“She’s started!” Val said.
“The battery’s had time to recharge a bit.”
The goat herders looked on. I didn’t like the noise coming from the engine, a sort of “flak, flak” sound.
“Don’t get too excited, we’re not actually moving yet.”
I looked under the bonnet.
“What’s wrong?”
The fan belt’s gone.
“And we need that?”
“Yep.”
I turned off the engine and went to my suitcase. I pulled out my green tights.
“I’ve always wanted to try this,” I said.
It was one of those stories you hear all the time, but I didn’t know if it was going to work. I gave Val one end of my tights and stretched them as far as they’d go. I got a spanner from the tool kit, pulled out the broken fan belt. I ended up black to my elbows, but I managed to replace the broken fan belt with the stretched tights and knot them into position. I turned the engine on again. The tights held. It sounds easier than it actually was. It took me nearly an hour.
“You’ve fixed it!”
“Yes.”
“You’re a mechanical genius!” Val said.
I was pretty pleased with myself. The goat herders tried not to look impressed.
There was the smell of food cooking. My stomach made a loud gurgling noise, which the men found very amusing. It was almost dark. They didn’t invite us into their house, but indicated that we could sleep in the barn. The young woman brought us food. It was rice and kebabs—the goat I’d hit with the taxi. We were just unrolling our sleeping bags when the door opened and one of the men herded about a dozen goats into the barn. It wasn’t big so we were squeezed into a corner.
Dolf was asleep. Val and I were alone, though it didn’t feel like it with all those goats. We ate in silence by the light of Val’s torch.
“Now what?” I said.
“I have to get Gertrude to the border so I can get the carnet money.”
“Couldn’t you get more money from your father?”
He shook his head.
“After you left, my father started planning out my life for me. The next morning I told him I wasn’t going to go back to any university, let alone one of his choosing. He said I wouldn’t get any more money from him. Not a penny. He’s going to write to my mother and tell her not to give me anything either. After I’d dramatically stormed out, I remembered I didn’t have enough money to go anywhere.”
He looked me in the eyes.
I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but Val has beautiful blue eyes.
“You know I can’t do it without you. I couldn’t drive the taxi even when it was working perfectly.”
Did he think it would be that easy to talk me round?
“And then what?”
“Then I’m going to find Alun,” he said. “He might be all right. He might be having the time of his life. He’s a prick for not telling me where he was going, but I can’t go home until I know for sure.”
Did he think that all he had to do was smile and look me in the eyes, and I’d do whatever he wanted? “Okay,” I said.
It had been one of those long days that feel like a week. It didn’t seem possible that it was only twenty-four hours since I’d rolled the taxi. I took off my skirt and unzipped my sleeping bag. The only sound was the bleating of goats and a faint jingle.
“You’re still wearing the ankle bracelet,” Val said.
“Yes.”
The next morning we hammered the crumpled passenger side door roughly back into shape and tied it shut. The rear tyre had gone down again, so I jacked up the wheel and exchanged it for the spare. I put a cushion on the box in front of the steering wheel. I topped up the battery, but there was nothing I could do about the brake fluid. We made Dolf as comfortable as we could in the back of the taxi using the sleeping bags and the cushions. Overnight he’d got more bites, probably from goat fleas.
The family all came out to say goodbye. The young woman was wearing the same drab tunic and trousers that she’d had on the day before. But underneath I caught a glimpse of pink nylon patterned with blue flowers.
“She’s wearing my nightie,” I whispered to Val.
“It’s her best dress now.”
Val went over and shook the goatherd’s hand, thanking him in Farsi. I wished we had something to give them in return for their hospitality. I felt guilty. I had money in the bank, even if I couldn’t get at it. I was only temporarily poor. Their poverty was permanent, and they hadn’t come out of the bargain well. I had an idea. I went to my suitcase and as I pretended to repack it, I took out my pink lipstick. I went over to the young woman and held out my hand for her to shake. She looked confused. I didn’t withdraw my hand. She glanced at her husband and he said something to her. She timidly held out her hand. I shook it and pressed the lipstick into her palm. Her beautiful eyes widened, she took the lipstick and disappeared into the house.
