Pension Day

Pension Day

  Patrick O'Duffy

  Copyright 2012 Patrick O'Duffy

  Dunny pulled the cab around the corner, saw the little old lady with her shopping bags by her feet and decided that she was the next one he would rob.

  He parked beside her, got out and came around the side. 'Do you need a cab, ma'am?' he asked. It was good to kick off with ma'am, he'd learned. Got the oldies on side and into the car.

  'Oh, aren't you nice?' the old woman said in a chirpy voice. 'That would be lovely, yes. Can you help me get these into the back seat?'

  'Sure,' Dunny said and picked up the grocery bags. Usual grandma shit, tinned food and powdered milk and a cheap saucepan. Stuff you need to stretch a week's worth of money into two week's worth of occasional eating. Whatever. All that mattered was whether she had the remaining week's cash stuffed into her ratty handbag.

  Once she was in the bag the old bag gave him directions and quickly revealed herself as one of the chatty ones, the ones who wanted to tell Dunny their whole fucking life stories because no-one had given a shit about listening to them for like thirty years. 'My name's Agnes, darl. What's yours?'

  'Darryl, ma'am.' Today it was Darryl, last fortnight it was Darren. Dunny always used something that started with D because it was too confusing to come up with something else.

  'Well, it's nice to meet you, Darryl', Agnes said, pulling steel knitting needles from her bag and putting them to work on a ball of wool. 'You look much nicer in person than you do in your photo.'

  'Ah, right. Thanks.' Not many of Dunny's passengers looked at the photo, which was good, because the guy in it had brown skin and a turban.

  The smartest move Dunny ever made (it was the top of a fairly short list) was jacking that Indian prick's taxi last year. He kicked the curryman's nuts in, grabbed his keys and left him in a ball crying his jibber-jabber while Dunny drove off. Serve the prick right for trying to stop Dunny smoking in the back of the cab.

  But at first it seemed like a waste of effort. He tried to offload the taxi, but no-one wanted it – what the fuck does anyone but a cab company want with a cab? So then he thought about selling it for scrap metal, or painting it black and driving it himself, or maybe just setting it on fire and watching it burn. Some days that was enough to make him happy.

  But then he had an idea. And those were rare and precious enough for Dunny that he clung to it like it was a vagina stuffed with diamonds.

  'Oh, what a nice day it is. They do all that talk about climate change but it's just lovely today.' The old woman sounded like a sparrow, all tweets and trills, and her knitting needles went click-click-click like a muffled stopwatch. She went on and on like all the talkers, glad to have a captive audience for a change, and Dunny nodded and said uh-huh a couple of times and didn't tell her to shut the fuck up because she was going to make it worth his while in the end. As per the big idea.

  Dunny changed the plates, scraped off the ID number, tore out the GPS (and got twenty bucks for it down the pub) and started driving around the western suburbs, looking for passengers. Not in any official capacity, of course. Actually driving people around was for suckers. Shit, that was a job, and even without forking over whatever the fuck to the taxi company it still stank too much like work.

  No, Dunny picked and chose his days and he picked and chose his passengers. Little old ladies, second and fourth Thursday of the month.

  Pension day.

  All he had to do was cruise around the supermarkets around midday, waiting for the old women to come out with their fortnight's shopping, ignoring any other dimwit who tried to hail him for a ride. Once a granny flagged him down, it was just a matter of driving somewhere secluded, like an industrial district, and then tearing their money from their trembled, wrinkly hands.

  It was a sweet fucking gig. Most of the biddies round this side of Melbourne were the ones who didn’t trust banks or understand EFTPOS, so they got their whole pension out in cash the day it came through. Four or five rides on Thursday arvo would usually land him about a grand, and if he came up short he could always go back for seconds on Friday. Then it was time to stick the cab back under the tarp, pick a new suburb to trawl next time and spend the money on getting fucked up good and proper.

  'Do you have any children, Darryl?'

  'Me? Nah.' None he'd admit to, anyway.

  'Oh, that's a shame. I had two boys, but one passed away and the other, well, he doesn't visit any more.' Blah blah fucking blah. It was starting to get on Dunny's tits. If old Agnes didn’t shut up soon she was going to be one of the unlucky ones who didn't get driven somewhere close to home after he took their money. Or worse.

  Dunny's grandma was an evil old bitch who used to dunk his hands in near-boiling water if she caught him jacking off or swearing. So if any of the old ladies reminded him of her – and a lot of them did – he took it as a good enough reason to smack 'em around a bit. This one old bird tried to scratch his face so he punched her in the gut, kicked her walking frame into bits and then turfed her out. Told her to find her own fucking way home.

  'Go on then, grandma. Crawl.'

  He could hear her wail as he drove away, and to be honest that didn't make him feel too good about himself, but he'd picked her up between the bank and the shops so he scored her whole pension and the guilt soon evaporated like meth in a lighter flame.

  He told his mates about the cab scam. They were supposed to be impressed, but they just gave him shit: 'Yeah, nice work Dunny, smack around some grannies.'

  'Don't fuckin' call me Dunny!' he said, same as always. And they ignored him, same as always, but fuck 'em, he was the one with the taxi and he was the one pulling in enough every fortnight to keep him in beer and smokes and speed. So who was the smart one now, eh?

  Dunny. That's fucking who.

  So this morning, three months after stealing the cab, Dunny woke up about eleven, scratched his balls, drank the last of the instant coffee and set off to Sunshine to start harvesting grannies. He'd already collected six hundred bucks after a couple of hours, and once Agnes was in the bag he'd do maybe one more before calling it quits and heading to the pub.

