At least I didn’t have to work out which way to go. Val was sitting on the food box navigating—if that’s what you call guessing which is the best way to go. We had a map of Europe which was useless, and not because it was written in Dutch. On the right-hand edge of the map, there was a little pimple of land on the eastern side of the Bosphorus disappearing into the latitude numbers. I’d just driven off the map.
Because Dad was such a genius at getting lost, Mum got to the stage where she wouldn’t go anywhere without taking a map. Even if we were just going for a Sunday drive to Victor Harbour, she always sent away for RAA maps. It was my job to follow the strip maps, which just showed the road you had to take snaking up the middle of the page. All the towns you passed through were marked, plus any features that were by the roadside. Side roads were cut off after about half an inch to discourage any thoughts of turning off the main road. It made it seem like we were forever driving north in a straight line. I missed getting lost.
Now for the first time in my life, I was driving across a completely unknown, foreign country without any sort of map. Mum would have been terrified. I thought if we didn’t have a map, we should at least consult Ulla’s BIT notes. I asked Val to read out the page on Turkey.
“Not a bad country despite the terrifying stories one hears about it.”
“Is that it?”
“There’s some stuff about long prison sentences for possessing drugs, and the terrible conditions inside the jails.”
I tried to remember what the returning travellers had said, but they’d just referred vaguely to “Turkish hassles”.
I hadn’t had any breakfast, but Val didn’t want to stop.
“Check if the girls left any food,” I said. “Their supplies are in that box you’re sitting on.”
He got up and opened the box. The American girls’ food stock was almost non-existent—half a jar of peanut butter, a packet of macaroni and a tin of tomato soup. Nothing immediately edible.
“You’ll have to wait,” Val said. “I don’t want to get any further behind.”
Eventually, I had to stop for a toilet break. The trees were few and far between, and too skinny to squat behind, so I stopped at a small town where two-storey, whitewashed buildings opened right onto the main street. One of them was a restaurant. The food was all spread out in the window and behind that you could see the people preparing it. While Val ordered something to eat, I went to the toilet. It was a squat toilet and it smelt bad. There was no toilet paper. I thought of Alun.
Outside the restaurant, there were two tables under a verandah draped with a grapevine, but Val wouldn’t let me sit down.
“You can eat while you drive,” he said, getting back into the taxi.
He’d bought lamb wrapped in fresh bread and the Turkish equivalent of pizza. There were figs as well.
Driving the taxi might have been like driving a tank, but I was quite enjoying it. I liked the little round foot pedals, the comfortable leather seat, and the indicator lever with a knob on the end that needed turning off as well as on. But after about four hours, I was getting tired. My calm was in danger of disappearing. There I was driving off in the wrong direction, with two boys I hardly knew, with next-to-no money. What had come over me? I needed some mental stimulation to distract me.
“I can’t just drive like a robot, Val,” I said. “I didn’t get much sleep last night. Unless you want me to drive off the road, you’ll have to talk to me.”
I knew what he was thinking—talking to the driver was Alun’s job.
“Tell me five things about yourself,” I said.
There was no response.
I interrupted Dolf’s mournful rendition of “Wild Horses”. “What about you, Dolf?”
“What things?”
“Anything. Your family, your favourite colour.”
More silence.
“Okay, I’ll go first.”
“I already know five things about you,” Val said.
“Dolf didn’t hear them, and anyway there are at least eight things to know about me.” I thought for a moment. “I like swimming in the sea at sunset, I’m allergic to strawberries, I’m five feet five inches tall, I was captain of the school hockey team, I have excellent long vision. Your turn, Dolf.”
“De Rolling Stones is my favourite rock and roll band, I have one broder and three sisters, my favourite food is chocolate, I want to be a guitarist in a rock band, my moder wants me to be a doctor.”
I turned to Val.
“See, it’s not hard.”
“Keep your eyes on the road.”
“Come on. You can do it.”
It was like talking about himself was painful or against his religion.
“If you don’t, I might start to panic, turn this taxi around and drive back home.”
Actually I was developing a taste for this Russian roulette way of living, where any morning you could wake up and change your life completely.
“Tell me how you met Alun.”
No one had mentioned Alun’s name since we’d left Istanbul, and I could feel Val almost wince when I said it.
“I met him at Nottingham University on enrolment day. I’d signed up for all my subjects except one. I’d had enough of standing around, so I joined the shortest queue.” He managed a little smile.
“What was it?”
“Medieval Celtic Literature. Alun was in front of me. He started telling me how fascinating it was all going to be, and asking me if I’d read this and that. He was like a kid lining up to go to the circus. He soon realised I didn’t know anything about it.”
“So you studied together?”
“We started off in the same course. I changed my major ... twice. He did a double load. Now he’s about to start Honours, and I’m thinking about dropping out.”
“That’s only one thing.”
“Two.”
