“There’s a roadblock up ahead,” I said.
“Scheiße!”
I glanced in the rear-view mirror. Dieter was up on his knees, staring through the windscreen. The colour drained from his face. “It is the police.”
I’d just thought it would be an annoying delay until it dawned on me that Dieter was carrying drugs.
“Don’t stop!” he said. “Drive through.”
A man in a beige uniform with lots of badges and a peaked cap stepped out into the road and waved us down. He had a gun in a holster. Pretending to be a rally driver was one thing, being on the run from the Iranian police was something else. I put my foot on the brake.
“Perhaps they just want to check our visas,” I said.
The policeman walked over to us with a confident swagger. We were miles from anywhere.
“Pass-a-ports,” he said.
We dutifully handed over our passports. He called over the other men. They were wearing simpler uniforms and berets, but what caught my attention were the rifles slung over their shoulders. The man in the peaked cap showed his underlings the three different sorts of passports—mine was blue, Dolf’s was red, Dieter’s was green. Flicking through them kept them amused for several minutes.
The man with the peaked cap handed back the passports. I was worried that he’d use the excuse of searching me to do something unpleasant, but he wasn’t interested in me. He went up to Dolf.
“Show me your pockets,” he said.
Dolf didn’t understand what he meant.
The other two men shifted their guns.
“He wants to see what’s inside your pockets, Dolf,” I said.
Dolf dug his hands into his jeans pockets. All he had was a plectrum, a condom and a few rials. One of the men, patted down his pockets front and back to make sure they were empty. The policeman looked disappointed. Then it was Dieter’s turn. He pulled out his water purification tablets, some tiny nail clippers, and a little ball of silver paper.
The policeman’s sulky sneer turned into a white-toothed smile. He unwrapped the silver paper to reveal a small piece of something brown about the size of peanut. He sniffed it and held it up between his thumb and his index finger triumphantly.
“This is illegal in my country,” he said.
He took a folded sheet of paper from his breast pocket and opened it out carefully. It was grubby with use and the folds had worn thin. From where I was standing, I could see what was on the paper. I couldn’t read the Arabic writing but there were columns of regular numbers. He ran his finger down the first column.
“Deutsche marks.” His finger moved across to the next column. “Two hundred.”
“Zweihundert!” Dieter said.
The policeman nodded pleasantly as his finger slid to the next column. “Or two year’s prison.”
Dieter went to the rear door of the taxi and took out his rucksack. He was taking stuff out, unzipping pockets and zipping them up again. The policeman looked me up and down. I tried to look innocent of all crimes. He said something to his men that made them laugh. I didn’t move a muscle. One of the soldiers took out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to his superior. As he was lighting it, Dieter suddenly bolted off into the bushes. He swung his rucksack onto his shoulders as he ran. The three soldiers dropped their cigarettes and ran after him, unslinging their guns. Dieter was fast, despite the weight he was carrying. He was heading for a steep rock face. The soldiers slowed their pace and spread out, confident that they could easily corner him. I guessed that wasn’t Dieter’s plan.
“Get in the taxi, Dolf,” I said.
Dolf didn’t move.
“Dey shoot at us if we go.” His voice was shaking with fear.
“They might shoot us anyway,” I whispered as I shoved him in the rear door, shutting it as quietly as I could. I wasn’t going to hang around to find out.
I jumped into the driver’s seat. Gertrude started first go, bless her. I put my foot on the accelerator and sped off—at least Gertrude’s version of speeding.
I was pretty sure the man with the peaked cap was just a local cop making money out of dope-smoking hippies, probably in league with whoever had sold the drugs to Dieter at the last town. I hoped he wouldn’t follow, but all I could think of were those guns, and bullets speeding towards us. I hunched down, wondering how far I had to drive until we were out of range. I risked a glance in the rear-view mirror. The jeep stood empty and stationary. They must have thought that Dieter on foot was easier prey.
