The eleven o'clock never left

Gate 14. At 23:40 the board changed from DELAYED to DELAYED, which is the polite way of announcing that nobody working there knew anything.

I was flying north. At half eleven they handed out meal vouchers worth twenty-two reais, to be spent in a food court where nothing cost less than twenty-eight. I sat there holding the slip like a raffle ticket from last year.

The man two seats to my left laughed. Not at me. At his own voucher, identical to mine.

"Twenty-two," he said. "That's a coffee and half a cheese roll."

"You get the whole cheese roll at the place down the far end. They don't check."

"So you've tested it."

"I've been here since Thursday."

A lie. I'd been there since seven that evening. He laughed in the right way and I let it stand.

There was an old baggage tag still knotted to the strap of his rucksack, from a flight to Bogotá, half the letters worn off. People who don't cut the tag off either travel too much or too little. I didn't yet know which one he was.

At ten past midnight: further information in sixty minutes. The whole gate reacted like the audience at a bad play.

We went up to the bar on the first floor because it was the only thing open. He ordered a beer, I ordered the same out of laziness about the menu. The stools were too tall, the kind that leave your feet hanging, and after twenty minutes I had given up on posture and had one heel resting on the rung of his stool.

He didn't mention it. He also didn't move the stool.

"Ricardo," he said, too late for an introduction and too early to be anything else.

"Bea."

"Beatriz?"

"Bea."

He took it. I liked that he took it.

Airport conversation at three in the morning doesn't count as real conversation. Nobody is where they live, nobody has arrived where they're going, and for a few hours people have no address at all. He told me about a dog that died in May and a brother who hasn't spoken to him since the will was read. I told him about a flat I rented without seeing it and a man I lived with for four years who is now just a number I haven't deleted.

He never once asked what I was flying up for. I noticed. I had the impression he was not asking on purpose, the way you don't turn on the light in a room where somebody is nearly asleep.

The bar shut at one. The woman warned us twenty minutes beforehand and nobody moved, then she warned us again and everybody moved.

We went back down. An airport at three in the morning is a place with no hour attached to it. A man was running a floor polisher across the concourse in straight lines, in no hurry. A family slept on the ground near the airline desk, four of them with neck pillows, and the mother was awake with a rucksack held tight against her chest. A man in a suit had been talking to himself on the phone for about forty minutes.

We sat down again in the metal chairs at gate 14. He put his head back against the wall and shut his eyes, and I looked at his profile for longer than you look at the profile of somebody you met at twenty to twelve.

"You're looking at me," he said, eyes still closed.

"I'm checking whether you snore."

"And do I?"

"I'll find out."

He opened one eye.

Twenty to two: cancelled.

The airline handed out hotel rooms. The transfer was a minibus that smelled of pine disinfectant, driven by a man who drove as though it were still midday. We took the same bench because the rest were full, and his shoulder knocked into mine on every curve of the slip road, and neither of us shifted to make it stop.

At reception the woman passed the key cards over without looking up from her screen. 214 and 216.

We both laughed at the same time. The laugh lasted a second longer than the coincidence deserved.

The second-floor corridor had the kind of carpet that swallows a footstep. The door to 214 was just left of the lift. 216 was three metres further on.

He stopped first. Tapped the card. The little light went red.

"Always the second try," I said.

He tapped again. Green.

And then he stood with his hand on the handle without opening it, looking at me the way someone looks when they've already decided and are only waiting not to be the only one.

I didn't open my door. It was the closest thing to an answer I could manage.

The blackout curtain didn't close all the way. A strip of orange from the car park came in crooked and fell diagonally across the bed. It was the only light left once he'd killed the rest.

He kissed me like a man who had waited all day for it. Technically false: we had met at twenty to twelve. His body wasn't counting the hours the way the clock was.

I got out of my coat. He let the rucksack slide off his shoulder and hit the floor with a thud we both ignored.

The bed was hard. Airport hotel beds always are. I found that out with my back and then forgot it for a considerable while.

At some point he stopped, his mouth at my collarbone, and said my name. Nothing else. Bea. The way you check you're still in the right place.

I told him he was.

The alarm went at five forty-five. The rebooked flight left at twenty past seven.

He was asleep with one arm across my hip and his face pushed into the pillow. I lay there two minutes looking at the ceiling, working out what would still fit between that minute and check-in.

Nothing fitted. I got up.

His clothes were on the floor with mine, and mine were on top, which I registered with an idiotic satisfaction.

The room had one of those airport hotel pictures: a canoe sitting still on still water, gilt frame, screwed to the wall so nobody could take it. I spent the next five days remembering that picture at unlikely hours.

From the bathroom, washing my face, I heard him shift and mutter something with no consonants in it.

In the boarding queue there were seven people between us. He waved. I waved. His seat was at the back, mine in the fifth row, and neither of us offered to swap with anybody, which is also a way of saying things.

At the carousel his case came out before mine. He waited until mine came out too.

"Right," he said.

"Right."

That was it. No numbers swapped. He didn't ask, I didn't offer, and we said goodbye with a kiss on the cheek that was less than the night and more than the queue at the bar.

It was only in the taxi that I found the Bogotá tag in my coat pocket. I don't remember taking it off his rucksack. I think I took it while he was asleep. I think he saw me.