by Helen Moat
My love of high places had started as a young child when I’d stared out of my bedroom window to the Dromara Hills. In the fields beyond my house, I’d catch glimpses of the Mournes on clear days, higher, more majestic. They begged to be climbed. Later, my brothers would take me with them to scale the peaks along the Mourne Wall – the rocky-topped Binnian and Bearnagh – and traverse the paths that criss-crossed the range. They had strange and romantic names, such as the Brandy Pad and the Devil’s Coach Road. There were other landmarks that paid homage to fowl and bird: Pigeon Rock, Buzzard’s Roast and the Cock and Hen. On top of Slieve Donard, the highest mountain in Northern Ireland, I saw yet more mountains that called to me across the Irish Sea to the Isle of Man, the Lake District and Wales. A wider world was reaching out to me.
Once, I’d set out with my father from Newcastle to climb up through forest and glen to the mountain valley that rises up to the saddle between Commedagh and Donard. My father had looked at his shiny dress shoes and the rough track beyond the gate that headed up the valley and hesitated.
‘Let’s go on,’ I pleaded with him.
I could see in his eyes that he too was drawn to the mountains in front of us. Then he gazed at the wall of scree and rock below the saddle and shook his head. ‘Best get back.’
I’d thought him timid and unadventurous back then, but he must also have thought of my mother, down in the town, waiting for us in his cousin’s house. My father’s horizons were pulled in again.
*
Jamie and I carried on along the Kamchiya Valley, listening to the tinkle of water and feeling the dampness of mountain dew on our skin – just as I’d experienced on the River Glen below Donard with my father. Then it happened again: another ping – a second spoke. I looked ahead at the road as it headed up into the mountains. How would Jamie’s bicycle bear up with two broken spokes and the stress on the back wheel as we climbed? We cycled on in troubled silence, no longer appreciating the song of the river or the cooling balm of mountain air.
And the ping came again: a third spoke. I sighed. To cycle on three broken spokes would put too much stress on the wheel. Jamie and I dismounted from our bikes and contemplated the long walk to Aytos, still twenty miles on the other side of the pass. I opened my pannier, to get the map and figure out our options, and found the hoteliers’ fruit. Biting into a peach, the sweet juice hit my tastebuds in a burst of flavour. Above us, the hillside bounced with the call of a shepherd. I lay down on the grass verge and closed my eyes, forgetting the broken spokes for a moment, just savouring the soft flesh of the fruit, our gift from the Bulgarian sisters.
‘What shall we do?’ Jamie was asking.
‘Let’s walk up to the next village and see if we can get help.’
What sort of help, I wasn’t sure. The road that had been devoid of traffic at dawn was now slowly filling up with traffic, mainly white vans. I looked at the back doors and thought how easy it would be to slip in two bicycles. Could we thumb a lift with two bicycles? Would anyone stop? Was it wise anyway?
So we continued on, my eye on the buildings tumbling off the hillside, the village appearing and disappearing with the twists and turns of the road until, at last, we reached Daskotna. We found a typical Balkan village store and I started to tell the shopkeeper about our problem, but then noticed his eyes were uncomprehending. He didn’t speak English.
I made circular movements with my fists to indicate pedalling. The shopkeeper frowned. I touched the wire of a vegetable rack then drew the shape of a wheel in the air, spokes radiating from the centre, saying ‘ping, ping, ping’ as I pushed finger and thumb apart. The shopkeeper looked from me to the door as if hoping someone would come and rescue him from the mad foreigner.
Then a look of comprehension, followed by, ‘Ah, ah, ah. Da.’
Somehow, he’d understood my desperate sign language and he followed me outside to see the ‘air wheel’ in reality. He held up his finger in a ‘wait’ motion and waved a mobile with his other hand. He spoke at length into the phone then handed it over.
‘You are with my uncle. You have a broken bicycle?’
‘Yes.’
‘Please, don’t worry. The minibus can take your bicycle. It will come at twelve-thirty.’
