Belfast-Cab: NI-D6

A Story by Abishai100

A special Belfast 'cabbie' named Satan offers Northern Ireland joyrides and dreams of escaping the real disease.

A UK fable inspired by Night on Earth.

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It's not so easy living in Belfast (Northern Ireland), even in this 20th-anniversary year of 9/11, when we're all trying to celebrate the good communion feeling of globalized safe traffic linked to mass anti-terrorism. After all, inter-religious schisms between the Irish-Catholic minority and British-Protestant majority population(s) in Belfast (Northern Ireland) have been felt for generations, and people simply sometimes live in this troubled area of the United Kingdom huddled in the shadows of life.

There's some nice comic books and paperbacks in Belfast news-stands and stores and book-shops, so one can indulge in the daydreams of escapism and just forget about that dark reality of enduring this sort of sectarian division between Catholics and Protestants who otherwise comprise the two dominant denominations of the world Christian community. This pulp-fiction entertainment comprises a modern Northern Ireland mindscape for real sanity-maintenance and innocence remembered.

Amlan Satan's an average taxi-driver in Belfast (Northern Ireland). He drives an average taxicab in Belfast everyday and through most of Sunday. He drives from about 8 am in the morning to about 2 am at night, takes in some late night pub-drinks or goes to a late-night exotic theater-show and maybe tries to meet a wandering attractive young woman, be-she Protestant/Catholic, and then calls in for a 2-3 hour rest-sleep before repeating the work cycle at 8 am. The only other time Amlan rests is sometimes for a 2-hour midday nap in his cab when thoroughfare is low and no calls from the cab-company station-manager come in to his taxi-CB. Amlan is a typical cabbie in Belfast, an Algerian-born resident of Northern Ireland.

Satan drives his taxicab in Belfast regularly and drives well. His customers sometimes compliment on the quality of his driving, to which he returns their thanks but mostly hopes for an extra tip for the joy-ride. He drives through sectarian areas of Belfast, those marked with either pro-Protestant or pro-Catholic wall-graffiti/art. He sometimes tells his passengers, if they're travelers-tourists that the wall-imagery represents sectarian 'sane life' in Northern Ireland. His passengers appreciate his basic professional conversational tone while in his Belfast cab.

Satan makes just enough money to dabble in some art supplies from a local Northern Ireland shop where he procures oils and paints and watercolor-sets and papers and canvases so he may indulge in this hobby of making side-show art and pastime creative works which sometimes he makes phone-photos of to post online in mosaics about the quality of everyday living life in the United Kingdom. Sometimes his artworks represent map-imagination, sometimes comic book oriented daring, sometimes everyday holiday-season merriment, sometimes Belfast blues, sometimes random depictions of survival or daydreams.

SATAN: I make myself acid-guns for protection in my Belfast taxicabs.

In fact, Amlan Satan wields two toy water-revolvers which he inserts with thin glass tubes in the shooting-piston to fill with home-made corrosive HCL acid. He keeps these 'acid-guns' in his cab glove-compartment, in the off-case that one of his passengers is a psycho or a 'rogue' member of the IRA (Irish Republican Army) or UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) who seeks to make anarchy/violence/hell or try to steal his cab/livelihood. He'll just shoot such a psychopath in the hands with his acid-gun should such a horror-incident arise, and he never tells anyone this, and this problem has not yet arisen in Satan's magical Belfast cab.

To Satan, life in Belfast is a combination of Samhain/Halloween spirit and everyday United Kingdom raw survival-consciousness, a way to think about supermarket shopping, pretty-woman watching, and basic driving. To live in Belfast, sectarian-troubles, and Catholic-Protestant mixed, is to see the dark side of Western civilization, neglected by the 'real news' of Israel-Palestine. To Satan, life in Belfast (Northern Ireland) is like a diagonal silent-film.

SATAN: I doubt one of my passengers, should he/they be, will confess to me while in my peaceful cab that they're rogues.

He considers driving a cab in Belfast (Northern Ireland) a practice of basic and humbling peace and sanity and self-control. You never know while driving if you might witness firsthand events linked to some undesirable underworld crime, perhaps blood-diamond smuggling related, perhaps IRA-UVF skirmish-connected, perhaps police-violence incisive, perhaps burglary-immersed, perhaps arson-conceived. You just want life in Belfast to be regular and not out-of-the-ordinary! That's what Amlan Satan provides during his cab-rides, and his passengers like him for it, and it's made him a popular Northern Ireland cabbie, with his distinction license-plate number --- NI-D6.

The other secret Belfast Cabbie Satan has is that a number of his post-sunset passengers happen to be Northern Ireland prostitutes. They may be Catholics or Protestants but are usually Catholics, since Catholics compose the majority of the under-classed or lower-working class population group of Northern Ireland (Belfast). He picks up these NI prostitutes after sunset and takes them to destinations or from them, perhaps to their customers' hotels/homes or from them.

This 'flock' of female passengers have come to regard Amlan Satan as a very dependable Belfast (NI) cabbie. They know to regard him with perfect dependence, and they know he's someone they can trust to be the right sort of night-driving 'smalltime hero' who'll just/simply get them to where they need to go and on time! In fact, the flock of female passengers in Satan's NI-D6 taxicab refer to him as Captain Hook ('the hookers' favorite').

On some rare events, such as Halloween and Christmas, Satan has a romantic encounter with one particular Belfast prostitute/hooker who happens to be Irish-Catholic --- Chalize O'Meara. She tells him of the sad tale each encounter of how her brother, Sean, a guerrilla-recruit of the N-IRA, was brutally killed by an ex-Brit policeman who joined a rogue gang of the UVF in Northern Ireland (Belfast). Every time she weeps and makes love to Amlan, and every time, Satan promises he'll marry her someday and take her to the United States where they'll open an art-shop!

SATAN: Life in Belfast ain't a bedtime-story, but sometimes I dream of Charlize as my special fairy-witch of prayers.

CHARLIZE: Amlan drew me this lovely-cute sketch of a Christmastime antihero, 'Evil Elf' or something --- reminds me of Sean.

Can a working-man like Amlan Satan make it in Belfast (Northern Ireland) in this 20th-anniversary year of 9/11, when anti-civilization terrorists destroyed the capitalism-symbolic World Trade Center in NYC and awakened the world to the 'dark reality' that nothing was sacred in terms of traffic-government in modern times? Will Satan in his Belfast NI-D6 cab make it to the United States with his 'fairy-angel' part-time hooker Charlize O'Meara? Is this a tale of Irish fortune...or Irish darkness?