I immediately thought that they must be spies in league with the Iranian government.
“But you’re on the wrong side of the border,” Val said. “If you sell us your carnet, how will you get back into Iran again?”
“My wife’s over the Iran side with the car. I crossed over a couple of days ago.”
Maybe they were thieves in league with the Iranian guards.
He showed us an official-looking document with AA on the top and an address in London. He also had two number plates.
“We swap the number plates, you cross over the border, they check your documents. You’re cool. Then when you leave Iran you get the bond money back. It’s actually more than we’re asking.”
Or they were drug addicts who needed money desperately and were prepared to rip off fellow travellers.
“I’ll drive the car over. I signed the carnet.” He showed us his passport, which had a matching signature on it. Gerry was Canadian.
“What are you asking?”
“Just twelve thousand rials.”
“That’s still a lot of money,” I said.
“About sixty-seven pounds,” Val said.
I thought that would have been the end of it, but I could see him calculating.
“You get it back when the vehicle leaves the country, it’s just a bond.”
Val peered at the fine print.
“You don’t even have to pay me the money until we’re safely over. If there are any problems, I’m the one who’s going to be in trouble.”
I think if Dolf had thrown in the towel then, Val would have given up and turned around, but Dolf wiped his eyes with his good arm and put the photo of Ulla in his pocket.
“I want to continue,” Dolf said.
“What time was it when you tried to cross?”
“About three-thirty,” I said.
“Okay, the shift change is at five. We’ll wait till then.”
While we waited, I unscrewed Gertrude’s number plates and replaced them with the ones the Canadian had in his bag. He bought us all a Coke. It was lukewarm and tasted almost the same as Coke at home, but not quite. Then we got back into the taxi—the Canadian driving, Val on the food box, Dolf and I in the back.
Gerry crunched the gears. “I’m not used to a stick shift,” he said.
We moved back into line. It was half an hour before we reached the front of the queue. I was suddenly terrified. Wouldn’t they notice that the carnet was for a completely different vehicle? What if they compared the engine number on the form to the one under Gertrude’s bonnet? I’d read in the BIT notes that there was a death sentence in Iran for drug smuggling. I wondered what the sentence was for fraud.
The Canadian handed over the carnet document, his passport and vaccination certificate. The guard didn’t look at all interested. He checked our passports. He smiled when he saw the fresh stamp on Dolf’s vaccination certificate. He seemed to think that we’d received our allotment of pain and waved us through.
The Canadian turned into the car park on the other side of the border and pulled in next to a sleek American car—a red, two-door Dodge about a mile long. A young woman was sitting in the passenger seat with the door open. She had a scarf covering her hair with the ends thrown back over her shoulders and wore a long-sleeved tunic over jeans. She at least knew how to dress in a Muslim country. Val exchanged several ten pound notes for a pile of crisp Iranian notes with pictures of the smiling Shah. He gave most of the notes to the Canadian in return for two sheets of paper. They shook hands. The Canadians drove off in the red Dodge.
Val looked pale.
“I’ve got less than five pounds left,” he said.
Nineteen
Middle of Nowhere
Iran was different to Turkey. The roads were better for a start. They were bituminised and well made. There were more vehicles and more crops growing in the fields—rice, wheat, some vegetables. More women too, all with long scarves draped over their heads, but not so worried about people seeing their faces. It was also hotter.
It seemed like days since we’d been able to cruise along a road at maximum speed. Val was a different person when he wasn’t anxious. As the miles clicked by and Tehran got closer, he finally started to loosen up. He talked without me having to encourage him.
He told me about his family, how he was an only child, and about his dad who used to be in the diplomatic service before he retired. Val had lived all over the world when he was a kid—Singapore, Zurich, Lima. He was used to travel, though it’d always been on planes and luxury liners before. His mother, it turned out, lived two streets away from me in Maida Vale, but whereas my house had been divided up to make ten bed-sits, she had the whole four floors to herself.
“Is that where you live when you’re in London?”
“Yes.”
“I might have passed you in the street or sat next to you on the Tube.”
“Maybe.”
Except in London he wouldn’t have struck up a conversation with me, and he wouldn’t be telling me all about himself. He wouldn’t have even noticed me.
When his parents split up, his mother bought a restaurant and turned it into a vegetarian place. Not because she was a vegetarian herself, but because she thought she could cash in on the trend. It was doing well.
Val even asked me about Adelaide.
Semaphore sounded like a colonial outpost when I described it to him—the Norfolk Island pines uniformly spaced along the foreshore, the Ferris wheel, the train that went down the middle of the road. Our house made of pressed-metal moulded to look like stone blocks, the buffalo grass lawn, the umbrella tree.
“I always remember it as sun-baked and summery, the sand too hot to walk on, the bitumen soft like toffee,” I said. “But it’s winter in Australia now. It’ll be cold and rainy. I got a letter from Mum just before I left. She said there’d been a storm and part of the jetty was washed away.”
