The tarmac came on like a river under the wheels, and I paced my way with perfect ease, wondering where in the world I’d go if I had an endless supply of currency and a motor van big enough to sleep in. I would travel the highways, and the low ways, for as long as I could hold a steering wheel and see a hundred yards in front. But I was getting too old to think of such an escape route out of life, and instead pictured lovely Sophie strolling topless around her rustic Umbrian farmhouse, impatient for me to call and set her to rights.
My mind splits in two while driving (though in no way like loony Ernest’s) one part entertaining the imagination, and the other keeping every yard of the road in sight. The two states never meet because they don’t need to, each knowing their place. And so it was when, as Sophie’s divine flesh faded, I saw a tall figure with a suitcase limping along the hard shoulder some way in front.
Knowing it could only be William Straw, I slowed down. Wanting to continue enjoying my own company, I admit to thinking that I would drift by with the cheeriest wave I could muster, but knew it would leave me with a memory impossible to put up with. Not that anybody would need to worry about Bill surviving an unhappy situation, but wanting to know how he had got into it finally sent my expectations of a peaceful solo journey into the dustbin.
I put the blinkers on, to stop, but even so got such a horn blast from a bone idle lorry driver, who now had the trouble of overtaking, that my brain spun a full circle and back again, and I nearly shot by my oldest friend.
“This is a rare and unexpected pleasure,” I said. “You’d better get in.” He did, but didn’t speak until we were well on our way. “So what happened?”
He made himself as comfortable as an injured leg allowed. “Michael, I have to say, you came at an opportune moment.”
“One of us always does.”
“I know it, but it proves, in my philosophy, that a good turn sooner or later brings one on for yourself, and I’m overjoyed that it was sooner. I wish I could find that monster of spite who made me swerve. He drove a black lorry with a purple stripe along the back, which I’ll keep in my mind to my dying day. I’m not a vindictive man, but if ever I find him I’ll knock his head about something wicked. He banged that Corsa up so effectively I’d have needed a tractor to get it out of the ditch, so I thought it best to abandon ship. If you go a bit faster we might be able to catch him up.”
I refused to take part in such a pursuit. “You’re supposed to be in Thebes. Or was it Delphi?”
“This leg’s giving me torment. It got twisted under, and turned me into one of the walking wounded. I got to Delphi and the girls weren’t there, so I belted back to Thebes, and they weren’t there, either. Anyway, how could I spot them among all those ruins? I found a little monastery in the mountains and stayed overnight to write my report to Major Blaskin. Next day I went a route march over the hills. I stopped to eat and drink in a village, and got on so well with the innkeeper he wanted me to stay a month or two as his guest. He couldn’t do enough for me when I said I was Gilbert Blaskin the great writer. But I shook his hand goodbye, wanting to see a few more horizons before nightfall.
“In the afternoon I went into another village grogshop, and told the proprietor I was Major Blaskin who had been in Greece during the German occupation helping the partisans to fight. This time though it didn’t go down at all well. He’d been a communist, and thought it was blokes like me who’d foiled their plans to take over the country. He all but kicked me out. Sometimes I think I ought to keep my trap shut.
“This morning I intended looking at a bit more scenery on the road to Patras, meaning to nightstop in Athens and hand the car in tomorrow, but that lorry driver had his bit of fun, and here I am.”
“Shouldn’t you have got the car back on the road and informed the agency?”
“Michael, there are times when your suggestions are particularly unhelpful. With only two hands and a game leg it would have been no fun. I was in no state to do anything. And in any case can the car rental company sue me for damage and dereliction of duty? Let them try.” The laugh proved him a nihilist to his dying day, till the pain from his leg kicked in and stopped it dead. “All I want is a lift to England, a country I may not like but which I love very much, especially at times like this. So let me worry, which I’m constitutionally incapable of doing anyway. I paid insurance, didn’t I? Or Major Blaskin did. So it’s up to the agency to worry, and get it back before shite-hawks build their nests in it.”
