Chapter 3

“Welcome to Big City,” my taxi driver said, “the city of big ideas and no money.”

For no extra charge he drove me to the address of the university offices at the top of the letter.

The university offices were closing as I arrived. I just had time for a brief and pointless argument with the official locking the doors. “Come back tomorrow,” was all he said and I wasted a lot of hot air trying to get him to say more.

My taxi driver was sympathetic. “You can come and stay with me,” he said.

“I couldn’t”, I said, because I’m British and that’s what we’re taught to say in these situations, rather than the more obvious “Thank you that would be wonderful,” favoured by the rest of the world.

Luckily the taxi driver insisted. “The amount you paid for the fare it should include bed and board.” I joined in his laughter, but cursed my own naivety. I had had a swift lesson in the value of money and the ways of the world.

My naivety continued. I naively assumed that the offer involved his taking me straight home, whereas what he was in fact offering was to keep me in the car with him until his shift ended. I was therefore taken completely by surprise when he suddenly stopped the car when an old lady waved at him.

“Grimmond Cemetery” she said, getting in next to me. The distance was similar to the drive from the airport, but the fee was just 80 cents, as opposed to the 10 dollars he had charged me. I really had paid for my bed and board.

For the next three hours I sat in the cab as all manner of people climbed in beside me; businessmen, tourists, workers returning from work, late shift workers going to work, a policeman requiring a free ride to “rest his feet.”

I learnt that the driver was called Miguel, because seemingly everyone else in Big City knew him by name.

I noted the fees which changed hands ranged from a hundred dollars (businessmen) to 20 cents (a woman and her child returning from hospital). It was like the perfect tax system, based on ability to pay rather than on pre-set rules. It took Miguel just a few seconds to assess the person’s wealth through the reflection in the driving mirror, his trained eye taking in every indictor of wealth, from the unsubtle display of expensive laptops and phones to the amount of wear on a smart-looking dress.

In the back of that cab I was introduced to all sides of Big City: the bustling tourist centre, crammed with traders and beggars, whose paws protruded at us through the car windows: the city areas where the suits worked, with policed streets empty of traders and ragamuffins: and the back streets, where the real people of Big City lived, narrow, crammed, noisy, friendly, but smelly.

It was in one of these streets we finally stopped. “This is home,” Miguel announced, just as I had given up all that that I would ever get to leave the cab.