Under the amber babble of the backstreet dive the driver was talking. His pudgy lips beneath his beady eyes beneath his balding head, his voice gruff but slow, plodding along:
“They always look so bloody morose. I mean, it got to me the first day or so, them staring all blanklike at me with my carrier like I were the boogyman. Their little eyes and all. I’d feel sorry for them if I didn’t know what they were like when they were full sized, from back when I was an overnight cabby in Soho. Better they’re mins than bums and bumboys, init?” He shook his head and took a pull on his pint. “They say some of them are happy now they can’t kill themselves with all that. Makes you think maybe, just maybe, they were meant to be that way. You know, god’s plan. I mean, they don’t do such a good job of that either, obviously, if they’re still leeching off people, but at least they’re not in everyone’s way. I pick them up from all the Essex hospitals and bring them to shelter and that’s that. Two people can look after all of ‘em and Essex is a bit cleaner every day. And— Here just a sec. Excuse me?” He signaled the bartender, a bored snub-faced woman whose black shirt failed to hide her gut. She refilled his drink. He took a long swig and placed it on the bar counter. “And the best part is that, yeah, they’re still leeches and all that, but it isn’t costing the taxpayer’s a cent. Place is run private. The entire population of minpeople in this country can fit in a place smaller than the first floor of my house.” He caught himself. “I mean, not all hundred thousand. Just the ones who were such cunts they’re not only shrunk, but homeless too. Families won’t take them back in even now they can shove them in the sock drawer if the little buggers get cheeky.” He laughed and caught some of his drink in his throat and had a fit of badly stifled coughs. “Good thing too the place is private. Prime Minister would’ve had a fucking riot on her hands if she’d tried to make people like us pay for their mistakes.”
The man next to him nodded and grunted his approval. Kept staring at the replay of the previous night’s football match on the television and took a pull of his own drink.
The driver, reinvigorated in his diatribe, continued. “You’d think they would have learned from the first time this kind of thing happened to em, wouldn’t you? But no, moment they know there’s a cure for that one—and a cure, mind you, free on the NHS, which we end up paying for—they get right back to it. My mother in law, religious twat, says Jesus does it to ‘em, but that’s bollocks of course. They do it to themselves. The Irish drink, the jews cheat, and all them junkies and prozzies give each other whatever diseases they can.”
He shook his head. “I used to be a bleeding heart when I was young, if you can believe it. Not an activist of any kind, mind you. Was always too tired during the day to go walking around with a sign from spending all night driving, but I thought it was a shame first time this thing happened. Swear I did. I didn’t necessarily cry over any of them—already had a basic idea what they were about—but I thought it was a shame. But now it’s the boy who cried wolf. Fool me fucking once.”
The driver turned his head around to see if he’d caught any kind of audience. A couple at a table in the back were necking. His expert eyes scanned their hands and found only one ring.
Turned back to the Martha, the bartender. “You drive late night around some places in this city and you meet all kinds, don’t you. I’m sure you get it, Martha.” She ignored him. “No, there’s all kinds, but never did get Julia Roberts in my cab. That one bloke in the Green Party’ll have you feel sorry for them, but the truth, plain and simple, is that they’re scummy little people, and they were even before they got minimized. At best, they’re broken, and it’s not like they’re about to get fixed.” He chuckled. “Get fixed. Like fuckin’ cats.” He took a drink for the first time in a few minutes. “At worst.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. At worst, fuck ‘em.” He tilted his head back and drained his third pint.
He chuckled. “And on top of being all around scummy people, half of them are just plain numpties.” He turned to the man on the stool next to him and grinned. “You know some of them try to run away? I’ll leave the cage door open and look away for half a second and one of them’s trying to climb out. To where? If you hadn’t burned all your bridges when you were big, if there was some place else for you to go, I wouldn’t be transporting you to a shelter. Martha, dear, another, if you could.” He didn’t wait for her to fill his glass to keep rambling. “Do they think they can still survive in whatever alleyway they were sent to the hospital from? It’s illegal for them to exist out there unattended, and someone ought to tell them it’s for their own good.” Martha refilled his drink. “Thank you so much, dear.” He took a sip and put the pint down, cradling it with both thumbs looped through the handle. “How are they going to get their breakfast out of a dumpster they can’t climb into any more?” He laughed. “It’s absurd, really. You take people who spend their days begging for other people’s hard earned money who have given themselves what should be a terminal illness, and you try to reward the cunts for it with a place with three hots and a cot built just for them, free of charge. And they would rather sleep in the street, at five inches big.”
“Don’t get me wrong, there are some good folks who get caught in these people’s crossfire. Get the bug through no fault of their own than being too trusting. But them lot have somewhere to go. I never even see them. I just get paid to wrangle up the bad ones who got what they deserve and take them somewhere nicer to live that they don't even want."
“There is one good aspect of my job, though. A little perk.”
Nobody bothered to ask what the good aspect was. What modicum of interest anyone bothered to show him at the start of his rambling was gone. The man beside him watched the replay. The bartender finished wiping down a glass and started on a section of the counter. The woman at the back table withheld a pleased gasp as her partner snuck his coarse fingers across her smooth underwear. A Pulp song playing at a low volume mingled in the thick air with the sound of football commentary.
The driver stared down at his reflection in his drink, which was still wrapped in his hands. His mouth, silent, hung slightly ajar. The Good Aspect had woken back up. She was thrashing her limbs against the sensitive skin of his scrotum’s underside.