Legends – of dragons and heists and heroes – live because we tell them. People too. We take stories to heart, even when they are our own. Tell them again and again until we change them for ourselves.

And therein lies the lesson of this tale: we could all be more bard.

More barbarian, or mage, or mastermind DM. More true.

My seventeenth birthday was due in early September, so it didn’t seem to me too ambitious to assume that I’d be on the road by Christmas. Fourteen weeks was surely plenty long enough to master a simple, everyday skill if I took the task seriously. And I was a girl to take things seriously.

I was motivated of course by all the usual reasons – convenience and independence, and so on – but even then, though I would never have said so out loud, I knew some of my impatience to earn that licence was to do with a friend – a new friend who’d joined our class only recently. She’d been immediately liked by everyone, but I’d become preoccupied with a desire to stand out from the others in our group, just a little. I wasn’t funny or interesting like the rest of them, but what I did have in my favour was that I was one of the oldest, so here was a chance to offer something that they couldn’t. How exciting, I thought – how glamorous! – to be able to arrive at her house and offer to take her anywhere she wanted.

Fizzy, her name was – the friend. It was perfect for her. I always thought that. Right from the beginning.

*

At this time, it was just my father and me living at home. My mother had left to move abroad – São Paulo, was the last we’d heard – thirteen years earlier. My father never mentioned her. He wasn’t a man to talk about feelings and I think I assumed that he didn’t have any. Perhaps, even, that fathers in general didn’t; they just had no use for them at all, after a certain point.

It wasn’t in either of our natures to pry into each other’s lives, but we co-existed companionably enough. Over dinner, he would talk to me about his errands and his work as a plumber, and I would report any small achievements from school. It was during one of these polite exchanges that I mentioned my intention to learn to drive, and I did so without expectation of any special interest from him.

I was surprised then, when the following day, he announced he’d found someone to teach me.

“A woman I’m doing some work for. She does a bit of that – bit of driving lessons. She says she’s happy to take you on.”

“Well, I should look around before deciding. Compare results, prices. That sort of thing.”