An address in Ainslie, and when she came out in a light, gauzey green dress, telling me “Paviliion”, I wondered. The Pavillion is a nearby hotel, not a place for locals to go for a drink, but somewhere for visitors to stay. Bill Bryson, for instance.

But I didn’t say nothing.

It’s not at all easy to get to, and I had to head towards Dickson and back down Northbourne Avenue. When I indicated left to go in to the hotel entrance, she woke up, saying “No, the Carillon!”

Maybe she blushed, but I wasn’t looking.

We sorted it out and I promised to knock a few dollars off the fare. Down Limestone, Anzac, Constitution, and we see a sign saying that Wendouree Drive to the Carillon was closed. Something to do with the secret new ASIO headquarters building being constructed nearby.

So we had to go around the Kings Avenue roundabout – or rather the pot-holed temporary roads that mark the transition from roundabout to overpass – and across the bridge, under Kings Avenue, back over the bridge, and into the other entrance to the Carillon. I knocked off a few more dollars for that – I’d dimly remembered about the road closure from months ago – and all up it was a prime example of incompetence on my part.

The Carillon on Aspen Island is one of my favorite places. A beautiful elegant bell tower soaring white and pure above a small island, landscaped in a man-made lake, shores studded with monuments, showpiece buildings and grand vistas.

An open-air ninja concert featuring Amanda Palmer – Neil Gaiman’s brand new punk cabaret queen wife – and it looked like a merry scene as my passenger walked to join her friends, green gauze skirt brushing her thighs.

The clouds were darkening over Black Mountain as I turned the cab. Home was a few minutes away, and while I made a fresh cup of moka pot coffee, the skies opened. Heavy rain, lightning, wind – the whole deal, and I was glad that I was tucked drily inside Betsy.

Apparently it was an awesome concert. Umbrellas were not enough to shelter the crowd, and the lofty chamber of the Carillon can’t have provided much of a roof in the wind.

But the atmosphere! Reading Amanda’s twitter feed, it sounded like an incredible, albeit damp, time was had, leading to some monumental hangovers.

Me, I went off to hide in the underground carpark of Parliament House, to ponder whether I could have found any more roadworks and diversions on the way. I’ll be so very glad when they finish the current wave of construction!

So after sitting on Dickson rank for half an hour, slumping into my seat and jumping when a chap opened the door and got in beside me, I decided after dropping him off that I’d have a snooze.

But first I had to take my guy home.

“Braddon,” he says, but he couldn’t tell me the street name. “I’ll show you – just a bit this side of the football oval.”

Hmmmm. Never a good sign when a passenger doesn’t know where they are going. I had Chet Baker going and this guy had his eyes closed and was making kind of gurgling sounds in the back of his throat. He was ringing a whole lot of alarms with me, but he didn’t smell of alcohol. Maybe he was just tired. Like me.

I asked him a question and he opened his eyes. Last thing I want is someone falling asleep when I don’t know where to take them.

We found his place and I dropped him off. $11.50 on the meter, and he just wanted five dollars back. I expected a twenty proffered, but he’s got a wallet full of fifties and he hands me one.

“Ah, just give me thirty back.”

Well, of course I didn’t. I gave him back thirty five dollars, because that’s the fare and a sweet tip. He seemed surprised, but didn’t argue the point.

Next stop was one of my little parkland hideyholes, and I locked the doors, turned off the meter display, killed the sound, cranked the seat back, put my cap over my eyes, closed them and just then the despatch screen lit up with a silver job.

Naturally I hit the “Accept” button. Silver jobs are an extra eleven dollars, and generally a class of passenger who won’t run off without paying, smack you in the face or throw up in the ashtray.

Senator Brown of the Greens. Actually quite a nice bloke, and I’ve given him a lift before, years ago in a normal cab. He may well end up being quite an important party leader after the election.

He hopped into the back seat this time, along with another chap, who I assumed was a party official, and they talked party talk in low tones, Chet Baker blowing over the top.

After I delivered them safely, I looked at the airport rank, and it was reasonably empty after the stats screen showing sixty cars or so out there all evening, so I raced out there, tailed onto the line and had a family sitting in the cab fairly quickly.

“Fiji,” I thought to myself. In Canberra’s winter, Fiji is a popular, cheap and warm holiday destination. They had the international traveller feel to their bags, and they didn’t say much after a long day of travel.

Took them to Kambah, and found another favorite snooze spot nearby, where I actually got a good nap.

