But then aggression must out, in some form or other.

It was doubtful whether Private Jacobson of Albany had fought for anything much – even if he thought he had – but I was sorry for him stretched out somewhere in France, having missed all the fun for the last seventy years. I was damned if I knew, however, which was to be preferred: being back in populous Europe as he was, never too far, wherever he lay, from a motorway or boulangerie, or lying in the unbearable stillness of Donnybrook, like Ros’s grandma or the Chinaman Ah Yet, the kindly market gardener who in 1902 was murdered in his cabbage patch, just a stone’s throw from the cemetery, for a five pound note, Australian currency.

10 The Town with a HEART of Gold

Ten
 
The Town with a of Gold

‘All these bloody surveys they’re doing,’ the taxi driver said to me, ‘it’s time they did one on women’s minds.’

He was furious because the woman driver in front of him was taking an eternity to move out into the traffic.

‘What do you think they’d find?’ I asked.

He took me to it by a roundabout route. ‘You can be too safe,’ he said. ‘Don’t get me wrong – I value caution. But you’re a liability if you’re too safe. Do you want to know the three most important qualities in a driver? Alertness. Concentration. And recklessness.’

So that’s what a survey of women’s minds would show up: irrefragable proof of their constitutional incapacity for driving recklessly.

I said, ‘Maybe that’s because they’re used to having children in the car.’

‘Not the ones I’m talking about,’ he said. ‘She hasn’t.’

‘She hasn’t now. But maybe her habits are formed from when she does have.’

By now he didn’t like me much. ‘It’s a theory,’ he said. But he made it pretty clear he wasn’t buying it. The next passenger would almost certainly hear how it was time they did a survey on the minds of Poms.

It occurred to me, as I was paying him, that Perth might be one of the last places in the English-speaking world where you could have these sprawling conversations with taxi drivers. Melbourne and Sydney were out of the question now that the drivers only spoke Croatian. Bars and bullet-proof windows had put paid to New York. The very design of the cabs minimized communication in London, for which, given the spurious verbal vitality of London cab drivers, one had to be grateful. Only in Perth was a taxi ride still safe, philosophical, and largely in one’s own language.