The man opened the basket. It was full of food—bread and soft white cheese, and some sort of sausage. He invited us to eat with him. We used our hands—our right hands.
“When I got up this morning, one thing I wasn’t expecting to be doing was having a picnic in the middle of nowhere,” I said.
“Be polite,” Val said. “He might at least have a cart or something he can take us to the next town on.”
I waved my left hand at the scenery.
“Very beautiful,” I said to the goat herders.
I knew they couldn’t understand me, but I hoped they might get my meaning. The Turks talked among themselves, obviously discussing us.
“What do you think they’re saying?” I asked Val.
“They’re probably thinking it’s very strange for two men to share one woman,” he said.
“Great.” I wanted to defend my honour, but there are some things you just can’t get across with sign language.
One of the Turkish boys milked a goat and passed around the bowl. It tasted a bit like dirty feet, but I was thirsty. Val drank some, but Dolf wouldn’t.
After a leisurely lunch, the goat herders got up and walked over to the taxi. They talked among themselves. One of the boys unscrewed the petrol cap. The man stuck his crook in the tank and pulled it out again. He examined it.
“I could have told them we’ve got plenty of petrol,” I said.
Then the goat herder sniffed the end of his crook.
Val was getting impatient. “This is a waste of time. We may as well start walking.”
“Benzin,” the goat herder said. He looked at the taxi and shook his head. “Dizel.”
“What’s he saying?”
“Gasoline,” Dolf said. “He says gasoline and den he says diesel.”
The food in my stomach did a bit of a somersault. My hand went up to my mouth.
“Sugar!” I must have looked like a bad actor. I nodded to the goat herder. “He’s right!”
“What?” Val said.
“I filled the tank with petrol, but the taxi must run on diesel.”
I pictured Veronica and Vanessa, making their carefree way back to civilisation lounging in the back of a purple bus. They could have mentioned that the taxi had a diesel engine!
The man and his boys got behind the taxi ready to push. They gestured Val to get in the driver’s seat. I shook my head and got in myself. The men looked confused at the sight of a woman behind a steering wheel.
“Help them push,” I said to Val and Dolf.
“But where do dey push it?”
“I don’t know, but they seem to have a plan. I don’t think we’re in a position to argue.”
I checked that the taxi was in neutral and the hand brake was off. They started to push, not along the road but off into the barren countryside. I was beginning to think my trust in the Turkish goat herder was misplaced, when we came to a dip in the landscape. A track led to a tiny mud-brick village below us. The houses were in a jumble, like a scatter of kids’ building blocks. A small field had been scratched into the plain where yellowing tomato plants and limp greens were growing. Another push and the taxi was coasting down towards it. One thing was certain. We wouldn’t be pushing it back up that track again.
The taxi rolled to a halt near the huddle of houses that were built from the rocks lying around everywhere on the plateau. A dozen or so children came running out to inspect the strange vehicle, and its even stranger driver. The girls wore long dusty skirts, the boys dark trousers worn through at the knees. They stared at me, talking to each other, as if they were trying to decide who or what I was.
Val and Dolf arrived with the goat herders and soon the whole village was gathered around us. The children wanted to touch Dolf’s curls. A woman brought out a tray with a teapot and little glasses. It was a double-decker teapot with hot water in the bottom one and tea in the top. The glasses were small with rims that turned out like flowers, so that you could hold them without burning your fingers. While we sipped our tea, another woman gave me a tomato and an onion. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do with them, but I thanked her anyway. Meanwhile the goat boys were siphoning the petrol out of the taxi and into an oil drum. Then they filled the fuel tank from a jerry can.
“Dizel,” our friend said.
I got back in the driver’s seat and turned over the engine. Nothing happened. A murmur ran through the crowd. The goat herder shook his head. He was out of ideas. I had one of my own though.
“There could be air in the fuel line.”
I crawled around the taxi on my hands and knees, peering underneath looking for a valve. I eventually found a little tap under the bonnet and bled out the air. I got back in and turned the key. The engine coughed into life. Val paid for the diesel.
“How did you know how to do that?” Val asked as I drove back onto the bitumen. “I thought you were a dressmaker.”
“I have more than one talent,” I said.
Seventeen
Different Stars
We’d lost another two hours, so I drove until it got dark. We went through a few villages and one small town, but the goat herder had charged us two hundred lire for the diesel, so Val wanted to economise by sleeping in the taxi and not buying food.
I pulled off the road and we found a place to stop near a little stream. I didn’t mind sleeping in Gertrude, but I couldn’t manage without food. The only option was Virginia and Veronica’s macaroni. I got out their camping stove. Val and Dolf watched hopefully. It wouldn’t light.
“The gas has run out,” I said. “We’ll have to collect firewood.”
“We haven’t seen a tree all day,” Val said. “So unless you’re planning on walking back to Ankara for wood...”
I broke off some dead twigs from a bush, but it wasn’t enough. I was considering gnawing on the raw macaroni.
“Shit,” Val said.
I thought he was just annoyed, but he was searching for something on the bank of the stream by torchlight.
