The radio underneath the dashboard crackles to life for the first time in nearly an hour.
“Vacant Mosman, Raglan – City, one.”
There is an instant cacophony of voices and static as cars
compete across the airwaves for the job.
“Three-seven is on Spit Road” calls Dave, no
doubt returning from one of his northern beaches assignations and likely to be
no more near Spit Road than I am. A quick, “three-sev” from the
operator accepts Dave’s bid.
“Spofforth and Military, three-eight.” What is
Jumbo still doing on the air? He should have finished work a couple of hours
ago, popped into the North Sydney Anzac for his customary nightcap and then
gone home. He must have sneaked over to Oxford Street and the Thirty-Three Club
for a few more and is only now on his way home, thinking to slip in a brief job
to the city to make up for what he has obviously contributed to the one-armed
bandits. Wendy is going to kill him. “Three eight”, comes the ever brief
and soulless acknowledgement from Noel in the radio room at Crowey. He is also
coming to the end of his shift and is clearly ready to call it a night. Not
that anyone would ever describe Noel as garrulous even on a good day.
“Avenue Road and Rangers, Car 5”, comes the
unmistakable raspy, voice of Greasy Jim. He owns a couple of trotters and would
have been at Harold Park last night for sure. This is an early start for him,
and he is very close – if you can believe him. He is also just as likely to be
sitting in his car outside his old place in the back streets of Neutral Bay
thinking this is a good way to start the day. There is a reason why he’s called
Greasy Jim, and it has nothing to do with his complexion or his choice of hair
oil.
I reach out and pick up the little mike hooked on to the
side of the radio and press the call button, “thirty four’s on Mosman
Rank.” That does it. It would not matter now if there were a vacant
cab calling from outside the address, the job is mine. Being the one and only
car on Mosman Rank gives me priority over all cars calling on work in Mosman.
“Three four, it’s a block of flats at 40 Raglan, one
passenger going to the city, I’ll call and tell the party to come out.” It
is always “the party”, never him or her or them – always “the party”.
“Got it,” I say, “on my way.” I scribble a
quick “40” on the note pad pinned to the dashboard next to the
steering wheel, reach up to turn off the Vacant sign and am starting the engine
when the front passenger door is flung wide open. A heavy set and out of breath
middle-aged man throws himself on to the front seat and slams the door. “Let’s
go!” he says.
“I’m sorry sir,” I begin, “I’ve just taken a
radio job, I’ll get them to send someone…”
“I said, let’s go, boofhead – NOW!”
I look around. There is not another car in sight anywhere.
It is 2.30 am Monday morning, Mosman Junction winter 1972. This guy is big.
Overweight, and out of breath, but big and mean-looking.
“Right” I say, “I’ll just let the base know that
I’ve taken another job, so they can re-call it”
“Touch that radio, son and I’ll break your arm and kick
you out of the fkn car!”
“Yeah, sure,” I respond, “OK, no worries,”
thinking that now would have been a good time to have one of those floor
buttons, with an open mike back to Base. Don’t think – drive.
We start along Military Road towards Spit Junction where I
will have to either turn left towards the city or right to the northern
beaches.
“OK, where are we going?” I ask.
“Head for Manly”, he grunts.
OK, I think, getting ready to make a right at the lights,
Manly and the northern beaches, it is.
The light turns red.
“Keep going” he says, turning and looking behind us.
This is getting scary. I gun the car through the lights, avoiding an oncoming
car angrily blowing its horn and head down the hill towards the Spit. The guy
keeps looking out of the back window.
The Spit Bridge is a single bascule opening bridge and as we
came towards it a warning bell starts to ring, and the barrier begins to
descend.
“Hurry”, he says, “you can beat it”
I am driving a recent model Ford Falcon with not many miles
on the clock, but if we were in a McLaren, I am not going to get to that
barrier.
He obviously sees it too. “Stop the car!” he
says. I pull up harshly in front of the closed barrier.
Shit, what now?
I look into the rear-view mirror; another vehicle is racing
towards us at speed.
My guy pulls what might be a firearm from his pocket, jumps
out of the car and runs. He darts around the barrier and heads toward the
bridge which, like a giant trapdoor is slowly rising. By the time he gets to
the end, the bridge is at least two metres above the road deck. Without
hesitating, he leaps.
I stare open-mouthed through the windscreen.
