I was friends with this guy, he might have been a spy, might have been a criminal but I didn’t ask questions and that’s why we were friends.
All I know is that his job had me and him needing to be in specific places at specific times and we used fast cars and fast boats to get there.
I was shotgun following our progress on an electronic map in some fancy sports car going up through the mountains.
“Wow we just climbed twelve hundred feet in twenty minutes” I said, looking up from the map. He was so smooth and confident in his driving and he didn’t even look like he was pushing it. This week it was our last car ride together and next week it was our final boat ride. He was going to drive down ahead in the car and I was going to follow in the boat. I was looking forward to it, I’d piloted the boat a lot and got quite prolific at it. I’d not be going alone, one of our mutual friends was coming with me to take the car back while my friend and I carried on to his “grandmother’s funeral” or at least that was the cover story.
The day of the trip, mutual and I headed down to the docks and found our little boat, It’s engine had been tuned somehow for more speed than it looked capable of and the boat itself had a hard plastic hull about the size of a lakeside fishing boat but used an inflatable ring around its edge more than doubling its size however the ring wasn’t currently fitted.
We searched nearby to see if we could find the inflatable part of the boat but with no luck we went to the harbour office.
“What do you mean maintenance?” I asked the harbour clerk in confusion.
“It’s the law, all boats of this type registered here have to have annual maintenance and today is the last day for your boat to have this done.” Said the clerk.
“But our friend is going to miss his grandmother’s long trip to be with her parsed loved ones” said mutual, trying hard to not say the word funeral.
“Can we have an extension or something, we need that boat today.” I pleaded with the clerk but he just said that was the law. After realising I was getting nowhere I pulled out my phone. ‘If it was law for any boat registered here, then I’ll just register it somewhere else.’ Within an hour we were on our way bouncing over the waves having been told by the clerk to remove the boat from the dock immediately because it wasn’t registered there. Fine by me.
After saying our goodbyes and handing the car keys to mutual, friend and I were on our way and with friend at the helm we felt like we were going twice as fast.
After stopping on the water for lunch we sat on either side of the boat, backs to the water.
“You never asked my real name.” Said friend after some time silently contemplating the water. “You never asked any questions” he added.
“I never needed to and there’s only two thing I need to know.” I said. “That we had fun doing what we did and that I’m going to miss you.”
“You know I’m not actually going to my grandmother’s funeral.” He said more solemnly than if he actually was.
“Yeah.” I said, staring at the horizon.
“Do you know what it would take, how many strings you’d need to pull to get a person out of a country that didn’t want that person to leave, on the other side of the world and get them here without anyone else knowing their name or even knowing of their existence?” Friend asked as if the weight of his entire world bore down on his shoulders.
“I can imagine.” I said, somewhat dismissively. “I hope you and ‘grandmother’s funeral’ have a happy life together”
“I hope so too” he said with hope creeping into his voice. “You know you get to keep the boat right?” He jovially added.
I looked at him and smiled contentedly, reminiscing over the time we had together “I will treasure it forever.”