The four a.m. fare

Nivaldo picked the job up at 4:07 on a side street off the bar district, one of those with a narrow pavement and a queue of people still standing outside a place that had already shut.

He had worked nights for eleven years. He preferred them. Traffic is honest at that hour, and a passenger at that hour either says nothing or says far too much, and he knew what to do with both.

Two of them got in. Her first, from the kerb; he went round by the road, which Nivaldo thought was well mannered and filed away, because filing that sort of thing away was his sport.

"Evening. Down south, is it?"

"That's right."

The app said thirty-eight minutes. Nivaldo knew it would be forty-six, because the app never counted the flyover ramp properly.

He pulled out, took the main road, went down.

In the first ten minutes he worked out two things, both of them in the mirror, which is a piece of work equipment before it is anything else.

The first: they had not known each other before that night. You could see it in the gap between them on the seat, in the hands on their own knees, in a conversation that was still made of questions rather than subjects. People who know each other don't ask which part of town the other grew up in.

The second: they were both going to the same address, and neither of them had said so out loud yet.

Nivaldo turned the radio up. Not much. Just enough that a conversation in the back stopped being a conversation the driver was listening to and went back to being a conversation between two people.

It was an oldies station. At that hour it plays the big-arrangement things, brass and strings, that nobody chooses and everybody recognises.

At fifteen minutes he stopped at a light on the long avenue.

A red light at night lasts longer than a red light in the day. It's a small cruelty of traffic engineering, and that one in particular runs seventy-two seconds, a number Nivaldo had counted once out of boredom and never managed to forget.

He looked ahead. A saloon car idling alongside, a delivery rider cutting up the wrong side, the sign of a twenty-four-hour chemist.

In the back the conversation had stopped.

Nivaldo is fifty-eight and has one rule he invented himself in his first year on the app: the mirror is for seeing what comes through the door and what comes up behind the car. Beyond that, the street has plenty to look at.

He looked at the street. The light changed. He drove.

What he took in over the next twenty minutes came through his ears, and through the weight of the car.

Weight, because a car with two passengers on one side takes a bend differently, and the ramp onto the ring road is a long left-hander he has driven for a decade. He felt the car ask for more wheel than it should and corrected without thinking, the way you correct anything you do every day.

Ears, because the radio was loud but the car is small.

A zip, possibly. He would not have sworn to it. A low laugh, cut off in the middle by something else. A "wait" that was not a request to stop, and Nivaldo, who has been listening to people for fifty-eight years, tells those two versions of that word apart without any effort at all.

Then a long quiet with breathing inside it.

He put his indicator on a good four hundred metres early, which was not necessary, and moved into the left lane.

At 4:31 the app recalculated the route.

There were roadworks on the riverside road, water main, and the diversion threw the job out through the back streets and added twelve minutes. The screen asked. Nivaldo pressed the green button.

He told himself afterwards, more than once, that he pressed it because it was the only route available. That was true. It was also true that he pressed it rather fast for a man weighing up alternatives.

Twelve minutes is a considerable quantity at half four in the morning.

He took the whole diversion in second and third, in no hurry, treating the speed bumps with a respect he himself would have called excessive on any other night.

They arrived at 5:02 at a three-storey block with a gated front and a fruit tree on the pavement.

Nivaldo pulled in, put the handbrake on and studied the dashboard with great attention, as though the dashboard had news.

It took a while for the door to open.

She got out first. Her hair was flat on one side and the strap of her dress was in the wrong place, and she dealt with both on the pavement in two quick movements and no visible hurry.

He got out after, with his jacket folded over his arm in a strategic sort of way.

"Thanks, love."

"Sleep well."

She laughed. Not at a joke, because there wasn't one. She laughed at the fact that those were the words he chose, with that face on him, at two minutes past five in the morning.

She left five stars before the car was off the street. Nivaldo saw the notification on the phone clipped to the vent, and under it a tip that came to roughly the price of twelve minutes.

He did three more jobs before seven.

A lad in hospital scrubs who slept in the back. An older woman going to the airport with two cases and a great many opinions about the airline. A man on his own, silent, of the type the small hours turn out by the thousand.

At home Nivaldo had coffee with Zélia, who was waking up as he came in, which had been the arrangement for eleven years and worked better than either of them ever admitted.

She asked whether it had been a good night.

He said it had been ordinary.

Then he spent a while stirring coffee that was already stirred, and said he'd picked up two people who had met each other that same evening.

"And?"

"And nothing. That's it."

Zélia looked at him over the top of her cup, in the manner of a woman who has been married thirty-one years and knows precisely how much is being left out.

She didn't ask again. That morning the two of them went to bed at the same time, which was not the arrangement, and Nivaldo didn't explain, and she didn't ask him to.