Fire—

Don’t cash this until two weeks when certain things straighten out. I’m selling the watch. When I do that the check will be good. Right now it will bounce. Please though if you could give mama 2000 pound for me in the meantime then deduct it from when you cash the check which should be soon. Tell her the money is from me. Tell her I look good. Tell her she don’t see me cause I shame of my roots. Don’t say what you saw.

Waiting to meet Fire at Heathrow was his cousin Courtney. He was short and ginger-haired, with narrow eyes cut into a broad, flat face. He grabbed Fire’s bags and hurriedly led the way, babbling on about carburetors, headers, and limited-slip differentials as they moved through crowded passageways and skipped up stairs to the third level of a parking garage, where parked between a yellow Toyota Supra and a black Honda Prelude was his latest restoration project, a ‘72 Ford Cortina Lotus—a boxy, pearl white coupe zipped from head to tail with the Lotus flash in racing green.

Stepping over the bags, Fire walked around the car, running his palms over the paint job, checking under the wheel wells for rust. Then, satisfied that the exterior had neared perfection—there was a small dent near the driver’s door—he asked to see the engine, the legendary twin-cam, push-rod dynamo that spurred a hundred and fifty horses to power the rear wheels. As he checked it, he was thinking about his mother.

It was his mother, not his father, who had taught him about mechanics. Her father, who was a cousin of the Manleys, was a fighter pilot in the RAF during the Second World War, and returned home to introduce crop dusting to the family farm where she was born and raised. By the time she was fourteen Fire’s mother had learned to overhaul and operate the biplane.

Backing off so he could look at the Cortina in relation to the cars around it, Fire noted to himself that he would take it over either the Toyota or the Honda, which—with their aerodynamic noses and power-assisted steerings and noise-dampened cabins—in the company of the old Ford were like yuppies in a blue-collar bar. He loved old European cars: Mini Cooper Ss … BMW 2002s … Volvo P 1800s … Alfa Romeo Alfettas. Driving cars in which he could feel the pores of the road through the fingers of the shocks and hear the guttural cussing of the engine as he pushed it toward redline.

“Lemme drive,” he said, excited now.

Courtney threw him the keys, admonishing in his South London accent that his baby cousin be careful. “Many have died so I could have this.”

Fire laughed at the vocational reference. Courtney was an undertaker. He’d passed only woodwork and bible knowledge at O level. What else, his father had said at the time, was he fit to do?

Settling into the Recaro seat, Fire ran his hand over the burl dashboard and flush door panels, eyeing excitedly the rows of analog gauges and toggle switches.