They had a book of Rolling Stones’ lyrics. Dolf opened it at “Little Red Rooster” and played a guitar as they sang along. Then they asked me the English for words that didn’t appear in the lyrics of Rolling Stones’ songs—gear stick, tin opener, and bulldozer. They also wanted to know the meaning of words in the more challenging lyrics of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Van Morrison—hedgerow, fritter and viaducts. Thomas did the driving. Dolf’s contribution was to yell insults at other drivers in Dutch ( Klootzak! Lulletje!) and laugh in his high-pitched giggle.
I made myself comfortable among the jumble of sleeping bags and scrunched up clothes on the back seat. Everything was going to be all right. Thomas was a good driver and he was wide awake. The Citroën’s engine didn’t exactly purr, in fact it made a noise more like a piece of farm machinery, but it sounded strong and reliable. The car was surprisingly roomy. A rapid version of “Brown Sugar” lulled me. I watched a strip of Italy flash by—a wood, a church, a municipal rubbish dump. Then I couldn’t focus and the fields became a green blur. I was confident I’d be home in a couple of days, back in my cosy little bed-sit. I closed my eyes and pictured egg on toast, tea made in a pot and clean sheets.
Eight
Detours
Something smelled bad. I couldn’t lift my head and there was a jabbing pain in my left arm. I opened my eyes. The smell was coming from dirty socks among the pile of clothes I’d been using as a pillow. My face was stuck to a vinyl car seat with my own dried-up dribble. I badly needed to go to the toilet, and a boy with curly blond hair was poking me in the arm.
“Wake up, sloopkop.”
It all came back to me in a rush—the trip to Paris, the lost folio, the night in a field. My stomach lurched as if I was on a roller-coaster that had just made an unexpected plunge. Then I remembered I was in the back of a Citroën and I was hitchhiking home to London and I didn’t feel so bad. It was Dolf who was leaning over from the front passenger seat trying to wake me.
We’d stopped and all I could see through the window was an ugly box of a building made of unpainted concrete blocks with mortar in a solidified ooze between them like cream in a stale sponge cake.
I felt like I’d been asleep for a long time, but it was still daylight. I stared at my watch until it came into focus. It was seven-thirty, which meant I’d slept all day. Were we in Holland already?
Two men wearing badly fitting khaki uniforms with rifles over their shoulders were peering through the window at me. One of them stuck his hand in through the driver’s window. He was speaking in a foreign language, which didn’t sound like Dutch.
“He wants to see your passport,” Dolf said.
“Where are we?”
“At de border.”
I felt in the front pocket of my suitcase for my passport. I sat up and handed it to Dolf. In the driver’s seat, was an unsmiling girl with long blond hair and a jagged fringe smoking a thin hand-rolled cigarette.
“Where’s Thomas?” I asked.
One of the guards compared me to the picture in my passport while the other waved for me to get out. It wasn’t French he was speaking either. I glimpsed myself in the rearview mirror. My hair was wavy, my fringe sticking up. The girl in the front seat sighed impatiently.
“What does he want?” I asked.
“You are Australian,” she said.
That was one of the few things I wasn’t confused about.
“You must get a visa.”
The girl got out of the car and stretched. Her blond hair fell to her waist and was dead straight. She wore jeans covered in embroidered patches and she smelt of patchouli oil.
“Where are we?” I asked again. I thought this was one piece of information I really needed to know.
“Yugoslavia,” Dolf answered.
I snorted. I wasn’t in the mood for a joke.
He looked at the blond girl.
“Jugoslavien,” she said.
Dolf wasn’t joking.
“Yugoslavia?” I just wanted to make sure I’d heard him right.
“Joegoslavië,” he replied.
I now knew how to say Yugoslavia in three languages, but I still had no idea how I’d ended up there. My brain was trying to work out why Dolf was going home via Yugoslavia, perhaps to avoid the summer holiday traffic? My mental map of Europe was a bit hazy east of Switzerland, but I was pretty sure that Yugoslavia wasn’t on any possible route to Amsterdam.
The blond girl explained it to me slowly. “Europeans do not need a visa for Yugoslavia, only Australians.”
