CHAPTER 9
She couldn’t afford the minicab, but she had no other way of getting there. The buses didn’t run at that time of night and she couldn’t wait till morning. She wouldn’t wait till morning. She kept a tin of small change and a few loose notes in the kitchen cupboard, which she’d emptied into her coat pocket. It would be enough to get her there, and she would worry about getting back later. Anyway, she could hang around until the buses started running again. One step at a time.
She sat in the back of the moving minicab as the streetlights of Wellingford gave way to open countryside and then to the brightly illuminated dual carriageway which formed the route to Brinfield. The driver was, not surprisingly, Asian, and had a strong Birmingham accent which, Jess decided, made him at least second or third generation. British born and bred. She was instantly nervous the moment she saw him pulling up outside the house and the irony was not lost on her, but as soon as he opened his mouth, she somehow felt more at ease. Irrational, maybe, but she had no choice. She wondered if they even existed, white British cab drivers prepared to work all hours.
She soon found out what sort of a character he was because from the moment she climbed into the back seat and the car left the kerb, he started to chat and never stopped for breath. A Bangla pop song was playing loudly on the radio, which meant that he had to raise his voice to compete. Jess wondered why he just didn’t turn it down but did her best to ignore the noise.
Her mind was buzzing anyway and she found him difficult to understand, so her ears filtered the combined noise to a dull echo in her brain. The absence of any response or reaction from his passenger appeared to be of no consequence to him and she wondered whether he talked to himself when there was no one else there. Undaunted, he launched into yet another minicab anecdote.
“So I picks up this next bloke, right? All booted and suited, like. Businessman out on the razz. Had a few, like …”
Jess continued to stare out of the window at the scenery flashing by. She was aware the driver was talking but he and the accompanying Bangla music sounded like they emanated from the dark recesses of a cave or the bottom of a deep well. She wasn’t taking in anything he said. Her mind was still reeling from the implications of the late-night call.
“‘Why don’t you just fuck off back to where you came from’, ‘scuse my French. I said, ‘What, Birmingham?’ Ha! You should a seen the look on his face.”
She could see little in the dark, other than her own reflection in the glass. She thought about the last eighteen hours. It seemed like everything was happening at once, an uncontrollable sequence of events propelling her remorselessly to some indeterminate destination.
“You know, I’m a human being and I got feelings. If you prick us, do we not bleed? That’s an old Muslim proverb, that is …”
She was powerless to stop it. It was totally out of her control, so why did she not feel panic? Maybe it was just meant to be. One step at a time. She never regarded herself as an eternal optimist, but she had endured so much in her short life, surely some good would come out of this?
“So next day I goes down the cop shop, right, and makes a complaint for racial abuse, and you’ll never guess what? He’s only the bleedin’ chief constable! The geezer in the cab. He’s a top copper. I’ll tell you what that is. That’s the drink. That’s what the drink does to people. Brings out the dark side.”
The mention of alcohol and the dark side somehow penetrated the aural fog and reached into her consciousness. She twisted her head to look up at him in the driver’s mirror. Until then, everything he had said had been a barely audible blur, but this had struck a subliminal chord. He carried on relentlessly, oblivious to her sudden attentiveness.
“I mean talk about Jekyll and Hyde, dyanotamean? Now my mum says—” He broke off suddenly. “Oh, here we are, love. St James Nursing Home.”
The announcement snapped her out of her thoughts, and she watched out of the window as the grim four-storey Victorian building loomed up at them. The cab halted outside the front door and the driver switched off the radio, the Bangla music mercifully falling silent. He looked puzzled.
“Er, funny time for visiting, innit? Are they open?” he said to her through the mirror. Jess didn’t answer. He turned in his seat and looked at her. “Or are you the night shift?” He chuckled loudly but then seeing her lack of reaction, stopped, looked back at the building, and as the penny dropped, so did his head. “Oh … I’m really sorry, love. Got a big mouth.”
Jess was unmoved and actually felt sorry for him, but was in no mood for more chatter.
“How much is that?” she said.
“It’s nothing, love. It’s on the house. You mind how you go.”
“Thank you very much,” said Jess, touched by the man’s generosity and humanity. If only he knew how hard up and therefore how grateful she was. But she was not minded to prolong the incident, nor argue about it, so she opened the door and climbed out. Before she had gone three paces, she heard the front passenger window slide down and a voice call out.
“’Ere!” She turned back to the cab and leant over to look through the passenger side. “How long you gonna be?”
“Dunno … about half an hour?”
“I’ll wait for you.”
She nodded, smiling lamely, and then turned back to approach the front door.