It was late and I was tired and so I decided to get a cab home after the gig tonight. Typically every time I saw a yellow “taxi available” light approaching up Oxford Street, some other crafty bugger managed to nip in and halloo the cab just before me. It looked like I might end up walking home.
But finally I managed to be the crafty bugger who nipped in and hallooed a cab right from under the noses of a gang of men on the other side of the road. It was a fair steal – the driver saw me first. Those are the rules. But all the people who stole off me were not fair steals. Because.
Though as I got to the front window I almost wished that the men had got there first as there was something a bit weird and unearthly about the driver. He was in his fifties and had mad staring eyes, like Johnny Rottens (officially the second scariest eyes of all time, after the eyes of Michael Jackson at the end of the Thriller video). I couldnÂ’t see, but I suspected he also had teeth like Simon Munnery (officially the second scariest teeth of all time, after the teeth of a Dracula). I donÂ’t believe in the concept of auras, but if I did I would say he was definitely giving off an aura of pure evil, that put me in mind immediately of the serial killer Dennis Nielson. I felt there was an excellent chance that he would murder me and wear my skin as a suit and my head as a hat and so maybe I shouldnÂ’t have got in his car, but I couldnÂ’t face the walk home and IÂ’d stolen the cab fair and square, so I had no real choice.
As the spectral driver (who had previously probably worked as one of those weird skeletal horsemen from off of Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter depending on how clever you are) turned the cab round he made a point of halting and shouting madly out of the window at the group of men, “Don’t call me an arsehole!”
I hadnÂ’t heard them call him an arsehole, but it is quite possible that they had. It didnÂ’t help ease my fears about me having entered the transport of the Grim Reaper himself. I began to resign myself to a slow and grizzly death by torture and to imagine what it would be like living in a well for the last few days of my life. Possibly I would be rescued at the last minute, by Clarice Starling, but maybe I wouldnÂ’t be so lucky and IÂ’d be dredged up from a river in a few months time with an unusual moth in my throat. At least the driver was making the pretence of taking me the right way for the moment. But more than once I caught him staring at me in the mirror with his piercing Johnny RottensÂ’ eyes. Possibly sizing me up and working out which piece of me he was going to eat first.
I am sure most of us have had this kind of paranoia when getting into a cab (and with most mini-cabs it is a fairly logical reaction, though I was in a black cab this time – black the colour of death and evil, how could I have been so stupid). You are after all entrusting yourself to a stranger (and my mum told me never to get into a car with someone that I didn’t know) and incredibly vulnerable. What if the demonic Dementor (damn I have revealed my own intelligence level) had rigged up his seat belts so that once you clicked them on they locked around you? What if he’d adapted the back seat area into a air tight box that he was shortly to fill with knock-out gas? The doors are of course locked when you are travelling – there would be no way out. I looked around the interior for an official badge giving the number of the cab or an ID card that would prove this driver was at least registered and licensed, but there was none to be seen. Would anyone have seen me get into this cab? Would the group of men have recognised me as that bloke who used to be on that thing on the telly? Probably not. And my face had rung a bell they had probably mistaken me for Dom Joly. Was I just about to become another statistic, one of the many lost souls who go missing, never to be seen again, until their skellington is found under a patio two decades hence? Well obviously not, as I am writing this. Unless the cab driver was an insane Misery-style fan of Warming Up, who was worried by my recent suggestion that I might stop writing so regularly and now has me hobbled in his basement, typing away at a computer. Unlikely, because I am sure he would censor this before posting it on the net and to be honest it would probably make for even duller future postings than usual – “I stayed in bed all day today, what with my useless broken legs and all. I did make an attempt to escape. I hope Mr Johnny Rottens’ Eyes doesn’t read this and find out what my plan is….”
My killer was biding his time any way and I was nearing my home. When would he strike? Was that poison gas I could smell? Or had I just done a fart? I had considered asking him to pull over to test whether I would be let out, but then IÂ’d be stuck in Notting Hill and be far from the bed that I craved. So I let him carry on with his abduction plan so as not to inconvenience myself.
He took me to the door of my house and stopped the cab. Clever. Lulling me into a false sense of security. I stood up to pay him his money. Clever. Getting his money first – though I suppose he could just steal all my cash once I was dead. I was stooping slightly. “You don’t want to stand like that,” he hissed at me in a very sinister fashion, “You’ll hurt your back!” He seemed to find this amusing thing to say and if this had been a film a large meat cleaver would now have crashed into my spine, splashing blood, marrow and ghoulish irony all over the floor, whilst old Johnny Rottens’ Eyes laughed revealing his Simon Munnery’s teeth for the first time, whilst I screamed and hit my fists against the window of the cab, only to realise that the cab was soundproof and my dying gurgles would go unheard by the residents of Hercules Terrace.
But in actuality the man just gave me a receipt and I got out of the cab and went inside. Even so I was quite spooked and thought I might walk into my lounge to find him magically sitting on one of my many sofas, smiling at me. And then when I turned to escape heÂ’d be standing in the doorway. And so on.
But it didnÂ’t happen.
But I know he is just biding his time.
After all, he knows where I live.
