It was half way through the journey into central London that I began to hate the taxi driver. The sky was fifty shades of grey, the cab was stuffy, and my driver, taking full advantage of his captive audience, was hitting top gear on his specialist subject of “What Has The EU Ever Done For Us?” even as the taxi, with me as its prisoner, slowed to a crawl.
His name was Terry – at least that’s what it said on the laminated permit behind the glass, next to a mugshot so unclear that it could have been anyone from Edward Snowden to O.J. Simpson posing for the photo. Given Terry’s emerging antipathy towards anyone not born within earshot of Bow Bells to bona fide Pearly King and Queen parents, this seemed unlikely.
I stared glumly at the long lines of brake lights inching forward along Brompton Road and listened. Lots of bold talk rapidly going nowhere fast. It seemed to be an apt metaphor for the Leave campaign.
I closed my eyes and thought back to the previous weekend in the hills of Catalunya: the sweeping views of mountains set against a glowing sky, the poppy strewn wheat fields, the laughter by the pool, the amazing food, the plentiful wine, the great company of friends from half a dozen countries, the hailstones, the pilates on the lawn and discussions about box sets you must watch, if not before you die, then certainly before the next season of ‘The Walking Dead’ begins.
But the Terry hadn’t finished.
“The Queen,” he roared, delightedly. “Even the Queen is on our side!”
The Queen. I thought of Cersei Lannister. I thought of Game of Thrones. I thought how wonderful it would be if my cab driver was banished to The Wall or, like Ser Ilyn Payne, had lost the power of speech altogether.
“Her Majesty is a Brexit supporter!” he proclaimed, with a flourish of his hand so impressively regal that we veered sharply and nearly wiped out a cyclist who had unwisely chosen that moment to pass the semi-stationary taxi. Unpeturbed by the fact that the collision would have been entirely his fault, Terry wound down the window and bellowed.
“Youshouldnbeontheroadmate! SHOULD-N’T-EVEN-BE-ON-THE-ROAD!”
You shouldn’t have the vote, I thought. Should-n’t-even-have-the-vote.
“How do you know?”
“Oh the way these bleedin’ cyclists ponce about not looking where they’re going.”
No, you moron, and as one of those bleedin’ cyclists, please let a spark plug zap through your windscreen the moment I set foot out of this cab and frighten the living bejesus out of you.
“No, I meant how do you know the Queen supports the Leave campaign?”
“Well, she’s the Queen, ain’t she. Send her victorious, happy and glorious, an’ all that.”
Yes, we sing it at The Last Night of The Proms and other pivotal moments of history, like Euro 96.
“But has she actually come out and said ‘Vote Leave’? You’ll have to forgive me as I’m a bit behind on the news. I don’t live here any more.”
Terry seemed quite perplexed at being challenged on this point. Or perhaps it was the fact that I’d confessed to being an immigrant, albeit in someone else’s country. He squinted at me suspiciously, as if I were a Martian or some other alien creature, like a Bulgarian pipe fitter.
“Not exactly,” he said conspiratorially. “Not in as many words.”
Not in any words, perhaps? Just in a tiny, wide-eyed, figment of your imagination, like all the other EU facts that never were, such as the one about school children being forced to gorge themseves on bratwurst and then bludgeon corgi pups to death in front of the Victoria Memorial.
“But ‘The Sun’ has a source,” he continued, as if this was the killer fact. “Highly confidential – they obviously can’t talk about it – but I can promise you, mate, The Queen wants to leave. I can’t say it any clearer than that.”
Clearer than what? Clearer than the smeary glass hatch between us, with the tatty ‘Vote Leave’ beer mat wedged in like a protective amulet to ward off the evil spirits of the doubters? Clearer than the clouds through which I’d plunged to land at Heathrow, its damp, murky gloom a world away from the azure skies of Barcelona?
“I think – whatsisname – Gove. Yeah, Michael Gove. He was spot on. We’ve all had enough of experts.”
This from a man who spent three years of his life cruising round London on a borrowed moped in the rain, trying to acquire something called The Knowledge.
“I had Govey in the back of my taxi once. Not in the biblical sense! Ha, ha, ha!”
Ha, ha, ha. He probably despised you too.
