“None of your business,” I replied and drove off.
In the rear-view mirror, I watched Val watching me.
It didn’t cross my mind that Gertrude wasn’t mine to drive off in.
Twenty-two
Flames
The drive out of Tehran was like a bad dream. I had a pain in my stomach as if I’d been stabbed in the guts. Val’s words had hurt me, wounded me. I was shaking all over and trying so hard not to cry, I could hardly breathe. I couldn’t vent my anger at Val, so I took it out on Iran instead. And there was plenty to be angry about—the Tehrani drivers, the pedestrians, the Iranian government for making me drive on the wrong side of the road. I leaned on the horn so much, it’s a wonder I didn’t flatten the battery. I drove fast. Every time I took my foot off the accelerator, a little voice in the back of my mind tried to speak, but I wouldn’t let it open its mouth. I jammed my foot on the accelerator again.
It took ages to get out of that city, but the anger didn’t go away. I was angry with the taxi for being too big, for needing fuel, for not having air conditioning. I was annoyed at Dolf for being a lousy navigator and getting us lost three times before we got out of the suburbs. I was irritated by the sun for making me sweat and then, when we were finally out on the open road, there were mountains to be annoyed with.
I wanted to speed through the countryside, but we’d started to climb even before we left Tehran. I was forced to go slowly, except I was driving the local version of slow, which involved taking corners on the wrong side of the road, making the tyres squeal and beeping the horn at anyone who dared get in my way.
Dolf was holding on to the door handle as if he was thinking of jumping out.
“Where do we go?” he said.
It was a fair question.
“East,” I said.
Where was I going? I thought it might be time to consider that.
“Alun got a visa for Afghanistan,” I said. “He must be going there with Wasim.”
“We go to Afghanistan?” Dolf sounded terrified.
“No, of course not. They’d have caught a bus, and left yesterday, maybe even this morning. Buses have to stop to let people get on and off. We can catch up with them.”
“Is Ulla wid dem?”
“I don’t know. Probably.”
Aziz had told me that Ulla had left on her own, but I didn’t want Dolf bailing on me as well.
My anger ebbed away and turned into something mottled and tender like a bruise. I felt sorry for myself. I wanted someone to tell me how badly I’d been treated, to put an arm around me, rub my back and say, “There, there.”
The road kept going up. That snow-peaked mountain that had formed such an attractive backdrop to Mr de Lacey’s house? We were crawling up it. There were dark, dripping forests of pines or cypress disappearing into mist. The strip of muddy earth along the edge of the road ended too soon in a steep plunge to jagged rocks. Ahead I could see the pale thread of the road weaving up through the dark rock of what a few minutes earlier had looked like impassable mountain. I tried to keep my eyes on the road, but I couldn’t help looking over the edge. There were no barriers. There was nothing between us and sailing off the mountain and plummeting a long, long way down. I stared at the road ahead, straining my eyes, willing the rear end of a bus to appear on the horizon.
The taxi was straining. It was built to drive around London, not to climb mountains. The temperature gauge was edging ever higher. The mist turned into fog. My visibility through the cracked windscreen wasn’t good on a clear day, with the fog I was almost driving blind.
I needed a good navigator. Dolf was useless and kept falling asleep. We didn’t have a map, but Val had managed to keep us on track by interpreting signs and asking directions. I jabbed Dolf in the ribs.
“You have to stay awake. I need another pair of eyes on the road.”
He stayed awake for about five minutes.
I’d forgotten to wind up my watch. I don’t know how long we were climbing, but it must have been hours and I needed to pee.
I thought of Alun who hadn’t been able to cope with Welsh hills. The highest mountain in Wales would have been a pimple compared to the one Gertrude was crawling up. He would be terrified. We kept climbing, and then the fog disappeared and we were in sunlight. The next time I glanced over the edge, there was a sea of fluffy white, below us. The fog we had driven through was actually clouds.