Val sat on his rucksack in the luggage space. He had complete faith in my mechanical abilities. I didn’t. I’d been lucky so far. The things that had gone wrong were things I could fix. I started Gertrude up. The gears made an awful grating sound as I put her into first.
It was about fifty miles or so into Mashhad which, I’d discovered, was the next town. Gertrude wasn’t the taxi she used to be. She wouldn’t go faster than twenty-five miles per hour. There was no windscreen and the brakes barely worked, so I didn’t want to drive any faster anyway. Val dug his sunglasses out of his rucksack. They helped with the wind, but it wasn’t a pleasant drive. Val was looking through the BIT notes as we approached Mashhad. “We have to get visas for Afghanistan.”
It looked like the whole town was made of mud. So far, most of the bigger towns had had some European-style buildings, but Mashhad appeared to be just a jumble of mudbrick boxes.
People stared at us as we walked down the street. Children followed us, as if the circus had just come to town, shouting, “Hello, Mister,” and “Howareyooou”. Dolf was in a lot of pain. The first thing we did was find a chemist. At least we thought it was a chemist. From the outside, it was just another rough mudbrick building with a hole cut in it for a doorway, and a pile of mud and straw for a roof. It looked more like a stable than a chemist shop, but inside there were shelves of pills and lotions. The children crowded around the doorway of the shop and watched as we pantomimed someone in pain. The shopkeeper handed us a brown bottle of pills and pointed to the label. It was written in Arabic, so we had to trust that he’d understood us correctly.
The Afghan Consulate was on the outskirts of the city in a wide tree-lined street. The painkillers had taken effect quickly and Dolf was looking much better. He smiled and chatted to the other westerners standing in line—Germans, Swiss and Americans—showing them his broken arm like a war wound. We had photos left over from when we’d applied for the Iranian visas. The staff were polite, the visas were free.
“This shouldn’t take long,” I said.
Famous last words.
In that part of the world a visa is something that can’t be handed over in a rush. It has to be earned by a process of queuing at several desks, filling in forms in triplicate without the aid of carbon paper and of course waiting. Lots of waiting. In the meantime we had a very late breakfast—a bowl of something like hot ground rice. I made Dolf eat some.
“This is the holiest city in Iran,” Val said.
“How do you know?”
“A guy on the bus told me. He was on a pilgrimage. To the mosque. It’s the second holiest place in Islam—after Mecca. We should go and look at the mosque.”
The mosque would have been difficult to miss. It was in a huge circular complex surrounded by a grassy ring. There was a dome of gleaming gold, like a bull’s-eye in the middle of the city, and golden minarets pointing to the sky and another bigger dome covered in turquoise. The rest of the building was decorated in coloured tiles in intricate patterns. It was the most colourful thi
ng I’d seen for weeks, very different to the sombre stone mosques in Istanbul. It looked like the people of Mashhad had used all their building resources and creativity on that one building. I wanted to get a closer look, but as we walked towards it, angry men kept shooing us away. Since we couldn’t look at the very holy mosque, we had lunch. Food was cheap.
We went back to the consul and queued again. It took an hour to get to the desk where the consul officer stamped my passport and Val’s. I was looking at my Afghani visa (which was rather plain and disappointing after the Iranian one), when I realised that there was a hitch. The man hadn’t stamped Dolf’s passport. He was shaking his head, pointing at a sign written in English.
Visas will not be issued to people with hair like beetle.
He pointed to Dolf’s hair and mimed cutting with scissors. If I could have spoken the language, I would have pointed out that none of the Beatles had blond curls. Val’s hair was closer to a Beatle cut, but they weren’t interested in cutting his hair. It was shoulder-length locks they were concerned with. I thought that would be the last straw for Dolf. He was so proud of his hair.