At half past two I drove onto a tank landing craft plying across the Gulf of Corinth. I stayed in the car, but Bill went out for a recce, and came back to say that the lorry which had driven him off the road was on the same boat and not far away. “When I’ve done a bit of tinkering it’ll only get off this landing craft with some very hard duty block and tackle.”
My advice not to be a bloody fool went unheeded, and I listened out for the splash of his corpse after the lorry crew caught him, but a minute before landing he limped into the rear seats, and covered himself with Moggerhanger’s best tartan blanket.
Like Lord Knob I drove the regal car down the ramp, both windows open to hear shouts and screams from the stalled lorry, horns blowing from cars that couldn’t get free. Scared at the prospect of being stashed in a Greek lock-up, I nevertheless stayed calm and drove at my most stately till we reached the mountains, where I stopped to let Bill come up front, sorry I hadn’t left him behind. “So what did you do?”
“Michael, even their spare tyre’s no good. As for the electrics, it don’t bear thinking about.”
“What if they’re going to Italy, and catch up with us? I don’t want to get goulashed.”
“You mean moussackered. It didn’t have the letter on the back to suggest they’d be going our way, so don’t get worried.”
I decided we’d stop the night at Missolonghi, recalling how Frances had told me that Byron had died there. The town looked something Spanish, but the surroundings were lush and grand, except for fishermen’s huts on stilts in the shallow water of the feverish lagoons. “No wonder Byron snuffed it here,” Bill said.
We went into a club-like cafeteria in the main square and had tubs of bitterish coffee, Bill scoffing half a dozen fancy pastries, to get over the shock of his accident with the Corsa, he said, not to mention the disablement of the lorry.
People inside the hotel were speaking so loud that the walls shook, the kids joining in as if in line to imbibe the democracy of their parents. We shared a room, to cut down expenses. Bill threw aside his tourist garb and got back into a suit. “No lorry driver will recognise me now.”
We were invited into the kitchen to see what was for supper: a vat of vermicelli, a cauldron of meat sauce which the cook swirled with an iron spoon, and a dead chicken picked up by a leg and thumped on the table.
We sat on the terrace, half a dozen mosquitoes playing King of the Castle on my hand. I killed some, and so did Bill, but they called on their mates for reinforcements before expiring. Some dived into my sauce, till our cigar smoke drove them off.
Disdaining the inane soap opera on television, we went up to our room, each of us with a Sidney Blood, but Bill soon threw his down and went into the sleep of the innocent. I splattered more mosquitoes, which blooded the Blood, because even the little machine plugged into the light socket didn’t keep them away. At seven a terrible clanging of bells must have been celebrating the pint of rain that fell in the night. A mosquito turned into blood on the wall, and left a fleck on my palm which was my own. I licked it clean, till thinking I might get malaria, so washed my mouth with whisky from the flask. Those killed by Bill gave the beige wall an attractive stippled effect. “If they bite me,” he guffawed, “they’ll fly away coughing, to a very miserable death.”
I suggested a walk before breakfast, but he sat forlornly on the bed. “Michael, where’s your imagination? My leg aches from yesterday. I’m going to be crippled t
ill the end of my life.”
I felt sympathy, having seen his swollen knee, but we had to get moving. “Pretend you’re on the retreat to Dunkirk.”
“I was too young for that show, and in Normandy we were motorised, except for the odd mile or two. But don’t get so sarky.”
He was too proud not to keep level along the dusty streets. In a dark shop he insisted on the best quality and most expensive walking stick. “As befits my status.”
He spun it about, to show what a help it was, then followed me into a stationer’s to select a postcard for Frances: “I’m on holiday in Greece with my pal Bill Straw, seeing the classical sites. Food fine. People wonderful (unless driving a lorry) and weather perfect. Looking forward to telling all about it. Love you, Michael.”
Bill gazed over my shoulder. “How are you going to describe the classical sites?”
“I drove by Mount Olympus and around the Acropolis, didn’t I? I’ll make the rest of it up.”
