Games Makers: A London Satire

by Andrew Calcutt

Bloody fool’s getting in the wrong car. ‘Here, mate.

  Over here’.

  The minicab driver is 60-something, West Indian with a grey moustache and a button of silver hair underneath his lower lip, in the style of soul singer Rufus Thomas. He’s laughing because his fare has stepped out of one of those towering office blocks and tried to get into the car nearest the main entrance – some poor bloke who just happened to be waiting there – because he thought it was his cab.

  The (wrong) driver had his doors locked, so the fare didn’t get very far. Now the real minicab driver, name of Lenny, is calling him over, thinking: this is a fancy-looking guy, spends time on his appearance but he doesn’t get it quite right.

  Lenny’s still cracking up over it when Tony – for it is he – climbs into the back of the passenger vehicle, licensed for private hire, pre-booked only, etc, etc. ‘You should have seen his face, man,’ Lenny cackles. ‘Must have thought he was being car-jacked.’ Others might have been put out by the laughing cabbie. My good man, I’m the fool who’s paying your wages (not those words nowadays, yet that kind of snooty, snotty attitude); but straightaway Tony warms to Lenny’s good humour.

  ‘You’re right’, he concurs. ‘If he’d had a gun he might have blown me away.’

  Where to? Tony gives Pete’s home address in Lewisham. Sad sod lives south of the river. South of the River. Margaret Thatcher once said, show me a man over 30 who lives South of the River, and I will show you a failure. Well, no – she didn’t; but she should have. Anyway, thinks Tony, I’m not struggling out there on the DLR and then having to walk who knows where through the back streets of an evening, flashing my iPad2 with the Google maps on it so that all the local youth can see. So of course I asked Les to get me a car. And what turns up is the jovial personage of laughing Lenny, my new friend.

  Nice in here. Reggae on the stereo. Bit of bass in it, not too much. Definitely Reggae, not Bluebeat or Ska, but made in the days before Dub and before it got heavy. Hea-vy.

  There’s a smell; every minicab, always a smell. If a man sits in a confined space for eight to 10 hours, at least five days a week, he’s going to leave something of himself behind. How could he not?

  But this ain’t bad. Like a borrowed leather jacket; not your own but it fits OK.

  Yeah, I like it in here, thinks Tony. And I like the driver. I could tell in an instant he’s not the sort to wind me up. Perhaps I’ll ask him to come and live with me. Like to see the look on his face.

  ‘So, come on, then – Lenny, is it? Just saw the name on your license – apart from weird people trying to get into the wrong car, what’s the craziest ride you’ve ever had, in your considerable experience?’

  And Lenny explains how his Control is on contract to the education department in one of the London boroughs, and he has to take all kinds of kids to school, to foster homes, all sorts. And the worst is when it’s his gig to take kids to the special school.

  A boarding school where they go to give their parents a rest. And sometimes there’s nobody else in the car with them, just the kid and me, Lenny, the driver.

  ‘And you’re driving along and suddenly, smack, the kid’s taken a swipe at the back of your head, or chopped you on the neck, and it’s not because he’s a real nasty piece of work, but they can’t communicate and they get frustrated and the first you know about it is: Bang! And you have to hold on tight to the steering wheel because sometimes it really hurts.

  ‘As well’, Lenny continues, ‘there are the pimps and the thieves, and you just sit in the car waiting while they are in the shop and then they come out running with a big television, and what are you supposed to do? How are you to know until they’ve gone and done it? But somehow with those people you sort of do know, you can smell it on them, or something, when they’re going to do something.

  But the special needs kids, man, there is just no telling. Smack! That’s the first you know about it.’

  He’s a lovely man, thinks Tony. These youngsters who’ve hurt him, put his life in danger (and their own) – he talks about them sympathetically, without a trace of bitterness. Not towards them. But plenty of bile directed at the construction company he used to work for.

  ‘Twenty years I worked for that lot. Started on the motorways in the Midlands, staying in bed and breakfast with no heating in the bedroom. Imagine that, you came off the site when it got dark and you still couldn’t get warm, not unless you went to the pub. After 20 years of that I couldn’t stand the cold no more, so I asked for my cards and you know how much they gave me? Three months’ pay. Three months – that was it, after 20 years. They want shooting, these people. I would pull the trigger myself, and I’ve seen a man die from gunshot wounds, so I know what it means. But I’d do it to them, any day.’

  ‘Just pass the ammunition, eh Lenny?’ Tony chimes in, not wanting to disagree with this fine old man, of an age when he should be at home in his dressing gown, feet up on the table, a can of Red Stripe whenever he wants one. Or else safely bedded down with a plump Princess for him to pamper, hair in curlers or straighteners or whatever, and her rubbing Embeco on his sore elbows and creaking knees. But instead he’s out all hours, a small packet of sheer humanity weaving through the nondescript streets of south-east London with a succession of little people in the back of his clapped-out cab.

  He’s the one to do it for, Tony tells himself. If London can’t get it on, doesn’t get it up for the Olympic Games, it’ll say to Lenny that he was wrong to come here in the first place. Should have tried for the States, instead; gone for a Green Card.

  Or even stayed in the Windies. Should never have come here. But if London comes together, it’ll mean he made the right choice. All those years ago, Lenny chose well. And the 50 years of working, with next to nothing to show for it, will have been the right thing to do, all along. So do it for him, Brother Tony. Believe me, it’s not just for yourself. No need to feel sick at the size of your own vanity. This is for the small people, too, to make them feel bigger.

  By this time, Lenny’s pulling up outside Pete’s front door. Offers to write a receipt but Tony says no, this isn’t business, it’s strictly personal.

  Hands Lenny the fare and a fiver on top, then waves him farewell as he drives off.

  (13) Rupa’s easy exit