“You don’t have to go on, Dolf. Ulla can look after herself.”
“Alun too, but you still go.”
Dolf was arguing as he was led away, along with one of the Swiss guys who had a plait half way down his back. Dolf was speaking in Dutch, the Swiss guy in French. The consul man didn’t understand either of them.
Val and I sat in the waiting room on a hard bench with no backrest. There was a poster of Afghanistan on the wall, the sort of travel poster that usually depicts the most attractive thing about a country. It was a picture of men galloping on horseback with one of them leaning down to pick up the battered body of a headless goat.
“It’s a game,” Val said. “The Afghan equivalent of football.”
There were also posters with beautiful, but indecipherable Arabic writing. On one the script was written so that it took the shape of a boat.
“I wonder what they say?” I asked.
“They’re probably prayers.”
I didn’t recognise Dolf when he came out.
All resemblance to Robert Plant had disappeared. His blond curls were gone—hacked off above his ears. He looked so young. The consul official took him to the front of the queue. Dolf stood dazed, unable to move. A single tear slid down his grimy cheek. I took his passport from him and opened it at the photo page. A cherubic boy with tight blond curls was smiling back at me. I read the birth date. Dolf didn’t just look young, he was young. Val was looking over my shoulder.
“Jesus, Dolf, you’re only fifteen!”
He nodded miserably.
“You must be still at school,” I said.
He nodded again.
The consul officer took the passport from me and stamped it with a flourish. He didn’t seem to mind that Dolf looked nothing like his visa photo. I was as stunned as Dolf. I’d let him do whatever he wanted up until then, without even thinking about it. I’d thought he was old enough to look after himself. Now I felt responsible for him. I pictured his frantic mother when Thomas arrived home, without her car or her younger son.
It must have been five o’clock when we stumbled back to the taxi. We didn’t get far before dark.
Without the mattress, the back of the taxi was uncomfortable, so we spread our sleeping bags outside. Val watched me as I brushed my teeth. I had the feeling he was waiting to say something. I wriggled into my sleeping bag. The evenings were getting a little cooler; it would have been nice to have another body to keep me warm.
He finally spoke. “What I said about your designs ... I was angry ... What do I know about fashion?”
That was his idea of an apology.
During the night, I woke up thinking that Val had reached out to touch my face, but the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced it had been a dream. Sharp stones stuck into my back and it didn’t matter how many stones I moved, there were still more.
I’d thought we were close to the Afghan border, but we still had about two hundred miles to go. It was a slow journey through a barren moonscape—nothing to see but sandy earth and rocks. Gertrude was overheating, so we had to stop about every half hour to let her cool down and top up the radiator. The grating gears were getting worse. I couldn’t get her into first or fourth. The brakes no longer worked at all and I had to use the handbrake to stop. It took all day for Gertrude to crawl to the border.
The border post was a complex of newly-built concrete buildings staffed by guards in smart green uniforms. The border itself was marked by a wire fence about ten feet high. A queue of vehicles waited to cross, as well as a few hot and weary hippies on foot. They were all grumbling. They’d been held up by customs and the last bus had left without them.
“It’s a scam to force us to stay in the hotel,” a girl from Bristol said. “The customs guys are in league with the hotel owner.”
“Shall we stay the night here and cross over in the morning?” I asked Val.
“We’ll wait till it gets dark and cross then,” Val said. “We don’t want them asking too many questions about the taxi. The guards will be tired, so they might not notice what bad shape she’s in.”
As soon as the light began to fade, I moved Gertrude into the queue. The guards who were checking outgoing travellers were more interested in what was happening on the other side of the road, where those who were trying to get back into Iran were being searched for drugs. The customs officers had completely dismantled a VW van owned by two German boys. Their belongings were piled outside the van. The door panels had been removed and the seats taken out.
