Sugar Sugar

by Carole Wilkinson

  Thirty

  Moonless

  Someone was thumping on the door. Val got up and stumbled over to open it. It was Fakir. He was talking fast and making that strange underarm gesture that people in that part of the world make, like he was beckoning us to duck under his arm.

  “The truck’s ready to leave,” Val translated.

  We hurried out into the early morning light, dishevelled and unwashed. The other passengers were waiting patiently in the truck. We climbed up, but there was nowhere left on the floor for our luggage, so we had to nurse it.

  The driver was slow and careful, different from a lot of the other drivers we’d experienced on the road. He wasn’t out to prove his manhood by speeding and taking stupid risks. The day passed much the same as the previous one. Barren mountains stretched into the distance in all directions, like lengths of crumpled and faded brown linen, breathtaking in their sameness. Villages consisting of houses exactly the same colour as the surrounding earth were invisible until we were almost on top of them. There wasn’t a blade of green to be seen anywhere. What did these people eat? What did they do all day? It was so bumpy I had to hold onto the side of the truck to stop myself bouncing off. It was like being on a fairground ride without a seatbelt. And it was hot. The dragging, draining heat weighed down on me like iron.

  I was thirsty and hungry.

  I pictured the pale green Kelvinator in the kitchen at Semaphore. Every day after school, my brother would open the door. Inside there’d be cheese and cabana, left-over spaghetti, apples and pears, icy-poles in the freezer. And he’d say, “There’s nothing to eat,” and close the fridge door.

  “I think I’m getting delirious with heat and hunger,” I said to Val. “All I can think about is food—crisp salads, crunchy apples, Eskimo Pies.”

  “What’s an Eskimo Pie?”

  “A block of vanilla ice-cream covered in chocolate. What you call a choc-ice in England.”

  Val sighed. “I was thinking of sausages, mashed potato and a pint.”

  He was wearing his Afghan shirt. The material was maroon, patterned all over with small posies of pale blue and pink flowers. The contrast of the dark maroon background and the pastel flowers was beautiful. Val wore the shirt with the sleeves rolled up two turns and three buttons undone at the neck so that the crescent slit fell open. The colour suited him. The pale flowers somehow emphasised the maleness of his brown arms and neck.

  “Actually, I’d just settle for a glass of water,” he said.

  “I keep remembering the tap in my bed-sit. I could just turn it on and get as much cold water as I liked. It seems hard to believe now.”

  The truck lurched over a hole in the road and we both reached out to hold on to the rail. Our hands touched. Val pulled his away.

  A man got on the truck with his wife. She was wearing one of those black tent garments, so we couldn’t see her. As she climbed up onto the truck, her husband kept pulling it down over her feet, so that no one could glimpse her ankles. I don’t know how she could breathe. It must be stifling inside those things on a hot day.

  Our minds seemed to be trying to escape from the bleached landscape around us. We talked about other places, cool places, comfortable places. Val told me about spending term breaks with Alun’s family in Wales—green, wet hills; rushing streams; damp mist; and hot soup in front of the fire.

  “I think I’ve forgotten what green looks like,” I said. “You know, the green of lawns and new leaves.”

  The only green we’d seen for weeks was a sort of faded, drab olive.

  “What about blue?” he said

  “I haven’t forgotten blue.” I smiled. “Haven’t you noticed the way people have been staring at you since Istanbul?”

  “That’s because I’m a whitey.”

  “No it isn’t. It’s your eyes. They’ve probably never seen a blue-eyed person before.”

  Finally we stopped for lunch. It was the first food we’d had in twenty-four hours There was no ice-cream, no lettuce, but a good filling meal of rice and lamb and water served in washed-out fruit tins.

  I’d been telling Val about Shell Beach where we went for our holidays—the dusty campsite, the millions of flies, clambering over the sand hills to reach a perfect bay of aqua ocean.

  “You should be used to this sort of heat,” he said as we went back to the truck.

  He was right, it must have been about thirty-eight degrees and it got that hot in Adelaide every summer.

  “It’s different in Adelaide,” I said. “You can get away from the heat—turn on the fan, open the fridge, run through the sprinkler. There’s always the promise of a cool change. And there’s the sea. You can always cool down in the sea. Here it’s the same every day.”

  The driver couldn’t get the truck to start. I groaned. I thought we’d left engine troubles back in no-man’s-land. He turned the key over and over again, but all he got was a loud ticking noise.

  “I think I know what’s wrong,” I said. “I don’t want to embarrass the driver though. Do you think I should say something?”

