“So, how did you end up here?” I asked when we were back out in the chaos of Istanbul.
“Still looking for the Pink Floyd concert,” Alun said. “Someone we met in Belgrade said he’d heard from a friend who went out with the sister of one of their roadies that it was definitely going to be in Istanbul. It sounded reliable and Ulla said she’d be here and Val thought she might have heard something. And he threw the dice...”
The Tomb of Alexander the Great was next on Alun’s list, but after that Val got his way and we went to the Covered Bazaar. It was huge, with alleyways of shops going for miles in all directions, beneath arched ceilings with windows set in them, edged with tiles patterned in blue and white. It was even more crowded than the streets. There were stalls hung with coloured clothing, some were covered with jewellery, others with heaps of yellow and orange spices. Rugs stood in piles six feet high. We were staring at this profusion, but everyone else was staring at us. There was jangling music with warbling Arabic singing blaring out from small radios. It smelt of cinnamon and rosewater one minute, wood smoke and urine the next. Then I noticed another smell. There was a cafe where men with vacant eyes and slack mouths were smoking a big hookah pipe.
“I guess that’s not tobacco they’re smoking,” I said.
I’d only ever smelt marihuana once before. That was in Hammersmith where Colleen’s boyfriend Robbie lived with three other guys. Colleen didn’t seem to mind that her boyfriend took drugs, but I never went back to Robbie’s place again.
Every stallholder shouted out to us, wanted to be our friend. They all insisted that what they were selling was the best, the cheapest, the most authentic, one hundred per cent wool. And then there were small boys trailing after us, who didn’t have anything to sell, but wanted our money anyway.
Alun bought a scarf for his mother—a plain black square of material edged with tiny brightly coloured crocheted fans. The stitches were so small, it was as if they’d been made by fairies. I would have liked a scarf for myself, but I had more practical things to consider. My feet had swollen in the heat, my blisters were multiplying and I couldn’t wear my platform shoes any longer. I bought some cheap sandals. My legs were getting hairy which was bad enough, but also men were muttering when I passed them. One of them tried to grab my bottom and I yelled at him, but people stared at me as if I was the one who was doing something wrong. Hotpants definitely weren’t the right sort of thing to wear in a Muslim country, so I looked for a long skirt. All I could find were voluminous, flared skirts made out of ugly material and covered in sequins which were meant for belly dancing. I bought a length of plain blue cloth instead, so that I could make myself a skirt.
I’d arranged to meet Dolf and Ulla in the afternoon. The Citroën was waiting patiently where we’d left it in the Blue Mosque car park, and I was glad to see it again, even though we couldn’t get into it because Dolf had the keys.
A girl with red patterns dyed on the backs of her hands was telling anyone who would listen about her travel experiences.
“Don’t go to Pakistan if you can help it, man,” she said. “Those cats stoned me, and I don’t mean they laid some dope on me. I mean they threw rocks at me. I couldn’t handle the groping. That place is a bad trip.”
“I thought Afghanistan was the most dangerous country,” said a boy who was about to head east. “I heard that two chicks were killed because they were travelling alone. You know, without a guy.”
“Can’t tell you too much about that place, man. I was out of it the whole time.”
I had no urge to explore unknown parts of the world. The edge of Europe was as far as I ever wanted to go. I was glad I’d seen Yugoslavia and Istanbul, but I was ready to go back to London. I promised myself I wouldn’t just sit at home and watch colour TV with Millie when I got back. I would see more of England. I’d go to concerts, see some countryside, visit Colleen in Scotland.
We were heading back to the Pudding Shop through a part of the Blue Mosque car park that everyone called Hippy Corner. I wasn’t looking in that direction. I wouldn’t have noticed it if it wasn’t for Alun.
“Don’t look now, Val,” he said. “It’s your fan club.”
I turned around. There was the London taxi.
Twelve
The Cabriolet
Veronica was leaning on the bonnet; Vanessa was sitting in the shade of a tree. Neither of them looked very happy.