I stopped at dusk when the road flattened a little. There was a small grassed area on the side of the road near a waterfall which clattered down a rocky cliff, disappeared under the road and re-emerged to cascade further down the mountain. I could have driven further, but I was scared that in the dark one of the wheels might end up in the slippery mud at the side of the road and we would skid and disappear over the edge like the water.
Dolf crawled into the back and got into his sleeping bag.
I wasn’t ready for sleep. The events of the day were still swirling in my head. It was cold. I needed some warmth and I thought I was justified in using the emergency can of tomato soup. I collected up some damp twigs, but I needed paper to get a fire going, and I knew exactly where to find some. I got my folder from the taxi and pulled out my designs. I looked at them in the glow of Gertrude’s interior light. Val was right. They were childish. I couldn’t believe that just a couple of weeks before I had been so proud of them, that I’d actually thought that they would impress André Courrèges.
I tore them up one page at a time and scrunched the pieces. I arranged them into a pile and put the twigs on top. I lit three corners of the paper with Dolf’s matches and watched the tiny flames struggle to take hold. I thought they were going to go out, but then they flared up. The paper burned, the twigs crackled. It was a miserable little fire, but it did the job. I opened the tin of tomato soup and warmed it over the flames.
Twenty-three
Sugar
We didn’t have breakfast, so I stopped for lunch well before noon at a village that was clinging to the side of the mountain. There was no road up to it, just a footpath. Dolf wanted to stay in the taxi, so I left him there and walked up.
There was a small café full of men who stared at me as I entered. It was a rough wooden hut with a round stove in the middle of the room and a sort of urn or samovar sitting on top of it. A huge framed portrait of the Shah hung on the wall. I ordered more lamb (or it could have been goat) on skewers. Dolf had said he didn’t want any food, just a Coke. I bought him some brown fizzy liquid in a Coke bottle with white Arabic writing and a red bottle top, but I doubted that it was the real thing. I had tea served in the usual little glass on a saucer with a lump of sugar, but no spoon to stir it. I watched one of the locals. He put the sugar cube on his tongue and drank the tea through it. I did the same. It tasted good, much better than the Tetley’s tea with long-life milk I’d had at Val’s father’s. A small glass of it wasn’t enough. I wanted some to take with me, so I got the café owner to fill the peanut-butter jar. I bought some sugar cubes, which he wrapped in a piece of coarse brown paper. A knot of children stood in the doorway staring at the foreign girl who was doing something strange with tea.
I went around the back of the cafe to what passed as a toilet. The children followed me. The toilet was literally a hole in the ground. I couldn’t stop myself from looking down at the thick brown liquid which was bubbling as it festered. The smell was so putrid, I thought I might faint. I held my breath as I squatted over the hole. There was no door. The children watched me.
I went back to the taxi and we resumed the upward crawl. We’d been driving since dawn and still hadn’t reached the top of the mountain. It got cold, so cold I thought it was going to snow. Dolf sipped his Coke and shivered. Then, finally, we started to descend. That was even worse. It was impossible not to look down at the minute fields and tiny villages. More than once I saw the rusting remains of a wrecked car far below us. I wanted to shut my eyes, but I couldn’t do that. I focussed on a huge body of blue water
in the distance, a massive lake so big I couldn’t see the other side. I wondered what the lake and the mountain were called. The slopes grew less steep and were planted with orchards and tea bushes.
“The bus must be going even slower than we are,” I said. I hoped.
Dolf was feeling better, so he was a bit more conversational.
“My parents don’t want me to be a rock guitarist,” he said. No surprises there. “Dey expect me to be a doctor like dem. Thomas as well.”
“My dad wanted me to be a mechanic,” I said. “I just told him I wanted to be a fashion designer. He was okay about it.”
“It is different because you are a girl, isn’t it?”
He chatted about his favourite bands and his friends. He talked about Ulla.
“She is very beautiful,” he said. “De most beautiful girl I ever knowed.”
I didn’t have the heart to correct his English. Sometimes he lapsed into Dutch and I didn’t know what he was talking about.
