Free Dolly And The Cookie Bird - Dorothy Dunnett - Johnson Johnson 03 by Unknown

brothers had cars, and you would be a bit of a clot if you hadn’t tried out half a dozen by the time you were fourteen or fifteen. At the price of a bit of smooching in the back seat, it was a good way to learn. Clem Sainsbury had an old Rover which was always full of wet towels and Rugby gear, I remember. He was the best teacher of the lot: a bloody perfectionist and no funny stuff while you were driving. I suppose that was why most girls got fed up with him after a while. I had some final lessons and passed my test on a windfall from Daddy, but neither Derek nor I ever had a car till Flo and I clubbed together last year and got our ten-year-old Morris.
    The Maserati Mistral can do 155, the book says. I didn’t know what the Alfa Romeo’s top was, but I did know that I wasn’t going to let that indoor coffee plant pass me. I put my foot down and kept it there. An open-tile wall and a patch of garden— marigolds, antirrhinums—jumped past, and a woman sweeping the dirt with a long-handled broom slid back, a dark blur. The road narrowed, the fields dropping below: there was a grey retaining wall with a line of giant grasses on my right. Ahead, a Barreiras lorry packed full of cartons of Kelvinators,
su seguro servidor
, turned a corner and lumbered toward us, followed by a fat Ibiza-tours bus. Coco held it to the last second, and then moved in behind me.
    A black-and-white petrol-pump sign and a workman on an old Vespa, a wicker wine bottle strapped on his pillion. I cut out a second before Coco did and roared past the bike and the petrol station, the Alfa Romeo following, and found myself behind an old, high, scarlet Opel with a cloth roof, doing about twenty-five, with a big Seat 1500, a taxi, coming in the opposite direction.
    It was coming fast, but it wasn’t here yet. The Bar los Cazadores was coming up on the right, and the
Atención
sign for the long, wire-netted swoop round to the Portinaitx junction. There we joined the main road, and I’d have to give way. I put my hand on the horn, shoved my signal light on, and drew out and found the red Opel right in the path of the taxi.
    He didn’t even have time to brake. I saw his face and heard a yell from the Opel as I skimmed past, and then I was bearing round the red-and-white netting and up to the Portinaitx junction. It said Ceda el paso. The road to the right was quite empty. A little distance away on the Ibiza road, a cart was coming toward us, an old man holding the reins. I changed down and looked back.
    The Alfa Romeo had got past the Opel and was halfway along the big curve toward me, at the point where it divided in two for incoming and outgoing traffic. As I put my foot down and moved out to turn to the left I saw that Coco wasn’t following me. Instead, he was cutting across to the left, hugging the wrong side of the junction, in order to cut the corner and strike the Ibiza road just before me.
    He got there just as the cart did. I heard, as I accelerated, an almighty screaming of brakes, half drowned by an outburst of yelling in Spanish. Then the rest was covered by the sound of my own engine as I changed up and roared up the road.
    Here, the country was flat: low, green fields dotted with trees on the left with small terraced hills lying behind, and on the right, crops and small trees stretching far out of view. They passed in a blur. I overtook a big cream Mercedes, with forget-me-nots painted all over, and had to slow down to fifty for the Santa Eulalia bus; then I was off again. The white steps of a villa, with bright pots on them. A wood with fir trees and juniper and a snatch of wild thyme. Ahead, the San Miguel road about to come in on the right, with a huddle of buildings on each side. A lorry, stacked high with thin metal pipes, came out of the junction and set off before me, the long pipes swaying gently before and behind. There was traffic coming. I slowed down to a respectful distance and glanced in my driving mirror. Empty. The best bit