The Last Night of the Foam

At night the car wash beside the motorway turned into a small bright island, and Ife liked the night shift for exactly that reason. From ten until six she sat in the glass booth with an apple and a library book. She watched the headlights slide past on the road and waited for the rare driver who wanted a wash at two in the morning.

Tonight nobody came. The owner had explained why before he left. At six, a crew would arrive to remove the old foam machines and install waterless sprays. These were cheaper and, in his words, boring but sensible. Tonight was the last night of the foam. At exactly three o'clock the system would flush the tanks for the final time.

At twenty past two, Ife was counting the bottles of wax on the shelf when she noticed that something was missing. For a week a cardboard crown had been sitting beside the vacuum cleaners. A customer had left it on the back seat of a car, and nobody had come back for it. It was the kind of crown children wear at parties, with crooked sequins and the word KING written in marker.

The shelf was empty. Ife turned around, and a boy was standing in the doorway of the booth.

He looked about her age. His hair was wet, his feet were bare, and his coat shimmered like the skin of a soap bubble. He held the crown against his chest with both hands.

"Please do not scream," he said. "Everybody screams."

"That crown belongs to a customer," Ife said. She was surprised that her voice stayed calm.

"It belongs to a child," the boy said. "That is exactly why it works. A real crown would melt in the foam in a week. A crown that a child has made with glue and a lot of hope lasts as long as somebody believes in it. I am Wim. I am the last prince of the Kingdom of Foam."

Ife looked at the clock on the wall. It said 2:21. "I think you should start from the beginning."

He did, quickly. The kingdom, he said, existed only in the white hours between a dirty car and a clean one. It had lived inside this tunnel for sixty years, and every wash was a day of its history. Its people were made of the soft part of the suds. They had a road, which was the conveyor belt, and a throne, which was the great dryer arch at the far end.

"But the machines are being thrown out at six," Wim said, "and the foam ends at three. If the crown is not on the throne before the final flush, the kingdom has no king, and a kingdom without a king simply stops. If it is on the throne, it can sleep. It would wake up whenever someone makes foam there again."

"Then put it on the throne," Ife said.

"I cannot walk through the tunnel when it is running. Neither can you. The safety gate locks."

Ife thought about that. She knew the tunnel better than anyone, because she cleaned its nozzles every night. A normal wash took nine minutes from the entrance to the arch. A normal wash started after ten to three would reach the throne too late. By then the flush would have begun, and the foam, and everything that lived in it, would be gone.

"We need at least three minutes of margin," she said. "Maybe four."

"Can you make the wash shorter?"

"The Express button skips the wax and the pre-soak. It takes only three minutes." She stopped. "But the entrance needs a car. There is a metal sensor in the floor, and the machine will not start without one."

Wim's face fell. "There are no cars. There have been no cars for hours."

Ife did not answer. She was looking at the cleaning cart in the corner, a steel frame on four wheels, with a mop bucket on top. The sensor in the floor did not care whether the metal on top of it was a car or a cart. She had seen it start for a delivery trolley once, to the owner's great embarrassment. She also knew that the brushes swung in only for objects taller than a metre, and the cart was half that.

"Wim," she said, "I think I have a vehicle."

They spent half an hour testing the safety gate and the floor sensor, and it was 2:54 when she wheeled the cart onto the belt. The crown sat on the bucket, leaning slightly, its sequins catching the light. Wim placed his hand on it for a moment. Ife could have sworn that his fingers were already thinning at the edges, like a drawing on a misty window.

"Whatever happens," he said, "do not let it sag."

"It is cardboard. It is going to sag."

"Then do not let it sag too early."

She ran back to the booth, pressed the Express button, and watched through the glass. The belt jerked and began to move. The first jets hissed, and a white curtain rose around the cart. The foam looked thicker than usual, almost solid, and it moved in slow, deliberate waves, like a crowd making room.

At 2:55 the brushes stayed up, exactly as she had hoped. At 2:56 the foam reached the middle of the tunnel, and she could no longer see the cart at all. She saw only a tall, pale shape walking beside it, with an arm raised, and she decided not to look closely.

At 2:57 the belt carried the cart under the last arch. The dryer started with a roar, and the whole tunnel filled with warm wind. The crown rose from the bucket and spun once in the air. Then it settled on the highest beam of the arch, as if somebody had placed it there with great care.

For one second the white lights above the tunnel turned gold. A low, clear note rang through the metal, the kind that a very large bell might make a long way off. Then the lights went white again.

Ife looked at the clock. It said 2:58.

At three, the flush began, exactly on schedule. The tanks roared, the foam poured down the walls, and it drained away in a long, pale river. In less than a minute the tunnel was silent and wet and ordinary.

She walked in slowly. The cart stood at the end of the belt with the mop bucket still on it. The crown was gone from the beam, and there was no sign of Wim anywhere. Only a few sequins glittered on the concrete beneath the arch.

Ife crouched beside the floor grate and listened. She heard the motorway, very faint, and the last water gurgling down the pipes. She heard nothing else.

Then she noticed it, in the corner of the grate. It was one small bubble, no bigger than a coin. It was not white, but pale gold, and it trembled slightly in the draught from the dryer. She watched it for as long as she could. It did not pop.

It was still there at six, when the crew arrived with their wrenches and their long grey crates. Ife stood in the tunnel with her coat on, and she had still not decided what she was going to tell them.