Jim Baen’s Universe
Page 57
The ones you get by day are sensible enough. Elderly vehicles, driven by mild-mannered gentlemen, generally, turning a few extra quid to blow on the horses.
But when you order a minicab for any hour after midnight, what you get is a vehicle that defies the laws of physics driven by a manic khat-addled West African space cadet who regards speed limits as an affront to his manhood. These guys can do things with a twenty-year-old Datsun with a dodgy gearbox that challenge any preconceptions you may have had about light-speed limits and the interpenetration of solid objects. All while keeping up a three hundred word-a-minute monologue on-and I have heard all these while praying for deliverance in the back of a minicab while steaming drunk in the wee hours of a Sunday morning-Why His Girlfriends Don't Understand Him, Whether It Is An Immoral Act To Trap Or Poison Mice, Why We Bother To Eat When All We Do Is Shit It Out, I could go on.
Tonight's was no exception.
I'm hazy on the details, so let me give you the Generic After-Midnight Minicab.
The whole stands upon four bald tires. These things violate accepted notions of topography by actually having negative tread; they're folded through hyperdimensional space so as to have absolutely no grip on the road. Engineers looking for frictionless bearings are wasting their time, just run your machine on four minicab tires and perpetual motion will ensue. This is probably how they get from place to place, actually, without apparently charging enough money to keep the vehicle in fuel and the driver in both food and the heroic amount of khat he uses to get him through the night without sleeping, eating, visiting the lavatory or stopping to inhale during his monologue.
The bodywork may have had paint on it at some point. Now, though, it's coated in something that looks like the enamel off an octogenarian smoker's teeth, set off with bright-metal scratches and dents and prodigious amounts of rust. But for the strength of the bonds in Iron Oxide, it'd fall apart when you looked at it.
Inside, it's worse. Strange dusts arise from the stuff the seats are made of. I shall not dignify it with the word "upholstery." It's imitation leather as made by a man with no feeling in his arse or hands and who'd never seen leather to boot. It's got little sphincter-shaped cigarette burns in it that fart stale gusts of dusty air when you sit on the seats. The front seats have got those bead-cover things on them, it's practically a bylaw, and there's always some elaborate ornament in shiny gold-foil and plastic hanging from the rear-view mirror.
I daren't speculate about the engine. There's probably some kind of eldritch horror in there that… oh, it's scary. It either makes an emphysemic rhythmic wheeze or no noise at all. It almost, but not quite, forms intelligible words when it's ticking over. Sort of "bloodbloodblood… hororoorooroororr… manglemanglemangle…" and this is the petrol ones. The diesels are all that and more, but with a basso-profundo style.
"About what I expected," said Rowen.
"Quit whining," said Bobby. "We're off to catch a bloody big fish."
"Indeed," I said, and improvised a little on the old Greenland Whaler's shanty with the theme of "we are bound out to Wandsworth, the pike-fish to kill…"
"Where to?" asked the driver, "I mean, Wandsworth? Where's that?" He was holding an A to Z to the streetlight and peering into the index.
Well, that provoked a debate, didn't it?
Y'see, the Wandle rises away to the south of London in the south downs away near Carshalton somewhere and joins the Thames just upstream of Wandsworth Bridge. Most of the river is a touch hard to get to and the bickering was mighty. It came down to me and Sheila the end.
I happened to know that there was a spot by the supermarket in Colliers Wood that was accessible, deep and relatively slow-flowing and-this is important, given that we were dealing with a minicab driver who could be relied on to have only a limited grasp of which planet he was on, let alone what street he was in-could be reached by simply driving down the A24, which we happened to be standing on at the time.
Sheila maintained that a monster fish of the Pike's vital statistics would need deep water, which meant we should be going to the confluence of the Wandle and the Thames next to the euphemistically named "solid waste transfer station."
Now, I'll allow as she had a point. Everywhere more than about a hundred meters from where the Wandle flowed into the Thames, it was no more than about knee deep. Which means that a fish of the Pike's size, which would draw about two feet of water, would face something of a problem going about its lawful occasions without having small boys on the river banks pointing and throwing things at it. Most undignified.
"But Sheila," I said, declaiming for the benefit of the crowd, "them waters are tidal. Pike's a freshwater fish. Well-known fact."
"What of it? Fresh water's all very well, but if there's not enough of it, the fish can't swim in it."
