It is late night, and I am on the taxi rank.
There is a spicy smell drifting across the road from the Indian restaurant, and I can hear Hungarian chatter and laughter from the staff smoking at the back door of the hotel. It has been the most glorious, sunny, celebratory Easter day, and people have walked and gazed at the fells and chugged up and down the lake in all sizes of boats: and now they have finished their dinners and last drinks and are drifting towards the taxi rank, sleepy and content. Most of the children are gone now, half dragged, half carried, off to tents and caravans and guest houses, the stout matrons and the determined walkers and the enthusiastic old couples have retreated, and the night belongs to the young now, to boisterous youths and to girls still inexpert in their high holiday heels.
A thick mist has slowly crawled in across the lake. The night has chilled, and everything is softened by its haze. I love the cheerful feeling of life, of people, in the town, an oasis of life under the great dark fells. I can see the yellowish-lit sign of the pub across the road, and the warm glow through the windows of the Chinese restaurant. There are blue fairy lights strung along the railings, and now lights are flickering on in the cheap-to-rent bedsits and flats above the shops, as kitchen porters and hotel receptionists and waiters stagger home to tear off ties and shoes and collapse.
There are half a dozen other taxis here. We are not talking to one another at the moment, we have been talking all evening, and most of the afternoon before that, and by now we have heard everybody’s stories: and this is the time when people might want to go home, so we are in our own cars, waiting and watching and hoping for good luck.
Good luck is everything. Everything hangs on the whim of the Gods. A night’s waiting might produce hundreds of pounds or almost nothing, and there is no way to foresee which. We talk about it endlessly, measure ourselves daily one against the other: who had a good night, who had a bad, who gave up and went home: and we tell each other wisely that to do so is foolish, because, you see, you have to be in it to win it.
We wait in the middle of the town. The waiting spaces are haphazard, but we all know whose turn it is to take the next passenger. When they go up to a car, guessing wrongly, as they mostly do, they will be refused and sent to somebody else, to their confusion, and occasionally irritation. This is an important point of honour. To make a mistake makes it necessary to apologise profusely, penitently, one must not back door anybody and take a passenger out of turn. Sometimes people will trawl the rank, looking for the cheapest fare, usually they will be sharply refused, but if it has been a bad week maybe the youngest or the most despairing drivers will break rank and undercut so dreadfully that he will hate his passengers for the whole journey.
I have been working since lunchtime, and now that it is almost midnight I have had enough: but it is so hard to leave when there might still be passengers, and impossible if I am first turn, because the next job…the next job just might be a really good one. I have had a sandwich in the late afternoon, and a flask of Earl Grey tea, and some ginger biscuits, and once we went home for a cup of early-evening coffee. Several times I have passed our house, and put my head in at the door to check on the children. Lucy has hung the washing out and hoovered downstairs, and Oliver has done his homework, and ridden his bike, and they have had fruit juice and pizza and Harry is coming to stay the night. I am pleased and relieved and grateful that they are good. Tomorrow I will give them some small share of my profits, because we all do best when we know there will be financial reward.
It has been fairly financially rewarding anyway. The working day started encouragingly when I harvested £5.31 out of the back of the taxi, left there very late last night by people who had drunk themselves into incompetence, there had been quite a few of those. It was beautifully sunny, at least by the time we got up, which was about eleven, because the incompetent drunks had kept us busy until almost five. I am always a bit ambivalent about holidays like this one, my soul yearns to rush off into the sunshine and drink wine and swim and loaf about, but there is no ignoring the inescapable knowledge that my corporeal presence has got to be on the taxi rank, waiting for the next job, until the school fees and the mortgage are paid: so when Mark and the dog buzzed off to the farm to saw up some logs for the fire, I gave the children a list of jobs to do and then went out to work.
And now I have had enough, and after the next job I will go home. If I am lucky it might even take me home.
Or I might just stay a bit longer and see what comes along. You’ve got to be in it to win it.
