We walked back to where I’d parked the taxi outside a hotel—a modern one that reminded me of the Adelaide Hilton. There were tables and chairs in the foyer and people drinking tea. There were foreigners, not long-haired hippies but ordinary people, all men, businessmen perhaps. Surely no one was in that town by choice? I don’t know whether it was classified as a teahouse or a restaurant, but I didn’t care.
“I’m going in here,” I said. “You can do whatever you like.”
I helped Dolf out of the taxi and sat him in an armchair under a fan. I was the only woman in the place, but the waiter brought me tea in a tall, silver teapot engraved with swirling patterns and with an elegant long spout. He poured the tea from a height—to cool it I suppose—into rose-coloured glasses. The tea was expensive, but I didn’t care. As far as I was concerned it meant I’d rented that chair for as long as I liked. I was probably breaking half a dozen laws of Iranian etiquette. I didn’t care about that either.
Val wouldn’t sit down.
“I’m going to the Embassy,” he said.
“Which Embassy?”
“The British Embassy, of course.”
“What for? We don’t need to go to the Embassy.”
“A foreigner can’t stay anywhere or leave the country without showing a passport. They’ll be able to find out where Alun is.”
“But that could take days, weeks. And they don’t do those sort of searches every time someone’s friend goes missing, do they?”
“What else can we do?”
“We can walk around. Go to the places travellers would go.”
“You can do that if you like. I’m going to the Embassy. I’ll meet you back here in a couple of hours.”
I left Dolf in the hotel and went in search of the few places people might want to visit in Tehran—the palace, the archaeological museum, the bank where the Iranian crown jewels are kept. I showed people the photos of Alun and Ulla. Neither of them could have kept up the pace that I had, so they couldn’t have been more than twenty-four hours in front of us. Someone had to have seen them.
When you’re travelling, there are some days that seem to last forever, and not in a good way. So much can change from morning till evening—countries come and go; strangers appear, tell you their life stories and leave, never to be seen again; health slides into sickness; relationships blossom and are broken; happiness turns to misery and anger. All in one day. That day in Tehran was one of them. And it wasn’t over yet.
I went back to the hotel and collapsed into a chair next to Dolf, who by some miracle hadn’t been thrown out. I ordered more tea—they call it chai in Iran. Drinking tea in those little rose-coloured glasses was the only thing I enjoyed about Tehran. I wasn’t game to drink the water, and the last thing I felt like was a sweet, fizzy drink, so tea was what I drank, about a gallon of it.
I was ready to give up. I was having my umpteenth cup of tea, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned round, expecting to see Val, but it was the Pakistani, the older one. I thought, this is it, we’ve succeeded, we’ll find Alun! I had a rush of happiness, of jubilation.
“Where is your friend?” The Pakistani wasn’t happy or jubilant, he was angry.
“Val?”
“No, the other boy, Al-lun.”
“I was going to ask you the same question.” My three seconds of joy, fragile as a soap bubble, burst. “Didn’t they arrive in Tehran?” I had a terrible image of the cabriolet crumpled at the bottom of a valley.
“They arrive, they deliver the automobile, and they disappear.”
He was telling the truth. I could tell.
“And Al-lun could not drive well,” the Pakistani complained. “The Mercedes has many...” He prodded the upholstery of a vacant chair with his finger.
“Dents?” I suggested.
He nodded. “And he has taken with him Wasim. Now I have no assistant.”
I didn’t know anything about the Mercedes importing business, but obviously bringing in two cars at a time must make it twice as lucrative. For that he needed an accomplice.
“We don’t know where Alun is. We’re looking for him too.”
I offered the Pakistani some tea and finally asked him his name. It was Aziz.
“That Wasim, he had nothing when I offered him this job. He stood in rags. He was hungry. His family was hungry. He earned much money with me and sent it to his family. He should be grateful. Instead he leaves me.”
Aziz drank his tea. Back in Istanbul, he’d hardly spoken; I’d assumed he couldn’t speak English. Dolf made a sudden dash to the toilet.
