"Petrol’s the one thing I resent spending money on"

I’M FLYING to London at 9.30pm.

This morning, my friend Marie offered to drive me to the airport. It is now 7.50pm, and I’m standing outside my house, giving her offer the kind of careful consideration I should have given it when she made it — so that I might have answered, with great conviction: “No. Thank you Marie, but I will drive my own getaway car.”

I’m playing an unusually tense game of “I Spy” with myself, meanwhile. Hoping that any second, I’ll spy, with my little eye, something beginning with “M”: Marie. Or “V”: Volkswagen. Or... hmmm... let’s see... for I’ve plenty of time... “H”: Holly, her dog, yapping in her lap.

How tense I get before flying is roughly commensurate with how badly I need to get away, and right now — I need to get away very, very badly; having advertised our house on a holiday-lettings website, using the words “charming” and “idyllic”, and toiled like a convict for the past month to make it so, I’m as tense as Papillon on the brink of his escape from Devil’s Island.

Finally, I spy... Marie’s Volkswagen. Her mother, who’s to be dropped home in Cork City after I’ve been put out at the airport, is sitting in the front passenger seat, and looks, I note, just as immaculate, out of place and nervous in her daughter’s vehicle as my mother does in mine.

“I want to see the floorboards you’ve painted raspberry,” Marie says, winding down her window.

“There are going to be no raspberry floor-viewings at five to eight,” I say, hurling myself into the back seat.

“I never knew you were so tense about flying,” she says.

My husband, who’s feeling the strain of having to put the final touches to the house before joining me in London, says, “tense about time-keeping. Different issue, same feel”.

He gives Marie a “rather you than me” look, which would have tested Papillon’s patience if he’d got one like it on the brink, and that’s for sure.

Setting off, her mother looks straight ahead, as if focusing intently enough on her destination might get her there. It’s a look I know from my mother.

By the time we reach Ballinascarthy, I’ve followed suit; better to focus on the road ahead than on Marie’s driving, which mainly comprises a relaxed attitude to indicating, chatting with her mother while maintaining full eye-contact with her, and saying “oops” a lot.

I have to be honest, if I wasn’t in the back crossing my fingers, I’d swear it was me driving.

But the conventional modes of protest are not open to me: I cannot curse with her mother in the car. So instead, I tell her mum, who keeps glancing at the petrol gauge and looking frightened, to cross her fingers too.

There is a dramatic uptick in tension in Bandon, when the dashboard emits a loud beep and flashes orange.

“Don’t worry, there’s a huge reserve tank,” Marie says, chattily, “petrol’s the one thing I resent spending money on. You see nothing for it. I mean what does it get you?”

“To Cork,” I think in the back.

In Inishannon, things have gone way beyond crossed fingers. The dashboard won’t shut up its beeping, the orange flash has locked on beam and Marie’s mother and I both have the same overall look — as if suffering a sudden sugar-low: faint and clammy from head to toe.

At Halfway, I’ve a suspicion Marie’s mum is praying under her breath. St Christopher, patron saint of finding things, would be a good pick, I think, for Marie’s clearly lost her senses; I’ve never known confidence in a reserve-tank like it, apart from mine, and if she recovered her senses, she might notice me waving a tenner around in the back and pointing at petrol stations as we pass them.

When finally Marie swings left into the airport, her mother looks at the petrol station as if it’s the very last minstrel in the packet. When Marie whizzes straight past it, her mother looks as if someone’s just eaten it.

Marie puts me out at the Departures door and roars off. Ten minutes later, I receive a text from her:

“I left my purse at home.”

But I’m all-checked in. All checked in on the other side of customs.

And I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with… “E”: Escape.