The Long Way Round

There are two routes from St Columba's to the town and one of them is four minutes longer.

The short way goes down Prospect Hill, past the retail park, onto the ring road, and it is the route every satnav gives and every driver takes, because it is shorter and because there is no reason to take the other one.

The long way goes out through Ellerslie, along the top road, past the reservoir, and comes into town from the north.

Owen has driven a taxi in this town for twenty-six years. He takes the long way from the hospital and he has never once charged for it.

Not everyone. He is not sentimental and he would like that on the record; if a man in a suit gets in at the outpatients rank at eleven in the morning and says the station, Owen takes him to the station the fast way and charges him for it.

It is a particular kind of fare.

You learn to tell. It takes about four years and after that you never get it wrong. It is not about crying — hardly anyone cries in a taxi, that is a thing from films. It is about the way a person gets in. There is a way of getting into the back of a car when you have just been told something, and it involves sitting down before you have finished opening the door, and once you have seen it eleven or twelve times you cannot unsee it.

Those fares get the long way round.

What the four minutes are for

The top road runs above the reservoir for about a mile and a half and there is a stretch where the trees break and you can see the whole water and the hills behind it, and at certain times of day it is genuinely something.

Owen does not point it out. That would ruin it and would also be, he feels, unbearable.

He just drives slower along that bit.

What the four minutes are actually for is the thing that happens at about minute nine, which is that people start talking.

Not all of them. Perhaps one in three. But the ones who do, do it at minute nine, on the top road, to the back of a stranger's head, and Owen has come to understand that this is a very specific and useful kind of privacy that almost nothing else in a person's life provides.

A stranger. Facing away. Guaranteed to be gone in eleven minutes. Under no obligation to say anything wise.

He has heard, in twenty-six years, a very great deal.

The rules he has

He does not ask questions. Ever. If someone stops talking, he lets them stop.

He does not say I'm sorry to hear that, because he learned early that it closes a conversation down; people hear it as the end of a transaction.

He says, if he says anything: "Right." Or: "Aye." Or, at most: "That's a lot."

He has never once given advice and he is proud of this the way other men are proud of a marathon.

He does not tell anyone. Not his wife, not the other drivers, not — and this took discipline — the other drivers, because taxi drivers talk and the rank is a small place and a story is currency.

Twenty-six years and he has never spent any of it.

Alun

There is a driver called Alun who has been on the rank about six years and who is, by every measure, better at the job than Owen. Faster, cleaner car, better with the app, does the airport runs Owen cannot be bothered with.

Alun asked him about it in 2022.

"You do the top road."

"Sometimes."

"From the hospital. You do it every time from the hospital." Alun was not being aggressive. He genuinely wanted to know. "That's four minutes you're not charging for, four or five times a shift. That's — what, twenty minutes a day? You know what that is over a year?"

Owen said he did.

Alun waited.

And Owen found, to his own considerable irritation, that he could not explain it. He tried twice. Both times it came out sounding either like a boast or like a man who thought he was a therapist, and it is neither of those things, and he could not find the words that made it the third thing.

In the end he said: "It's a nice road."

Alun let it go, in the way that people let things go when they have decided you are slightly odd but harmless.

The Tuesday

In March, Owen picked up at the main entrance at about four.

A woman of maybe fifty. She got in before she had finished opening the door.

He took the long way.

At minute nine, on the top road, she said: "You've gone the wrong way."

Which had never happened. Nobody had ever noticed.

Owen said, "Sorry — I can turn back, it'll be five minutes—"

"No," she said. "No. It's fine."

And then, after a while: "My mother used to bring us up here."

Owen said, "Aye."

She talked for the rest of the way. Not about her mother, particularly. About a caravan, and an argument in 1987, and a dog called Pepper, and a sandwich that had gone wrong in a way that was still, apparently, funny.

At the house she paid and did not tip, which Owen has never minded and does not record.

She got about halfway up her path and then came back and knocked on the window.

He put it down.

"Do you do that on purpose?" she said.

Owen looked at the steering wheel for a moment.

"Aye," he said.

She nodded. She stood there for a second longer, and then she said, "Right," and went in.

Alun

There is one thing Owen has not put on the rank, and it is that in April, coming back from the airport, he passed Alun on the top road at about six in the evening with a fare in the back.

There is no reason to be on the top road coming from St Columba's.

Neither of them has mentioned it.