We nudged past a huge statue erected in far off days to honour some long obscure Victorian. The vast plinth slid past the window like the fossilised remains of a giant biblical creature and just about as relevant. London is full of these redundant bronze and marble relics from the golden age of Empire. They could come to life and walk down Picadilly singing “Rule Britannia” and all you would hear in response would be:
“Youshouldnbeontheroadmate! SHOULD-N’T-EVEN-BE-ON-THE-ROAD!”
Maybe Terry did have some special insight. Maybe he was an undercover agent for the Leave campaign. I suddenly had a crazy vision of him sat round the table at a state reception at Windsor Castle, sandwiched between The Queen and the ambassador to Tanzania. As Prince Philip swore obscenities at the hapless Slovakian serving girl who’d just spilt the Chateau Lafleur all down his Order of the Garter, his wife leaned over and whispered to my friend.
“Prithee, good stout yeoman, be so kind as to let it be known amongst our subjects that We do most assuredly desire to leave the European Union, the most pernicious act of diabolical wick’dness that man hath ever created for the governance of Our affairs.”
To which the taxi driver, having assured her to say no more, and that a wink was as good as a nod to a blind horse, tucked back into the jellied eels and pie mash and returned to the discourse about the influence of Mesopotamian creation myths on Western religious thought.
Another lurch literally jerked me back to reality as the cab leapt over the kerb to make a right turn expressly forbidden by the sign we’d almost obliterated. A blonde office worker, too absorbed in her iPhone to notice the errant ground to air missile, almost got obliterated as well, but jumped back just in time. To my dismay, she dropped the phone whilst trying to clutch her coffee and it shattered on the floor, the glass screen erupting into an impossible number of diamond-like fragments across the pavement. Some say you know you’ve finally grasped a foreign language when you can use it to swear like, well, a taxi driver. I decided not to point out the irony to Terry as the girl hurled spectacular, impeccably formed Anglo-Saxon insults through the window in an Eastern European accent, running into the street to scream after us as we drove away. I felt like the guy in the bank forced to open the vault when the robbers arrive. It’s not my fault. And if we vote to Leave, that won’t be my fault either.
“Jesus, that was close,” I said. “Do you want to stop and see if she’s okay? I think she dropped her phone.”
“Nah, mate. She should’ve been watching where she was going. Shouldn’t even be ’ere. They have plenty of office jobs and iPhones in Warsaw but they come over here nicking ours. And there’s another thing….this one’s the clencher.”
Clincher. It’s the fucking clincher, you fool. I tried hard but it was no use. All I could think of was a pair of fat, white flatulent buttocks, tattooed with the Union Jack, trying to hold some semblance of control above a pristine Armitage Shanks toilet bowl, hand-decorated by Grayson Perry with the golden stars of the EU flag. And then I remembered. There was “another thing” after all, one last, pure and incontrovertible fact from the weekend that I suddenly, desperately, wanted to share with this obnoxious fool.
I leaned all the way forward so I could speak right into the small hole in the glass. He cocked his ear, anticipating that I was going to implore him to reveal the majestic zinger he’d been nurturing like a prize fart all the way from Heathrow. But instead, I gave him a zinger of my own that I’d learnt from a marine biologist friend in the Catalan hills.
“Did you know that a killer whale’s penis is eight feet long and that when he ejaculates, he’s also trying to flush his mate of all the sperm other males might have left behind in her vagina?”
I laughed gaily. “Just imagine it hitting you in the face? A few hundred litres of whale jizz! It would be like being soaked by a riot cannon! You’d be like the England rugby team (a nice patriotic touch, I thought). Beaten by whales! Get it?”
For a second, there was silence, then a subterranean growl filled the cab, like the sound of a tube train arriving into a crowded station.
“Euuuuuuuuuuuugh! That is fucking disgusting!”
He got it, alright. Deeply offended, Terry recoiled from the glass as if it were a glory hole through which eight feet of pristine cetacean manhood might come poking through at any moment. He gave me a final, strange, queasy look then gripped the steering wheel tightly and stared firmly forward into space. We did not take any more short cuts. And the fare was just over one hundred pounds by the time we reached St. Paul’s.
But he did not utter so much as a syllable throughout the rest of our journey. Black cabs have a reputation for being expensive but this felt like a bargain.
The Queen may be a Brexit supporter but her son is the Prince of Wales. I’d like to think there is an omen in that, after all.