop, and as I turned the corner, I could feel my cancer ramping up brownie stress points. My cancer? I'm thinking it's none of your business at the moment, I have told of it elsewhere.

I went back to my office mad as hell, demanding why no one even missed me. The guy laying outside my office threw a bottle of something at me as I left, a final humiliating we don't fucking care salute, you were there as well, I still see you in your cosy police car from time to time...

Oh! I've seen this madman that tortured me for an hour and a half a couple of times since then, laughing and joking with his friends, he doesn't come to my cab office that he used to frequent so often in the past anymore...


I've got pages and pages of incidences of your punches and digs, and your spittle dripping down my face, and like many tens of thousands of Cab drivers all over the world, they will have too.


You were there every time something happened, you watched AND took part, its not the others, there are no others! It was just you... and me.


Did you find this quite uncomfortable to read? I imagine your adrenaline levels spiked just a little, may have even got your back up a bit. I'm sorry, but spare a thought for the fifty four taxi drivers that have been murdered in the UK in the last eighteen months or so, fifty four men that got ready for work, and kissed their families goodbye for what was really the last time.


You were there too, don't you remember?



This has been subsequently published in the Sabotagetimes.com