The road started to climb. It got cooler and misty and there were more trees—cypresses Val said. The taxi crawled reluctantly up the hills. Eventually, we reached the top of what I thought was a mountain, but instead of going down the other side the road flattened out. We were on a mountain plateau that went as far as I could see. The landscape changed again. Now it was flat and barren, dry and rocky. There wasn’t a tree in sight, just tufts of dry grass and some low bushes. Dolf was composing a mournful song for Ulla. I turned to him to suggest something a bit more cheerful from the Rolling Stones’ song book
“Lookout!” Val shouted.
There was a goat on the road.
“Sugar!”
I floored the brake. The taxi fishtailed, but we missed the goat.
“That was lucky,” Val said.
“I don’t think a goat would have made much impression on Gertrude,” I replied.
“I wasn’t concerned about the taxi. Peasants can get nasty if their livestock is killed. We’d have to pay compensation at least.”
“At most?”
“You hear stories.”
“What if I hit a person?”
“It doesn’t bear thinking about.”
Which was a stupid thing to say, because I immediately thought of the worst possible penalties—a huge fine, imprisonment, being stoned to death.
“Why do you say ‘sugar’”? Val asked.
I blushed. It was a stupid habit, a hangover from my school days.
“There was an English girl at high school, who didn’t like swearing. She used to say ‘sugar’ because it rhymed with ‘bugger’. At least it did the way she pronounced it. It caught on. If we didn’t like people, we called them ‘bath plugs’.”
“Bath plugs?”
“Sounds like ‘bastards’.”
That was the first time I’d heard Val laugh out loud.
Dolf started playing “Not Fade Away” and I sang along with him.
We got to Ankara in the evening. It’s the capital of Turkey, but not a big city by European standards.
“We have to stop for the night,” I said.
“I need sleep. The Pakistanis only have one driver for each Mercedes and they want their cars to arrive in one piece. I’m used to driving and I’m stuffed. They’ll make sure Alun and Ulla get plenty of rest ... and food. And also...”
I was expecting Val to insist that we keep going, but he just smiled at me. I stopped talking.
“That’s very sensible,” he said. “But we have to stop anyway. We need visas for Iran. The Embassy will be closed now, so we’ll have to wait till morning.”
“You could have told me.”
We found a seedy student hotel with no name that was recommended in the BIT notes.
“Is there a shower?” I asked the man at the desk.
He nodded.
“Hot?”
He nodded again and showed us to a room containing five metal-framed single beds. The bare floorboards were filthy with years of grime. There were the shadows of stains on the sheets. I was glad I had my hostel sleep-sheet. There was also a large brown splotch on the wall, which I’m sure was dried blood. It was awful, but I was too tired to object.
The bathroom was dim, dirty and down the hall. I turned on the hot tap. Nothing happened. I turned on the cold tap. Still nothing. Then I noticed that there were boxes of soft drink in the shower stall and a lot of dust. There was a shower, and a hot tap, but I don’t think either had ever been connected to a water supply.
I woke up when two strangers speaking French came into the room to occupy the empty beds. I didn’t like the look of them. Val got up to go to the toilet and when he came back, he whispered to me.
“Junkies. Keep your money and your passport close.”
I took his advice. I remembered that the BIT notes had warned about avoiding junkies—French ones in particular.
There was another disturbance when the hotel owner came into the room. He said he wanted something out of a cupboard. Val and the French junkies told him to go away, but he was insistent and dragged Dolf’s bed out of the way to get to the cupboard.
If you’d have told me a week before that I’d be sharing a room with four males, two of them complete strangers, I wouldn’t have believed it was possible. But, despite French junkies and visiting hotel staff, I slept like a log.
Sixteen
Picnic
The Iranian visa stamp was all in squiggly Arabic writing and took up a whole page in my passport. Stuck on the opposite page were what looked like five postage stamps, each with a lion holding a sword aloft in its front paw. The Embassy official overstamped them with more squiggly Arabic. It looked very impressive. Mine and Dolf’s cost forty-eight lire. Val’s was nearly twice that much.
“I guess they don’t like the British,” I said.
Val had woken me as soon as it was light. I don’t think he’d slept much. He argued over the price of the room and beat them down from five Turkish lire each to four. Val navigated us to a nicer part of Ankara where we found the Iranian Embassy, a large white building in a modern Arabic style. It was only eight o’clock when we got there and the Embassy didn’t open until nine.
Val knew all about getting visas. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any spare passport photos?”
I didn’t and neither did Dolf, so we had to find a photographer.
There was a photographer in the same street as the Iranian Embassy. He had an ancient camera on a wooden tripod. We had time for breakfast while he developed the photos.
It wasn’t a good photo of me. I looked a mess. I’d always taken great care with my appearance. Even in London, I’d washed my hair every morning (in the bathroom sink) and blow-dried it to straighten it. I’d kept a fringe, even though fringes aren’t fashionable anymore. And I always wore makeup—light foundation, mascara, eyeliner, a little lipstick. The girl in the photo had wavy hair and an overgrown fringe held back by a hairclip. And she wasn’t wearing any make-up.
The Iranian Embassy staff wore smart uniforms and were civil, but not friendly. They weren’t in a hurry either. Our passports disappeared into an inner room and we were told the visas wouldn’t be ready until three.