The border guard asked for money for my visa. I didn’t even want to go to Yugoslavia.
The girl’s name was Ulla and she sounded Scandinavian. Dolf told me how he and Thomas had met her when they were getting petrol. It was while they were still in Italy, so it couldn’t have been more than half an hour after I’d fallen asleep. The boys had coffee with her, leaving me comatose in the back of the Citroën. Ulla told them that she had been to Tunisia and was now hitchhiking to Thessalonica in Greece. After spending half an hour with the lovely Ulla, Dolf had decided he would really like to see a bit of Greece before going home. Thomas hadn’t fallen under Ulla’s spell. He wanted to go home. A lot had happened while I’d been asleep and I was having trouble taking it all in. The brothers had argued and Dolf got back in the car with Ulla. Thomas refused to get in, so Dolf drove off in the opposite direction leaving poor Thomas in a service station just this side of the Italian border. Dolf was pleased with this brotherly rebellion. He had that same look on his face that my brother had the one time he’d beaten me at Scrabble.
“You could have told me.”
“We do tell you,” Dolf said. “You don’t say no.”
“I was asleep!”
“Yeah? I thought you say something.”
The guards were still waiting for me to pay for my visa. I had a look at Dolf’s map of Europe. It was in Dutch, so he pointed out where we were.
“It’s okay,” Dolf said. “I still go to Amsterdam. You can drive, isn’t it?”
Of course I could drive! I’d been driving since I turned sixteen.
“First we drop Ulla in Greece.”
He made it sound like Greece was a couple of suburbs away. Distances between places in Europe were small, I knew that, and on the map it didn’t look that far to the Greek border, but I had a career, a bed, a wardrobe full of clean clothes, and they were all in the opposite direction. Ulla had no interest in my dilemma. She was talking to some hitchhikers who were passing the other way across the border. They were all long-haired with straggly beards—the boys that is. The girls wore shapeless long skirts and Indian tops that had once been white.
“Got ripped off in Afghanistan,” one of them was telling her.
There were about a dozen of them stuck trying to get a lift into Italy. One weary American couple had been waiting there for twenty-four hours. We were the only ones travelling into Yugoslavia.
Dolf was ready to get back into the car.
“Do you come wid us, Jackie?”
I didn’t want to join the miserable hitchhikers. I counted on my fingers. It was Monday—there was no way I was going to be back the following day. Dolf assured me it would only take a couple of days to get to Greece and back. Ulla got back in the driver’s seat.
“You’re going straight back after you’ve taken Ulla to Greece?”
“Absolutely. I must be back when term starts.”
“Okay.”
I paid for the visa. I didn’t have any Italian money, I didn’t even know what Yugoslavian currency was called, but they were happy for me to pay with French francs. I looked at the new stamp in my passport. We were in a place called Kozina.
At first glance, Yugoslavia was an unattractive place, all rocks and bare hills. There were hardly any buildings, and the few that I saw were made of cement blocks, which was odd as the whole country seemed to be littered with rocks and stones. There were no crops growing and, apart from a few goats, no animals. T
he only people we saw were in the vehicles driving in the opposite direction. They drove fast and took bends on the wrong side of the road as if they were all hurtling towards the border desperate to leave the place. I wasn’t sure they’d make it. I counted the remains of six car crashes in less than an hour.
I asked Ulla why she was going to Greece.
“To get to Nepal.”
She told me she was on a spiritual journey, and she was going to “the East”.
“Swedish people are too hung up on money and jobs and cars,” she said.
Her journey to the East so far had been via North Africa, which I knew for a fact was south not east.
“I sold everything. I have no possessions,” she said with pride. “I am never returning to Sweden.”
The bit of Yugoslavia on the right-hand side of the Citroën disappeared and was replaced by the sea, which was huge and blue-green and at the bottom of a cliff that started about a foot beyond the road. There were so many jagged islands just off the coast, it looked like Yugoslavia was in the process of crumbling into the sea, like bread into soup.
