The Taxi Driver Who'd Met Me Before

The airport run was at four in the morning, and the driver was one of the talkative ones, for which — as it turned out — I will be grateful forever.

Small talk did its rounds: flights, weather, how long he had driven cabs. Nineteen years, he said, but he had been an ambulance man before that, back in another city — and he named my city of birth, six hundred kilometres away. I mentioned being born there. He asked which year, and made the standard joke about probably having carried my mother, the way ex-ambulance men apparently must.

Then, filling the 4 a.m. quiet, he told the strangest-night-of-the-job story he had clearly told a hundred times. A February blizzard, whole districts unreachable, and a first-time mother going into labour a month early in a top-floor flat with a broken lift — 'building like a wedding cake, on the hill by the water tower' — and how the baby had arrived before the hospital did, on the landing, wrapped in the father's enormous checked coat because the blankets were still in the ambulance four floors down. A girl, he said. Loud one. Born at 4-something in the morning, funny detail he always remembered because his watch had frozen on the way in and 4-something was its permanent opinion.