Chapter 2
Chapter 2: Packing and Other Forms of Warfare
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Chapter Two: Packing and Other Forms of Warfare
The morning of the trip, Kane and I had our first argument before nine o'clock, which is actually a personal best.
It was about the snacks.
"We don't need three bags of crisps," he said, looking at my contribution to the car food situation spread across the kitchen table.
"We need exactly three bags of crisps," I said. "One for the first hour, one for after lunch when we're in that dead zone between hungry and not hungry, and one emergency bag."
"Emergency crisps."
"You laugh. But one day you will be stuck in traffic on the M5 with nothing but the memory of the emergency crisps you left at home, and you will know."
He picked up the smallest bag. "This one is prawn cocktail."
"Yes."
"You hate prawn cocktail."
"They're for you."
He put the bag down. He didn't say anything. I moved past him to get a carrier bag from under the sink and began loading things in.
Here is what I've noticed about Kane: he receives small kindnesses with the same expression a person makes when they've sneezed and caught it — a fraction of surprise, swiftly composed. Like he wasn't expecting it and is trying not to make it weird.
"The playlist is already loaded," he said, after a moment.
"Which playlist?"
"Road one. About four hours. Transitions to road two around Birmingham."
"Did you put the Springsteen track on?"
"Obviously."
"What about the Gillian Welch?"
"First fifteen minutes of road two."
I zipped up the carrier bag. "You're a reasonable man."
"I know."
Joey arrived at nine-fifteen in a car he'd borrowed from someone and parked so badly I could see it from the kitchen window and feel personally affronted. He came up the stairs with the energy of a man who had already had two espressos and considered this a personality trait.
"Roma!" he said, as if we were old friends and not two people who had met at Kane's birthday drinks eight months ago and had since maintained a civil but cautious détente.
"Joey," I said.
"You look great."
"I look like someone who got up at seven and packed an emergency crisp bag."
"That's the look I meant." He punched Kane on the shoulder and I watched Kane grin — completely, without thinking about it. The grin of someone who hasn't needed to calibrate.
I felt an unfamiliar small thing, looking at it. I put it back wherever it came from.
Lexi arrived at nine-thirty with a tote bag, a neck pillow, and a level of logistical preparedness that I found both impressive and quietly threatening.
She had a printed itinerary.
Not on her phone. Printed. Laminated, even — no, not laminated, but there was definitely some kind of sleeve.
"I did a rough day-by-day," she said, setting it on the table next to my crisp bags. "Nothing prescriptive. Just options."
I looked at it. There were colour-coded columns.
"This is wonderful," Joey said, completely sincerely, and I revised my opinion of him upward by two points.
"I thought it might help," Lexi said. She looked at me. "I left lots of flexibility — I know you like to be spontaneous."
I do not, actually, like to be spontaneous. I like to feel spontaneous while secretly having a backup plan. But I was touched that she thought I did, so I smiled and said, "Looks brilliant," and meant it.
Kane appeared behind her and kissed her on the top of her head. "Car's loaded," he said. "Let's go."
The seating arranged itself without discussion. Lexi front, Kane driving, me behind Kane, Joey behind Lexi and already talking. Of course. Naturally. Fine.
I opened my window two inches and watched the city unspool as we pulled out of the street.
"Road one," Kane announced, and the playlist started.
The Springsteen track was third. I know because I know the playlist. I know because I've been in this car a hundred times and Kane makes the same playlists for the same moods and I have learned the shape of them without meaning to.
Lexi reached over and turned it down slightly.
"Sorry," she said, "I just — can I find something? I have this podcast we could all —"
"Yeah, of course," Kane said.
I looked out the window.
The podcast was fine. It was about urban architecture. It was, actually, right up Kane's street, and he and Lexi and Joey had a whole conversation about it while I watched fields replace buildings out the window and ate my first bag of crisps forty-five minutes ahead of schedule.
Emergency bag, I reminded myself. I always have the emergency bag.
Somewhere past Coventry, Joey fell asleep.
This was the most useful thing he had done so far.
Lexi was reading something on her phone with her neck pillow on. Kane had the podcast off now, and in the quiet the road playlist had come back on — lower, background, but there.
I could see his eyes in the rear-view mirror. Not pointed at me, just: there. The particular quality of someone driving — focused outward but the face visible and at rest.
"Stop reading my mirror," he said.
"I'm not."
"You're doing your assessment thing."
"I don't have an assessment thing."
"You look at people like you're trying to work out the load-bearing walls," he said. "It's deeply unsettling."
"That's very ironic coming from you."
He made a sound that was almost a laugh. "Fair."
We were quiet for a while. The road stretched ahead. I ate a prawn cocktail crisp from his bag and put it back in the holder without asking.
He didn't say anything.
The thing is, I had six months of not saying anything. Six months of a very specific education in when to say something and when to let the quiet do the work.
Month one: I had a toothache for four days before I mentioned it, because I'd learned not to make things other people's problems. I said it once, at dinner, as a passing complaint — I think I need to book a dentist, my back tooth has been killing me. Moved on. He didn't ask again. The next morning he'd left a Post-it on my door with the address of the NHS dentist two streets over that was accepting patients, their number, and the note: they have Tuesday morning slots, you're free Tuesdays. He'd checked my calendar.
Month two: We made carbonara on a Sunday evening. This was a joint effort in the way that joint cooking efforts usually are — one person doing the actual cooking (him), one person sitting on the counter with strong opinions (me). The eggs scrambled. This was, I maintain, a structural issue with the timing. He maintains I added the pasta too fast. We argued about this for twenty minutes while eating the scrambled carbonara, which was still fine, actually, and he laughed — properly laughed, the kind that doesn't perform itself — when I said "I refuse to accept that I am the kind of person who can't make carbonara" and simultaneously ate a fourth serving of it.
Month four: I read him the first page of a novel I'd just started, while he washed up, because I felt like it. He didn't ask me to. I just read it aloud and he listened without turning round, and when I stopped he said "keep going" and I read him the next two pages and he said "yeah, that's good," and dried his hands, and that was it. We've never mentioned it. It just happened and became part of the way things are.
In the front seat, Lexi shifted, glanced back at me briefly with a small polite smile, then turned back to her phone.
Behind her, I watched the road and thought about nothing in particular.
That's what I told myself, anyway.