Val ducked behind a car, pulling Alun down with him, but he was too slow to catch me. I was running over to them.
“I’ve been searching for you everywhere,” I said, managing to restrain myself from throwing my arms around Veronica’s neck.
They looked at me as if I were a complete stranger.
“It’s Jackie. You gave me a lift from Calais to Paris.”
“Oh yeah, the Australian girl. Hi.”
They didn’t seem surprised to see me, or particularly pleased.
“So how come you’re here in Istanbul?” I asked. “It doesn’t begin with V.”
Not that I had any right to be critical.
“Long story,” said Vanessa.
“We thought there was goin’ to be something here beginning with a V,” Veronica said. “That’s why we came.”
I wondered if they’d heard the rumour that the Pink Floyd concert was going to be in Istanbul, and they thought they’d find Val there.
The girls glanced at each other.
“Coming all this way was just dumb,” Veronica said sadly. “Now we just wanna go home.”
All their bounce had disappeared. I was dying to ask them about my missing folder, but they wanted to tell me all their troubles.
“We were gettin’ low on funds so we wired our folks to send us money.”
I’d assumed they were well off because they were Americans, but buying the taxi had been an extravagance that had eaten into their savings. They’d blown a gasket somewhere in Yugoslavia and a mechanic had charged them a fortune to fix it. (I could have done it for nothing, but I didn’t tell them that.) They’d already told their parents to send money to a bank in Istanbul, so they had to keep going even though they’d decided it was too far. They’d thought that it would take a week or so for the money to arrive, but the bank had told them it wouldn’t be available for thirty days.
“It’s a scam,” Vanessa said. “The money’s been transferred, but they’re goin’ to hang onto it for a while, so they can keep the interest.”
“And we’re stuck in this here car park. ”
“With no money.”
The girls sighed in unison.
“We had to sell stuff to buy fuel. Now we’re sleepin’ in the cab an’ relyin’ on other folks to give us food.”
“Like hobos.” Vanessa looked like she was about to cry. “I just wanna go home.”
“Yeah, me too. I’ve got a lift back to Holland with a Dutch guy, and Alun and V...”
I stopped short.
“Alun and Val?” Veronica said. “Are they here?”
I couldn’t stop myself glancing over to where Val was hiding behind the Citroën. Alun waved.
“Well, if it isn’t the Vestal Virginians!” he called out as he walked over to us.
The girls looked like they’d seen a ghost.
“Is Val here?” Veronica asked.
“Yeah.”
Val slunk out from his hiding place.
“There he is,” Alun said cheerfully. “Hey, Val. Look who’s here!”
Vanessa and Veronica shared another glance. Val looked frightened, like he was expecting them to attack him.
I wasn’t interested in their little drama though. I’d found the London taxi. I didn’t bother asking, I went over and opened the back door. It was a mess inside. The bed was unmade, there were dirty mugs and plates piled up, and a rubbish bag smelling of mouldy orange peel and sour milk. I ignored it all and reached behind the fold-down seat. My fingers closed around stiff cardboard. There it was. My folio. Crisp and clean. I took out the pages
and flicked through them. There were my drawings—my Marsupial Collection, my Galah Coat, my Peek-a-boo Dress. I did a little dance. I’d got my folio back.
Dolf and Ulla arrived in a car driven by the Pakistani guy. It was a nice car. A Mercedes Benz 300 SE. A very nice car.
“Far out.” Alun was attracted to the car like iron filings to a magnet. He ran his hand slowly over the dark green Duco. “Isn’t it lovely?”
The Mercedes was nothing like the other clapped-out vehicles in Hippy Corner. It wasn’t new—almost ten years old I would have guessed—but it was stylish with big chrome bumper bars and three sets of headlights. Ulla had invited the Pakistani back to the camping ground.
Val had picked a cheap hotel were he and Alun would stay.
“Let’s stay at the camping instead,” Alun said. “I can get Jackie’s book.”
I think it was more the thought of a ride in the Mercedes, than an urgent need to read Georgette Heyer that made Alun persistent.
