“Wait, so you’re going to Paris?”
“Driving all the way,” he replied, “I can get you to Dover.” He nodded at my whiteboard.
I jumped in buoyantly though I wasn’t in the clear yet. As he was aware, my sign said Dover and I didn’t want him to think he’d bitten off more than he could chew. We were in Maidstone after all and Paris is a long way from Maidstone. I’d have to charm him first.
I said I was going to the rugby, but changed the subject quickly. I didn’t want to give it away just yet. “What are you doing in Paris,” I asked.
“Well,” he began with a flourish, “I’m going to pick up my friend’s mother.” His voice was deep and his vowels rolled flamboyantly.
I enquired further.
“Yes it’s a funny one,” he said with a droll roll of his eyes, “My Armenian friend, god bless him, his mother is moving to the UK from Armenia but she has a dog and dogs are rather difficult to get into the UK. So she’s flown to Paris and I said I’d pick her up and bring her and her dog home.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes,” he replied cheerfully, “I’ve got a long way to go. I don’t think I’ll be back til…” he checked his watch theatrically, “Well about two or three in the morning…And then I’ve got to get up and take my wife to work at 7 o’clock tomorrow, bless her.”
We chatted amiably as you do. He told me how that morning he’d seen a little girl who’d lost her mother and he helped her find her again. “Anyway where in Dover is the rugby?”
By now I felt confident that he knew I wasn’t a murderer or a creep so I seized the opportunity, “Well it’s actually in…Paris…” I looked over a little nervously.
“Oh, Paris? I can take you!” He said it as if it was nothing, “It makes no difference to me. I’m going there anyway!”
“Are you sure?” I checked.
“Absolutely!”
Now I could relax. I’d made it and I couldn’t believe it, extraordinary. Maidstone to Paris in a oner… I shook my head in disbelief, a smile sprung to my face and stayed put.
Evan gave me his booking number and I called P&O to see if I could get on the ferry, “Yep no worries,” the lady said, “I’ll add you on now.” It didn’t cost a penny.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if everything was this easy,” I remarked, still grinning.
“Yep,” Evan said knowingly, “It sure would…”
We settled back into chatting. Indeed the only cost of the journey was keeping up my end of the chat for seven hours. I began enthusiastically, like a marathon runner who sets off too fast. Luckily Evan was a good marathon runner; it soon became clear I wouldn’t need to do too much to keep the conversation going.
I learned that Evan had met his wife in China. She was Ukrainian and they’d both been teachers out there with EF. “We met on the second day,” he said proudly, “went on a date and the rest is history. Met in China, proposed in Singapore, celebrated in Malaysia, got married in Thailand and had the honeymoon in Cambodia…Yep, we get around…!”
Evan loved his time in China and recommended EF strongly. “I’ve got friends from all over the world,” he crooned, “Ukraine, Israel, Costa Rica, India, Canada…you name it.”
He’d met his Armenian friend out there. “He’s a lovely guy,” Evan said, hanging on the incoming but, “…but he’s a pathological liar, bless him.”
I got all the stories. “He’s not very good with money you see. He owes everyone. In China he had a 4k bar tab that he never paid. And bearing in mind drinks were cheap over there, you know, for my birthday I got a round of drinks for everyone and it was about £20! So you can imagine how much 4k is. He’d go in and buy everyone drinks and expensive drinks too and he’d always be telling the bar owners, ‘yeah yeah I’ll pay,’ But he never did.”
He claimed to have a job and to work 60 hours a week but when Evan spoke to his wife she was furious, “he does not work 60 hours whaaat” she apparently said. They worked it out to be about 28 hours if that.
“But he’s a lovely guy otherwise,” I was assured and it was clear Evan was fond of him or else he wouldn’t be driving to Paris to pick his mother up, even if he was being paid for it, supposedly at least.
Suddenly the phone rang loud through the speaker. Evan paused and tapped the green phone on the dashboard. He cleared his throat and offered a curvaceous helllllllo?
The conversation didn’t last long. When it ended, he told me it was an interview for a job teaching English around the country. It was as much him sounding it out as it was an interview per se. He liked to keep his options open.
Evan was a maths teacher at an all-girls school in Kent. He taught maths. “Uh! My girls are fucking amazing!” He held his hand flat between his brow, “Ah they’re amazing, I love them. I walk in and I basically don’t have to teach them, they’re already working!”
The hills were opening up, the field verges were dusted with white chalk and the colours were saturated by that nebulous sense of excitement you get when you’re going abroad. Soon through a cleft in the hills the navy twinkle of the sea emerged, expanding as we sped towards it. Dover was approaching.
We snaked a long curve down the hillside, down to sea level, beneath the white cliffs that always seem so dirty up close, like snow cleared off a road. We followed the signs and the careful lanes to the ferry port. Bollards flashed red, white, blurring to pink as if in a zoetrope and soon we were at the arm of the ticket office. It rose up to salute us.
“I just have to check,” Evan said cautiously, “but you’re not carrying any drugs are you?”
I assured him I wasn’t.
We slid down a lane and parked in a rank. The giant hulk of the ferry rose ahead of us, the cliffs rose higher behind us and the sand-coloured tarmac stretched between.
As Evan took his call I got out and enjoyed the air. It was fresh and salty, scented with the oily exhaust of vehicles on the move. A large lorry hissed and clunked to a halt to my left. Its side was emblazoned with a simple phrase: It Simply Works.
And I thought of hitchhiking.