Woken up by a job coming in from Woden, and when I arrived at the pickup point, there was a young lady standing there with enough helium balloons to make her light on her toes. She crammed them into the back seat, completely filling my rearview with red and yellow and white and red, and directed me over the ridge to Weston.

She’d had a farewell party. Her naval officer husband was off on a four year posting, and it was goodbye to Canberra. Having been a naval wife myself, I was able to swap a few yarns with her.

And then I was empty again, cruising the winter streets of the nation’s capital, just Chet Baker and I in a silver limousine, cool as you like in the late evening.

Evenings are like that. Most of the afternoon rush is from the big offices and hotels to the airport, and once out there cabbies tend to stick around and have a chat with their mates when they see the work in town drying up.

I’d just taken a short fare from Woden to a nearby suburb, and as the hospital zone was showing only one cab logged in, with a half dozen jobs in the past hour, I parked in the taxi rank at the entrance. If I didn’t get a radio call from the surrounding residences, I might get a patient or a doctor fed up with the chronic lack of hospital parking.

Instead, nothing happened for half an hour and I checked my emails on the laptop. People would come out the hospital entrance and head towards me and then walk past to one of the other buildings, so I was always looking up and being disappointed.

Finally, the door opened and a man got in, sitting down beside me and growling.

Yeah. Growling, and if it wasn’t growling, it was snarling, his face contorted into a mask of anger. Honestly, I almost opened my own door to run away in panic.

However, I listened carefully, hoping to get some useful information out of the grunts and snorts.

I’m good that way. People tell me where to go, I take them there, and then they give me money. It’s a pleasant system, and it helps reduce stress at traffic lights and in traffic jams. I glance down at the meter, happily ticking away, and life is sunny.

No instructions were forthcoming. The man gave up, dug around in his pocket and fished out a torn piece of paper with a name printed on it.

I read the name. He looked hopeful. “Is that you?” I asked.

He nodded and pointed off down the road, with a hand that was shrunken and deformed into a claw.

“You can show me where to go?”

He nodded and gestured again.

I indicated, pulled away from the rank, turned on the meter and headed off into the winter dark.

I was pretty nervous, to be honest. Most passengers are very good, and most of my work is what you might call mind-numbingly repetitive. It’s the fares that are a bit out of the ordinary that bother me, because I’ve got to work out how to handle things on the fly, and if I make a mistake, it’s a vicious circle.

I once had a tourist with limited English, and when I drove him late at night to the Formule 1 motel out on the highway, taking the back road past the television studios and the bushland and the kangaroos, he ceased believing me when I mistakenly told him it was very close a couple of times, and he demanded I stop and let him out. He paid off and must have walked a long way back to civilisation, but I couldn’t have taken him the last two hundred metres to the (invisible from the road) motel, because he had clearly ceased to trust me and was on the verge of taking action against the obviously mad cabbie.

My bloke tonight couldn’t talk, he looked (and sounded) angry, and I had no idea where I was driving him. I was hoping for a short fare, to tell the truth. A house in one of the nearby streets, maybe.

Instead, he directed me out onto the main road and we sped up to match the traffic. He was pretty good at giving good indications of directions, and which lane I should be in, so I relaxed a bit. I’ve often said that language is not a problem with cabbies, as you can always tell the driver where to go with four hand signals. Go. Left. Right. Stop.

And heaven knows that there are often language barriers with cabbies. Immigrants arrive and get a cab licence because it’s an easy job, and they learn English on the go. If the passenger doesn’t know where to go, like because you’ve just picked up a tourist at the airport, why you simply hand them the street directory and they will tell you. And if there are any mistakes, hey, the meter’s running.

My passenger directed me off the main road, through the suburb of Curtin and north. I kept glancing at him as we approached each intersection, but he wanted me to drive on.

The last houses disappeared and then we were on the Cotter Road and soon on Lady Denman Drive, past horse paddocks, bushland, the zoo and the dam. Not quite your howling wilderness, but neither was it a busy road. I started wondering about someone scrawling a name on a bit of paper and luring an innocent cabbie out into a deserted layby.

Through a tricky intersection and on through Gridloch Interchange, heading for Belconnen. He seemed happy as we poured up Bindubi Street, tapping his hand in time with Chet Baker, the soft jazz soothing the savage breast.

We stopt at lights near the shops, and he gave some instructions, drawing a diagram with his finger on the console. Right and left and right. Right.

That took us to the hospital. Calvary Hospital instead of Canberra Hospital. My son bashes dixies at Calvary, and it’s a pleasant place, surrounded by bushland.