And as I sit here wondering whether this ugly prick who just
called me a boofhead and threatened to break my arm made it across the bridge
and is on the other side running towards Seaforth; or whether he is flailing in
the water, or unconscious, or dead; or why anyway, is the Spit Bridge operating
at two in the morning when it only operates during the day; or whether the
party at 40 Raglan is ever going to get to the city, I ask myself a simple
question.
“What the hell am I doing here? I’m supposed
to be on a ship.”
Twelve months earlier having left the tanker Marion
Sleigh in Singapore, I arrived back in Australia after my stint as
third engineer. It was not my happiest assignment. Aside from the fact that the
8-cylinder Götoverken diesel engine was a bad tempered piece of work, my
relationship with the second engineer was far from pleasant. I thought he was a
pompous, inexperienced, English prig. He thought I was a brash, ill-mannered,
Australian know-all. Turns out we were both right.
I arrived in Sydney looking for work and soon had a position
as commissioning engineer with a medium-sized engineering company building
water treatment plants. I love water treatment. There is something very special
about working in the water industry and I’ll write another whole story on that
another day.
It was a great job, with plenty of outdoor work and travel
and I resolved to build a career for myself in this wonderful city. After a few
weeks living in lodgings, I moved into a pre-war Federation style house in
Sydney’s lower north shore, with my old shipmate, Bob and two or three other
guys.
The job was good, and the living arrangements were all that
I could have wished for. Bob was a bit of a hardliner when it came to
cleanliness and kitchen duties, but it kept us all on our toes. I started
playing a little sport and my social life began to bloom.
But something was missing. I had not left my last ship on
good terms. It had been a challenging few months, and although I enjoyed the
work and got on well with all of my shipmates except one – it was that one
relationship that left me with a feeling that I could have and should have done
better. There was still too much salt in my system, and I decided to give it
another go.
There was plenty of work around for marine engineers – but I
needed to wait for the right opening and when it came, I would have to be ready
to leave at once. I had a good job and a good boss here in Sydney and I didn’t
want to do the wrong thing by dropping everything and just leaving in the
middle of a critical project so I gave a month’s notice, left on good terms and
went in search of a job where I could walk out at the drop of an anchor.
One of my cricketing teammates who owned his own cab
suggested I talk to his co-op at ABC Taxis. I did and within a couple of weeks,
I became a cabby.
This meant passing a driving competency test and a local
geography assessment. Sydney is not London, so it did not demand months of
learning “the knowledge”, but it was important to know where most of the major
suburbs were and how to get to the airport from any one of them. Almost
everyone has a GPS these days, and it is no longer much of an issue, but in
1970 I swear there were times when it would have been easier to give a treasure
map to a squirrel than to ask a taxi driver to look at a road atlas.
So here I am on a wet and miserable Sunday afternoon in
October armed with brand-new taxi-driver’s licence, Gregory’s Sydney street
directory and a bag of loose coins, reporting to the taxi depot for my first
day as a cab driver. The depot is a small office up a flight of stairs over an
Ampol Service Station just off the Pacific Highway at Crows Nest on Sydney’s
lower north shore. Here’s where the managed cabs are based. Owned and operated
by the Co-op, these cars are where new drivers literally find their training
wheels. The operations manager, a genial man in his sixties who I will only
ever know as GT provides me with a perfunctory induction, and I am on my own.
Other than the minimum required to keep them on the road, it
is clear that the level given to these tired old vehicles completely redefines
the words “care” and “maintain”. My car is a black Holden Kingswood that has
seen a lot more miles than I have. The smell inside is somewhere between dirty
laundry and a grease trap.
I am on the afternoon shift – three o’clock until changeover
time in twelve hours. The company pays for the fuel, and I get to keep 40% of
everything recorded on the meter plus tips. One thing that GT is very clear
about is ensuring that I am aware that not only is it against the law to carry
a passenger without the meter running, (a practice known in the industry as
“high flagging”), but also a sin which will lead to instant dismissal. Good to
know what his priorities are.
I start her up, turn on the wipers, clunk into first gear,
let the clutch slowly out and drive out of the depot. The wipers scrape
painfully across the windscreen leaving opaque patches and, as I enter the main
road water begins to dribble through the quarter window and soon makes its way
along the door panel and on to my trousers. This is going to be a hoot!
I drive watchfully up and down the highway waiting for a
hail, certain that in this rain, someone is going to be grateful for a
shabby-looking conveyance like mine. Is that what ABC stands for – a black cab?