I was trembling. That was when I decided I’d given up looking for Alun. All I wanted to do was go home, to a normal life, to London and safety. There was a problem though. I couldn’t turn around and go back now—I’d run into those gun-carrying policemen again. I’d just cut myself off from my escape route. I didn’t know what to do, so I kept driving. My mouth was so dry I could hardly swallow. I looked around for my jar of tea, but couldn’t see it anywhere. I was thinking of Val and how useless Dolf was, still staring out of the back window, too petrified to move.
“Dolf, come and find my tea jar.”
I sounded like a headmistress.
He didn’t move.
“Dolf!”
He grumbled that it was too hard to climb through the opening between the front and the back, but he was so thin he got through easily. He found the peanut-butter jar and handed it to me. The tea was only lukewarm, but I didn’t care. I held it between my knees and unscrewed the lid. It was starting to get dark, so I switched on the headlights.
I’d got used to drinking tea with a sugar cube in my mouth. I was feeling around for the little twist of brown paper that contained the sugar cubes I’d bought. A silly song popped into my head. I started to sing. Sugar, Sugar. I only took my eyes off the road for a second or two. I found a sugar cube and put it in my mouth. When I looked up there were goats. Three or four of them, standing staring in the middle of the road. They had long earth-coloured fleeces, black legs and droopy ears.
I remembered what Val had said about hitting goats.
I floored the brake. The goats scattered, but one of them ran straight at us. There was an awful thump.
“Sugar!”
I’d never hit so much as a gatepost before. The sickening sound of live flesh hitting the taxi was something I’ll never forget. I yanked the wheel to avoid the other goats. The taxi swerved to one side. Dolf, who was kneeling up on the food box, about to climb through to the back, was flung against the passenger door. I tried to straighten the taxi up, but it had already started to roll.
There was a rush of air as the door swung open and Dolf half-fell, half-leapt out of the taxi as it rotated. His eyes were like saucers, bright in the fading light. The open door bent back and the leather hinges broke. The food box tipped and blocked the doorway. I crashed into it and a sharp corner dug into my side. The taxi stopped turning with a shattering thud and the sound of scraping metal. My shoulder smashed into the roof. The tea jar whacked me in the head. Cubes of sugar and windscreen glass rained down. I’d watched it all happen in ultra-slow motion, but actually it had been so quick the sugar cube in my mouth hadn’t finished melting. The sweetness ran down my throat and I slid into darkness.
Twenty-four
Bad Karma
Everything was the wrong way up. In the moonlight, I could just make out the upside-down numbers on the dashboard dials. The driver’s seat was above my head and the gear stick was pointing down not up. My face was squashed up against the taxi’s canvas ceiling. I didn’t dare move. Gertrude could have been balanced on the edge of a precipice for all I knew.
It was safer to keep still. I was in shock, I was in pain, but I wanted to stay in that moment between before and after when nothing was required of me. Once I moved, I’d have to work out what to do next, and that seemed much too hard. I called out to Dolf, but there was no answer. It wasn’t cold, but I was shivering. Every bit of me hurt. I wondered if I’d broken something. I studied a rip in the canvas ceiling, coun
ting the broken threads.
I drifted in and out of sleep.
What was I doing there in an upside-down London taxi in a country that I’d have trouble finding on a map of the world, in a barren landscape where I might die of thirst or lack of medical attention? I longed for my little bed-sit with its French windows that opened out onto a weedy garden where in spring daffodils and bluebells appeared like magic. I wanted to open the garden gate and sit under one of the plane trees on what Millie called the green—a private park, shared by all the houses on the three streets that backed onto it. I wanted to watch the autumn leaves fall. If I could just get back there, I would work hard. I’d volunteer to tell the Konundrum girls how stupid I’d been, even if I had lost my job. It would be penance. I’d take Millie to the Albert Hall to hear the Hallelujah Chorus at Christmas. I’d make donations to Oxfam and the Pestalozzi Children’s Village.
When I woke again, it was still dark and the nightmare hadn’t gone away. My arm had gone to sleep, so I shifted my position. I heard the tinkling of my ankle bracelet. For thousands of miles, I’d been censoring my thoughts, not allowing myself to admit the truth even in my head. I no longer had control over my brain. It thought whatever it wanted to, whether I liked it or not. I moved my foot again.