At last we came to the bottom of the mountain and the road flattened out. We stopped for diesel in a town called Amol. I asked a man selling vegetables if a bus from Tehran to the Afghan border had passed through the town. He didn’t speak English, but with some suitable mime he seemed to get the idea. He nodded and pointed down the road.
“Mashhad,” he said.
I didn’t know what that meant. I pointed to my watch and made a theatrical shrug. He put up two fingers.
“There’s a bus two hours ahead,” I told Dolf, confident that I’d translated the gestures correctly. “They could be on it.”
“Hey, man, I could use a ride.” A young man with neatly cut hair and a trimmed moustache came up to the taxi. “I’ve been waiting six hours in this shit hole.”
He was too neat to be a hippy and he was carrying a huge, expensive-looking rucksack and wearing massive boots. I’d dragged all possible conversation out of Dolf, so I thought someone else to keep me awake would be a good idea.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Kathmandu,” he said, as he climbed in the back of the taxi.
I didn’t know where that was.
We exchanged the rest of the usual travellers’ questions. Where have you been? Where are you from? How long have you been on the road? His name was Dieter. He was from Germany and he was going to climb a mountain range called the Hindu Kush. He only wanted to talk about mountains and climbing equipment. He knew that the big lake I’d seen earlier wasn’t a lake at all. It was an inland sea, the Caspian Sea.
“You don’t know that?” he said, amazed at my ignorance.
He knew that the mountain we’d crawled up outside Tehran was Mount Damavand and it was seventeen thousand feet high. He’d just climbed it.
It was mid afternoon. I could feel Alun ahead of us, just out of reach. The thought of seeing him filled me with warmth. I remembered his lilting voice, his friendliness. He’d never made me angry, and despite being very smart, he’d never made me feel stupid. He liked me. I needed to see him so I could tell him about Val and how awful he’d been. How he had abandoned us both. Alun would understand how I felt.
I was worried about him too. I just couldn’t understand what had made him go off into more mountains.
The road was flat and straight, and the countryside lush and green. I’d had enough of mountains to last a lifetime and I hoped I’d never see another one. I certainly didn’t want to listen to Dieter talk about climbing them. I put my foot down and concentrated on driving. The taxi hurtled through the Iranian countryside at a speed that would have been modest on a European motorway, but which was making the sound of Gertrude’s engine move up another octave. We were making good progress, leaving fields and villages in our wake. We passed a road sign with a picture of an aeroplane. It was strangely reassuring. Iran was a civilised country which had airports. I could do this. I didn’t need Val to guide me. I didn’t need him at all.
When it started to get dark, I stopped in a town to get food. No surprises about what was on the menu—lamb and rice. Dieter didn’t like the look of the flyblown food for sale. He went back to the taxi and left me to go into the restaurant by myself.
I could feel men staring at me. Heathen whore, they were probably thinking. Then they did more than look. While I was filling up my tea jar one of them grabbed my bottom. I turned round to hurl abuse at him, but there were half a dozen men standing behind me. Close, too close. I could see the hairs growing out of their noses, smell their bodies and their cigarette breath. I changed my mind about eating there and pointed at food I could take with me—slices of lamb wrapped in bread and small greenish biscuits. As I was leaving, another man squeezed through the doorway so that his body brushed mine. I wouldn’t have given it a second thought if I’d been in London, but there it felt like a violation.
I’d been thinking about getting a hotel room (I didn’t fancy sharing the back of the taxi with Dieter), but it wasn’t a nice town, so I got back in the taxi and drove some more.
An hour or so later, I pulled off the road.
“We’ll stay here for the night.”
No one objected.
Dieter might have been a bore, but he was a big guy and I was glad he was there. He’d told us that he’d climbed all the mountains in Switzerland, and from the size of his thighs, I could believe him. I wouldn’t have felt safe with just skinny Dolf to protect me.
“I make some food,” Dieter said as he pulled a little spirit stove from his rucksack and set it up on a rock outside.