  Shit, nearly two-thirty. Time to finish this old bird off before traffic started to pick up.

  Dunny turned down a side street and parked the cab in this fortnight's spot, an estate around Tottenham with nothing but old warehouses and broken fences to bear witness. Agnes looked out the window and blinked. 'Wait, this isn't the nursing home,' the old woman said.

  'Nah, it's not.' Dunny got out and came round to open the back door. Agnes shrank back.

  'You said you'd take me home to Braybrook!'

  'Yeah, well, give us ya pension money and maybe I'll drop ya close to home.' And he leaned into the back seat to reach towards her. 'Come on, gimme that fuckin' purse!'

  She dropped the handbag on the seat, Dunny went to grab it, and that's when Granny Agnes stabbed him in the left eye socket with her knitting needle, the sharpened metal tip punching through his eye to ram into the bones around his sinus cavity.

  Dunny had once broken his hand in a fight and still had to punch a dude with it, and he thought that nothing could ever hurt more than that, but he was wrong, wrong, fucking wrong.

  Then the second knitting needle punched through the crotch of his jeans to pin his cock to his right nut, and Jesus fuck that was bad but still not as bad as his eye. Dunny flopped around screaming in the back seat while Granny Agnes got out the other side, and when she pulled the saucepan out of the grocery bags and cracked him across the head with it, he was almost grateful for the black rush of unconsciousness.

  He couldn't have been out for more than a few minutes before he came to, choking on the blood gushing from his sinuses down into his throat. He was lying in the foot
well of the cab's back seat, blind in one eye with his legs dangling out the open door, with Agnes in the front seat and driving along at a fair fucking clip. He screamed, spitting a mass of red and black garbage onto the floor in the process.

  'Welcome back, sunshine,' said the old woman. 'I was hoping you'd wake up before I dropped you off.'

  Dunny could do nothing but moan in response.

  'You're always such smart cunts, you young people, aren't you?' said Granny Agnes, and through the blindness and agony Dunny still felt a flicker of outraged horror that a little old lady would use language like that. 'You always think you invented everything, like your internets and your gay marriage. Probably think you were the first smartarse to ever try picking on the oldies. Like we never saw spivs like you before. Like none of us ever tried it ourselves, back when it was only a shilling to get from Flinders Street out to Camberwell.'

  'Fucking hell, grandma! Ya fuckin'... my eye...' Dunny could hardly talk. It took most of his strength just to breathe past the mess in his throat and endure the pain from his ruined crotch. Every few seconds the cab would bounce and his feet would scrape the road and pain would tear through him all over again.

  'Oh grow a pair, you little bastard. Soft, you lot are. Too bloody soft. I did three stretches in Ballarat by the time I was your age. That was a proper prison, not like your holiday camps now. They tore it down before you were even born. The hags in there, they'd have eaten you for breakfast and asked for seconds. But no, you never think anyone has history. You never think that old people used to be younger and smarter and harder than you.'

  Dunny could only just hear her little speech over a chorus of honks and horns, passing drivers raising the alarm in case the taxi's driver hadn't realised that the back door was open and that a man's legs were hanging out. He wanted to call for help, but couldn't manage more than a ragged and gurgling whimper.

  The cab bounced as it took a corner and sped up even faster, horns louder and louder as it moved into a busier street. Agnes raised her voice, chirping like a frantic and furious pigeon.

  'You shouldn't have robbed my bridge partners, you little bastard. And you sure as shit shouldn't have beaten up my friends.'

  Agnes slammed the brakes and yanked the steering wheel hard. The cab jack-knifed around anticlockwise before jerking to a halt, and Dunny's arse flopped out the open door onto the road, the knitting needle in his face scraping along the floor in the process. The sudden and massive spike in pain paralysed him, and he could do nothing as the old woman got out and laboriously dragged him the rest of the way out of the cab. He lay on the gravel, helpless and drooling blood.

  The old woman pulled the knitting needles out of his ball and skull, tsking as she wiped the ruined remains of his eye on his nose. If he'd had any strength left he could have grabbed her as she bent over him but he was fucked, he was fucked, and he could do nothing as she said:

  'Go on then, dickhead. Crawl.'

  And Dunny heard her close the cab door. Heard her drive off.

  Heard the honk honk honk of oncoming horns.

  ###

  Afterword

  I’m not sure exactly what put the image in my mind of an old woman stabbing someone in the eye with a sharpened knitting needle, but it was there and I had to do something about it so I wrote this story. It’s a charmer, isn’t it?

  If you liked it, you should check out my other ebook titles, particularly The Obituarist, which is another crime story (although a less nasty one). The rest of the ebooks are more horror/fantasy/weirdness – but hey, maybe you’re one of those odd ducks who like both crime and horror. I certainly do.

  The cover image is a photograph of a Melbourne taxi – well, what else could I really use? – taken by Chris Keating in 2006 and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. I then downloaded it, ran a paper-cutout Photoshop filter over it and put the title and my name in the only spots where they would be clear once the image was in greyscale.

  The Obituarist

  Hotel Flamingo

  Godheads and Other Stories

  'The Descent'

  'Watching the Fireworks'

  'The 86 Tram Disaster as Outlined in a Series of Ten Character Studies'

  'Hearts of Ice'

  Connect with me online

  Website: https://www.patrickoduffy.com

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/patrickoduffy