Page 71 of The Trip of a Lifetime

And I was. The idea of a lift in a warm cab was wonderful.

‘I think you might have just won us the race,’ Erin said to him, which had him grinning.

‘Bit premature,’ I ventured, but Erin waved a hand of dismissal.

‘Positive mental attitude,’ she said.

‘That’s the spirit. I’m happy to help you both. My truck is parked over there.’

Curtis smiled warmly at us both.

‘Noah will have to come with us,’ I said. ‘Are you okay with that?’

‘A chaperone for you ladies won’t be necessary but he’s welcome all the same.’

‘It’s not that,’ Erin said, and I smiled at her confidence. The woman who didn’t want to get in a car with a stranger at the start of this race was now jumping into lorries with bearded truckers. ‘That TV show I told you we were on, he’s the cameraman.’

‘I see,’ said Curtis. ‘I was about to reassure you with the fact that tomorrow is my wedding anniversary. I’ve been very happily married to my husband for ten years.’

‘Congratulations,’ I said. Of course, the fact he was a happily married gay man didn’t automatically make him less likely to be a serial killer… or did it? I wasn’t sure. With the three of us, though, I felt we’d be just fine.

I’d never been in a big articulated lorry before and Curtis spent a few minutes showing us the luxuries of his cab. Then after we were settled in, he took out his phone.

‘Now, let’s get serious. No point jumping the gun here. Let me see how you can get from Moncton to Prince Edward Island easily. I mean, I can drop you off at another gas station and you might be lucky again, but let’s just check buses.’

He spent a few minutes looking at options but there wasn’t a bus that we’d be in time to catch. With the best will in the world we wouldn’t arrive in Moncton until six this evening and the bus to the island left at two. It would be an overnight stay and then another early start tomorrow. I felt okay about that. We had managed to cover a lot of ground already. He let Erin scroll through his phone and she found a hostel that she booked.

Curtis turned out to be so much fun and Erin spent the first couple of hours of the journey singing along to his top tunes. He had an eclectic mix of favourites and as she had opted to sit in the front with him, they were belting them out together. Noah spent more time on his phone than he did filming us. He had set up the other camera in the front of the cab though, so that was doing most of the heavy lifting.

I let my head fall against the side of the cab and drifted off to sleep, dreaming about Erin and Clare running together in some unknown race to an unknown destination. It wasn’t a gentle dream, though, it was dramatic and dangerous and I woke feeling unsettled.

We rolled into Moncton at exactly six o’clock and Curtis dropped us as close to the hostel as possible.

He and Erin swapped details and she promised him she’d be in touch to let him know how we had done.

‘I’m just delighted to have been a small part of it,’ he said before he drove away with his horn blaring.

It was the positivity of Curtis that left us unprepared for the fact that when we turned up at the hostel, the room we thought we’d secured wasn’t available.

‘I wasn’t on duty, I didn’t book it,’ said a surly girl behind a desk in the small reception area. ‘You’ll have to find somewhere else as we have no room. Karla was mistaken.’

‘Karla was very clear when we phoned,’ Erin said. ‘She was really nice and kind, too.’

‘Well, she’s mistaken about a lot of things,’ the girl said and turned away.

We walked straight back out as there was little point getting into a row with her. She wasn’t going to magically find us beds. We walked over to a little copse of trees with a bench underneath and I dropped my bag down on top.

‘We’ll just have to find somewhere else,’ I said.

‘There weren’t any other hostel rooms available when I thought I’d booked that one, though. It will be this park bench or an expensive hotel,’ Erin said.

Noah and Cally had already driven off after they saw us through the door of the hostel, assuming that was us done for the night. Not that it mattered. They weren’t there to help us on our journey, just to document our progress, or lack of. Well, Noah was going to miss this one.

Erin was becoming flustered, I was just plain tired, it had started to rain and maybe those three facts were responsible for what happened next.

‘I’m not sleeping on a park bench,’ I said, despite my thoughts earlier in the day of curling up on one.

‘We need to be careful with our budget, though,’ said Erin. ‘We’ve spent a lot on bus travel over the last couple of days.’