The bracelet jingled.
This was the truth. I hadn’t really trailed across unknown lands because I was worried about Alun. Everything I’d done since Istanbul, that whole insane drive into next-to-nowhere was nothing to do with Alun. It was because of Val. I had wanted to be there for those moments—few, fleeting and infrequent—when he seemed to like me. My face burned, even as I shivered, when I thought about how pathetic I was.
It wasn’t the first time a boy had made me feel foolish. The first time was when I was still at school and Colleen threw a party while her parents were away. I was so proud when the second-best-looking boy at school came over to talk to me. I’d had a crush on him since primary school and I didn’t object when he wanted to kiss my neck in the corner of the lounge room. I’d tried to forget it had ever happened—the uncomfortable fumbling in Colleen’s bedroom, my inability to say no when he “went too far”, him going back to the party afterwards. I’d crept home to wash the blood off my new pink and mauve mini-dress. The following week at school, he’d ignored me completely. Now I’d let another boy lead me astray, not into a bedroom, but hundreds of miles into God knows where. And look where it had got me. Ulla would say it was my karma.
The next time I woke, Gertrude was still upside down, but it was daylight. I was hot, wet with sweat and a lot of me had gone numb. My mouth was parched. The nightmare wasn’t going to end. This time I couldn’t make it go away by pretending it hadn’t happened. I had to see if I could move. I started with my fingers. They were all right. Then I moved my arm, the one that wasn’t squashed underneath me, all pins and needles. There was a sugar cube among the broken glass near my head. I reached out for it and put it in my mouth. I didn’t have enough saliva to dissolve it. I had to crunch it so that I could swallow it. My toes were okay, but when I tried to lift myself, there was a sharp pain in my chest. I was wedged in the corner of the roof and the glass screen. The windscreen no long existed. That seemed to be the easiest exit. My body had decided that it never wanted to be in motion again, but I managed to talk it out of that plan.
I crawled out. It was even hotter outside and the light was blinding. Every time I moved, it felt like someone was stabbing me in the chest. I had red and purple bruises and there was a cut on my arm, but I was okay.
I got to my feet and looked around. Gertrude wasn’t teetering on the edge of a mountain; she was wedged in a dry creek bed, all her wheels in the air, like a huge black beetle flipped on its back. We were on the lower slopes of the mountain overlooking a brown open plain. After all those precipitous mountains I’d driven across without a hitch, I’d come unstuck on a foothill. On the other side of the road the land dropped down into a valley. It wasn’t that deep, but if I’d swerved the other way, I would have gone over and the result would have been much worse.
I sat on a rock and looked at what I’d done to the taxi. It made me groan. Poor Gertrude. The battered passenger door was hanging from one bent hinge like a broken wing. The front right tyre was flat, the radiator grille squashed, the headlights smashed. And the A-for-Austin ornament on the bonnet that Veronica had been so proud of had snapped off.
The air was hot and silent. I could have been the only person in the world. I was alone ... but not for long. A man took shape out of the rocks, stared at me but offered no help or advice before moving on. Then I remembered Dolf. I started calling his name, blundering around the creek bed looking for him. My stomach did a flip and I had to sit down again. What if he was dead? What if I’d killed him? I remembered the passenger door opening, Dolf’s arms wind-milling in slow motion as he fell out of the car. I followed the taxi’s tracks back to where it had left the road.
I called out again. There was a faint reply. I found Dolf lying in a ditch by the side of the road. His head was bleeding and his left arm was twisted at a nauseating angle.
“Are you all right?” It was a stupid thing to ask.
I’d been feeling so sorry for myself, wallowing in self-pity, sooking to myself about my injuries, but they were nothing really. Dolf was bleeding and in real pain. He was muttering in Dutch. Then after a few minutes, he found some English words.
“My guitar, is it okay?”
If only he’d been as concerned about his health.