“I should never trust an Afghan.” So Wasim wasn’t a Pakistani. “They are uncivilised, tribal. They do not even trust each other. Wasim, he is the worst kind—corrupted by the capitalist West.”
I resisted the urge to point out that his foreign car importation racket was a model capitalist venture.
“Where do you think they went?” I asked.
“I do not know.” He looked at his watch. He had to go and pick up the cabriolet from a car repairer.
Dolf returned from the toilet. He looked worse.
“What about Ulla?” Dolf said.
I’d almost forgotten about her.
Aziz shrugged. “The girl, she left as soon as we arrived in Tehran.”
Of course, Ulla had delivered her Mercedes in one piece with Scandinavian efficiency. The heat was making it hard for my brain to work. There were questions that needed answers, Why had Wasim left Aziz? Why had he given up a well-paid job that involved not much more than sitting in the passenger seat of a very comfortable car? And the most puzzling question of all, why had Alun continued heading east?
Val should have been back at five. He finally turned up at ten past six.
“You’re late.”
“It took longer than I thought.”
“Guess what? I ran into the Pakistani, the older one!”
Hope lit up his blue eyes. “Does he know where Alun is?”
“No.”
His smile faded.
“At least we know he’s alive,” I said. “Did you find out anything at the Embassy?”
“They’ll do a search. We’ll know then if he’s still in the country. It will take a couple of days.”
There was something different about him. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“I’ve found somewhere to stay,” he said.
“Where?”
“My father’s house.”
I felt a cold lump in my stomach, like I’d swallowed a stone. “Here? In Tehran?”
We’d lain together at night in strange places. Our skin had touched. We’d shared secrets, but he hadn’t told me that his father lived in comfortable retirement in Tehran. Perhaps it was only me who had shared secrets.
Perhaps his were still locked inside.
Ever since I’d met Val, I’d been going further and further away from everything I knew and into the unknown. I’d gone out on a limb, edged out onto the very tip of the branch. My face burned. Not with anger, I wasn’t angry yet. I was humiliated. I’d been so stupid. I’d thought we were taking the risk together, but he’d been heading for safety all the time. I wondered how long ago the dice had made that decision for him.
Twenty-one
Voices
Val’s father’s house was in the foothills, in a cool suburb that looked down on the grey city beneath it. The streets were quiet, the houses like small palaces. There were gardens and trees. A snow-capped mountain formed a perfect backdrop. Shiny American and German cars purred around the streets. I felt sorry for Gertrude. Dented and dusty and with a cracked windscreen, she looked like a pensioner with broken glasses.
The inside of the house was white; white walls, white marble floor, white ceiling fans twirling like dancers. It was cool and clean. Val’s father regarded us with distaste. Dolf looked terrible and he smelt worse. Even Val looked like he’d slept in his clothes for a week. There was only one question I had for Mr de Lacey.
“Can I use the bathroom?”
I looked at myself in the floor-length bathroom mirror. I’d seen glimpses of myself along the way in toilet mirrors, miniature images of me in photos, small oval sections of myself in rear-view mirrors. I hadn’t seen the life-sized whole of me for a while. Who was that in the mirror staring back at me—a gypsy, a tramp, a bag lady? My face was smudged with dirt. My nose was sunburnt and peeling. My hair was like straw. The hem of my hand-made skirt was coming undone. My paisley blouse was filthy. And, of course, I’d stopped wearing make-up somewhere back in Yugoslavia. I took off my smelly clothes. There were lines of grey grime around my neck and ankles. The soles of my feet were black. No wonder Val’s father had looked at me like I was something the cat had left on the doormat. I realised who was looking back at me from the mirror—it was a hippy.
I had my first hot shower in nine months and it was heavenly. I scrubbed off the dirt and helped myself to the shampoo and conditioner. (Mr de Lacey must have had a girlfriend.) I sat on the toilet. It was the first time I’d done that for some time. It didn’t smell, and there was nothing deposited on the floor or splattered up the wall. There was toilet paper. I wanted to live in that bathroom.