We pretty much ignored Dolf. I hadn’t noticed that for once he wasn’t plinking away on his guitar. I feel bad about it now, but at the time I was preoccupied with getting to know Val. It wasn’t until we stopped for food that I noticed that Dolf was sprawled across the mattress, sweating and looking very sick.
“It’s a reaction to the cholera injection,” Val said.
I remembered that I’d got sick when I’d had mine. It had been like a sudden, bad dose of the flu. Except that I was able to get over it in my own bed with Mum bringing me thin soup, dry toast and orange juice.
Iran looked a lot more affluent than Turkey in most ways, but the food wasn’t as good. We stopped at a roadside restaurant and all there was to eat was rice and meat. Dolf wouldn’t get out of the taxi even though it was very hot in there. He wouldn’t eat anything either.
The food refueled me and I felt like I could drive all night. We were getting closer to finding Alun. I think Val sensed that too. It’s funny, but I don’t remember anything about the scenery on that part of the journey. I suppose that’s because all my attention was inside the taxi.
Val told me about his grandmother, the only member of his family who’d never left England.
“No matter where we were in the world, I always went to stay with her in the summer holidays while my parents went somewhere else.”
“They wanted to get rid of you?”
“Yes, but I loved it. She lived in a big old manor house in Devon, which was the last remaining piece of the family estate. It had seventeen bedrooms and a park and a secret tunnel that led to the sea. There was just me and Gran, a big dog, five cats and a cook who didn’t like cooking. We lived on cornflakes and sandwiches.”
“Will you inherit the family fortune?”
“There’s not much left to inherit. The house was falling apart, so when Gran died, my father sold it. It’s a hotel and restaurant now.”
“Where did the rest of the family fortune go?”
“Into other families. The de Lacey’s weren’t much good at producing male heirs.”
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“De Lacey sounds like a very aristocratic name.”
“It was once. We’re descended from William the Conqueror.”
“You are not!”
“It’s true. Through an illegitimate daughter of Edward I. Gran had a pedigree chart to prove it.”
“That’s impressive.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. There’s probably millions of people who are descended from William the Conqueror, they just don’t know it.”
“I hardly know anything about my ancestors.”
“They weren’t convicts?”
“No, they came from Scotland. They were farmers and poets, according to my grandma.”
Since I couldn’t tell him about my ancestors, famous or otherwise, I told him about my school friends, about Colleen and our plans to become famous in London. I described the beach at Semaphore, and how during the day the sea was like a pond and you had to wade out miles to have a swim, but in the evening the tide came in and it was deep and there were waves. I told him about transparent jellyfish on the beach, walking home along suburban streets with no pavements and sudden twilights.
“When I was younger, you used to be able to drive onto the beach a bit further up the coast. We’d go there after dinner and swim.”
“You never talk about living in London,” Val said.
“There’s not much to say. And there’s nothing I can tell you about London that you don’t already know.”
“Do you like living there?”
“Yes. I like the fact that it’s old. The only things that are old in Australia are the rocks.”
“That’s not much of a reason to live in a place.”
“London hasn’t happened for me yet. I just work ... and wait.”
“What are you waiting for?”
“For my big break, for Terry...”
“Who’s Terry?”
“He’s my ... my boyfriend.”
“Boyfriend? You never mentioned him before.”
I could feel myself blushing.
“He’s still in Australia saving to go to England.”
Val was smiling in that lopsided way he has when he thinks something is amusing.
I had a sudden twinge of guilt. The postcard I’d written to Terry in Paris was still in my bag. I hadn’t really given him a thought since somewhere back in Yugoslavia. To tell the truth, I didn’t miss him at all. I’d liked Terry mostly because we looked good together. We were the In couple of Adelaide. I’d made him some lovely paisley shirts and velvet pants and I enjoyed walking down Rundle Street with him when he was carrying his guitar case in one hand and holding my hand with the other.
“I take it you haven’t got a girlfriend back in England,” I said.
“Why do you say that?”
“You know, Veronica, Vanessa, Ulla.”
“There was nothing with Ulla,” he said. “She came on to me, but ... you know...”
He glanced into the back of the taxi at sleeping Dolf. “No, I haven’t got a girlfriend. I’m not into relationships.”
Things went quiet again after that. And there was none of Dolf’s guitar playing to fill the silence. I was afraid I’d asked one too many questions—that I’d got a little too personal.
We stopped to eat in a town called Tabriz at dusk. More meat and rice. I was starting to crave something different, like a bowl of spaghetti or a tuna mornay. Dolf still wouldn’t eat. I was getting worried about him.
“Do you feel up to driving some more?” Val asked.
“As long as you keep me from falling asleep.”
I was expecting him to be sullen and silent when we got going again, but he wasn’t. After a while he started talking again.
He told me about living in Peru, and how he and Alun had been involved with a comedy review at university.
“I wouldn’t have thought Alun would have been confident on stage ... performing.”
“You’d be surprised. He has a great sense of timing. He can make a few seconds of silence seem hilarious.”