“Can you stand up?” I asked. “The only place there’s any shade is next to the taxi.”
He didn’t answer, but I helped him to his feet anyway and gently led him over to the taxi.
I settled him in the narrow band of shade and crawled into the taxi and pulled out his guitar. A string had broken and there was a gouge out of the neck. “It’s still in one piece,” I said, handing it too him.
He put his arm around the guitar.
I didn’t know what to do. The hot sun was making me dizzy. There were no trees to shelter beneath so I sat by the roadside and rested my head on my knees. When I looked up again, two children were standing staring at me, which made me jump. There was a boy in a shapeless tunic made from coarse cloth and tied at the waist with string. He couldn’t have been more than eight, but a shaved head and a crease above his nose from frowning made him look like he was already old. The girl was taller and she might have been about twelve. She had a headscarf tied under her chin and wore a faded floral dress with trousers underneath. They just stared. I rested my head again. When I looked up, the children were gone.
A truck appeared in the distance heading towards Tehran. I waved it down. At last, I thought, someone will help me. Someone will take away the responsibility for having to fix things. I had a brief fantasy that the driver might be an off-duty policeman (not the one who’d busted Dieter) or a travelling doctor, but he was just a farmer. He got down to have a look and I did my best to ask for help using sign language. I took him to where Dolf was. He nodded and pointed along the road. I hoped that meant he would seek help at the next town.
I rigged up the quilt to make more shade for Dolf. I collected up the things that had been thrown from the taxi—a saucepan, my tea jar, the Rolling Stones’ song book—and made a small pile of them by the side of the road. I took out our bags. Various cars and trucks passed by, slowing down to stare at me and the upside-down taxi before driving on. A motorbike pulled up.
“This is very bad,” the motorbike rider said in English.
He was an Italian riding to India. He gave me a tin of sardines, a hunk of bread and some water. He promised to seek help in Mashhad, which he said was less than fifty miles east.
I tried to make Dolf comfortable with the cushions. I offered him some water, a piece of bread and sardines. He wouldn’t eat, but he took a few sips of water. I’d eaten nothing but a sugar cube for more than twenty-four hours. I wolfed down the sardines and the bread, wiping up
every drop of oil with the last crust. More hours passed. I had the promise of help coming along the road from both directions, but none came. I would have to walk back to the next town.
The next vehicle to come up the road was a donkey cart. It stopped and two men with angry faces got down. They were wearing wide trousers caught in at the ankles, sashes around their waists and grimy waistcoats shiny with wear over clean white shirts. There was a dead goat on the cart.
The men got down from the cart and inspected the taxi, then they inspected Dolf. More men arrived on foot. They gathered around Dolf, speaking a language neither he nor I understood, assuming that he was the driver. It never occurred to them that a female could be the one in charge of the vehicle. They spoke harsh sounding words that sounded like threats, but what could they threaten us with? Dolf lay moaning quietly as they pointed at the goat and made strange gestures with their hands. I didn’t really need to understand their words or their gestures. I knew they wanted compensation for their goat, but they weren’t talking to me.
I sat down behind Gertrude and counted my money. How much was a goat worth? I had thirteen pounds and forty-six pence, three Turkish lire and some Iranian rials. I didn’t have enough money to catch buses all the way home and there’d be even less when I’d paid the people for their goat. I’d have to hitchhike all the way back to London. And I had no one to help me. I was on my own and responsible for Dolf too.
I stood up.
“The car is mine,” I said, pointing to my chest and then to Gertrude.
It wasn’t true, but I was the one responsible for the accident, for Dolf’s injuries, for the dead goat.
“I’m the one you should be dealing with.”
I didn’t know what language they were speaking. I hadn’t even bothered to learn how to say please and thank you, bread and water, as I had in the other countries we’d passed through. I was completely in their hands.
They stared at me for a while, talked among themselves and then came over to look at upside-down Gertrude. A car stopped. It was packed to the roof with carpets leaving just enough room for the driver who spoke French. I tried to explain the situation to him. My French vocab had emptied out of my head during the night.