‘Twelve-thirty!’ It wasn’t even nine in the morning. We settled down for the long wait on the outside bench when the shopkeeper reappeared. He handed the phone to me again.
‘Hello?’
‘I’m sorry the minibus is too small for two bicycles. It can’t take you to Aytos.’
These were the kind of obstacles that filled my mind with worry before we’d left England. But here on the road, I was learning that with every obstacle there is a solution. The shopkeeper’s nephew phoned back.
‘My uncle has organised someone to take you to Aytos. You pay him thirty lev. Okay?’
I imagined one of the white transit vans that were so plentiful on the road, but when our skinny rescuer in frayed shirt and ripped trousers arrived, he had a clapped-out estate covered in boils of rust. He grabbed the bikes and slung them into the boot, indicating that I should squeeze into the small space beside the bikes and panniers. I refused and climbed into the front with Jamie. The driver shrugged, running dirt-ingrained fingertips through a tangle of woolly hair. He jumped into the driver’s seat and turned the key in the ignition. The car shuddered to life and the stench of exhaust fumes filled the vehicle. He offered us cigarettes, then chewing gun, before shooting off at speed, dust flying up from the unmade road.
The estate ate up the miles at a ridiculous pace after the months of leisurely cycling – buildings and landmarks shooting by in a fuzzy blur. Then our driver slammed on the brakes.
‘Politsai!’
He did a quick U-turn on the road and drove into a petrol station, indicating again that I should go into the boot. There was no arguing this time. I squeezed under the bikes, and we set off once more, past the policemen who, seemingly concerned about three in the front, were less troubled by the lack of seatbelts or the exhaust smoke that would have had the car impounded in most other places.
From now on, my view was of sky, ridge and treetop. I could sense gravity pulling the car down to Aytos – until we came to a sudden halt outside a small bike shop in a side street. The shop owner and his wife pulled our bikes out of the car and onto the pavement, where they started to check them over.
‘Come back two hours. All done.’
Jamie and I found a square and sat down on a bench to eat our rolls. I watched two toddlers play with their toy cars on a low wall beside a fountain while their mothers gossiped with friends among the prams. I tried to imagine an alternative existence in this Balkan town caught in the shadows of the mountains, but couldn’t.
When we returned to the bike shop, the bicycles were ready as promised: six spokes and a tyre replaced on Jamie’s bike; my brake and gear sorted.
‘Old tyre not good,’ said the shop owner with a disapproving frown. ‘From India. Bad. Dangerous.’
I nodded contritely.
‘Where you buy it?’
‘Romania.’
‘Romanian bike shops no good.’
It was too complicated to explain how I’d searched for a tyre in a small Romanian village, grateful for any tyre that would fit, so I smiled my agreement.
‘All good,’ the owner’s wife said. ‘Here, for you.’ She handed us a set of lights.
I was grateful for their thorough service and repairs, and for the gift.
‘Strong spokes now – but bags too heavy.’
In retrospect, we should have bought front as well as back panniers. Too late now: we’d continue on and hope for the best. Cycling out of Aytos, we were relieved to be back on the bikes. Ahead, the road climbed with the thermostat. The temperature was pushing forty degrees, the yellow sun sickening. We stopped at a roadside taverna, packed with locals eating stew. I wondered how they could eat the steaming food in the heat of the afternoon sun. We managed ice cream, pushing
our bodies against the eaves of the building on the outside terrace, trying to catch the thin strip of shade.
On the bikes again, the hill ahead went on forever. My head began to fuzz. It was a gradual incline, long and shallow, yet my legs felt like they were pushing wheels of concrete.
‘I’ve got to get off the bike,’ I said to Jamie, and crawled into the vegetation on the roadside, trying to find its shade. Now it was Jamie’s turn to feed me biscuits, along with sun-warmed water.
Somehow, I made it to Karnobat and our park-side hotel. I ordered a bottle of wine on the terrace and waited for the sun’s clawing heat to retreat. Tomorrow was my birthday. We would have a day off and finish the wine. We would ward off the evil eye of the sun in the cave of our air-conditioned room. We’d come out in the evening, like vampires when the shadows were falling.