Even though Val and I were starting to get on, I still missed Alun. He would have made it easier between us. He’d have filled the silences, smoothed the awkwardness, made us laugh. I wondered if I would stay friends with Val and Alun when we got back to England. Would we get together in London when they had term holidays?
It must have been midnight by the time we stopped somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
It was a beautiful night, cool after the hot day. It was good to get out of the taxi and walk around a bit, to look up at those stars. There was a moon, almost full.
“The moon’s so bright,” I said, “I reckon you could read out here.”
Val laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“Reckon ... that’s very Australian.”
There was no colour, everything was in shades of grey and silver, including Val as he walked up to me, put his arms around my waist and kissed me on the mouth. It was a long kiss, and I didn’t want it to end. It was like that kiss had been in the air, waiting patiently until the perfect moment and that was it—the stillness, the silence, the silver light. Neither of us spoke. We’d been talking for hours and there was nothing left to say.
I’d driven thousands of miles for that kiss. And it was worth every one of them.
Val rolled Dolf over to the edge of the mattress. I took off my blouse and skirt. Val took off his jeans and shirt. And we lay together in our underwear, our skin touching for the first time. It felt wonderful. It was enough. I wanted to just lie there and enjoy that closeness, but I was exhausted. I couldn’t keep sleep from washing over me like anesthetic.
Twenty
Rose-coloured Glasses
Tehran was a big city with a bad vibe. There were billboards and multistoried concrete buildings. There was money in Tehran, you could feel it. And see it. The footpaths were made of glazed white tiles. Thousands of expensive cars, all driven by impatient men, clogged the streets. No one took any notice of the traffic lights, and it was like it was against the law to drive slowly. A huge modern tower loomed out of the heat haze. The sort of thing you see in movies set in the future. Perhaps it was supposed to be Tehran’s answer to the Eiffel Tower. It was ugly.
We’d made it—more or less in one piece. To tell the truth my first thought wasn’t about Alun and where he might be. I was thinking about where we were going to spend the night. And what the sleeping arrangements would be. I thought we might splash out for once and get a hotel room with a proper bed and clean sheets. In fact two rooms, one for Dolf. My heart was thumping, but Val had gone quiet again. Each time we took a step towards some sort of closeness, he took two steps back.
“So now what do we do?” I asked. “Where would you go if you wanted to buy a Mercedes? Are there car showrooms in Iran?”
Val’s smile had disappeared as well. “I have no idea.”
I don’t know how big Tehran is—a lot bigger than Adelaide, not as big as London—but that day it seemed like the biggest city in the world. I drove around willing the cabriolet to appear. It was an eye-catching car, but we didn’t have a hope. Finding one particular car in little old Adelaide, even an unusual car, would have been hard. Finding it in Tehran was off the scale of possibility.
Val’s enthusiasm had wilted like a flower on a forty-degree day. He just stared out of the window, shaking his head and saying, “This is a waste of time.”
After an hour and a half, I had to agree with him.
I parked the taxi and we walked instead. We found the street with the cheap hotels that were recommended in the BIT notes, but there weren’t crowds of hippies like there were in Istanbul, no one wanted to hang around in Tehran. It was just a stop on the road east that you had to pass through. No one had seen Alun.
There were more foreigners at the bus station than anywhere else. It seemed like every westerner who landed in that city immediately decided that being there was a mistake and they had to get out again in one direction or the other. Even
the locals didn’t expect visitors to stay. Every bus company had boys touting for business, handing out cards for buses out of town. Bleary-eyed travellers staggered off one bus, were surrounded by the boys and led straight to another bus.
The few Iranians we’d met at our stops in the countryside had been poor and pleasant. They were used to foreigners passing their doors and were happy to sell us what we needed, to take our rials, and point out the way for us. The citizens of Tehran were tall, well dressed, and looked down their noses at us like Persian Parisians. The young men were wearing expensive-looking western suits, the older men wore more traditional clothing, but tailored and pressed. And there were women on the streets, quite a lot of them. They wore long headscarves like the women in the countryside, with one end flipped over a shoulder to cover their mouths and the other hanging to their knees, except the Tehrani women’s were so fine you could see their faces through the fabric anyway. They wore smart tunics over floral pants. Some of the younger girls wore jeans underneath and platform-soled shoes.
We asked a few of people if they had seen the cabriolet. The women looked at us as if we were street urchins. The men strode past, clean and superior, forcing me off the footpath so that I had to walk in the gutter, but they always managed to brush against me or touch me as they passed. No one answered our questions.
We asked about the cabriolet in second-hand car places. The whole deal wasn’t made any easier by the fact that Dolf was as sick as a dog. He couldn’t walk around, so we had to leave him in the taxi, which was really hot. It all got too much. Like I said, that city had a bad vibe. I got into an argument with Val, over whether we should stop to rest in a teahouse or in a restaurant.
“Women don’t go to teahouses,” he said. “Only men.”
“I need to sit down. I need to have a drink. If it offends anyone, too bad. It’s all right for you, you haven’t just driven thousands of miles on next-to-no sleep. And we have to get Dolf out of the taxi. It’s like a sauna in there.”