"Come on," I said, "This is biology we're talking here. Only one fish, no, I tell a lie, two fish pass from fresh water to salt like that. Salmon and eels. Not"-and I knew I was turning over an ace here-“a pike. It'd drown." I could swear that a pike would violate the laws of physics, but not its essential fishiness. That was asking me to believe too much.
I shall here excise, for reasons of space, the drunken shouting match that ensued on the subject of whether a fish could be truly said to “drown.” Does an animal that breathes water really drown, which is how you die when you try to breathe water when you can't? Or can you only drown a fish in air?
Hairs were split, logic chopped and the argument liberally salted with obscenity. Lights started to come on in the neighborhood. Net curtains twitched.
No doubt various minds, roused from their well-earned rest, started on that train of thought that eventually leads to the police being called to these idiots who were discussing piscine biology, semantics and etymology at the top of their voices at two in the morning.
Eventually the taxi driver got impatient. "Where we goin'?" He was leaning out of the window and occasionally spitting something we didn't want to know about in the gutter.
"Collier's Wood," said Hudson, and got in the front seat. The rest of us crammed into the back seat, none of us small, and Sheila in the middle complaining that she couldn't reach the ashtrays.
"Dogends out the window, guys," said the driver. We were cool with that. To drunks at two in the morning, the world is an ashtray with infinite capacity.
"Right," said Bobby. "If you philosophers are done bickering?"
We assented that we, in fact, were prepared to continue this all night but were content to do so during our progress to the locus in quo.
"Fine. Driver, straight ahead until I tell you otherwise. Colliers' Wood."
"Right, chie
f," said the driver.
What followed is a sort of blur. For the bits where I wasn't wincing, I was greyed out as the acceleration pressed all the blood out of my eyeballs. Between those conditions I passed through a flicker of quantum states of abject terror; I was watching the world through the distortion of severe drunkenness, so any given scene needed a moment or two to imprint on my brain.
The next clear memory I have is of the driver saying, "Okay, here's Collier's Wood. Where do you want dropping?" We were, at this point, orbiting the gyratory thing that they have there at about three hundred miles per hour. Fairly sedate as these things go.
I looked around, found the spot, and pointed. "Over there," I said, "down by the river there. Close as you can get."
Well, how was I to know how literally he'd take me?
We bounced over the kerb and into the long grass. A vehicle such as our trusty steed for the night, the generic nighttime London minicab, need not be concerned by mere unevenness of traction. The roads of South London will do more to the unwitting suspension than any mere off-road excursion in pursuit of fish. No, the difficulty arose from the interaction of four essential principles of physics: inertia, momentum, balance, and friction.
We had a great surfeit of the former two-more than answered our purposes, in fact-and a great want of the latter. That our driver was out of his gourd on something as yet unidentified added to our distress.
Even sober, little of the detail would remain with me. I have a vague memory of our driver hauling on his handbrake to stop the car, and wedging his elbow into Hudson's ribs. Big mistake. I have a slight hint, somewhere in the confused spin and jolt of getting my face, cigarette and all, mashed into the window resulting in a nasty burn to the nostril that troubled me for days after.
The next clear memory that surfaces is of climbing out of the car, shaken and nauseous.
"Bollocks." I was not at my witty best. Bollocks is a versatile word. As well as being a choice epithet of disgust, amazement, scorn, horror and, suitably modified, approval.
Whatever. A pretty situation we were faced with, albeit not of our making. Friend driver had decided to drop us exactly where we'd asked for, by the river. To do this he'd had to mount the kerb, drive across the pavement, drive over a coping-stone that separated pavement from grass riverbank, and then, having applied what passed for brakes, he skidded and spun the car across fifteen yards of rain-wetted grass, leaving a worms-track of tangled black swatches of mud that gleamed in the orange light of the streetlamps like long, black, oily things.
Hudson retrieved his tackle box from the boot of the cab, and absolutely did a first-class double take. He then proceeded to turn to jelly with laughter.
God help us all, I thought, if Bobby’s so drunk he didn't notice that until now…
Sheila got out. She'd gone an interesting shade of green.
Patrick paid the driver. Me, I'd have rewarded him with a boot for that performance, but I was feeling a bit delicate for casual violence.
"We're going to have to sort this out," said Rowen.
"Sort what out?" I demanded. "He drove it here, he can drive the bloody thing out." I had visions of -well, they turned out pretty bloody accurate.
