The Last Car on the Lot

The board at Vellhaven went from DELAYED to CANCELLED at eleven minutes past two on a Thursday afternoon in June, and it did it to every departure at once, which is how you know it is weather and not a single aircraft, and eleven hundred people in the north pier made the same noise at the same time.

Nkechi Balogun-Ward, who is thirty-three and who everybody except her mother calls Kiki, did not make the noise. She stood absolutely still in front of the board for about four seconds doing arithmetic, and then she turned round and started walking very fast towards arrivals, and she was already dialling with one hand while she pushed a trolley with the other, and on the trolley were three white boxes strapped down with a luggage belt.

The boxes contained a wedding cake. Not a whole one — the tiers were baked and the sugar work was done and the assembly was to happen on site — but everything that could not be bought, borrowed or improvised in a town eleven hundred kilometres away on a Friday evening, including a hundred and forty individually wired sugar freesias that had taken her nine days.

The wedding was on Saturday at two. It was her sister's. She had made the cake for nothing, over five weeks, in the evenings after the bakery closed, and had refused three times to let anybody else be responsible for getting it there, and she had booked the eleven-fifteen flight and then moved to the four o'clock because the four o'clock had a cargo hold temperature she was happier about, and that decision is the entire reason for everything that follows.

The car hire desks at Vellhaven are in a glass annexe past baggage reclaim and there are four of them. By the time Kiki got there — eleven minutes after the board changed, at a speed that she says now was undignified and that the man behind her says was the single most impressive thing he has ever watched a person do with a trolley — three of the four had a queue running out of the door and the fourth had a sign on it.

The fourth was the one with a car. It had exactly one car, an estate of a make nobody chooses, and the sign said RESERVED PICKUP ONLY, and the reserved pickup was standing at the desk with his passport out and had been for about ninety seconds.

He was somewhere in his forties, in a jacket that had been slept in, with a soft bag over one shoulder and the expression of a man who has been awake since four in the morning in a different country. His name, according to the piece of paper the clerk had just slid across the counter, was Rafferty Oduya-Kine, and he was going to Ardsmuir, which is eleven hundred kilometres north, and which is where Kiki Balogun-Ward's sister was getting married in forty-eight hours.

Kiki has been asked a great many times what she said, and she is honest about it, which is that she does not remember the words and that she is fairly sure they were not good ones.

What Raff remembers is a woman arriving at his elbow at considerable speed with a trolley, looking at the paperwork on the counter upside down, and saying, "Ardsmuir. You are going to Ardsmuir. I will pay for all of the fuel and half of the car and I will not talk to you for eleven hundred kilometres."

He said no. That is the part neither of them ever leaves out. He said no, immediately and without much politeness, because he had been awake since four, because he had a reason to be in Ardsmuir that he was not going to explain to a stranger in an airport, and because the last thing on earth he wanted was twelve hours in a car with somebody.

Kiki said, "All right," and did not argue, and stepped back, and went and stood by the window with the trolley, and got her phone out and started working through the alternatives out loud in a flat, fast, entirely undramatic voice: trains, which were full; coaches, which were full; a car from the town rather than the airport, which meant getting to the town; a van; a taxi, which she priced, out loud, at a number that made the clerk look up.

Raff signed the paperwork. He took the keys. He got about eleven paces towards the door and then stopped, and stood there, and afterwards he said that what did it was not the cake and was not the sister and was not the money. It was that she had not tried to persuade him a second time. She had asked once, been refused, and gone straight to solving the problem herself without a single word of reproach, and he had spent a very long time around people who did not do that.

He came back. He said, "What is in the boxes?" And Kiki said, "A wedding cake." And Raff Oduya-Kine, forty-six, on his way north for reasons of his own, said, "Is it heavy?" and she said, "It is about nine kilos and it must stay level and under twenty degrees," and he said, "Then it goes on the back seat and not in the boot, because the boot has no air in it."

He also, without saying anything about it, went back to the desk and had the second driver added to the agreement before they left the annexe, which cost him nineteen euros and four minutes and which meant that a woman he had refused to help eleven minutes earlier was now legally entitled to drive the only car at Vellhaven Airport.

They loaded it in fourteen minutes. He held the boxes while she made a nest of both their coats and her cabin bag to stop them sliding, and he did not once suggest that this was excessive, and she noticed that and has said that if he had rolled his eyes at the freesias at any point in the first ten minutes there would be no story at all.

They agreed the terms in the car park with the engine running, and Kiki wrote them on the back of the hire agreement, and that piece of paper is now framed, which she finds mortifying and which was not her idea.

One: she paid all the fuel and half the car. Two: they drove in shifts of two hours and neither of them argued about being tired. Three: no radio unless both wanted it. Four: no questions about why either of them was going to Ardsmuir.

Rule four was his. He proposed it at about the second minute, flatly, in a tone that Kiki recognised immediately as a door being shut, and she agreed to it without hesitation and without curiosity, which is the second thing he noticed about her.

"We are two people sharing petrol," he said. "That is all this needs to be, and it will be a great deal easier for both of us at hour nine if we have not been polite at each other for eight."

Kiki said that this was the most sensible thing anybody had said to her since Tuesday and that she wished more of life could be arranged that way, and then she got in, and checked the boxes, and put her seatbelt on, and said, "Right. Eleven hundred and four kilometres. I have done the route and if we do not stop we are there at half past three in the morning, which is stupid, so I have found a place at six hundred and ten that has rooms and a car park you can see from the window."

Raff said that she had done all of that between the car hire desk and the car park. And Kiki said that she had done all of that in the queue at the car hire desk, before she asked him, because there was no point asking him if the plan did not work, and Raff Oduya-Kine put the car in gear and said nothing for about six kilometres.

What he was thinking, and what he told her nineteen months later, was that he had spent four days being managed by kind people who kept telling him to look after himself, and that he had got into a car with a stranger who had simply made a competent plan and expected him to be an adult inside it, and that it was the first time in a fortnight he had been able to breathe properly.

They did not speak for the first hour and eleven minutes, which both of them regard as the foundation of everything.

Vellhaven to the northbound trunk road is forty minutes of ring road and industrial estate and it was raining, which is the weather that had closed the airport, and the wipers were on the fast setting and the car smelled of the inside of a hire car, which is a smell with no origin.

Kiki looked at the boxes in the mirror about every four minutes. Raff drove. Neither of them put the radio on because neither of them asked, and rule three cut both ways in a manner that neither of them had thought about when they wrote it.

At an hour and eleven minutes, on the long climb out of the coastal plain where the trunk road goes up through the cutting and the rain stopped all at once the way it does when you come out of a weather front, Raff said, "It is going to be fine. The road is dry from here and there is nothing on the map until the bridge."

And Kiki said, "Thank you," and then, after a moment, "Was that a question about why I am going to Ardsmuir?" And Raff said, "No. That was a man telling you about a road." And Kiki said, "Good. Because I would have told you and then you would have had to tell me, and I have read the rules."

He laughed. It surprised him more than it surprised her; it was the first time in eleven days and it came out wrong, more of a cough than a laugh, and she had the grace not to remark on it. They drove another twenty kilometres. Then he said, "The cake is your sister's." And Kiki said, "That is not a question." And he said, "No. It is not," and put the indicator on for the services, because rule two said two hours and it had been two hours.

Somewhere in there, without either of them noticing the moment, rule four had become a game rather than a wall, and they played it for the next eleven hundred kilometres, and the entire book is about the four occasions on which one of them broke it.