Everyman's Taxi
1989 South Africa: Bra Nelson has left Robben Island. In parliament, FW De Klerk officially unbans the ANC. It is the end of an era. John Dexter is a middle aged white South African male who did the boarding school, played rugby and cricket, did the army, is somewhat racist, got the good job, got the suburban house with the pretty upwardly-mobile blond. Dexter negotiates rush-hour traffic with a mind-numbing hangover. Taxi drivers wreak havoc with him: Cutting him off and blocking his way. He seethes - yet his face is dangerously inscrutable: This is an old war. On the highway, he screeches to a halt trying to avoid a body flying through the air towards his Mercedes. Luckily however he manages to stop before trampling the body. While desperately proclaiming his innocence to a traffic officer, another driver arrives, and Dexter is absolved. Severely shocked, he grudgingly picks up a hitchhiker, who, in return for the lift, offers numbers for the horses at Turfontien. Enduring much derision from his peers in the pub, Dexter, who never bets, lays out ten bucks: the numbers come in and Dexter wins a fortune. Everything should be peaches and cream. That night he has a nightmare in which the body he nearly hit becomes a horrendous (To Dexter) African mask which bellows: 'Two weeks Dexta, and then I am coming to get you!' He schemes, 'Well, if I am rich and I am going to peg, then there's a score I need to settle.' He buys a Taxi and smashes the windscreen, sending his girlfriend Melanie and the Garden boy scuttling down the road. Bent into a pleading expression, A tear forms in one of the taxi's light clusters and runs down to the paving. Dexter sets out on the road...