While we waited, we found a garage and filled up Gertrude’s fuel tank. Val asked a man in a truck about the road to Iran. He said there were three roads—north, central and south. Val looked slightly stunned, a little panicked. He was about to take out the dice, but I didn’t think our choice of road was something we should leave to chance.
“They’d take the quickest way,” I said.
The man said the central route across Turkey was the quickest, so that’s the way we went.
I’d never met anyone as closed up as Val.
The delay waiting for the visas hadn’t helped. I had to prise words out of him. Once we were back on the road and we’d put more miles behind us, his mood improved and I dragged some more information out of him.
He told me about his parents. “They don’t like each other much, but they don’t want to be divorced, so they find it easier if they live in different countries.”
I thought of my parents who have never been apart for more than an eight-hour working day all their married life, and who I’m sure had never thought about divorce, even in the brief moments when they hated each other.
Val was like a five thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle and I’d only fitted together about ninety-five pieces—all the corners, some of the bottom edge and a patch of blue sky. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. He took a turn at picking a Rolling Stones’ song (“Get Off of My Cloud”) ... and even sang along. He smiled, not at a joke, but at me. He was finally starting to relax and open up, when the taxi’s engine started to make a knocking noise. I hadn’t noticed while I was talking to Val, but Gertrude was losing power. We were only going thirty-eight miles per hour, even though I had my foot flat to the floor. Then the engine cut out.
“What are you stopping for?”
The taxi rolled to a halt. “It wasn’t me—the engine died.”
It wasn’t the clutch. It couldn’t have been the battery. I had a look under the bonnet and I went through everything I could think of, but the taxi’s engine wasn’t like any I’d seen before.
Val was tapping the fuel gauge like they do in films when a plane’s about to crash.
“We’re not out of petrol,” I said. “We only filled up in Ankara.”
I did a three hundred and sixty-degree turn. We were still high up on the plateau. All I could see was brown earth dotted with clumps of dry grass. There were no trees. No buildings. No flocks of goats. No sign of human habitation, apart from the narrow bitumen road, which was cracked and quietly disintegrating along its edges. The only things in abundance were rocks, which were scattered everywhere. More mountains rose up even higher in the distance. The peaks were white, like pointy cakes sprinkled with icing sugar.
“We’re fucked, isn’t it?” Dolf observed.
I had to agree with him. It was a long time since we’d gone through a town. We’d have to walk back at least twenty miles, or stay where we were and hope someone would drive by and take pity on us.
“Someone will stop,” I said, hopefully.
“And what? He’ll be a mechanic who has intimate knowledge of London taxi engines?”
The last vehicle I’d seen was a wooden cart pulled by a large cow-like animal that I thought might have been an ox.
“We have to leave de car and hitchhike,” Dolf said.
“This is not a country you can hitch in,” Val said. “No one will pick us up, and anyway I just paid fifty quid for this crate.”
He kicked one of Gertrude’s back tyres. We stood there in the middle of nowhere listening to the silence.
“Hey, there’s a car!” I could see a black speck approaching from the direction of Istanbul.
When it got close I waved my hands over my head in what I thought was an international signal of distress. The car didn’t even slow down.
“Bathplug!” Val yelled after the car as it disappeared down the road.
I laughed. “How can you be so calm?”
/> I should have been panicking, but I wasn’t.
A man materialised out of the featureless landscape a few feet away as if he’d formed by magic from the earth. Within a quarter of an hour we were surrounded, not by people, but by the man’s flock of dark brown goats. He studied us, as if he’d just come across a type of bird he’d never seen before. He had a large moustache, a white skullcap and a patched waistcoat. Hanging from his arm was a sturdy stick with a hooked top—a crook, the sort of thing that Bo Peep always has in nursery rhyme books. Dolf and Val could have explained our situation in at least six languages between them, but the goat herder wouldn’t have understood any of them.
I did a bit of pantomime, turning an imaginary wheel, pressing an imaginary pedal, followed by an exaggerated shrug. The goat herder nodded and circled the taxi, muttering something in Turkish.
“I’m sure he could tell you anything you like to know about goats,” I said, “but I don’t think there’s much chance of a Turkish goat herder being able to fix a London taxi.”
The goat herder sat on the ground by the taxi and gestured for us to join him. Since he was our one slender connection to the human race we did as he asked. We sat there in the dirt smiling at the goat herder.
A young woman appeared out of a fold in the earth I hadn’t even noticed. She was kicking up dust as she came marching towards us, and it had stained the hem of her ankle-length floral skirt. A long white scarf covered her hair and the lower half of her face. She had a basket balanced on her head. She was very interested in Val and Dolf and couldn’t take her eyes off them. As she swung the basket down, her scarf slipped revealing her face. She didn’t seem to mind. I suppose that must have been quite flirtatious in that part of the world. The man said something in a sharp voice. She flicked the scarf back over her shoulder, turned on her heels and disappeared back into the Turkish earth.
Two boys appeared on the other side of the road, with more goats. They came and sat down with us. They didn’t look at all surprised to be sitting by the roadside with three foreigners.