“We’ve saved them a lot of trouble if they want to do that to us,” Val said.
He was trying to look relaxed, but I knew he was nervous about having the fake carnet scrutinised. So was I. It had seemed perfectly reasonable when the Canadian had suggested the scam. Now it seemed very dangerous.
Since we weren’t moving, I turned off the engine to give Gertrude a rest. The customs officers hadn’t finished with the Germans’ VW. They took out its engine and searched every hidden crevice of the van. Meanwhile the guards on our side of the checkpoint moved at a snail’s pace and stopped for frequent cigarette breaks or to talk to friends.
It was an hour and a half before our turn came. I couldn’t get Gertrude into gear. The sound of grating was awful as I managed to wrench her into second. A sullen guard held out his hand and asked for the carnet. Val had it ready. They thumbed slowly through our passports. They looked at Dolf’s smiling photo and at him. I still wasn’t used to the shorn Dolf. Val mimed cutting and pointed back towards Mashhad. They examined our Afghan visas and checked us against a list, presumably of international criminals. I was half-expecting him to find our names on it. While one of them looked at our vaccination booklets, the other poked his hand through the space where the windscreen should have been. The guard spoke German. Val seemed to know a little of every European language and made a Germanic explanation. Dolf was nodding in agreement.
“What did you tell them?”
“I said that we couldn’t get a windscreen to fit in Mashhad and that we’d ordered one to be sent to Herat.”
“And he believed that?”
“Apparently.”
Val looked relieved. The guard scribbled on the carnet document, stamped that as well and handed it to Val before turning his back on us.
“Wait,” Val said, “Where’s my carnet money? Argent, Geld.”
The guard shook his head. “No money,” he said and pointed to the part of the form in English.
Val read the fine print and turned pale before my eyes. “I don’t get the reimbursement here. I have to get it from the AA back in London.”
He stood there swearing at the absent Canadians while the guards stamped our passports. They hadn’t finished with us though. One of them was pointing at Dolf’s vaccination booklet. He held up two fingers. When I’d had my cholera vaccination back in Adela
ide, I’d had two injections.
“You have to have two cholera injections, Dolf,” I said. “You’ve only had one.”
The doctor had told me I had to have the injections two weeks apart. It was barely a week since Dolf had had his first, but that didn’t seem to bother the guard. Dolf was led away again.
When he returned, I started the engine and tried to get the taxi into gear. All I got was the awful sound of grating gears that made my teeth stand on edge.
“I think she’s had it this time.”
Thankfully the guards were distracted by the activities on the other side of the road, where the Germans were arguing with the Iranians about who should put their VW back together.
Val was looking panicky.
“What will we do?”
“Just push.”
Val pushed Gertrude. She rolled to a halt a few feet over the border.
“We just have to get clear of the border post,” Val said. “There must be some clever thing you can do.”
He had an unrealistic faith in my mechanical skills. I shook my head. The guards had lost interest in the Germans and turned their attention back to us. One of them started to walk towards us.
I remembered Dad telling me about his first car, an Austin A30. He still has a faded photo of it pinned up above his workbench. The gearbox had been on the way out, but he’d kept driving it anyway. It finally gave up the ghost halfway down the Port Road late one night. The only gear he could get it into was reverse.
The gears scraped, but I got Gertrude into reverse. I stuck my head out of the window, smiled at the guard and waved towards the toilet block. I swung her around and backed towards it. There was no reason at all why I should’ve been reversing there rather than going forward, but fortunately at that moment a Ford Transit van painted to look like the Yellow Submarine pulled up. The guard’s face brightened. Another victim.
Once I’d reversed to the toilets, I switched off the lights and kept going. I backed onto the road.
“What are you doing?” Val’s faith in my ability was finally fading.
“The gearbox has had it. I can only get Gertrude into reverse. Get in the back and guide me.”