The boss has vanished out the door, leaving important papers swirling in his vortex. I gather the pile of tenders together and thunder down the back stairs, taking the steps four at a time. I stumble down the last flight and out onto an empty backstreet.
No sign of the boss, but my ears pick up some screams from the main street. Lo and behold, a car streaks around the corner, trailing menaced citizens in its wake. It’s the boss. He attempts to hurry my entry by throwing the passenger door open for me as he approaches. Not realising we’re in some Japanese gangster flick, this move catches me unawares. Quite literally, it floors me.
“Jesus, mind the tenders,” he says, gunning the engine. “Come on, will you get in, will you?”
I clamber in and the screeching tyres give us a send-off. We’ve got an extra twenty-five minutes going by his hopelessly optimistic dashboard clock, but then it also claims that it’s a Tuesday – it’s Friday in the real world.
He glances at the dashboard and exhales. “Ah sure we’ve plenty of time. Mary had me worried with all her panicking.”
“Well that clock is a bit slow,” I offer. “We might be cutting it a bit fine.”
He throws me a dirty look for intruding on his augmented reality and leans on the horn.
“Jesus, where are all these people going. This traffic is crazy.”
It’s a sunny Friday afternoon on a bank holiday weekend, and people like to sneak home early. I’d like to do the same myself, if I wasn’t in the car delivering the tender with the boss. “These people,” as he calls them, probably include the entirety of our office that we left behind only minutes ago. Nothing unusually congested, but nonetheless he’s still going on: “Is there some sort of youth festival on?”
He is throwing me an accusing glance, like it’s my fault, my generation. At thirty-seven, I no longer consider myself a spokesperson for “youth”, but that doesn’t seem to wash.
We zip down a lane marked Emergency vehicles only and No Entry, One Way, but tender delivery is of course a legitimate emergency situation, so these signs do not apply.
“Here, I’ve got a map back there,” he says, vaguely gesturing towards the rear of the car as we snake towards the motorway.
He could well have a map, but finding it in this archaeological skip will be a challenge. There are manuscripts and small ancient trinkets and even a helmet.
He glances back. “That’s Sumerian,” he says. “Don’t mind that, have you the map?”
Burrowing further between layers of papers and journals, I encounter some soil with some green shoots, and – what’s this? – a small strawberry plant complete with baby strawberries. Surely this is a sort of botanical wonder, but there is no time to stop in awe. I must furrow on.
“Have you not got it yet?” he asks, as if it’s my fault he is curating a small museum-cum-rubbish-tip in his vehicle. He reaches into the back of the car. His hand strikes into the mass of paper like a cobra and withdraws the map, recently sandwiched between a 1959 paper on International Relations and a crushed Dead Sea scroll with a melted chocolate bar acting as the epoxy holding them together. He thrusts the map at me.
“Here! There’s some old back road up through the mountains.”
The map is antique, but at least in English. And indeed, an ancient quarry route reveals itself cutting up through the Blacksticks Mountains, looking like a shorter journey if the quality of the road is in anyway passable. Unfortunately, while all manner of boreens and byways criss-cross the map, it does not include this fancy motorway we are currently pelting along.
“We’re not on the map, but the road we’re looking for is,” I say.
“Ah feck’s sake,” he says helpfully and peers up through the windshield at the gathering storm clouds coming in from the west.
“If we take this next turnoff, we might be able to get onto it that way,” I say.
The next turnoff is three lanes away in solid traffic and we are speeding rapidly past.
Next week, we’ll continue the journey through the ends of the earth to get the tender in on time.
——–
‘The Tender’ is being serialised from a book of short stories called ‘Yarns’ by author Ben Moran.