We were met at the main entrance. A man who seemed very pleased to see my passenger, who positively bounded out like a puppy and skipped away with him.

Um. Thirty three dollars on the meter. The man had muttered something about getting a Cabcharge, but here I was, sitting empty, passenger door open. Waiting.

Waiting.

Ten minutes and the man came back with a card, paying the fare.

“I’ll bet he has a lot of trouble with other cabbies!” I said.

“Yeah. He’s really a sweet guy. Thanks for your trouble.”

And it was no trouble, really. Sure, a bit of anxiety here and there, but once I stept into his shoes and saw cabdrivers through his eyes and imagined some of the worries he’d have with them, it was no trouble at all. No wonder he was tense and nervous to begin with. I’ll bet that he’d been taken for a drunk or a lunatic any number of times, and when he couldn’t explain, it would be even worse.

That’s one of the delights of the job. The regular fares are pleasant enough, and the money’s nice, and a couple of times a shift I’ll have a good old chat with a passenger, but you never know who is going to jump into the passenger seat and tell you where to go. Every shift is the same, but different.

It was past half-time. Half-time for me comes after the Perth flight at 2230. There’s one more Virgin flight – an hour later – before the airport closes for the night, but I’ve found that passengers on the low-cost carrier aren’t as likely to take a cab, and if there are more cabs than required, likely I’ll have wasted a long wait and the two dollar boomgate fee to get out of the airport cabyard.

I got a nice long fare off the Perth flight, down to Oxley, Chet Baker singing and playing his trumpet all the way. “That’s the best cab ride I’ve ever had,” she said, and I agreed with her. Driving a night cab along the deserted motorways of a well-planned city, soft jazz playing love songs, it’s no hardship at all.

I worked out of Kingston for the rest of the night. Kingston is tricky because the rank is out of direct view of the bars on Green Square, and unscrupulous cabbies will often cruise slowly along, or worse, park with their light on, snapping up passengers before they get to the cab rank where the honest cabbies are waiting. And waiting.

I got a long fare about half past twelve. Kingston to Cook with a wait for cigarettes at the Belconnen Shell servo. That put me over budget and, contemplating the remainder of a quiet night, I gave up, heading off for Braddon, a top-up, a “taxi wash”, vacuum and home to bed.

I was almost onto Belconnen Way when I got a radio job. Not fifty metres from the Belco servo, as it happened. And not a familiar address. Oh well. I turned left for adventure and profit instead of right for home and comfort.

Nobody waiting at the servo, and the street was a quiet little lane, serving the back entrances of various shops and repair yards. Not a regular place for taxi passengers. I hunted up the short lane, turned at the top and paused, scanning for human life.

A few cars moved out of a carpark, so there were people around. I realised this was the back entrance to the Pot Belly, a pleasant little bar often featuring live music. Probably locking-up time and a staff member needed a lift home. Probably a nice long fare, otherwise one of the others would give him or her a lift. Maybe even back into town, which would be nice.

Two figures approached, and one slid into the back seat. A young lady about middle age, looking like she’d had a few too many. I greeted her, asked her to buckle up, and prepared to move off, once I’d been given a destination.

Uh-oh. Instead of fastening her seat belt, she pushed her handbag into the front seat and climbed after it, sitting beside me.

“Uh, where are we going?”

“Home.”

“Where’s home?”

“I can’t tell you.”

Not good. Drunk passenger, no destination. I was also wondering if she’d fall asleep on me. Or throw up. Or have money to pay.

It emerged that getting home wasn’t a high priority. She eventually named a suburb, but when I pressed for more details, all I got was “we could find a park and neck.”

Hmmm. While I’m not averse to necking with middle-aged women, the authorities – meaning my wife – might not approve. Besides, I was thinking of getting her home safely and me home and to bed. I did my best to ignore her occasional touches.

I told her that the police station was just around the corner, and unless she gave me a destination address, I’d have no alternative but to leave her there. And, realistically, that was my only other option. I could hardly leave her seriously intoxicated all alone on the street, nor could I sit and chat with her all night. If “chat” was the word for what was on her mind.

Of course, one hears stories of female passengers offering themselves to cabbies, sometimes in exchange for a ride, sometimes on top of the fare, but apart from a bloke or two laying his hand on my knee, and a very rare peck on the cheek from a happy young woman, none of this had ever come my way.