9. Birthday Blues
The nausea began late in the morning of my birthday, building up in waves like the Bulgarian landscape. My stomach fisted into a ball of pain and I retched and retched, my body heaving, but nothing. Then relief as I brought up the contents of my stomach. Before the process started all over again.
Happy birthday: the messages rolled in on my mobile, but I felt miserable. By evening, I was still retching, although there was nothing left to bring up but water and saliva.
The next morning, Jamie brought me dry toast from the hotel kitchen. I sent him down again to book another night and curled up in bed, weak and full of self-pity. For the first time, I wanted to go home. Sofia was just over three hours away by coach. The temptation to abandon the bikes and fly back to England was hard to push away. I drifted in and out of sleep, only to get up once in a while to retch over the toilet bowl yet again. Outside, I could hear children playing in the park, giggles and cries just audible over the hum of the air-conditioning, their shouts of delight mixed with the conspiratorial soft voices that children use to invent worlds.
And in those fitful dreams, where reality and fantasy and past and present blur, I too was a child again, back in my lumpen bed with some childhood illness – chickenpox or measles, perhaps – and my father standing over me with a bottle of Lucozade, speaking softly. He’d pour me a glass and pass it to me. My father’s concern, the sound of fizz, the sharp burst of sweet, sticky foam on my hot tongue – that combination was the best medicine. My mother, in comparison, had little patience for sick children who got in the way of her daily cleaning, but she would come in to my room to remake the bed, roughly pulling the sheet and blankets tight around my body until I felt I was encased in a cool cocoon. There were cold mornings of illness, when I could see my hot breath steaming against the chilled air, my bedroom scraping together just a few degrees in the single-glazed room without heating.
‘Turn the air-con off,’ I muttered to Jamie, shivering under the duvet as the children’s voices outside the hotel window faded away.
In those winter days of childhood illness, there would be silence, except for the distant hum of the Hoover and the sombre song of a solitary robin somewhere. There were summer illnesses, too, when the room was filled with the blackbirds’ sweet melody or the neighbour’s homing pigeons rhythmically cooing like a soft heartbeat.
My parents never said they loved me, but their love for me was present in the everyday: in the proffered Lucozade and remade bed; my mother clothing me with her own knitted and sewn creations and feeding me up with her rounds of Friday baking. It was there in woodland and field walks with my father, foraging and flower-picking, cricket games on the beach and the shared bags of chips on the way home. And when my father waited for me in his green grocery van outside the school gates on wet days. It was a mutual love. What went wrong? My heart running cold? That night, unspoken of in my family, but always with me – a hammer blow. What had happened that night I had carried with me into adulthood, the darkness and heaviness of my knowledge weighing me down. My siblings had responded differently. They’d rewritten the narrative of that evening into something more palatable, I sensed, something that fitted with their romanticised view of our childhood. Who could blame them? Isn’t that what we humans do? Rewrite the narratives of our lives to create a world we want to present to others and wish for ourselves? Isn’t it how we protect ourselves from pain? But I, I had to be out of step, disrupting the equilibrium of our family, brutally honest with myself and others – no matter how much pain it caused.
*
On 31 July, I woke up having had enough of hotel walls.
‘I think I can continue,’ I said to Jamie. ‘I think I can make it to Yambol. It’s just over thirty miles. What do you think?’
We crept out of the hotel at dawn and reclaimed our bicycles beside the rubbish bins at the back of the building. I still felt wobbly and was thankful for the long, straight road that led, mostly level, alongside vineyards, where bags and coats were slung surreally over posts on the edges of fields. Large signs rose from the bushes announcing Chardonnays and Muscats with pictures of bunched grapes and slender bottles of wine.
On the edge of Yambol, we cycled past rickety buildings with windows covered in plastic sheeting, while on the other side of the road, shacks of corrugated tin and wood lay low in the ground alongside the pavement verges, the makeshift homes not much more luxurious than a pig house. Further in, there was a mix of dilapidated concrete blocks and broken pavements. I was shocked to see this level of poverty in a European country.
