Last night turned into a rather more exciting evening than I expected in the end.
Please bear with this entry, as I am having a night off and hence am trying to write through a haze of red wine. The events are interesting but my head is a fuzzy blur. Intoxicated reminiscences are the theme of the night.
It all started happening somewhere around one o’ clock last night, probably after you had all gone safely to bed. I had just finished writing to you, and was having a peaceable cup of tea with Mark, when a very intoxicated chap lurched across the road and collapsed into the back seat of my taxi.
I wasn’t at all surprised to discover that he was going to the staff block of one of the big hotels. As you all know by now, Monday night in the Lake District is the night for hotel staff to go out and drink themselves into oblivion. This is in order that they can forget the horrors of living in staff accommodation and spending a life working as an abused slave in some steamy kitchen with a vile-tempered chef throwing things at them all day.
I dropped him off at the staff block, but he didn’t stagger peacefully inside. Instead he leapt out of the taxi and sprinted off back down the road the way we had come.
My interest in customers vanishes the second they have handed the fare over, and so I didn’t think anything about this at all. The police asked me about this later, and I explained that I thought of nothing, which they accepted because I am a taxi driver and they don’t expect that we will think of things.
By the time I had turned the taxi round he was in the road embroiled in some sort of horrible brawl with another chap, whose girlfriend was shrieking her head off.
I stopped in front of them and turned the lights on full beam. This usually puts people off their exciting punch-ups. Once they are visible they tend to feel a bit embarrassed and get up and slope off quickly.
These two weren’t going to do any such thing. The girlfriend was hysterical with shriekiness and yelled at me to help.
Against my better judgement I got out of the taxi, at which point the girlfriend predictably pegged off up the road and disappeared completely.
My customer was busily murdering another chap.
I mean really trying to murder him. The other chap was lying on the pavement spurting blood everywhere and my customer was punching him in the face and bashing his head against the pavement. The chap on the pavement had got his thumbs in my customer’s eyes and was trying to gouge his eyes out.
I dashed across helpfully, as you do when you are an interfering middle-aged old biddy, and tried to drag them apart, without success. I grabbed my customer’s punching arm and tried to stop him squishing the other chap’s nose all over his face. I didn’t succeed in this.
My customer punched him so much that I thought the other chap should be dead, although I could see that he wasn’t, because he was still swearing a lot and trying to tear bits off my customer’s face.
There was blood everywhere, all over me and the road and squirting in great fountains everywhere. I didn’t see any eyes lying around, so that particular part of the endeavour must have failed, which was a relief. The police asked me afterwards what colour the chap’s hair was, and I wasn’t especially helpful; because as far as I could see it was bright red.
It went on for ages. In the end they gave up trying to fight one another and me, and my customer – really – spat some teeth out and ran away. I took the other one back to the hotel reception, where the girlfriend reappeared and escorted him off to try and clean him up. She was entirely unsuccessful in this endeavour. When the police turned up he was still so blood-drenched that the whites of his eyes were scarlet, like zombies in a Playstation game.
The rest of the night was spent in the usual tiresome activity of making a statement to the police, who thought that it might be an attempted murder. After I had actually met the victim and heard him talking a bit I wasn’t at all surprised, he was an utter horror, and all my sympathies were with the other chap.
The night porter made me a cup of coffee, and I had the unexpected and peculiar experience of sitting in a beautiful and expensive hotel lobby at two in the morning, covered in blood and explaining an attempted murder to a patient policeman.
It was the policeman who had been to our house when somebody had pinched Oliver’s bike, so we were old friends, especially since he had got the bike back again.
Some of the blood turned out to be mine, which was exciting.
I do like my job.
All the same, I wasn’t sorry to have a night off tonight.
Have a picture of the serene and tranquil Lake District.
