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folk who could destroy a thing of ancient beauty so brutally … well, nothing they could do would surprise me after
that … and the way they treat their women too.'
    So far as I'm concerned the way they treat their women is the best thing going for those fuckers … keep those bints in line, I say … you take my ex, she's only gone and slapped a fucking restraining order on me, now that'd never 'appen in Kabul, I'd have 'er trussed up in one of them black cloaky things before she could say CSA … 'I couldn't agree with you more. Very sad business.' 'Coz they should go a bit bloody further – take the kids off a them – no kids, no bloody power over us . . .
    Past the Odeon, with its egg-box roof, the cab squealed to a halt at some lights and the meter – which had been ticking away
with generous increments – slowed to a trickle of pence. After fifteen years of cabbing Dave Rudman was so finely attuned
to the meter that he could minutely calibrate it with his own outgoings. At the beginning of each day a spreadsheet popped
up behind his heavy eyelids, and as he drove, picking up and dropping off, ranking up and driving again – so the figures were
instantly calculated to inform him whether he was ahead or behind, if he could pay for his diesel, his insurance, his cab
repayments, his food, his fags, his booze, his prescriptions, his child support and his divorce lawyer. At 8 p.m., when the
second tariff band comes in, the figures alter accordingly; at 10 p.m., when the third starts, they change again. But they all oughta be the bloody same: 6 to 2, 2 to 10, 10 to 6. That way, you know what you're getting – punters inall. In the future the tariffs will be equal, oh, yeah. Time, distance and money – the three dimensions of Dave Rudman's universe. Up above it all was the Flying Eye, Russ Kane trying to make a joke out of a fucking lorry what's shed its load at the Robin Hood Roundabout …
    Dave Rudman hardly ever used to go into the dozen or so cabbies' shelters that were still scattered about Central London.
However, nowadays he was so skint he needed the cheap and greasy fuel the old biddies who ran them pumped out. They were weird
little structures, the shelters, like antediluvian cricket pavilions of green wood, which the city had grown up around. Inside,
the cabbies sat jawing and noshing at a table covered with a plastic cloth. So many cabbies, their faces dissipated by the
life like those of prematurely aged peasants, worn out by their bigoted credo. Dave didn't want to talk about the lost boy,
but last week, in the shelter in Grosvenor Gardens, when some pillock of a cabbie, seeing Dave's face, horsey with depression, stupidly asked what was eating him, Dave spilled. Then the other
cabbie quipped: 'A woman is like a hurricane: when they pitch up they're wet and wild, and when they bugger off they take
your house and your car.'
    Michelle hadn't only taken Dave's house; she'd got a bigger, flasher one. She'd even got a new daddy for Dave's boy – and how fucking sick is that? As for this Cohen cow who was milking Dave, she must 'ave a fucking meter in her desk drawer and every time I bell her she pops it on and it goes up and up, fifty quid at a time, a wunner for a letter. Then there's the brief she gets to stand up on his hind legs in the judge's chambers for a grand a pop – but I bet she gets a kick-back, though. Cow. Lawyers – they're all scum.
    As the cab crawled up the Edgware Road, the fare looked bemused by the shiny pavements thronged by Arabs. Arabs sitting behind
the plate-glass windows of Maroush supping fruit juices and smoking shishas, Arabs stopping at kiosks to buy their newspapers
full of squashed-fly print. Their women flapped along behind them, tagged and bagged, but under their chadors they're tricked out like fucking tarts in silk undies, they are. It gives 'em a big turn-on … And my ex, with her little job up in Hampstead, wrapping