When I eventually finished, I made Dolf have a shower and give me his clothes. He didn’t have anything clean to put on, so he had to borrow a dressing gown. There was no washing machine and I was about to dunk everything in the bath, but Val gave the whole stinking mess to a servant who took it to a laundry.
Val’s father looked old enough to be his grandfather. He was neat and clipped, reserved and cold, with an even posher accent than Val, who must have worked on modifying his. He was polite, but not welcoming—not even to Val, who he hadn’t seen for three years.
We had a meal, the same sort of meat we’d eaten on the road, but arranged on white plates with tinned vegetables. We ate with shiny knives and forks while Mr de Lacey explained that his final diplomatic posting had been in Tehran, and he’d decided to stay after he retired. It was like a scene from one of those weird Italian movies I’d occasionally seen at the Praed Street Classic. There was tinned chocolate pudding for dessert.
I hadn’t eaten since breakfast so I ate everything in sight. I could tell that Mr de Lacey didn’t approve, but I didn’t care about his opinion of me.
“Australia is one of the few places I have never visited,” he said.
He pronounced Australia like the Queen does, Awstraliah. He made it sound like it was somewhere he would never choose to go, like a swamp or a slum or a ... penal colony. Tea was poured from a china pot into cups with saucers. There was a sugar bowl and a little jug of milk.
“It’s not fresh, of course,” Val’s father said as he poured milk into his teacup. “It’s ‘long-life milk’ flown in from London.” He sounded like he was narrating a documentary. “It need not be refrigerated until opened. You may have seen it on supermarket shelves at home.”
I’m sure he’d never been to a supermarket in his life.
Dolf hardly ate a thing. He was pale and thin with rings under his eyes, and he was constantly scratching his bites.
“Has your friend been taking drugs?” Mr de Lacey asked, as if Dolf couldn’t hear him.
“No, he’s not well,” Val snapped. “He had a cholera injection at the border.”
As soon as I could, I took myself off to a bed. It was a large house with enough bedrooms for us to have one each. I slid between the spotless white sheets I’d been dreaming of. I was clean and sweet-smelling. It was just how I’d been imagining it. Except I was alone.
I tried to imagine what Alun’s plan was. Where would he go? Was he holed up in a hotel room somewhere in this city? I hoped he was happier than I was.
I slept until after nine. Outside the window, there was a courtyard with flowers, a pond and trees that diluted the harsh sun to dappled light. We couldn’t go anywhere until our clothes came back from the laundry. It was like we’d slipped into slow motion. We ate breakfast (cornflakes, eggs and tinned ham!) and drank several cups of milky tea. No one said much. I thought I had every right to be angry with Val, but I couldn’t see why he wasn’t speaking to me.
Since I had time on my hands for once, I decided to spend some more of it in the bathroom. It would be a while before I had another opportunity for a long bath with endless hot water and no need to put shillings in a meter. I filled the bath and added bubbles. I climbed in and lay back to soak. I must have stayed in the bath for more than an hour. It was the sort of cleanliness and comfort I’d been craving for weeks, but I felt miserable.
I put on the only clean thing I had—the long skirt with splits up both sides. Val and his father were in what Mr de Lacey called the drawing room. Sound travelled in that house, probably because of the tiled floors. Mr de Lacey spoke like an actor projecting his voice to the back row. He didn’t care if I heard. In fact I think he wanted me to. His English reserve wouldn’t allow him to say what he thought to my face.
“I’ll help you out this once, Valentine. But there are conditions. You must go back to university immediately and take up law. You must attend a better university. I have some contacts at London and Bristol, but Oxford or Cambridge is out of the question. And you need to select your friends more carefully. You will get nowhere in the company of drug-takers and ... Australians.”
Val didn’t say a word.
