We were just coming back from a football match in Manchester and I was trying to find the car.
To get to the match we had to walk a lot. Liam had brought a friend but even so, we were going to arrive very early. Nobody else was even making their way. And we were lost cutting through a suburban estate.
Middle class, wide roads curved left and right, sided by red brick houses and manicured lawns. It wasn’t very exciting.
I told the boys to hang back, ”We don’t want to get there so early”, but they went on ahead.
And when eventually we did get close to the stadium, only a few stalls were opening up for food.
I wanted hot dogs but the woman gave me a palm-sized Saran wrapped banana leaf that contained the dog inside. I wanted the greasy kind. Still she told me, ”There are seven layers of leaf so you peel them to get to each bite”.
I ate it in one go and went looking for another.
The next stall I found also had bad hot dogs; this time the greasy kind and that’s what I wanted.
“Give me the sandwich bread,” I said pointing at a line of cut pieces of baguette. And the man landed the dog onto a baguette slice like I asked.
Returning from the match, Liam and his friend walked off to do their own thing, and Siobhan and Lizzie joined me to go look for the car.
I’d had to move it because a traffic warden told me that, though legally parked, they were towing the area anyway. I had moved it but I couldn’t remember where.
We tried an area in front of an abandoned field that was surrounded by a wire fence. Overgrown uncut grass. Siobhan and Lizzie tried the red brick lane adjacent and together we tried the place where I had originally parked, but there were no cars left.
We even wandered the streets where no cars could drive, where there were only narrow walkways with cute white Greek houses decorated with bougainvillea.
Some one told me Shawn from work lives there, pointing down a side street lined with olive trees and flower boxes. That’s certainly nice, I thought. I was surprised he could afford it.
Then we stepped back out onto the roads and kept walking, until we were further from the city center. Until, finally, I recognized a street, Queen’s Parade, which curved to the right, townhouses on one side, the park on the other. Just before the road curved leftwards once more, I recognized our car so we hurried past the other silver SUVs. Until we were close enough to see the decals on the back of our own Highlander.
When we got there I saw the tyres curbside had been punctured, as if someone had stabbed each tyre, the rubber crunched between road and hub cap. Sitting in the car with the convertible top down were three Chinese girls. One sat on the drivers headrest, her toes up on the steering wheel; she was reading a magazine. The other two were in the back.
“What are you doing? I’m going to calls the cops.” I said. And we had a little argument, clipped teenager tones between them, before they agreed to mend the tyres. Their mechanic came by, his feet bare and swollen like balloons, but he unscrewed the tyres and rolled them away and the girl in charge said he’ll be back at seven.
As they were leaving a parking attendant reassured us it would be OK, and we walked back the way we had come while the girl went off with the mechanic. Then it struck me that I had not got a cell phone number so I caught up with the attendant to ask her. She knelt on the pavement and started writing.
“I‘ll give the number of both the mechanic and of the girl. Though I suspect the number I have is for a burner phone and she’ll have changed it by now,” she laughed.
Photo of hot dog stand by cjuneau and of Naxos village by Marko Verch both via Flickr
