A taxi was coming down the street towards them. The actor hailed it. Damn! Something as simple as that. He was going to get away. The actor climbed into the cab and it drove off down the street, past Dirk. Dirk swivelled to watch it, and caught a momentary glimpse of the actor looking back through the rear window. Dirk watched helplessly and then glanced up and down the street in the vain hope that ...
Almost miraculously a second taxi appeared suddenly at the top of the street, heading towards him. Dirk shot out an arm, and it drew to a halt beside him.
“Follow that cab!” exclaimed Dirk, clambering into the back.
“I been a cabbie over twenty years now,” said the cabbie as he slid back into the traffic. “Never had anybody actually say that to me.”
Dirk sat perched on the edge of his seat, watching the cab in front as it threaded its way through the slow, agonising throttle of the London traffic.
“Now that may seem like a little thing to you, but it’s interesting, innit?”
“What?” said Dirk.
“Anytime you see anything on the telly where someone jumps in a cab, it’s always ‘Follow that cab,’ innit?”
“Is it? I’ve never noticed,” said Dirk.
“Well, you wouldn’t,” said the cabbie. “You’re not a cabbie. What you notice depends on who you are. If you’re a cabbie, then what you especially notice when you watch the telly,” continued the cabbie, “is the cabbies. See what the cabbies are up to. See?”
“Er, yes,” said Dirk.
“But on the telly you never actually see the cabbies, see? You only see the people in the back of the cab. Like, the cabbie’s never of any interest.”
“Er, I suppose so,” said Dirk. “Um, can you still see the cab we’re supposed to be following?”
“Oh yeah, I’m following him okay. So, the only time you ever actually ever see the cabbie is when the fare says something to him. And when a fare says something to a cabbie in a drama, you know what invariably it is.”
“Let me guess,” said Dirk. “It’s ‘Follow that cab!’”
“Exactly my point! So if what you see on the telly is to be believed, all cabbies ever do,” continued the cabbie, “is follow other cabbies.”
“Hmmm,” said Dirk, doubtfully.
“Which leaves me in a very strange position, as being the one cabbie that never gets asked to follow another cabbie. Which leads me to the unmistakeable conclusion that I must be the cabbie that all the other cabbies are following ...”
Dirk squinted out of the window trying to spot if there was another cab he could switch to.
“Now, I’m not saying that’s what’s actually happening, but you can see how someone might get to thinking that way, can’t you. It’s the power of the media, innit?”
“There was,” said Dirk, “an entire television series about taxi drivers. It was called, as I recall, Taxi.”
“Yeah. Well. I’m not talking about that, am I?” said the cabbie irrefutably. “I’m talking about the power of the media to selectively distort reality. That’s what I’m talking about. I mean, when it comes down to it, we all live in our own different reality, don’t we? I mean, when it comes down to it.”
“Well. Yes. I think you’re right, as a matter of fact,” said Dirk uneasily.
“I mean, you take these kangaroos they’re trying to teach language to. What does anyone think we’re going to talk about? What are we gonna say then, eh? ‘So, how’s the hopping life treating you then?’ ‘Oh fine, mustn’t grumble. This pocket down me front’s a bit of a pain, though, always full of fluff and paper clips.’ It isn’t going to be like that. These kangaroos have got brains the size of a walnut whip. They live in a different world, see. It will be like trying to talk to John Selwing Gummer. You see what I’m saying?”
“Can you see the cab we’re following?”
“Clear as a bell. Probably be there before him.”
Dirk frowned. “Be where before him?”
“Heathrow.”
“How on earth do you know he’s going to Heathrow?”
“Any cabbie can tell if another cabbie’s going to Heathrow.”
“What do you mean?”
“You read the signs. Okay, so there’s certain obvious things like the fare’s carrying luggage. Then there’s the route he’s taking. That’s easy. But you say he may just be going to stay with friends in Hammersmith. All I can say is, the fare didn’t get into the cab in the manner of someone going to stay with friends in Hammersmith. So, what else do you look for. Well, here’s where you need to be a cabbie to know. Normal life for a cabbie is lots of little bits here and there. You don’t know from minute to minute what’s gonna happen. What work you’re gonna get, how the day’s gonna go. You kind of prowl around in a restless kind of way. But if you get a fare to Heathrow, you’re away. Good solid journey, good solid fare. Wait in line for an hour or so. Get a good solid fare back to town. Thats your whole morning taken care of. You drive in a completely different way. You’re higher up on the road. You take better lines through corners. Your’re on your way, you’re going somewhere. It’s called doing the Heathrow hop. Any cabbie’ll spot it.
“Hmmm,” said Dirk. “That’s remarkable.”
“What you notice depends on who you are.”
“You couldn’t happen to tell which flight he’s catching, could you?” asked Dirk.
“Who do you think I am, mate,” retorted the cabbie, “a bloody private detective?” Dirk sat back in his seat and stared out of the window, thoughtfully.
Chapter 7
There must be some kind of disease that causes people to talk like that, and the name for it must be something like Airline Syllable Stress Syndrome. It’s the disease that seems to kick in at about ten thousand feet and becomes more and more pronounced, if that’s a good word to use in this context, with altitude until it levels out at a plateau of complete nonsense at about 35,000 feet. It makes otherwise rational people start saying things like “The captain has now turned off the seatbelt sign,” as if there were someone lurking around the cockpit attempting to deny that the captain has done any such thing, that he is indeed the captain and not an impostor, and that there aren’t a whole bunch of second-rate and inferior seatbelt signs that he mightn’t have been fiddling about with.
Another thing that Dirk reflected on as he settled back into his seat was the curious coincidence that not only does the outside of an aircraft look like the outside of a vacuum cleaner, but also that the inside of an aircraft smells like the inside of a vacuum cleaner.
He accepted a glass of champagne from the cabin steward. He supposed that most of the words that airline staff used, or rather most of the sentences into which they were habitually arranged, had been worked so hard that they had died. The strange stresses that cabin stewards continually thumped them with were like electric shocks applied to heart-attack victims in an attempt to revive them.
Well.
What a strange and complicated hour and a half that had been. Dirk was still by no means sure that something somewhere had not gone terribly wrong, and he was tempted, now that the seatbelt sign had been turned off by the captain, to go and take a bit of a casual stroll through the aircraft to have a look for his quarry. But no one was going to be getting on or off the aircraft for a little while now, so he would probably be wiser to restrain himself for an hour. Or even longer. It was, after all, an eleven-hour flight to Los Angeles.
He had not been expecting to go to Chicago today, and the sight of his quarry making a beeline for the check-in desk for the 1330 flight to Chicago had made him lurch. However, a resolution was a resolution, so after a brief pause to make sure that his quarry hadn’t merely gone up to the check-in desk to ask directions to the tie shop, Dirk had made his way light-headedly to the ticket sales desk and slammed plastic.