The driver started his eldritch conveyance up again, threw it into reverse (with the grinding sound a vehicle makes when it hasn't got a functioning clutch) and attempted to reverse back out the way he came. The wheels spun, the mud flew, the minicab sank into the mire and a great rooster tail of sticky black clay, bits of proto-fossil dog turd and clods of grass left Welch covered in it. He tried to duck out of the way, slipped, fell, and got covered worse.
Out pops the driver's head. "Can you give me a push, lads?"
Sheila stared at him, but there are some things that are just hardwired into the male psyche. Helping a motorist in distress is one of them. Someone asks you to help push a car, you do it. Why? I have no idea. No doubt there's a paleoanthropologist out there even now explaining what use this was on the mean trails of Olduvai Gorge.
We braced up and began to shove. Fortunately, fashion that year ran to stout boots rather than the runners that had been the thing until shortly before. No doubt against the possibility that a mountain might spring up in a pub while you were drinking there, or something. As it was, we were heaving against a dead weight while trying to get a grip on wet grass that wasn't so much growing there as floating in a soupy sort of clay. In Nike airs, we'd have been completely buggered.
We start to push. The car moved. Friend driver, who no one had thought to instruct in the matter of selecting a higher gear, or applying the power slowly or any of the other wise things one does when stuck in the mud, floored it.
Not just Patrick then. Oh, bloody brilliant. Mud absolutely everywhere: Had the Predator from the film of the same name showed up just then, he'd have wondered where everyone was.
Sheila, untouched because she’d been standing to the side like a sensible person, started singing "Oh Mammy." Hudson was now hysterical, laughing so hard he'd dropped to his knees in apoplexies of mirth and looked in serious danger of humor-induced double incontinence.
Patrick and I were steaming gently in near-homicidal rage.
And the cab? It had sprung free of the mud like a lemur from hot soup, hurtled back the way it had come in a spray of mud, and was now half-on, half-off the pavement while its offside rear wheel rolled away in the general direction of Morden.
"You, pal, are on your own," I said, glaring at the driver and reaching for my cigarettes.
As one, we turned toward the dark waters of the Wandle.
If ever there was a river no one was going to write poetry to or about, it was the Wandle. London's rivers have, over the years, become for the most part glorified storm drains. Roofed over for much of their length and largely the scene-where open to the sky-of unofficial household waste disposal. Shopping trolleys, mostly, for no reason I have ever been able to discern. The urban fisherman must resign himself to losing tackle from time to time.
The river in question was at low tide at the time, no more than a foot deep. The Wandle is one of the few of London's rivers that is more open to the air than bricked-over. It is largely knee-deep where it runs through Colliers' Wood, where we lay this night's scene. It has a few deeper spots and is, isolate incidents of urban detritus apart, relatively clear above the carpet of weeds.
Not that we could see any of that at that ridiculous hour in the morning. What we could see was a faintly rippling ribbon of black, highlighted here and there with the orange glare of the sodium streetlight.
"What now?" I asked.
Hudson, grunting briefly while he hefted his tackle, looked at me like I was a blithering loon
. A bit rich from him, I thought.
"I believe we're here to catch a fish," said Sheila.
"Bloody big fish," Bobby agreed.
"Sure," I said, "but what, exactly is the next step in the detailed plan you have for catching that fish?"
Hudson gave me that look again. "Find a good peg," he said.
A good peg. The term got extended from match angling-you fish from a peg drawn by lot. A lot of commercial fisheries actually build little piers at peg sites for the comfort and convenience of the paying angler.
The Wandle, however, is not so equipped. The National Rivers Authority is hard put to it to keep the stream flowing, let alone erect conveniences of any kind. The nearest one gets to it is a narrow dirt path for south London's domestic dogs to relieve themselves on.
Patrick raised an eyebrow. No doubt the dialect is different in New Zealand, or he was just being slow on the uptake. "A good peg?"
"Can't fish here," said Bobby, "too noisy. Scare the fish away." With which words he set off into the dark, away from the noise and traffic downriver.
"Strikes me," said Patrick, "that anything the size of the Wandle Pike isn't going to be worried by a bit of traffic noise."
"No," I said, "it's not. What is he up to?"
Rowen was quicker on the uptake. "Well, he's just gone off into the dark on a slippery wet path, carrying an unbalanced load, next to running water, while drunk."
The penny dropped. "Ah, in other words," I said, before being rudely interrupted by the crash of the tackle box, a thud and a splash, "Hudson’s being Hudson again."
"Something of a record, there," said Sheila, over the distant sounds of floundering and profanity, "not more than ninety seconds."