“What are you looking for?”
“Dung.”
We’d seen square pats of brown stuff drying on a wall in a village we passed through. Val had told me it was goat dung which people used to light fires. We found a place where goats had come to the edge of the stream to drink, and collected up some of their dung.
The sheet of brown paper that the figs had been wrapped in was all we had in the way of paper. Fortunately, Dolf had some matches otherwise we would have been rubbing sticks together.
Val built a little hearth of stones and miraculously we got a small fire going with the paper and twigs. Then we threw on the dung. It was very smoky and needed a lot of fanning to keep it alight, but I managed to cook the macaroni. I drained it and mixed in chopped onion and tomato. It wasn’t a gourmet meal, but it tasted a whole lot better than nothing. With the figs, it was enough.
The night air was still and the sky was huge and clear. There were so many stars, it felt like the earth was a tiny island in a black sea of phosphorescence. I’d been sleeping out for the best part of a week, but the other nights had been cloudy or I’d been too tired to even notice the stars.
“You never see stars in London,” I said.
“City lights,” Val replied. “They make the stars fade away.”
“I suppose it’s overcast a lot of the time anyway. You just get that strange orange glow when the light from the street lamps reflects off the clouds. Marmalade sky.”
I’d often wondered if the night sky in London had inspired John Lennon’s line in “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.
Val smiled. He knew what I meant.
Back in Australia, I’d seen starry night skies when we were camping at Shell Beach on the Yorke Peninsula. Dad had showed me where to look for the planets, taught me the names of some of the constellations and how to find due south from the position of the Southern Cross. Looking up at the Turkish sky, I couldn’t recognise anything.
“The stars are differen
t in Australia,” I said.
We arranged ourselves on the mattress in the back of the taxi—the boys on the outside and me in the middle with my feet towards their heads, each in our own sleeping bag. It was quite cold. I could feel Val’s hip against my thigh and I was glad of the warmth.
“We survived a day,” Val said into the darkness.
“Has it only been a day? It feels like a week since we left Istanbul.”
Val hadn’t mentioned Alun since morning. I knew, like me, he was thinking about him, wondering where he was resting his head and if he was okay.
I was back in the driver’s seat at dawn. Dolf had been bitten by mosquitoes during the night and kept scratching himself. The mozzies really liked Dolf’s blood, but they’d ignored me and Val.
It was hard to believe that anyone actually lived in the middle of Turkey. There was nothing and no one anywhere in sight. We drove through an endless brown landscape with hardly anything growing. Then, just when I was beginning to think we’d driven through an invisible barrier into an alternative world with no humans, a few fields and some earth-coloured houses appeared surrounding a miniature mosque with one short minaret.
I stopped.
“I’ll faint if I don’t eat,” I said. “And we need to fill the water container.”
People gathered around to stare at us.
“We’re not stopping,” Val said. “I’ll buy food we can eat while we drive.”
He asked a tea seller to wash out the peanut-butter jar (which Dolf had scraped out) and fill it with tea.
We were back on the road in twenty minutes. As I drove Val passed me food—kebabs and something that looked like a dark green cigar—which he said was rice wrapped in vine leaves—then he handed around the tea jar. Dolf was sitting on the fold-down seat behind me. Val offered him some of the food, but he didn’t like the look of the green things. He wouldn’t eat the meat either, since somewhere along the road he’d decided he was a vegan, like Ulla. It was good food. I ate everything Val gave me.
“We can play I-spy,” I said.
We were on a featureless plain. The mountains in the distance were magnificent and the sky was massive and blue, but there were limited options for things to spot, so the game didn’t last long.
“You two have to think up a game,” I said.
Dolf came up with Rock A to Z where we had to take it in turns to think of a rock band beginning with each letter of the alphabet. Val’s game involved naming a country beginning with A and the next person having to think of one beginning with the last letter of that country. Dolf was allowed to use the Dutch names, but Val always won. He knew countries I’d never even heard of.
There was silence for a while.
“What are dees drawings?”
I looked in the rear-view mirror. Dolf had taken out my designs, or what was left of them.
“Hey, they’re private.”
“Let me see,” Val said.
I’d been prepared to show my designs to one of France’s top designers, but I didn’t want Val to see them.
Dolf passed him the drawings. I tried to grab them, but he held them out of my reach and thumbed through them.
“Very ... original,” he said.
I didn’t know what I was more embarrassed about, the designs or the stupid things I’d scrawled all over them.
“So is that what you did in Australia? Designed dresses?”
It was the first time he’d asked me a personal question.
“I wanted to be more than a dressmaker. I wanted to be a world famous fashion designer.”
Val smiled. “That’s a big ambition.”
“It seemed entirely possible when I was a fifteen-year-old in Adelaide. That’s why I went to London.”
“You always wanted to do that?”
“Apart from a short period when I wanted to be a mechanic, yes.”
Dolf was still looking through my folio.
“I like dis one,” he said, holding up the drawing of my Galah Coat. “If it is shorter, it would be good stage dress for a guitarist, isn’t it?”
