HIGHWAYMAN

On the drive from Marbella to Madrid, my aunt’s face filled with longing. She was moving back to London and dropping me off, her Fijian niece, catching a plane home to Auckland. I asked how she coped with the Spanish verbs, the searing heat, the killing of the bulls.

She looked to the boiling blue sky and told me of the canyon named Dogs Plunge, the city with a pomegranate coat of arms, the fresh sardines cooked in half-drums in the sand. She said the only thing she wished for was a few more hours each day to sit on the beach and look to Morocco, wander through Moorish citadels, and drink sangria.

As we cruised the highway into Madrid, a car drew alongside us, gunmetal-grey. I saw someone hold up a silvery badge.

“Policeman flagging us down,” I said.

We pulled onto a narrow shoulder, articulated trucks hurtling past. A harried man wearing civilian clothes walked over, leaned on the chrome windowsill and spoke to my aunt.

“He wants our wallets,” she said.

I palmed the Visa card and handed over my woven-pandanus Tonga billfold.

He stretched the empty money compartment wide apart.

“Is that all,” he said, flinging it at us.

Then he rushed back to his car and sped away into the traffic.

“He took my 200 euros,” she said.

I remember my incomprehension as we drove to the motel and the look of fear in my aunt’s eyes. That look returned when she talked with the manager, rolling her Polish tongue on the verb “robado”. That sort of person … said my aunt … would never be free. She stood alone in the mauve dusk. I opened my mouth to apologise, to say there’s no way I would’ve fallen for such a scam on the Auckland motorway.

Then I ducked into a taxi.