By my calculations Dolf had only known Ulla for about eight hours, but he seemed hypnotised by her Nordic good looks. He couldn’t take his eyes off her nipples poking through her pale blue cheesecloth shirt. Ulla was yawning and talking about finding a place to stop for the night. Dolf was nodding enthusiastically. I was wide awake and I didn’t want to waste time in Yugoslavia.
“I can drive, if you want to rest, Ulla,” I said.
Dolf jumped at the idea. “Yes, you must rest,” he told her.
Ulla pulled over on the narrow strip of land between the road and the cliff. The Citroën wheels were scarily close to the edge and there were no safety barriers. Dark blue waves crashed onto rocks far below.
While Dolf and Ulla made themselves comfortable in the back, I had a quick look at the map. There were two roads through Yugoslavia, one through the middle, the other along the coast. The coastal road was shorter and I liked the idea of staying near the sea.
The Citroën was left-hand drive and it felt weird sitting on the wrong side of the car and the gear stick was very strange. It stuck straight out of the dashboard at right angles. I needed instructions. I particularly needed to know how you got into reverse so I could make sure I didn’t accidentally back us over the cliff. Dolf explained how instead of moving the gear stick from side to side to change gear, you had to pull it out and twist the knob. I got the car back onto the bitumen, remembering to drive on the right-hand side of the road. I soon got the hang of it, and I was glad to be in control of the car.
The sun disappeared into the sea, the sky darkened. All I could see in the rear-view mirror was a mass of intertwined blond hair, straight and curly. Dolf and Ulla didn’t want to chat and the car didn’t have a radio, so I quietly sang the early Beatles’ albums from beginning to end. I’ve always liked driving at night. The darkness makes me feel safe, as if the car is wrapped in black cotton wool and nothing can harm me. All that exists is the strip of road ahead lit by the headlights.
I stopped at about midnight parked the car on the land side of the road and crawled over into the passenger seat. The sound of the crashing sea lulled me to sleep. In the morning I discovered I’d parked near a rubbish dump. It was smelly and parts of it were moving. I looked closer and wished I hadn’t. It was home to rats. I was keen to get going as soon as possible and no one objected when I got back into the driver’s seat.
Dolf and Ulla were complaining that it was hot. It wasn’t really, but I suppose I’m used to long, hot hauls. We have relatives in Kalgoorlie and Dad must have driven us across the Nullarbor and back at least five times. Driving the length of Yugoslavia was nothing in comparison.
Dolf took his guitar and picked the most romantic Rolling Stones’ songs to serenade Ulla while she embroidered a new patch for her worn jeans. She had a tobacco tin which contained coloured threads, needles, an unpicker, a little pair of scissors shaped like a bird and some scraps of material. She was working on a square of denim, embroidering a freehand design of flowers, birds and spirals. She was very good. Dolf thought Ulla’s jeans were fabulous and he asked her to make him some patches. She didn’t say she would.
I couldn’t work out what Dolf saw in Ulla. She was good looking, I suppose, but cold and too skinny for my liking. Ulla didn’t smile and she didn’t speak much except to tell me how to drive.
“You must not drive so close to the edge,” she said.
I didn’t point out that she’d parked about two inches from the edge of the cliff the previous day.
“Jackie, you drive too fast.”
I was doing seventy kilometres per hour. I don’t know what that is in miles, but I’m sure it’s not fast.
“YOU DRIVE ON THE WRONG SIDE!”
Okay, so I was in the wrong that time, but only for a minute or two.
Even when Ulla shouted, she managed to sound cool. The only other time she talked was to tell us about her guru, who she’d met in Tunisia.
“Nothing happens by chance,” she said, quoting him. “Everything has a reason.”
The guru, whose name was Billy, was setting up an ashram somewhere in Nepal. That’s where she was going. To stay there forever. What sort of a guru is called Billy?
The road twisted and turned as if it couldn’t decide which way to go.
Later that day, we stopped for food and petrol in a place called Split. Ulla wanted to look around at a Roman palace and the terracotta-tiled old town, but I didn’t want to waste time sightseeing. We found a bank where I exchanged some francs for Yugoslavian dinara. It was too hot for tights so I took them off in a public toilet. I learned the Yugoslavian word for bread, which is kruh. Dolf bought pickled capsicums, hot potato salad and bread rolls spread thick with liver paste. He looked proud as he offered this little feast to Ulla, like a caveman offering a dead wildebeest to his woman.