I see plenty of taxis of varying colours and condition, all
of which are busily carrying happy paying customers. I wonder if my Vacant sign
is even working. It is.
I drive through Victoria Cross at North Sydney and pull up
at the rear of the taxi rank across the road from the train station. There are
four cars in front of me, a Red Deluxe, a Yellow, another ABC cab and a blue
Legion at the front. After a few minutes, a man runs across the road opens the
front passenger door and jumps into the Legion who starts his motor and drives
off the rank. We all shuffle forward a car length, and another ABC cab pulls up
behind me. I turn on my two-way, remembering that if a job is called over the
radio and it’s in North Sydney, the front cab is under an obligation to take
it.
I’m a couple of car lengths behind the black ABC cab which I
can see is Car 35 when the radio squawks, “Vacant north Sydney to the
airport.” The car at the front quickly, starts up and races off the rank
leaving me the next ABC cab in the line. I pick up the mike, press the button
and say uncertainly, “uh, 59’s is on north Sydney rank, but there is another
ABC cab in front of me – or there was.”
“Who’s the other car on North Sydney rank?” says
the operator. “Is it you, Ivan?” This is followed by a period
of silence, interrupted by some unintelligible cross chatter.
“Three five, are you on North Sydney?”
“No, base”, comes a croaky reply, “I just got a
fare, give it to five nine”. I watch as Car 35, does a U-turn in front of
the rank and drives back down the street. The driver is a thickset white-haired
man in his sixties. Puffing on a classic bulldog pipe, he gives me a wink as he
drives past. His cab is empty.
I later learn that Ivan spends his shift working around the
lower north shore doing local fares. He doesn’t cross the bridge to the other
side of the harbour – ever.
I don’t care. This is my first hire, and I’m off to the
airport. I take down the details of the address, and I pull off the rank. I may
be new to the cab-driving game, but I do know where the
airport is. Now all I have to do is find the passenger, apparently waiting in
the rain outside a block of flats on Blues Point Road. No bother at all.
I cruise slowly the road towards Blues Point Tower, an ugly
beige 20 storey apartment block which has blighted the McMahons Point skyline
for the past ten years.
It’s still raining and I’m looking for someone who should be
standing outside the building, or just in the lobby. I slowly drive past the
address continuing to the end of the street where the road widens to a
turnaround point. Not a soul in sight. Across the harbour, the wharves at Walsh
Bay stand in gloomy silence while the high-rises of the CBD loom in the
background, huddled together like a scrum of titans.
Through my rain-streaked windscreen, the Ferris wheel at
Luna Park is dwarfed beneath the giant grey arches of the Harbour Bridge, where
I should be crossing, if only I could find my customer. I turn around and head
in the opposite direction, kerb-crawling beside a wall of sandstone blocks. At
the end of the wall, I turn left into the driveway, and follow the road, past a
large ‘no visitor parking’ sign and pull up outside the main entrance of
the tower block. The place is like a morgue.
I pick up my radio mike. “Five-nine in.”
After a few seconds I hear, “Go ahead, five-nine.”
“There’s no one here, base. How long am I supposed to
wait?”
“Sorry mate,” comes the reply. I can tell from the
sound of the voice, that he is really not that sorry. “The call sounded
like it was from a PT, so she probably hailed a cruiser.”
More static, then another voice, this one sounding like
someone gasping for air. “Car five here. I just picked up a hail in Blues
Point, going to the airport. Sorry about that, five-nine. Didn’t know it was a
booking; just came on duty.”
This is followed by a burst of crosstalk and static. I pick
up a couple of phrases, “Yeah, that’d be right!” and “nice
one, Greasy” but not in a nice way, until the voice of the base operator
overrides everyone, “All cars, off the air unless calling on a job! I don’t
want to have to suspend someone”
“Five-nine, it looks like your car has been picked up by
Car five – sorry about that.”
Phew, I am going to have to get better at this. These guys
are brutal.
I make my way back to North Sydney and join the back of the
rank. It is going to be a longer wait for my first fare than I had thought.
I eventually get a couple of local fares, and I am soon
enjoying the pleasure of watching my meter tick over the fare at the
extravagant rate of 18 cents per mile. With a flag fall of 20 cents, a trip
from North Sydney to Cremorne takes me about 15 minutes and I collect 65 cents.
If I’m lucky I may get a 10 cent tip. I soon learn that the flag fall is the
key to success and lots of little trips, pussyfooting around the lower north
shore like Ivan is one way to make a living driving a cab. It’s as boring as batshit,
but Ivan does not crave excitement.