I smiled at Dolf in the rear-view mirror. He put the designs back in my suitcase and picked up his guitar again.
“Do you still want to be a fashion designer?” Val asked.
“I don’t know.” Out there in the middle of a Turkish plain, it did seem like a ridiculous idea. “Things didn’t work out the way I’d imagined. I’m wondering if I should be just happy to work with a famous fashion designer, not actually design myself.”
“If I’m being honest, I have to admit that going to London hasn’t been a big success for me.” I wasn’t sure that Val really wanted to hear my story, but I was in the mood to tell it.
“I arrived in London about ten years too late. I should have been part of the 60s really, but I was only five when they started.”
While I was saving for the trip, I’d made clothes to wear when I reached London—a mini-suit made of charcoal grey silk, a dark blue suede mini-skirt, a maroon felt winter dress with bottle green cuffs and collar.
“I couldn’t wait to get to London—the fashion capital of the world, the home of Paul McCartney and the Queen—but by the time I got there in 1971, swinging London had pretty much swung. No one was wearing mini-skirts anymore.”
I never wore those new clothes I made. I gave them to Oxfam.
“You don’t have to wear what’s fashionable.”
“You do if you want a job in a big fashion house. But now cheap and badly made Indian things are all the rage. Trendy London girls are wearing baggy granny dresses and smock tops that make even the skinny ones look four months pregnant. I just couldn’t bring myself to wear them. So I started wearing hotpants. They aren’t exactly the latest trend, even Princess Anne has worn them, but I thought I could do something with hotpants.”
“Isn’t that just another name for shorts?”
“Shorts are what you wear to the beach or when you’re playing tennis. Hotpants are not sportswear. You wear them with coloured tights and boots, long boots that come up over the knee. Over the top you wear a long coat, at least knee length, maybe even ankle length. It’s all about balance.”
“I stand corrected.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to lecture you.”
“Go on.”
Val was the first person to be interested in anything I’d done since I’d left Adelaide. I know he was only talking to keep me awake, just like any other driver who had picked him up, but I was enjoying the attention.
“I found a treadle sewing machine in a cupboard in our bed-sit, so I made several pairs of hotpants, using only the best quality material—velvet, wool, suede. I spent practically all the money I had left on some green pigskin boots. I also bought three floppy felt hats. I thought I looked pretty good.”
“I’m sure you did.”
In Adelaide I’d been confident I was the grooviest girl in the southern hemisphere. People turned to look at me in the street. Girls copied my clothes. In London, no one gave me a second look.
“Perhaps you should find an up-and-coming fashion house to work for,” Val said, “rather than one that’s already big and self-important. Get in early before they’re famous.”
Actually that wasn’t a bad idea.
“At least you have a plan,” he said. “I don’t have any idea what I want to do with my life.”
“Didn’t you have something you wanted to be when you grew up, when you were a kid?”
“I wanted to be a farmer when I was five.”
I laughed. “I can’t think of anyone less suited to be a farmer.”
“I was obsessed with tractors.”
Pine trees appeared on either side of the road and we started to climb. The distant mountains weren’t distant anymore; they were rearing up in front of us, dark, jagged and threatening. It grew cooler as we drove through a damp pine forest. The road twisted and turned, and no one spoke as the land on one side fell away almost vertically into steep valleys. Far bel
ow, a herd of sheep looked like grubby white dots, a lake like a puddle, a river like nothing more than a silver thread. Dolf stopped playing his guitar. It was as if we all thought we had to concentrate on the road or the taxi would plunge over the edge.
The temperature dropped and Dolf rummaged through our bags for jackets, and my cardigan and hat. I’d never been up such a high mountain. I suddenly understood the meaning of breathtaking. It’s when you’re so high up you’re scared to breathe. Dirty snow was wedged in shaded areas along the edge of the road. The sky clouded over. The bitumen disappeared and was replaced by a dirt road.
Val kept staring down into the valleys, as if he thought there was more chance of seeing the Mercedes down there than on the road ahead of us. No one had mentioned Alun all day.
It started to snow.
“Val, see if you can work out how to turn on the heaters.”
While he was fiddling with the assorted levers that were sticking out of the dashboard, I thought I saw someone by the side of the road. Then there was a thwack and in front of my eyes the windscreen turned into a spiderweb.
“What happens?” Dolf asked.
“I saw someone.”
“Keep moving!”
I drove as fast as I could without skidding on the thin layer of snow.
The rock had hit the windscreen wiper on my side, which was probably what had stopped the window from shattering into my lap, but the wiper was broken.
“I can’t see a thing! I’ll drive off the mountain.”
“I’ll guide you,” Val said.
The windscreen on his side wasn’t as cracked and his wiper was still working.
“Did you see him, Dolf?” I asked. “I only got a glimpse.”
The after-image was clear in my head—a man trying to grow a moustache, his hand grasping a stick, his shirt cuffs ragged, a deeply-furrowed brow, though he couldn’t have been all that old. I only saw his eyes for a second. They were angry.
“Perhaps I imagined it.”
“Does someone throw dat rock at us?” Dolf asked.