“But I don’t want to sleep in a tent with you again,” Val complained. “You fart and talk in your sleep.”
Val tossed the dice, and for once they fell Alun’s way.
I’d bought sticky cakes from a stall and Val had bought peaches. Ulla said something about us eating too much sweet stuff. “You need yin to balance all the yang.”
I tried to argue that Turkish food was tasty and nutritious.
“Everything is cooked twice,” Ulla said. “This is bad.”
She’d bought fresh vegetables to eat raw, but offered to cook some for the rest of us. If she was making a meal, no one was about to talk her out of it.
Alun went in the Mercedes with the Pakistani, Dolf and Ulla. Val came with me in the Citroën. I invited Veronica and Vanessa, just to annoy him. They jumped at the chance to come with us, but I think they were more interested in the food than in Val.
Val sat in the front seat. The girls got in the back. No one spoke. I had to fill the silence, chattering on about Yugoslavia and Greece until we reached the camping ground.
Ulla told us that the Pakistani had two Mercedes and he was looking for drivers to take them to Tehran, in Iran, to sell. She seemed pretty interested in the idea. She was heading in that direction and it would mean a free trip for her. I had a look inside the Merc. It had matching green upholstery, walnut-finish dashboard and air-conditioning.
“I will need a fire for cooking,” Ulla announced.
Boys love fires. All of them—Alun, Val, Dolf, even the Pakistani—jumped up to collect firewood. I left them to it.
Ulla was chopping vegetables very slowly. I could see it was going to be a while before the meal was ready.
“Can I borrow a sewing needle, Ulla?”
I’d bought a reel of cotton to sew my skirt, but I didn’t have a needle.
“Sure. Help yourself. It’s in my sack.”
I got the tobacco tin out of her rucksack. I opened it up and selected a needle and took out the bird-shaped scissors. I looked at the neat pile of patches ready to be embroidered and sewn onto her jeans. There was a denim one, a floral cotton one, a khaki one. I realised they weren’t scraps of material, but pockets. The denim pocket was from a pair of jeans. The floral one looked like it was made of the same material as the railway-room woman’s apron. The khaki one was off an army shirt. The patch that she was currently working on was grey velvet. It looked very familiar. I went to my suitcase and pulled out my grey velvet hot pants. One of the back pockets was missing. That explained why Ulla needed an unpicker.
A few days earlier I would have been furious that Ulla had sabotaged my clothes, but since we’d arrived in Istanbul, I’d begun to relax and it just made me laugh.
I started cutting out my skirt.
Alun was fidgeting about uncomfortably. He kept glancing at the toilet block.
“You can only piss in the bushes for so long,” Val said. “You’ve got to go sometime.” He was enjoying Alun’s discomfort.
“You’re having me on, aren’t you?”
“I’m not.”
“Couldn’t I use that paper bag that the figs came in?”
“No! The plumbing isn’t built to take paper,” Val said. “It’d get blocked and then we’d all have to put up with a stinking toilet.”
Alun glanced unhappily at the toilet block.
“It’s what everyone would have done before toilet paper was invented,” Val said. “How do you think people in the Middle Ages would have wiped their arses?”
“I dunno, with leaves or something.”
Then the second Mercedes pulled up and that took Alun’s mind off going to the toilet. His jaw dropped. The first Mercedes was a nice car, but this one was something special. It was a silver-grey, two-door convertible with the top down with chrome rims on the wheel guards.
“It’s a cabriolet,” I said.
Alun climbed into the passenger seat. He groaned with pleasure. “Check out the upholstery.”
“It’s only a car, man,” Val said.
“No, it isn’t.” He got closer and sniffed the leather.
“Jesus, do you want us to leave you two alone?”
“Yes, please.”
It was lovely. The seats, the door panels and the dashboard were all red leather. The steering wheel was white. It had more dials than an aeroplane.
“Can I have a look at the engine?” I asked.
Val shook his head in disbelief. “What’s wrong with you people?”