As the afternoon becomes late evening, I’m at Neutral Bay,
driving along Military Road thinking about food when I see two or three ABC
taxis parked outside a burger bar at the Big Bear Shopping Centre. This’ll do
me. I turn in and pull up next to the other cabs. Turns out this is one of the
favourite spots for ABC cabbies.
As I get out of the car, a stocky ginger-headed guy with a
neat little goatee breaks away from a small group standing around eating and
smoking and approaches me. “G’day” he says, “you must be the new
guy who got ripped off by Greasy Jim earlier this afternoon.” “I’m Dick, Car
68. How long, you been driving?”
I introduce myself and tell him that until a few hours ago,
I was a virgin. He grins and introduces me to the other guys, Moon (Car 54),
Les (Car 30) and Wally (Car 19). It turns out all these guys are driving
managed cabs.
I will get to know them well over the ensuing months. They
are good people, with a taste for a wise crack, a few jars at the end of a
shift, and rather too much fondness for the one-armed pokies at the local Anzac
Club or as often as not, the infamous Club 33 on Oxford Street in the city’s
Surrey Hills region. Club 33 is where the taxi drivers who finish their shift
at 1 or 2 in the morning, frequently go to unwind when everything else is
closed. The night shift cabbies, themselves usually a motley-looking crew, are
the most normal of customers when set alongside the other patrons – dancers
from Les Girls, off-duty strippers and ladies of the night, the odd gangster
and off-duty or maybe on-duty members of the vice squad. They can all be seen
there usually between midnight and 6.00 am when the club closes its homely and
unattractive doors.
Dick is a cool dude whose usual haunt is the taxi rank
outside Milson’s Point station under the shadow of the Bridge. With his short
beard and classical features, he could have been a model for a sculpture of a
Spartan general which would have fittingly matched his laconic wit. He works
for a fleet owner out of Northbridge, who cars have been painted in the trendy
new purple and white livery with a classic checker cab stripe down both sides.
Like I said – cool.
This might be a good time to tell you just a little of how
the taxi industry works in Sydney.
ABC is a small cooperative of owner drivers, whose area of
coverage is the Lower North Shore. The cars can go anywhere of course, but
radio coverage is generally restricted to an area of about 30 square miles
which extends from the Harbour Bridge, north.
Cross the Spit Bridge and you are in Manly Cabs territory.
Go north of Chatswood to the “wilderness” of Pymble and Hornsby, and you will
spend a lot of time driving around talking to yourself, for this is Red Deluxe
territory, and those guys are everywhere.
Most of the drivers are male, but I won’t finish this
chapter without telling at least one story about Rita of Car 44 (“that’s
my chest measurements, dearie!”).
As I become more experienced at this game, I learn more
about working smarter. I really don’t want to be a pussyfooter. It’s great for
old diggers like Ivan, who likes nothing better than sitting on the Cammeray
rank puffing away on his pipe while listening to 2UE and waiting for a call to
deliver the blue-rinse ladies to the local shops, or a doctor’s appointment, or
chicken parmy and glass of Chateau Cardboard at the Leagues club; but that’s
not my favourite way to spend an afternoon.
One of the first things I learn is that I need to find
something better to drive than this crappy old managed cab with its leaking
window, and manual gearbox with a dodgy clutch from too many hours sitting in
peak hour traffic. I need to find an owner-driver who doesn’t like night work.
Trevor is one of these guys. A former banker, he took an
early retirement a few years ago, cashed in his superannuation and invested in
a taxi plate. This was an investment of somewhere around $30,000 or about ten
times to value of the car itself. Trevor owns Car 34 and has just put on a new
sweet looking 1970 Ford Falcon. In keeping with the new look among the more
progressive owners, the car is white with a purple hood and the same four inch
wide purple and white checker strip that the Northbridge guys like Dick so
proudly sport. It is a pretty cool air-conditioned unit with a fresh new car
smell a million miles from the mouldy lunch box tang I’ve been putting up with
in Car 59.
Trevor is one of these guys who likes to be up and out early
in the morning to catch a couple of trips to the airport, then spends the rest
of the day doing small local jobs around the lower north shore before knocking
off mid-afternoon and heading off to his bowling club. He isn’t a fan of night
drivers who he feels always tried to rip him off and constantly leave the car
stinking of cigarettes and body odour. It comes as a surprise therefore, when
Noel my old cricketing mate, and the owner of Car 4 tells me that Trevor is
thinking about getting another driver – presumably to help pay for the new car.