I couldn’t leave the house wearing a skirt with thigh-high splits. I didn’t know what to do with myself. The day dragged on until the laundry finally arrived and I mended my blue skirt and put it on with my green singlet. Now that I had a decent mirror, I realised that all my tops clashed with the skirt.
The silence in the house was filled with the sound of the phone ringing. Mr de Lacey answered it.
“That was the Embassy,” he called out.
Val and I both went into the hallway to hear the news.
“I pulled some strings to speed up the process,” Mr de Lacey said. “Your friend applied for an Afghani visa the day before yesterday.”
We both stood there with our mouths open.
“Why would he go to Afghanistan?” Val said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“He must be going with Wasim. He’s an Afghan. Aziz told me. We should leave straightaway,” I said.
I went back into my room and flung open my suitcase to pack. My fashion folder fell out and my scribbled on designs splayed out on the bed. Val came in.
“Why aren’t you getting ready?” I said. “There’s still at least three hours of daylight, and I’m refreshed—I can drive till midnight.”
“I’m not going after Alun,” he said.
“But we know where he’s going. He’s not far ahead. We can catch up with him before he reaches the border.”
“I don’t know what he’s doing, but obviously no one’s making him do it. He just pissed off without a word.” He was rattling the dice in his pocket. “I’ve decided to stay here for a week or so, then I’m going to fly home.”
What about me? I wanted to shout. But I didn’t. What was the point? It hadn’t even occurred to him to include me in his plans.
“Alun’s a sweet boy,” I said. “He trusts everyone he meets. He’d help anyone.”
Ripping off foreigners is the job of anyone involved with tourism anywhere in the world, but in the East it’s a matter of national honour, a source of shame if you don’t achieve it. People had tried (successfully) to rip us off, but it was only ever small time stuff, a few cents if you took the time to do the currency conversion. I’d got used to that, it was like a local tax, but there were other people trying to use westerners to make serious money. Men like Aziz who imported Mercedes cars. On the travellers’ grapevine, we’d heard about people who paid penniless hippies to take hashish back to Europe, or to smuggle alcohol into Pakistan. It was the sort of thing desperate people did when they had no money to get home. Then there were shady westerners like Ulla’s Billy whose motives I couldn’t figure out.
“W
asim comes from a poor family.” I said. “If he tried to talk Alun into taking part in some dodgy moneymaking scheme, Alun would be a pushover.”
“He’s made his own decisions,” Val said.
I’d been angry with Val ever since he’d told me about his father. I’d been holding it in. All that day my anger had grown, filled up like a blister. A blister about to burst.
“You’re a spoilt rich kid. You don’t care about anybody but yourself!”
Actually, it was more like an abscess, spraying out foulsmelling pus. I just let rip.
“You’re a lousy friend. Alun would never leave you in the lurch.” I didn’t care if Mr de Lacey heard me.
“You’re a selfish...” I couldn’t find words to express my fury.
“Bathplug?” Val suggested.
I slapped him across the face. Hard. My anger had nothing to do with Alun, of course. I knew that even then. I tried to think of more ways to insult him.
Val glanced at my designs spread out over the bed. His eyes hardened, his mouth became a thin line.
“Your designs are crap, Jackie.” His voice was quiet and controlled. “Any fashion designer would laugh at them.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. Val’s eyes glittered with triumph.
I collected up my designs, put them in the folder, then stuffed it in the front pocket of my suitcase.
“You might have given up on Alun, but I haven’t.” My voice was shaking. “I’m going to find him.” I had to get out quickly. I didn’t want him to see me cry. I went to the bathroom, washed my face, used the toilet, stole some toothpaste.
Dolf was waiting in the hallway looking scrubbed, pale and angelic with his blond curls floating around his shoulders. He had his bag ready.
“I come wid you,” he said.
I could have hugged him.
“Let’s go.”
I stamped out to the taxi, threw in my suitcase and slammed the door as I got behind the wheel. Dolf was about to get into the back.
“You’ll have to sit in the front now,” I said.
Val had followed us out. “Where do you think you’re going exactly?”