The Collar and the Cab

In an act of pure opportunist self-promotion and in the hope of selling some I am publishing some extracts from my new book The Collar and the Cab on this blog. There are 35 chapters so it will take a couple of months to offer a little from each. 

You can order the book direct from myself or from the publisher by following the link above.

 

6
Holbeck – “Working Girl”

It was at this time of day one Sunday when the sterile sanctuary
of the puritanical cell I had constructed for myself was violated
for the first time. So long as I was able to consign anyone whose
manner of life was out of sympathy with my sacred creed to a
large box marked “Sinners” it was never necessary to see them
as people. The lazy, undemanding and safe thing to do with
anyone who made a living from the sex industry in any form
was to consign them to the moral cesspool from which they had
emerged and was, I had convinced myself, merely a staging post
on the fast track to hell. It was that morning that I encountered
Debbie, the first person to challenge my warped value system
and compel me to take a long hard look at myself and my
prejudices.

Months later I would have known that collecting a young
woman from this particular area so early in the morning could
mean only one thing, but I had not yet had sufficient experience
of the reality of the seedier side of life in a large city to anticipate
the existence of someone like Debbie. I understood that not all
young women were tucked up in bed by protective parents with
a nice cup of cocoa by ten o’clock in order to protect their virtue,
but nothing could have prepared me for her, or saved me from
the subsequent collapse of the prejudices I had heretofore seen
as cardinal virtues.

Debbie was, I would judge, in her early 20’s, but her youth  was marred by the scars of abuse – some self-inflicted. Dressed in denim jeans, cheap slip-on shoes with no socks she was  struggling unsuccessfully to keep out the sub-zero temperatures
by drawing round her neck a quilted top that reminded me
of something left over at a church jumble sale that nobody
could be persuaded to take. Her appearance aroused a curious
combination of sympathy and curiosity – even a protective
reflex, since she was about the same age as my daughter who
was away at university at the time. Her mousy hair had clearly
not seen the business end of a hairbrush all night, but the
smile was disarming and warm, girlish yet engaging – what
you might call “cute”. Whilst this was probably in part a look
that was cultivated to appeal to her customer base it seemed
far from artificial. My turgid brain (well it was only 5.30 a.m.)
and my imagination finally cooperated sufficiently to cause me
to wonder if this was one of those scarlet women I had heard of
and believed to be as good as doomed to hell, and if so should
I make myself ritually unclean by transporting her anywhere?

 I dismissed the thought as she was wearing neither a short
skirt nor layers of cheap make-up, which were surely what all
such people wore, didn’t they? My natural defences receded
and my previously inert better nature invented several naïve
explanations to account for her walking the streets at this time
of day. The self-imposed delusion didn’t last long; five minutes
into the journey and in the middle of an inane conversation
about something as riveting as the Yorkshire weather she let
slip casually that she was a “working girl” and had been out
all night. By then it was too late; I had neither will nor desire
to turf her out. I had realised she was friendly, interesting and
– well, just plain nice. The barrier had been breached, and I
was talking not to a prostitute, but to Debbie, who seemed
normal and pleasant, and could have even been a member of
my flock. Try as I might, I could no more see her as a member
of a subclass of undesirables than as a Carmelite nun.

 ... here was I – someone who had always considered
himself the Indiana Jones of the Christian world – meekly sitting
in my cab without the faintest clue as to how I might help this scrap                                             of wasted humanity. The resulting silence – embarrassing
only for me I suspect – as I sought in vain for something concise
but incisive to say that would give God the upper hand, was
mercifully interrupted by an instruction to pull up in a street
adjacent to the one housing the purveyor of illegal narcotics;
later I would learn that she could have chosen any one of half a
dozen houses in this particular road. As Debbie made off with
the nonchalance of one all too familiar with streets I would be
reluctant to allow my wife to walk in broad daylight without
a sizeable detachment from the SAS I tried to prepare for the
second leg of the conversation by trawling through my database
of ready-made conversation scenarios guaranteed to bring
sinners to their knees in repentance, and succour to them once
they displayed the appropriate contrition. It was like playing a
game of chess where your opponent has just made an opening
move you have never come across before and you try to work
out what sort of defence, gambit or counter-attack might bring
you the required result.
I had considered and discarded a dozen or more when
Debbie returned with the same relaxed air that had characterised
her departure and we headed off for what passed as home. My
rising sense of frustration, even panic, at not being able to work
out something worthwhile to say was almost palpable when,
unexpectedly, Debbie herself broke the silence with a bombshell.
‘I believe in God … I used to go to church when I was little.’