We set off north, to make the ferry to Italy in the evening, snacking at midday in a café bouncing with twangy local music, Bill filling up on sweet cakes and buckets of coffee, which didn’t stop him sleeping, though he did close his eyes as we went through ashy tree-spotted mountains to Joannina, where I parked by the lake and loaded two crates of Fix beer into the boot.
We floated on to Igoumenitsa, heavy rain falling halfway to the col, where a bus lay on its side, though no one was in it. The road was alpine in places, the Rolls, as if laying the road for its own individual use, turning every hairpin bend above canyons and valleys on its way to the coast.
At half past four we found the main street of the port lined with ticket agencies, and we were told at each that there would be no room on any boat across the Adriatic that night. One however said they might be able to do something for us if we came back at six.
After a few cold drinks we went back to the same place and were given tickets to put us on the waiting list, though with no guarantee we’d get on board anything till tomorrow. “We should have booked a month ago,” Bill said. “Everybody seems to be going over the water tonight.”
The hundred pounds I’d paid to be put on the list seemed a lot, though not if we got away in the next few hours. If Sophie was waiting for me in bed I hoped the crossing would come as soon as possible. We sat in the car, hundreds of other drivers having the same problem, a solid lock of waiting traffic by the dock gates. When the tout back at the office told us our total fare would come to six thousand dracks Bill got out his razor as if to cut a thread loose from his jacket. “Tell him we want to sail in the ship, not buy it.”
The man, whose name was Basil, agreed that it seemed a lot. “But there’s no place left on the ship to Bari. Unless you take a four-berth cabin.”
“We’ll go back through Belgrade,” Bill said.
Basil didn’t like that idea, as I had known he wouldn’t. “I could get you on the Neptune, which leaves at twelve-thirty. But you still have to pay for a four-berth cabin.”
“We’ll take it,” I said, before Bill could open his mouth.
He worked out the adjustments and confirmed our places, then gave me a thousand dracks back because it wasn’t the same style of accommodation as he’d thought.
“How do you know the tickets aren’t fakes?” Bill said outside.
“I think I’m a better judge of human nature than you.”
“I’ll only believe they aren’t when the sea’s all around us,” he said.
The Bari boat was supposed to leave at nine, but having been told at twenty past nine that it wouldn’t be, we locked the car and went to eat octopus and boiled potatoes in a cookshop. Smoking our cigars, we edged back to the Rolls. At eleven the Bari boat, which we’d missed getting tickets for, was announced as being five hours late, and that our ship The Neptune would leave before it, though if it was full when it came in from Patras nobody would get on.
“Michael, I think I’m getting a bit confused. Shall I tell you what we would have done in a situation like this in the army?”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“I’ll tell you anyway. See that passport control box at the edge of the scrum? I’d rev up this car, and charge. I’d frighten every other bloke out of the way till I got there.”
“You’re not going to do it.”
“I have another scheme up my sleeve. Listen to this. We drive down the coast towards Patras, pay a local man to row us to the Neptune as it comes by, get on board, and hi-jack it so that the captain takes us to Southampton. I’d nip up the side of the ship like a snake out of boiling water, find a way up to the bridge, and cut his …”
I gave a fair imitation of Sidney Blood: “Shut the fuck up.”
“That’s as may be, but look at the hundreds of cars around us. How are we going to get through?”
He was right. A solid mass, and we didn’t doubt there’d be a problem when the disentangling began. Lightning flickered along the hangar roofs, arc lights glowed over heaped up luggage racks. At half past eleven there were no ships in any direction, but we were jamlocked and nothing could move anyway. Agencies along the golden mile were still selling tickets whether anybody would get on a boat or not.
At forty-five minutes after midnight the Epirus came in for Bari (before the Neptune for Brindisi) and cars began farting and belching, a few getting sorted by the dock gates. Half an hour later I started the engine, and inched along when I could, cutting in on other cars.