He produced what looked like an army mess kit, which consisted of a square saucepan with a folding handle and a water canteen. He poured some of the water into the saucepan and heated it on the stove. Then he added water-purifying tablets and the contents of a foil sachet. The mixture turned into watery soup. He didn’t offer to share it.
I ate my cold lamb wrapped in bread and managed to persuade Dolf to eat two of the biscuits.
Dieter told us all about his special sleeping bag.
“It cost four hundert Deutsche marks, but it is full of down of goose and in it I can survive below freezing.”
I was a bit concerned about the sleeping arrangements, but just as I was shaking out my own sleeping bag (I thought of it as mine by that time), Dieter said, “Want to turn on?”
I thought he was proposing we have sex, possibly all three of us.
“No thanks,” I said.
Dolf on the other hand was nodding enthusiastically.
When Dieter rolled a large cigarette made by gluing three cigarette papers together, I understood. “Are you insane?” I said. “You get the death penalty in Iran for having drugs.”
He lit the cigarette, sucked in the smoke and then handed it to Dolf.
“Relax,” said Dieter. “The death penalty is for possession of one kilo or more. I just bought a few grams at the last little town. It was so cheap. I smoke it all before we get to the border. It’s cool.”
I got into Gertrude, shut all the doors and windows and zipped myself into my sleeping bag. Dieter had a very loud voice and Dolf was more talkative than he had been since Italy. His high-pitched giggle punctuated their conversation. I was exhausted, but I just couldn’t get to sleep. When Dolf eventually crawled into his own sleeping bag, he was restless and kept tossing and turning. Dieter took his expensive, goose-down, sub-zero sleeping bag and slept outside. After about three minutes, he was snoring. I didn’t sleep much.
In the daylight I could see that we’d left the greenness behind us some time during the previous evening. We’d left civilisation behind as well. I drove through a light-brown, flat landscape that didn’t vary. I was worried that Alun’s bus had gotten away from us during the night. I just kept driving. I felt like I’d been driving all my life, that I’d be driving forever.
“You shouldn’t eat local food,” Dieter said, when I had to stop after half an hour because I had the runs.
“It’s that or starve,” I said.
Dieter rummaged in
his rucksack and pulled out his first-aid kit.
“Wow, that’s impressive,” I said as he opened it up.
He showed me the contents as we drove, which kept me entertained for at least ten minutes. He had bandages, plasters, antiseptic fluid, even a surgical needle and cat gut. He also had burn cream, laxatives, several types of vitamins, water purifying tablets and some ointment that, judging from where he was pointing, was for pubic lice. He also had a selection of pills that he itemised for me.
“For malaria, for sleeping, for keeping awake, for insect bites, for headache and for dysentery.”
He handed me one of the latter and I swallowed it obediently.
The flat road was short-lived and before long we were starting to climb—again. Dieter was in the back chatting in German to Dolf. The German obviously didn’t know the hitchhikers’ rule about chatting to the driver. In the rear-view mirror I could see him unpacking his rucksack and showing Dolf his climbing equipment.
I didn’t like the way he had his dusty boots on the patchwork quilt. I should have been grateful for the tablet that had cured my dose of the runs in an hour. I should have been thankful that he’d got a map which saved us from getting completely lost when I took a wrong turn. Actually, I wished I hadn’t picked him up.
The trouble was, he was making me miss Val. I’d been trying hard to maintain my anger, but I’d failed. I still hated him for what he’d said to me, but I was also thinking that it might be true.
Later that afternoon I was driving up a twisty stretch of road with hairpin bends imagining I was a rally driver to pass the time. I rounded another bend and up ahead was a stretch of straight road, slotted into a narrow gorge between mountains. It wasn’t late but the sun had already disappeared behind the mountain looming over us. In the distance I could see something across the road. At first, I couldn’t make out what it was through the cracked windscreen. I thought it was a herd of goats or a cart that had lost its load, but as I got closer I could see that it was three men and a jeep.