We reached our hotel by ten-thirty and spent the first part of the morning on the terrace before booking in. I still felt weak and had no appetite, but I was determined not to take any more public transport. Besides, Elhovo, the border town with Turkey, was tantalisingly close – a mere twenty-three miles away. I could manage that.
In Elhovo, our accommodation was located above a DIY shop and we booked in at a counter stacked with cables and work tools. That evening, we ate in one of the restaurants – my first meal since the eve of my birthday. After days of only hearing Bulgarian, I was surprised when two Englishmen sat down at one of the tables. They had just arrived in Elhovo after driving across the continent over four days.
‘Four days!’ I exclaimed. ‘It has taken us three months to cycle here!’
The men laughed.
‘And why here?’ I asked.
‘We found a house we liked on the internet. Elhovo is cheap. The weather’s good, and we could buy a house for a few thousand pounds.’
I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to live in this quiet border town with Yambol as its nearest point of civilisation. Even the Black Sea and Burgas were over an hour away by car. ‘Have you spent time in Bulgaria before?’
‘No, never. We hadn’t even seen the house until today.’
‘So, you’ve been learning Bulgarian, I guess?’
‘We were going to learn the language but we’re discovering everyone seems to speak English.’
I pondered this. It hadn’t been our experience. English was rudimentary, even in the hotels and restaurants. I wondered how the men would integrate into the community when the level of spoken English covered the weather and the most basic of everyday platitudes.
‘Well,’ I said doubtfully, ‘I suppose you could always go back home if you don’t like it.’
‘Oh no, that’s not possible. I’ve sold my house there – I can’t afford to go back,’ one of the men said.
It was an astonishing act of abandonment and I wondered how they would find this small border town in the depths of the harsh Balkan winter.
Back in our room, we discovered the fridge didn’t work and we had to down our yoghurt drinks that were meant for breakfast. Worse, the light didn’t work, meaning we had to grope around in the dark, using the torchlight on our mobiles. We managed to pack up in the darkness of the pre-dawn. This was our habit now: slipping onto the road before the heat of the day.
Just a few miles out of town, we saw our first sign for Istanbul – our endpoint there in blue and white. Even closer was the border with Turkey, a handful of mil
es away now. Our eleventh and final country, excluding our coffee stop in France, was within reach.
We climbed the summit of the last Bulgarian hill and turned a corner to see the Turkish flag flapping in the breeze high above the queues of lorries, petrol stations and shops. Jamie and I stopped to message Tom with the news we had made it to the Turkish border.
The way through Bulgaria had remained stubbornly grey through my filtered lens: the grey of concrete; the grey of expressionless faces in restaurants and hotels. But there had been splashes of colour: the blood-orange sun of Nevsha and the bright Dutch farmer; the deep-pink hues of fuchsia and oleander and the warm smiles of the sisters in the Tsonevo Reservoir garden; the fresh wet green of the Kamchiya Valley.
At the border controls, I fetched out the Turkish visas that had lain at the bottom of my pannier since Rotterdam at the beginning of May. It was the second of August.
TURKEY
1. Into Turkey
It was the colour after the grey, so bright it dazzled
Tangy orange
Avocado green
Tomato red
Midnight blue
Sunflower yellow
It reminded me of a time long ago when I’d spent a winter in the Swiss Alps, the luminous green of the spring-melt had dazzled my eyes after months of monochrome snow and sky.
While my father hadn’t wanted me to leave for Switzerland, he’d accepted my decision. The week before I left, he’d asked me if I would drive to Clare Glen with him. We’d walked along the banks of the River Cusher, dark with hazel, oak and ash, the steep ground beneath the trees covered in bluebells and wood anemone, both of us aware that I would probably never return home. As we followed the river, we listened to the fresh spring song of dunnock filling the air, my head light with thoughts of new beginnings, my father’s head bowed with the weight of my departure.