Bill’s competitive spirit compelled him to wave a spanner out of the window. And help me along. “If there’s a fight, I’m with you. I’ll smash every windscreen in sight.”
Yard by yard the ticket and passport gate came closer. A posh English Vauxhall was having difficulty finding a place in line because a German car wouldn’t give way. Maybe I wouldn’t, in his place, but the driver of the GB car was a middle-aged steady looking chap with short grey hair, and the youngish woman by his side determined me to help. Not far from the control booth I held everybody else off and made sure they slid into the queue, getting a wave of gratitude from the man and a smile from his passenger.
I had only to keep my place, and by half past one was through the dock gates, into a vast ill-lit area in which we were the only car. “Now where do we go?”
We were on the quay, but still no other cars were in sight. The queue had melted away. How had it happened? I didn’t want to go over the edge and into the sea. My faculties ticked away in seconds, till I made out the entrances to two ships in the darkness, which must be, I thought, the Epirus and the Neptune. Perhaps my sight was going, knackered after driving two hundred miles into this Balkan cock-up.
A dock bloke I couldn’t see shouted, probably curses, but I couldn’t care less as I drove up the planks of what I assumed to be the Epirus, into a vast empty space as big as the Albert Hall (the one in Nottingham) till more spectacular shouts convinced me I was on the wrong ferry, at which I did a smart three-point turn, and trundled down the ramp, passing a BMW coming up whose driver didn’t yet know he was in the wrong ship either. I shot along the level quay towards a matelot, who waved me into the Neptune.
“Good lad, Michael,” was praise indeed from Bill, who had known when to keep silent. “I only wish the boat would take us on a cruise instead of to Brindisi. Or is it Bari? I don’t think I know anymore.”
We went upstairs with our overnight kit to find the purser, who showed us to a four-berth cabin that he said nobody else would be in. After we’d taken turns to wash and shave Bill got bollock-naked into a top bunk and told me to wake him when the ship tied up in Italy.
I dressed and went on deck to watch the rest of the loading. Coming as we had, from the light of passport control into blackness, drivers were still heading for the Epirus and coming out again, while others boarding the Neptune full of hope for some sleep at last shot back onto the quay and made against the grain
to get to the Epirus on which they had been booked. Above the noise of klaxons and the despairing screeches of dock workers rose a poisonous miasma of petrol fumes, to counter which I lit one of Moggerhanger’s best cigars.
Further along the rail I recognised the young woman from the English car I’d let into line, hoping she would know me as I approached. She did, and smiled: “That was a nice thing you did for my father. He would have been out there now if you hadn’t been so kind.”
“I couldn’t have done anything else but oblige a fellow countryman, could I?” I went a shade closer. “I hope you don’ mind the smell of my cigar.”
“Oh no. My father smokes them.”
I handed her a tubed Havana. “Give him this, then, with my compliments. It’s a Romeo and Juliet. He’s bound to like it.” Moggerhanger wouldn’t miss another, and if he did he could kiss my arse. I sensed her to be a bit of a daddy’s girl who would think well of my gesture, and she took it so gracefully I wanted to kiss her smiling face, but had to listen to her telling me about the Classical sites they’d been to, details I could repeat to Frances on getting home. “My name’s Michael Blaskin. What’s yours?”
“Rachel.” She was shy, seemingly reticent, but my direct questions encouraged her. I hoped she wasn’t married or attached, as I spun a tale about my frequent business trips to Athens, telling her I worked as chief courier for someone whose name I wasn’t at liberty to reveal. The engines thumped under us, and she said what a relief it was to be going.
“I’m glad, as well, though I’ve had a good time. Greece is like nowhere on earth.”
“It’s my first time,” she said. “My father’s been promising to bring me for years, and he did at last, for my thirtieth birthday. I’ll have a lot of wonderful memories when I get home.”
Lightning hot-footed it over the mountains. We walked to the other side of the deck, where lamps winked on the oily water. “And where is your home?”
“Reading, in Berkshire. My father’s a GP.”