As soon as safe, she erupted into shakes, with bouts of little shallow huff and gulp breathing. She didn’t have a lot of tears, but the few that blurred her eyes, came from the soul.
It had taken me a minute or so to rumble the freakiness of the situation.
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It was the weekend, late night and the tidal flow of revellers was home-bound.
These two had got in from the chaotic city centre pick-up office.
She sat herself quietly in the front seat and he got in the back, then shuffled across and settled directly behind me.
“Hi Boss… Busy?” He calmly and confidently enquired.
I would have responded, but the office marshall (the always happy one) was at my car window triumphantly announcing the area where these were going.
How he stayed happy was an amazement… this city centre pick-up office is chaotic.
The revellers pile in from the front street door… book a taxi at the desk… any nearby private-hire taxis get radioed in and arrive in the huge car park at the back… then the backdoor marshalls shout… “next!”
… and the next queued customers pile out of the office’s rear doors and grab at the car doors.
All this… whilst the marshall is on the radio to the inside desk, confirming the destination and relaying it through the driver’s door.
It’s often the case that several cars are streaming into the car park… so keeping the order of who is who, going where, is often chaotic… and in amongst the chaos is this always happy marshall.
This car loaded. The marshall ushered us away. We set off.
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“Ello”. Came my delayed, but courteous reply… even if I was ignoring the “busy?” tagline.
After a standard check that the destination area announced was correct, I got another confident, careful voice pitched over from behind my head.
“You’re the Boss.”
I presumed that to mean, yes.
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When a single passenger is in the rear, it is usual for them to sit in the nearside seat… It’s safer from a pickup/dropoff point of consideration, as a driver would usually present the nearside to the curb… the nearside, both front and rear, therefore is hidden from such things as traffic flow-past… so is safer.
There is another element of thinking… that of driver safety.
The private-hire taxis are typical saloon cars… they do not have protective screens up, separating driver/customer. The seat behind the driver is a blind spot (for a driver) and could be a chosen beneficial spot for a passenger, potentially, to do unsavoury things.
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Within the first minute, we had travelled a main roundabout and linked onto a main-vein road heading out of the city. Also within that minute, an uncomfortable atmosphere of muddled emotions had plagued the car.
We pick up people from funerals, courts of law, police stations etc. A lesson of note, is that customers could arrive in the car already primed in various states of fair muddled emotions… so in itself… not unusual.
The bit that was unusual here was the diagonal… Him selecting the seat behind me would give him a diagonal view across to the girl in front. On a healthy level, they would share a diagonal link to view and talk… but…
Something here was not healthy.
She hid from the connecting diagonal… and all that came from him were ready-made control sentences, pushed out with, for me, an irksome sense of self-assured delight.
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The girl spoke, one word… quietly naming a new area name. It was an area being a further 15-minute journey out of town.
She was polite, very nervous and unmistakably timid.
“Is that a change of plan?” I calmly asked.
Matey from the back responded pretty swiftly.
“You’re doing great, ‘Drives’. Just a minute up here I think. What time did you start today?”
There is a long-established, fun-type conversation, that frequently occurs in the car… with the customers asking.. what time did you start?… finish?… been doing this long?
I think it originated from a popular TV comedian.
Anyway, I usually acknowledge the fun bit, but never really answer the question… instead use it to spin up some in-car conversation area of various types.
In this case, however, I just ignored his question and focused on figuring out a few details, because there was an unpleasant edginess to this in-car situation.
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The area place name, this girl had mentioned, was just popped out of the blue. It wasn’t exactly a more usual type of in-car communication, such as… there’s been a change of agreed plan… or, we really need two drops, me first or last, type of thing… but I did twig, that just the original one-destination plan… at least in her head… had some flaw in it.
“Is that your drop-off place?” I enquired, direct to the girl, regarding the newly mentioned place.
Her petite hands held each other. I glanced further across and she shook her head.. or more accurately… gave a secretive quiver.
As the newly added place was further away, I figured I could run a common mode of operation, which was to drop the girl off first… make sure they were seen home safe… and all that type of thinking, soooo…
“Nearest first and/or girl/ first. That’s a typical rule for late journeys.” I announced calmly… but noticed, in an instant, the atmosphere became clear… unfortunately, clear in a bad way.
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She recoiled… kind of curled up… as if my announcement had abandoned her to the depths of hell.
I also was aware, in this instant, in amongst the background rumblings of engine and road noise… from the rear… from matey behind me… had come a cocky style whisper:
“My lucky day”.
I stole another glance at the girl. This girl looked near petrified and was clearly trying to hide it from the diagonal viewpoint.