What could possibly go wrong with that arrangement?
Actually nothing much goes wrong at least for a few weeks.
Trevor expects his pound of flesh, which means I have to keep the wheels
turning pretty much six nights per week, which is playing merry hell with my
social life. On the plus side, I don’t exactly have much of a social life
anyway and now that I’ve moved out of the expensive and empty little flat in
Mosman and taken a room in a share-house in Northbridge with my old seafaring
mate Bob, I’m actually able to afford a few groceries and meet the repayments
on my second-hand Futura. Things are looking up.
I’m asked if I would like to have a go at working a few
shifts in the radio room and since I’m not doing much else with my Sundays, I
give it a whirl.
Sundays are usually quiet and it’s a chance to get behind
the microphone and see how things work from the inside. This is where I meet
Rita for the first time. I’ve heard her vivid tones over the radio once or
twice while driving Car 44, a cab she shares with a wimpy little man, named
Bryan who is rarely seen and seems to spend most of his time working the
airport. In person, Rita makes an immediate impression. The phrase “built
like a brick outhouse” would be fitting – if your privy is five-foot high
and just as wide.
The first time we cross paths, literally, I am halfway up
the narrow staircase to the radio room, when I face Rita on the way down. “Stand
aside or lose a limb!” she barks, “you’re standing between me
and lunch”. I glance up and tactically retreat to the foot of the stairs
and out of the doorway, while she sweeps past me like the 144 bus from St
Leonards, fragments of paper and dust eddies swirling in her wake.
Her telephone voice ranges from mellifluous and appealing to
that of a road gang foreman. The speed at which she switches from one to the
other as she works the numerous lines coming into the control room is sheer
art.
“Good evening, ABC cabs how may I help you? Oh hellooo,
Mrs Smythe, how nice to hear from you. Yes of course, right away, Madam. Just
give me one moment please.”
-click-
“Hi Jessie, Rita here, I’ve got that old cow from IBM on
the line. She wants a car from Rose Bay to the airport. She thinks I’m her own
Miss Moneyfknpenny and she’s the Queen of Sheba. Can you do it in ten? Bewdy,
thanks luvvy, I owes yer one, Jess.”
-click-
“Hellooo again, Mrs Smythe. I have a car for you right
now. It’s a Sydney Radio taxi, the driver’s waiting outside for you now. Thanks
so much, it’s always a pleasure.”
-click-
“Bitch! She always calls when I’m trying to eat my
breakfast/ lunch/dinner!”
I should mention at this point that there are few times when
Rita is not trying to eat her breakfast/lunch/dinner.
But she is good at her job and is one of the reasons why ABC
are the go-to choice in our little corner of the world. That, and the charm and
wit of the drivers of course.
So life’s pretty good. I’m driving a cab a few nights a
week, doing a few shifts in the radio room, living in the best city in the
world, and one of these days I’ll get around to looking for a ship.
So here I am in the radio room – Sunday afternoon with Rita.
It’s been a quiet day. Nothing much to hear over the gentle crunching of Rita’s
Twisties on the other side of the desk and the occasional rustle of paper as
she idly flips through the pages of Women’s Weekly. The phone
hasn’t rung for at least 30 minutes and there are probably no more than 20 cars
out there, sitting on ranks or cruising up and down Military Road or the
Highway.
The speaker above my head crackles to life, and I hear the
unmistakeable deep voice of Bogdan. “Thirty-two in.”
Bogdan has a strong Eastern European accent and speaks with
all his emphasis on the last word as though he is competing to be heard over a
hubbub of voices. Bogdan has been driving an ABC managed cab for years and is
as reliable as the old cardigan I’m wearing as I sit across from Rita.
“Car 32, go ahead”, I reply.
“I have passenger in car. I think he die.”
Rita pauses mid crunch. She looks across at me with widening
eyes, her mouth a big O.
Hang on I think – I gave Car 32 a parcel job for an
accountant customer at least half an hour ago – he should be over near the
airport somewhere by now.
“Sorry Bogdan, I think I missed that, can you repeat.
What’s wrong?”
“Thirty-two in – I think he die, Base.
He’s no breathe, he just look and not blink.”
Oh for crying out loud, what next!
“OK Bogdan, tell me where you and don’t move, I’ll get on
to the police and ambulance.”