Nor am I in a position to take advantage. I see my cab as a way of getting people home, not as a mobile love nest. Well, not for me, anyway – sometimes there’s some serious romance going on in the back seat.

We moved away from the now closed bar and around the corner to the police station. This didn’t have the hoped-for effect of demonstrating that I was serious.

Now, I’ll go to almost any lengths to help a person in distress, but if they won’t let me take them to where they need to be, then there’s not much I can do.

When I’d exhausted my options, I called up base, asking them to alert the Belconnen police. Within a few minutes, five burley coppers were assisting the lady from the cab. She couldn’t give them an address, either, but the sting came when she accused me of making advances towards her. I think the cops registered the look of outrage on my face, because they told me I could leave.

I hope they were gentle to her, either giving her a room for the night or working out where she lived.

I’m sorry it worked out that way, but I must reserve any blame for the people who continued to serve alcohol to an intoxicated person, and then pushed her into a cab as a way of getting rid of her.

And this is why the Pot Belly is now on my blacklist. If I get any late night calls there, I shall refuse to answer them.

Thursday night. It’s what they call “Uni Night”, and the clubs in Civic cut their prices to attract customers who would otherwise stay at home. Not the after-work drinkies of Friday, nor the solid frenzy of Saturday, Thursday night is Uni Night, and it’s when the cheap drunks go out on the town.

The drinks are half price, and this means two things. First is that some people drink twice as much as normal. Second is that the cheapskates drink the regular amount. Either way, they are not necessarily the sort of people I want in my cab.

You get a better class of drunk on Friday. People with money in their wallets. People who can handle their grog. People who can carry on a civil conversation. Mind you, as the night progresses, the drunks become increasingly ratty, but on Friday, they start from a high base, and by the time I finish up at three in the morning, they aren’t too bad.

Tonight there’s been thunderstorms hanging around. I scored at the airport early on. A young lady got in and said “Dunlop”. That’s about as far west as you can get in Canberra, with the state border only a couple of hundred metres away. Nice long fat fare and it’s freeway most of the distance. Once I dropped her off, I headed in to “Bernies From the Bay”, a fish and chip shop at Charnwood. Not healthy tucker, but they do a very good grilled fish and chips. Especially the hand-cut chips.

I ate my dinner outside, under the awning, just as a storm came through and dumped a lake full of water on Canberra. Luckily I was sheltered enough not to worry, but Lord, what a deluge!

I finished my meal and followed the storm all the way back to the airport, spectacular lightning strikes ahead of me, puddles on the road, the setting sun lighting up the landscape under the dark clouds. Spectacular.

I did a few airport jobs and when the planes stopped landing, hit the main Civic rank. By half past one, I was dubious. There was a long line of cabs on the rank and the drunks were looking very ratty.

Two young men got in and gave an address in one of the northern suburbs. The guy beside me was fine. He was almost sober, in fact, but his mate in the backseat was gibbering. Calling me names, talking at random, telling me how drunk he was.

We pulled up at the sober bloke’s apartment block and he paid me with a generous tip, while his sozzled mate got out and gave the flower beds a watering. Then he climbed back in for the second half of the trip, out to Gungahlin. The address he gave sounded implausible, he was extremely drunk, his financial status was uncertain, and he’d cranked the window down – never a good sign.

“Just pull into the servo, willya? I need some fags.”

The good old cigarette stop for the nicotine addict. Every cabbie knows it well.

Every cabbie reading this also knows what was on my mind, as I pulled in beside the service station for my passenger to get out and buy his cigarettes.

He left the cab door open, but that was no problem. I gave him maybe ten seconds and hit the gas, the door swinging shut as I peeled back out onto the road. He came back out and peered forlornly after me, but I was too far away and moving too fast.

I’m allowed to refuse people under the influence of alcohol or drugs, so I was within my rights. I’ve spent far too much time and money on passengers who fall asleep, throw up, run away without paying, abuse the driver, leave rubbish in the cab or some combination of the above. I’d had a very good look at this guy, and as well as being very drunk, he was pressing all the wrong buttons with me.

I don’t feel good about leaving him stranded, but then again he was on the main shipping routes of Canberra’s cab world, and he wouldn’t have waited too long before finding a less wary cabbie.

Or walking home. I sure hope he didn’t try walking home, because about fifteen minutes after I left him, there was a second rainstorm, dropping another Sydney Harbour’s worth of water on Canberra.

Just as I was taking the cab through the carwash to remove the mud spatters from the first storm. I’d had enough of ratty drunks and I deserved an early night.