‘There’s still time,’ he said.
‘Don’t think bad of me, but I kind of wrote off the cavalry coming over the hill when I heard that your woman…’
‘Farnan.’
‘…her… when I heard she wasn’t stumping up the cash. I mean, I really thought, the day she walked around the factory…’ She threw up her hands. ‘Ah, well.’
It seemed as though there was nothing else to say. Except…
‘Do you know the only thing I regret?’ she said. ‘I never actually got to drive in one of them.’
He looked at her.
‘Don’t act so surprised,’ she said. ‘Not many of us did.’
‘No, no, I wasn’t… What are you doing now?’
‘Going for my bus.’
He gestured to the cars. ‘I’ll drive you.’
‘In one of these?’ She laughed. ‘You’ll not drive me far: eight minutes’ worth of petrol, remember, not a second more, not a second less.’
‘So I’ll drive it round to the service pump and fill it up.’
‘You’re mad,’ she said then gave up arguing. ‘Sure, go on ahead.’
He stepped away from the wall into the lot with her. ‘You get to choose.’
‘Hm.’ She walked along, eyeing them up. ‘So hard to decide.’ She stopped before one, angled her head to the left and the right, shook it finally, ‘No.’ She turned abruptly and pointed at more or less random. ‘This one.’
‘A very good choice.’ He raised her door before his own. She smiled. Of course she did.
For all the thousands of times she had clambered in and out of them, it was still a surprise on sitting down properly inside a finished car, buckling the seat belt, pulling the door closed behind her, how low the suspension was, and she was reminded, even before the engine started, of the dreams she sometimes had of flying — always close to the ground like this. Then the engine started — a sound of rocket boosters igniting (she was sure that was something that, given time, they would have had to work at) — and the car surged forward.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I haven’t driven them very often myself.’
He stopped again, a little untidily, fifty yards further on. The service pump was padlocked, but he had the key for it in his pocket, as it seemed he had a key for everything.
She pressed herself back against the seat, turning her head to one side, into shadow, as they passed the security man — a wave from Randall was all it took — at the gate; passed a banner saying, Don’t Let Our Factory Die.
‘You’ll have to direct me,’ he said once they were out.
‘No,’ she said. It was partly the car — she didn’t want to have to be getting out so soon after getting in — but there was more to it than that. ‘You take me the way you think we should go.’
‘You sure?’
She still had her head averted, looking out the window. ‘Positive.’
The way he thought they should go was on to the M1 at Dunmurry headed south. The speed — or the concentration of it in her solar plexus — was like nothing she had ever experienced. In every car they overtook, heads turned. Kids put their hands to the windows and frankly gawped. Lisburn passed, Moira, Lurgan, greater or lesser densities of light. They came off finally at the exit for Portadown, went round a roundabout and pulled into a lay-by where they switched over, him in the passenger seat her in the driver’s, and — oh! she didn’t even want to say what that felt like — drove back on to the motorway again headed in the opposite direction. It was deep dark now, the evening rush hour long since over, few vehicles of any kind driving into the city, so that for minutes at a time it was as though they had the entire road system to themselves.
They barely spoke. Even the switchover had been agreed with little more than glances and shrugs. Driver then driven, driven then driver. Two parts of the same thing.
They left the motorway again where they had first joined it then took to the back roads, some of them barely wide enough for the car to pass along, until they had climbed above the housing line in the foothills of Black Mountain or Divis — Liz could never tell the two apart, though as had been explained to her a long time ago there was no real distinction, Divis being the best fist the English could make of dubh, the Irish for black.
She cut the engine, letting her head fall back against the headrest.
‘That was just unbelievable,’ she said.
He peered into the darkness, unrelieved by streetlights, shop signs, the glow even of a screen between badly pulled curtains. ‘So is this where you live?’
‘Don’t be funny. I just needed a bit of time after that before I went back.’
For the moment there was no sound in the car but their breathing.
‘Have you lost something?’ he asked.
She had, she realised, been feeling around beneath her seat.
‘What? No. It’s just…’ She folded her hands in her lap then thought what difference did it make, really? ‘Do you know what it is? They all have messages scratched in them, under the seats sometimes, sometimes behind the dashboard.’
‘You’re kidding me?’ He sounded, as she had hoped he would be, more amused than aghast. ‘Don’t you know that’s a sacking offence?’
She held out her hand. ‘Look at me, I’m shaking.’
‘So did you…?’
‘Once.’
‘I don’t suppose there’s any point me asking…’
‘No.’ She put a finger on his lips. His lips. On an impulse she took hold of his face with both hands and pulling him to her kissed him long and hard. Drew back eventually. ‘Would you mind taking me home now?’
Before he could reply she had pushed up the door, letting the air in, and had stepped out on to the mountain road.
‘I am doing the right thing,’ she was telling herself. ‘I am doing the right thing.’
*
Randall dropped her, at her request, a couple of hundred yards (she said) from her house on a pleasant-enough-looking housing estate, marked out nevertheless — it was, apparently, inescapable — by flags and painted kerbstones. ‘This is probably close enough,’ she said. ‘It’s not as if you’re driving a Ford Escort. I usually walk the last bit anyway from the bus stop there.’
The bus stop too had been painted, in three segments, as though to deter the wrong sort of bus from stopping.
She let herself out, but when she had the door halfway down again she stopped and ducked her head underneath.
‘Do you really want to know what I wrote in that car? “I made this.”’
‘I don’t think anybody could argue with that,’ he said before her head slipped from view again and the door came down the rest of the way.
His last sight of her was illuminated in the sweep of his headlights as he turned the car about. She squinted against the glare, but kept on walking.
He drove back through the quiet suburban streets: gas stations, Chinese carry-out restaurants and bars the only businesses showing signs of life, these last, with their security fences, razor wire, and cameras, having the air of prisons rather than places of public resort.
He drove, without a second glance, past the entrance to the Conway Hotel, before turning right off the main road and a little later right again, and — another wave to security as he passed — through the factory gates. He crawled through the lot, up and down the aisles, until he found the empty bay and reversed the car into it. When he had walked a couple of dozen paces he turned and looked back and already he had trouble picking out the car he had taken. If it hadn’t been for the extra miles on the clock and the ache still in his jaw, he could almost have convinced himself the past couple of hours had never happened.