Training | 2010.03.21
Conning for Kelvedon | Jon Canter
Lazy but you want to be liked? Then you\'ll find yourself paying the Nice Tax, just like we did
We came out of Colchester station at 10.30 on a Monday night. There she was, babbling into her phone, a wild-eyed, mini-skirted girl in her 20s, with a woollen tartan cap. The next time we saw her, a minute later, she was rushing up to us in the station car park, telling us how relieved she was to see a man with a woman, as she\'d just approached a man on his own and he\'d immediately "been sexual". My sexlessness aside, though, what did she want? The answer, of course, was that she wanted to tell us a story.
She told us she had to go to Kelvedon – two stops from Colchester – but didn\'t have enough money for the journey. She was, she assured us, "not a scallywag". We could come with her to the booking office, where they\'d confirm she\'d asked for a ticket. All she needed was "two or three quid".
By coincidence, I\'d spent the earlier part of the day with an independent radio producer, working on 300-word story outlines to pitch to BBC radio, to persuade them to fund me to write scripts. I could see little difference between me and the girl in the tartan cap; except that my wife and I had two or three quid and I\'m not sure that BBC radio does.
Speaking professionally, I\'d say the girl\'s pitch was pretty damn good. The early mention of the sexual predator drew us in and made us feel for her. The reference to the booking office was a reassuring detail. The assertion that she wasn\'t a "scallywag" showed empathy – at that very moment, we were wondering if she was a scallywag.
Was she telling the truth, though? Some might say her pitch was too artful to be believed. A truly desperate person wouldn\'t have been so polished. Then again, we weren\'t the first people to whom she\'d pitched. (There was definitely the sexual man, and possibly others before him.) You can\'t blame her for getting good with practice.
As I reached for my wallet for the three quid, though, her pitch changed. She no longer needed three. Actually, she said, she needed five or six. Did this outburst of greed make her entire story unbelievable? No. Greed, as any banker will tell you, is not necessarily the mark of a liar. Her greed didn\'t mean she wasn\'t going to Kelvedon. It was just that, now we were giving her some money, how about some extra towards some chips, say, or a cab ride home from Kelvedon station?
Three quid now seemed a bargain, given that what she really wanted was six, but my wife said we\'d give her two. She could get the remainder from someone else. What a woman. (My wife, that is.) If the story was a con, we\'d wasted only two quid. And if the story was true, we\'d allowed someone else to join us in donating to a good cause. We\'d started a charity bandwagon that would take this girl all the way to Kelvedon.
Later, as we drove off, I looked through the window of the booking office. She wasn\'t there. Maybe she was raising the rest of her fare. Maybe she was already on the platform. I doubted it. Anger and self-loathing had kicked in. Never mind that we were talking about only two quid. Forget the "only". We\'d given her two hard-earned, shiny pound coins so she could buy drugs. (It\'s always drugs, isn\'t it?)
Why had we been so nice? I\'ll tell you. Nice guys finish last and pay up first for the same two reasons: they want to be liked and they\'re lazy. All we had to do was accompany her to that booking office, as she herself had (bluffingly?) suggested, pay what it took to get her that ticket, walk with her to the barrier and watch her go through it, safe in the knowledge that no dealer gives you drugs in exchange for a Colchester-Kelvedon train ticket. Instead, we paid our two quid – our Nice Tax – and saved ourselves the bother. Who wants to spend their life thinking and acting like a detective, with 24-hour suspicion and mistrust coursing through their veins? Far better to pay up, lazily, without question. I only hope that BBC radio feels the same.
Jon Canter is a novelist and scriptwriter
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/14/con-train-drugs-nice-tax
