The key is on a hook in a cabinet, and the cabinet key is in a drawer, and the drawer belongs to a woman called Pat who is on her break.
I have a visit at two, eleven miles away. It is twenty-five past one.
The book
You sign for the car in a hardback book with a pen on a string. Date, name, mileage out, mileage in, where you went.
Nobody writes where they went. The column says “visit” all the way down, for years, in forty kinds of handwriting. Somebody, a long way up the page, wrote “Asda (work related)”. I would like to know more and I never will.
Pat comes back at half past with a mug. She gives me the key and tells me the fuel card is in the glovebox, and that the number for it is on a note in the sun visor. Then she says it is not the number on the note, because that is the old number, and she tells me the new one. I write it on my hand.
What is in it
It smells of vanilla, from a cardboard tree, and under the vanilla of chips.
In the door pocket there is a windscreen scraper, a single glove and a parking ticket from a hospital. On the back seat there is a child’s car seat that nobody has ever managed to fit in under ten minutes. The cup holder has four pounds in it in small change, for car parks. It is the only money in the building that has never been audited and it has never once gone missing.
The seat is set for somebody much taller than me. The radio is on a station that plays hymns.
I move the seat. I leave the radio. It feels like somebody else’s and I am only borrowing the car.
The needle
It is on the red. It is always on the red.
Whoever had it last got back at five with nothing left in them, and thought, I will do it in the morning, and was not in the next morning. I know, because I have been that person. Somewhere in the building there is a colleague who remembers me for it.
So I stop at the garage on the ring road, and stand at the pump in the wind with the new number on my hand. I put in twenty pounds’ worth and keep the receipt in my teeth while I get the cap back on.
Two o’clock
I am four minutes late. I say sorry on the doorstep and I do not say why. Nobody on a doorstep needs to hear about Pat.
Coming back
I hang the key on the hook and put the receipt in Pat’s tray. Then I open the book to write the mileage in, and stop. I did not look at it when I set off.
I look at the line above mine. Whoever had the car last did not write theirs in either. Nor did the person before.
I go back through the pages. We have all been doing it for some time. According to the book, the car has not moved since March.
I write “visit”, and the date, and I leave the rest.
This is a scene, and it is made up, like the book. Nobody in it is a real person.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: School reception