O.K. my mind said… His apparent lucky day seemed, to me, to be linked to her apparent distress. Her being dropped first, for some reason, is clearly not good for her… and I was now in the mind-set to set this in a safe-guard mode.
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“Is that new area where you live mate?”
He remained annoyingly silent.
I felt the need to tackle him now. To break into his suspicious control freak strategy.
Keeping a calm voice, I began to poke.
“Whereabouts up there do you live? What’s your address?”
“No worries, ‘drives’.” Came his over calm and seemingly calculating, curve-ball response.
“Where is it, you want to go, mate?” I calmly asserted.
“Ooooh, ‘drives’. You had it all sorted a minute ago. You were doing so well.” Came another overconfident, contol-like attempt of a reply.
“Perhaps a re-sort, then. What do you think? We can do this the other way around. I’ll do it the same price as the original shorter plan. Drop you, then come back into town. Same end price. Whereabouts up there do you live? “What’s your address?”
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That seemed to work… it stirred it up a bit. For the first time his calm, cocky, self-delighted attitude faltered.
I felt a slow strong push through the back of my seat. It bowed for several seconds before he released.
“What’s the plan, ‘drives’?”
“Where do you live? What’s your address? I need an address.” Came my calm re-iteration of a key point… identity… reveal.
“I’ll just get out up here.” He said. His voice was now strained.
The ‘up here’ would be towards the original destination… which had been established as hers… by now clearly the cause of her fretfulness.
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An idea now, came to mind… to make this safe… and push his buttons a tad further… I went past her exit… smoothly went around a roundabout and headed back into the city.
“Need your address mate.”
All my words remained calm, but the subject had an absolute purpose… to call some accountability out of this slime-like, control-like, self-delighting, freak.
“What’s the plan, ‘drives’?”
Another, more sudden poke in the back of my seat, occurred.
Just as calmly, I gave him the information, along the lines that, all these private hires are pre-booked… then;
“If you don’t have an address, I’ll drop you back in the city… No charge… Sort it out with them.”
A sharper, more angry poke in the back of my seat, along with ‘true colours’… being an explosion of his true nastiness…
“F##k You!”
“Don’t interfere with my seat when I’m driving” Came my still-calm response.”
“Told you where I live, you f###ing ####”… Another push in the back of seat.
“You were asked a few times. For some reason you didn’t give the answer at all. They’ll help you out in the office… and I won’t tell you again about interfering with my seat.”
Seconds later… More sudden jabs in the back of the seat, more energy and up higher.
It was now, no longer safe for this guy to be behind me… or, perhaps, even in the car.
Reaching to my door I pressed the master window button to lower the rear windows.
As I pulled the car swiftly over, stopped and opened my door, I flicked the window lock to isolate the rear window buttons.
In an instant, I was outside his door, with a firm command to leave the car.
He was fumbling for the door locks, but that was fruitless as I had full access through the windows.
With a hand placed on the downed window edge, I simply stated, I had told him twice about the seat. Now, no charge, he must leave the car.
There was a welcome surrendered calm. The door opened and he spilled slowly outwards. A visual check of his hands showed no items (nothing harmful).
He made a pathetic attempt to lift his shoulders high and gave a somewhat muted…
“F### You”.
I remained unimpressed… and he swaggered off down the road.
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Eddie Izzard does a great stage comedy sketch about swaggerers. On stage, he recreates the shoulders, arms and the walking style, together making the swagger… but the comedic bit he adds… is a suitable tag line… which he puts to a jolly sing-song ditty… to the words, along the lines of:
“I’m a w#nk#r, yeh yeh, iiiiiiiiiii’m a w#nk#r, yeh yeh yeh…”
The laughable stage image, fitted perfectly, to what was the image, of matey, swaggering down the road.
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Back in the car, the girl was still there. Now not holding back the emotions of upset. She wished to go home and en route revealed how, in the waiting office, he had ignored her requests to be left alone.
She was unsure how to deal with it.
He had asked to share a cab and ignored her desire not to.
The realisation of ending up at her place and him getting out as well, was alarming her, once he’d actually got in the car.
… which is where this story started.
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On the rest of the journey… back out the city again…
We touched on ways to perhaps prevent this… and I kind of offered a thankyou… regarding her plucking up her courage and thinking to say aloud the only thing she knew about him… an area name, he had said he was from.
This episode occurred before dash-cams and CCTV were common, so only he-said, she-said accounts would be created, without ID of who it was all about.
This protection is much better nowadays… to run an evidential report with video & audio evidence.
We did touch on reporting it… She may… I reassured that I’d witness for her if need be in future… Didn’t hear.
I remember getting a calmly raised hand and a mouthed “thank-you”, as she paused in her home doorway, before slowly closing it.
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