“Poison!” Ulla spat.
Dolf deflated like a punctured beach ball. Ulla, it turned out, was a vegan. No meat, no eggs, no cheese, not even bread because yeast has feelings too, according to her. I could have told her that yeast was a fungus (I’d learned that in Domestic Science), but I knew she wouldn’t listen to me, so I ate her share. Dolf insisted on finding a vegetable market so he could buy Ulla apples and carrots.
I still hadn’t posted my postcard to Terry. I read what I’d written back in the Paris railway waiting room.
31st July 1972 Dear Terry, Sorry I haven’t written for a while. I’ve been so busy. Colleen and I are having a few days off work to visit Paris. I’ve seen the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe. How did you go in the Battle of the Bands? Will write a long letter when I get back to London. Love
Jackie xxxxxx
PS Wish you were here.
It was all lies, but nobody tells the truth on a postcard, do they? You always say you’re having a great time, even if you’re not. How do you explain that your plans have turned upside down? You can’t. Not in a three-inch square on the back of a postcard.
And anyway, I didn’t want Terry telling Mum I was travelling on my own. She’d have kittens.
I found the Post Office but it was closed for lunch. It would have been a bit hard to explain a Yugoslavian stamp anyway.
We wasted about two hours in Split, before I managed to coax Dolf and Ulla back to the car. Dolf rolled back the canvas roof and I was enjoying driving again after my nine months on public transport in London. The Citroën’s engine was tiny and very noisy, but it handled well. I’ve driven V8s that didn’t have suspension as good as the ugly duck, but by late afternoon I’d had enough. I was tired of listening to Ulla’s backseat driving and her patchouli oil was giving me a headache. I was sick of looking at the sea from a distance. I needed to feel it on my skin.
“Let’s sleep on the beach,” I said and turned off the road before either of them could object.
The beach wasn’t as close as it looked. I followed a narrow road for thre
e miles or so until it ended abruptly. To get to the beach, we had to climb a wire fence and scramble down a steep slope covered with prickly bushes. Then we had to clamber over rocks.
It wasn’t the kind of beach I’d been imagining. Boats were pulled up onto the sand in a small bay where fishermen were gutting their day’s catch. Fish heads and entrails floated in the shallows and there was rubbish on the beach. Above the high-tide mark, a dead goat was in the final stages of decomposition.
“This was a really bad idea,” Ulla said.
“It was a good idea,” I snapped. “It just isn’t a good beach.”
We struggled back to the Citroën.
As the ugly duck retraced its tracks, Ulla continued to whinge.
“I have a feeling,” she said, “and it is not good.”
I had a feeling too. I wanted to punch her Nordic nose.
We came to a fork in the road and I couldn’t remember which way we’d come from.
“Go right!” Ulla commanded.
I turned left. The track was sandy and overgrown. It wasn’t the one we’d driven down before. Spiky bushes scraped the side of the car and after a few metres the track sloped down steeply.
“WHERE DO YOU GO?” Ulla shouted.
Dolf was squeaking something in high-pitched Dutch.
There was no space to turn round. I tried reversing but the wheels just spun. I had no choice. I had to keep going.
“We will be stuck here,” Ulla complained. She was showing every sign of losing her Swedish cool.
I don’t know what had come over me. I’d been focussed on getting to Greece as quickly as possible, so that I could turn round and go straight back again. I’d driven day and night. Why had I suddenly decided to take a stupid detour?
The Citroën kept going down the track, which got more and more sandy.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did that, I...”
Then suddenly we were on a beach.
I’d sailed across the Indian Ocean. I’d been to Brighton for a day trip where what passes for a beach is a pile of pebbles. I’d crossed the grey and choppy English Channel and driven along miles and miles of Yugoslavian coastline. I’d seen plenty of sea in my travels, but I hadn’t been to a proper beach since I’d left Australia. The dark blue sea glistened in the orange light of the sun that was being drawn irresistibly to it, just like me. That beach was perfect.