“I’m on Highway at Gore Hill. I still have M6 in car.” That’s
code for he still has the parcel – looks like he got a hail and was trying to
fit another job in while doing his courier job – completely against the rules,
but it happens.
Another voice comes over the speaker, “Six-eight here
base. I’m on the highway, I can see 32 on the side of the road – I’ll take a
look.”
This is Dick, the cool guy I met on my first shift and a
good mate. He normally owns works nights, but I know that today he is doing a
double shift. He says he needs the money – don’t we all.
“Thanks six-eight. Park behind him and put on your hazard
lights.”
While this is going on, Rita has called Triple O, told them
who she is and what’s going on. If the passenger really is deceased, the car
will become a police scene, and Bogdan won’t be going anywhere for a while.
A minute or so later, Bogdan is back on the air. “Thirty-two in.”
Oh my God, Bogdan, don’t wait for an acknowledgement, the
airwaves are all yours. Or they should be, but no, some wag decides this is a
good time to make a smart comment, “You might get a new car out of
this, Bog!”
“All cars stand by, Car 30, you’re off the air for the
rest of the shift. Thirty-two, 6-8 is right behind you and we’ve called the
police and ambulance, now what was your question?”
“No question base, my passenger just wake up and is sick
in my car. What do I do about my M6 – oh, here comes police car.”
Dear Lord, this gets worse. Rita, is trying to ring the
ambulance service.
“Six-eight, are you there?”
Dick’s voice comes immediately on the line, with a loud
siren blaring in the background, “Yes, Base, I’m here”
“Six-eight, are you able to take over the M6 job?
Thirty-two, return to base, as soon as you can and put the car in to the wash.
What’s happening to your passenger?”
“Thirty-two in. He sits in gutter with
ambulance man. He need to pay.”
Just for a minute I have a picture in my head of a paramedic
and this guy both sitting in the gutter – but no, that’s not what’s happening.
I give one last instruction to Bogdan to forget about the
fare, and to get back to the base as soon as soon as he can – assuming the cops
don’t arrest him for wasting police time.
At least it helped to pass the time on a quiet Sunday
afternoon.
A little later that day, just before the shift ends I get a
call from Trevor, the owner of Car 34. He usually drives the cab on his own on
Sundays but today he hasn’t seen all day.
“Hey Mike”, he says, “can you do a shift
tonight? I was at my nephew’s wedding yesterday and I’m still recovering from
it.”
“Sure”, I say thinking there goes my evening
sitting around doing nothing, “I’ll come and pick the car up around five or
six and have it back in time for your start tomorrow”.
So I finish my shift with Rita, drive the couple of miles to
Trevor’s place, where the cab is parked in his driveway. I pull up outside the
house, and after leaving my own car in the street, collect the cab keys from
the letter box where he has left them and within a few minutes Car 34 is on the
air.
It is already becoming a busy evening after the slow
afternoon and I am able to keep the wheels turning most of night with a couple
of runs to the airport, a handful of pub and club jobs and a few runs around
the city and Kings Cross.
Later that evening I catch up with Dick, Jumbo and Dave at
the Big Bear for a late evening snack. Dick has had a long day which included
playing nursemaid to Bogdan with his “expired” passenger.
“He looked dead for all money when I first got there, but
the coppers didn’t see the funny side of it at all – neither did Bogdan,
especially when you sent him off for the night. Les wasn’t too happy with you
either”.
Les was the guy in Car 30 who I stood off the air for
cross-talking during what everyone at the time thought was an emergency.
“They’ll get over it” I say, “at least they
didn’t have Rita to deal with”.
Dick knocks off for the night, the rest of us decide to do a
few more hours.
There’s still a bit of work around The Cross as late night
patrons at various legal and barely legal establishments make their way home or
move on to the next experience.
Now here I am a few hours later, dozing on Mosman rank
thinking it’s just about time to get the car back for Trevor.
It has been a long, long day.
The radio crackles to life for the first time in nearly an
hour.
“Vacant Mosman, Raglan – City, one.”
After a bit of chatter, I pick up the mike and press the
call button, “thirty four’s on Mosman Rank.”
“Three four, it’s a block of flats at 40 Raglan, one
passenger going to the city, I’ll call and tell the party to come out.”
“Got it,” I say, “on my way.” I reach up to
turn off the Vacant sign and am starting the engine when the front passenger
door is flung open and a heavy set middle-aged man throws himself on to the
front seat and slams the door. “Let’s go!” he says, “NOW
Boofhead!”
And so it begins...
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