Day 13: A Deer in Denmark The tête-à-tête between peace and our minds often takes place in silence. Whilst that conversation is at its wildest and calmest in this atmosphere, silence itself is not peace. It can be foreboding and dangerous; it can be quiet death. The deer that swallowed all the peace in the world appeared like the ghost of a silent night as we drove into Copenhagen. Han Christian Andersen wrote many of his fairy tales near that place, and perhaps, I had driven straight into a spot of Denmark that had opened into the fantasy of another world. We’d been in Hamburg earlier that day, Reeperbahn the night before, enjoying a rare evening with old and new friends. Before this I’d spent time with Lanre, who I hadn’t seen for fifteen years, at her home in Amsterdam. School tales from yesteryear fell out of our mouths, interrupted by the mounds of eba and egusi that went the opposite way. We left Hamburg on the Autobahn where the rapid fury of German drivers kept us on the slow lane to Nordic Denmark. We crossed the border point at Odense before the long road to Copenhagen yawned before us. Night fell upon tired car and limbs after four hours and my mind had just fallen dangerously busy, caressing the thought that a warm bed awaited us in 30 minutes when tragedy fell. It took only a second, but time had frozen into the moment. Life jarred like a scratched CD player, like the tape of a video cassette, caught in an old Betamax, playing a single scene that darted furiously between before and after. The world was in a perpetual loop. Everything stopped and everything happened. A deer built like a bull had run out of the woods that flanked the motorway into the path of our moving car. The headlights—the car’s dazzling eyes—caught the white terror of the animal’s eyes in a moment of blinding, terrific light - as if something spiritual was unfolding. In this illumination of onrushing death, I slammed the brakes with furious, palpitating intention but it was too late. The surprised deer seemed to slow to a walk, floated left, half-turned and flipped back the other way, as if accepting its fate. Car, man and animal collided in a sickening crunch of metal, bone and emotion and the weight of the day, the breath of life and the dying embers of the night fell away from the deer like evening mist. We were saddled with a heavy corpse and stranded in the darkness of an unknown country, misfortune rising with smoke out of a car destroyed. Day 14: Malmö and the End The bad thing is that great occasions are not immune to the disease of an end. After the curious incident of the deer in the night-time, Toro grabbed the vengeful, bullish night by its horns and dragged it in the direction he wanted. I discovered the assuaging and unruffled calm of a man who seemed totally unaffected by the death we had both just witnessed. Whilst studying in Ilorin, before leaving for intellectual Massachusetts, Toro had spent some time working at a mechanic’s yard, mainly to increase the thickness of his wallet, an experience that proved useful here. He discovered the cause of the rising smoke: damage to the engine cooling system and got to work, mixing sand and glue onto the broken parts to hold them together. More significantly, I provided light from my iPhone (without which all his expertise would’ve been useless). We spent our only morning in Copenhagen at the picturesque and very touristy Gør Det Selv Væerkstedet, a workshop for damaged vehicles, to replace Toro’s crude but effective solution. This was a road trip and a fully functional car seemed rather essential. Lunch was a luxurious burrito from a gas station. (We did go on a canal cruise and took in Nyhavn so all was not lost). We reached Malmö in Sweden and discovered our Airbnb host was a Warri boy of delicious and invigorating company. Gabriel welcomed us with great delight, evidently pleased to stumble upon fellow Nigerians and as these things usually go, we cracked open a bottle of Merlot and discussed the solutions to our country’s myriad problems with full-throated gusto. A sunset stroll through the Scandinavian city concluded with veal meatballs at the Bullen. For the final time, we retired to bed, the daunting prospect of a 15-hour drive to England denying me any real sleep. Next to me, my would-be passenger slept like a buried stone statue.