Another Pakistani had driven the cabriolet. He was younger than the other one, no more than nineteen, and he was friendlier. His English was better too. He got out of the car and opened the bonnet so that I could see the engine. He looked a bit like that young Pakistani cricketer, Imran Khan, and he was a rock music fan. He plucked up the courage to ask us all which rock groups we’d seen perform. He was so impressed when Alun said he’d been to a Led Zeppelin concert. The others listed the groups they’d seen—Pink Floyd, Yes, the Band. I’d been to see Rod Stewart and Joan Baez at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, but the Pakistani boy wasn’t impressed by that. I was the only one who had seen the Beatles, though, even if I was only nine and it was at the Adelaide Showgrounds. (My sister and her friends had tickets, but one of them got appendicitis and Mum made my sister take me.)
Ulla was busy making the meal. She added far too much chili powder and then I saw her put two sugar cubes into the pot. I got the feeling cooking wasn’t something she did very often. She begged brown rice from a Danish couple camped next to us, and invited them to eat with us as well.
Alun was still sitting in the cabriolet. He looked like he wanted to stay there forever, but he took a deep breath and got out.
“This is it,” he said. “I can’t put it off any longer.”
He walked towards the toilet block like a condemned man.
Everyone else was still talking about rock bands. I took Alun’s map of Europe from a pocket on his rucksack, and spread it out on the cabriolet’s bonnet. Istanbul was down in the bottom right-hand corner. England was all the way up in the top left-hand corner. I couldn’t have gotten myself further away from London if I’d planned it.
I tried to work out what day it was. I thought it was Saturday. That meant it was more than a week since I’d left London and I was four days late back for work. I could say goodbye to my job at Konundrum. Actually, I wasn’t too sad about that, but I’d have to start looking for a new job as soon as possible.
Alun came back from the toilets looking even paler than usual. “I thought you were joking,” he said to Val. “It’s true. There was a sign. ‘No toilet paper allowed’. I had to wash my arse with my hand. I mean, it’s not hygienic is it?”
“You use your left hand for cleaning,” Ulla said, as if she was explaining something to a child. “Your right hand you use for eating and shaking hands.”
“But I’m left-handed.”
I was making a very simple wrap-around skirt. By the time the meal was ready, I’d already sewn the seam and half
of the waistband.
The brown rice and vegies weren’t very tasty, but we were all hungry so we ate the lot. Veronica was so hungry she licked her plate.
It wasn’t even slightly cold, but the boys were constantly feeding the fire with twigs or pieces of a broken crate. They just couldn’t help themselves.
“Why is it that boys are such pyromaniacs?” I said.
“It’s not pyro mania,” Alun said. “That’s destructive. Crazy about burning things. It’s pyro philia. A love of fire for its warmth and beauty. It’s a very primitive urge.”
The pyrophilic boys kept throwing sticks on the fire. Everyone was quiet, eating peaches and sticky pastries full of pistachio nuts.
I was just about to ask Dolf when he was planning on going home, when Ulla made an announcement.
“I am going to drive the Mercedes to Tehran,” she said. “It is decided. The meal is my goodbye gift to you all. I think you will never forget it.”
It was a strange thing to say, and I should have asked her what she meant, but I had more important things on my mind. Like how I was going to get home, for instance.
“So when are you leaving?” I asked.
“Tomorrow.”
Dolf’s shoulders sagged. I don’t think he’d ever thought he could talk Ulla out of going further east, but he was dreading having to leave her. Poor Dolf. I had a bad feeling that he was going to change his mind—that he wasn’t going to turn around and go home.
“How long will it take you to get to Nepal?” Val asked.
Ulla shrugged. “The journey will take its own time. The way there may not be the shortest.”
I tried not to smile.
Ulla pulled out the BIT notes.
“I don’t need these,” she said.
She was about to toss them into the fire but I took them out of her hands.
“But you’re going through all those countries,” I said.
“This is my guide book.” She had a slim book called Journey to the East by Herman Hesse.
Alun and Val nodded like they knew all about it. I’d never heard of it.