  “Well, we’re not going anywhere otherwise.”

  The driver had his head under the bonnet. I climbed into the cabin.

  “Everyone has to rock,” I shouted. “Tell them.”

  “I don’t know how to say that,” Val replied.

  A man in the passenger seat was shrinking away from me as I demonstrated, rocking back and forth in the seat, and indicated that he should do the same. The driver was telling me to get out of the cabin.

  “Come on, Val, get them to rock. It’s too heavy for me to do it by myself. It’s something to do with a worn bit on a flywheel. It happened to my HR. Have a little faith.”

  Val started to rock. The man next to me looked terrified of me, but joined in.

  “Harder!”

  A few other passengers rocked. The truck lurched on the spot.

  “That’s it! Again!” I turned the key.

  The engine caught. I revved the engine in triumph. There was a surprised murmur. The driver invited me to ride in the cabin alongside him, but I declined. The other passengers respectfully made room for me in the back.

  “That’s what women do in the West,” Val explained to the men, even though they couldn’t understand a word. “They cook, they clean and they mend cars.”

  As the hours passed, Fakir became more talkative. He told us of his experiences on the road. He spoke in Farsi, but he was a natural storyteller. With gestures and mime, aided by Val’s now twenty-word vocabulary, Fakir made us understand. He described the winter road impassable because of snow. He told us of the time they were held up by bandits and robbed of every afghani they had. He recounted how the road had once crumbled away and the truck he was in fell to the depths below, how he had jumped off as it went over the edge and was the only survivor. Fakir had a serenity about him, a kind of grace, as if he was proud of his place in the world, and sure of how his life would unfold. He was interested in the foreigners who had come into his world, but he wasn’t envious of us.

  It was a day of delays. Apart from the lunchtime episode, the truck over-heated twice, and there were hills so steep that we had to get out and walk. The third time we were walking up a hill, the men stopped halfway up to pray. There was one old man who the others called Baba. He didn’t pray because he couldn’t get down on his knees. While we were waiting, he showed us a gun that he kept in a pouch hanging from his waist. He indicated the surrounding hills and made a scary face. Then patted his pouch.

  “I think he’s saying there are bandits in the hills,” Val said. “I think he’s saying he’ll protect us.”

  The villages we passed were huddles of windowless mud cubes. They looked as fragile as sand castles, as if a decent shower would wash them away. Apart from our truck, ploughs pulled by oxen were the only machines. Cooking was achieved over a fizzle of twigs and a smoldering dung pat. For light there was the sun.

  It was dark by the time we reached the town where
we were to spend that night. Neither of us were surprised that it wasn’t Mazar-i-Sharif. The town was called Maimana and it had no electricity.

  We were led to a building and a room, empty except for one gorgeous carpet that covered almost the entire earth floor. It wasn’t the woven kind, but one with a soft pile. It was red and brown with a design of orange geometric camels and a border of blue woollen eyes. I only glimpsed it for a few moments by the light of the hotelkeeper’s oil lamp before he shut the door behind him and we were left in darkness. There was no moon.

  The sound of animals howling woke me during the night. It was a pack of dogs on the run. The howling got closer and then I heard another animal noise, a deep growling. It sounded like it was just on the other side of the wall. I wondered what it was. I tried to open my eyes and realised they were already open. It was pitch black.

  The other animal sounded like it was cornered. It growled and snarled and the dogs went quiet for a while then started howling again. I got up and moved towards where I thought the window was. I’d never experienced such complete darkness. With my arms outstretched I found the wall. It was cool and smelt of earth. I moved my hands along the gritty surface until I felt the rough wood of the window frame. I stood on tiptoes and put my face in front of it. There was no glass in the window, but I couldn’t feel any movement of air. I could hear the animal’s deep, rumbling growl below the window, but I couldn’t see anything, not even the faintest shape. Just blackness. The creature outside growled deep in its throat. The howling of the dogs started up again and then faded into the distance. Then there was nothing.

  The silence frightened me more than the howling. It was like my senses had stopped functioning. I stepped away from the wall and lost my bearings. I didn’t know where my sleeping bag was. I shivered. I was only wearing a singlet and underpants. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled across that invisible carpet. The tinkle of my ankle bracelet was the only sound. My hand touched the soft cloth of a sleeping bag. It wasn’t mine. I felt fingers slide up my arm and the slight movement of air as Val lifted the edge of his sleeping bag. Both his hands pulled me towards him. I ran my fingers over his warm chest, felt the few hairs there. I could hear his breathing and my heart hammering. I could smell his skin—dried sweat and maleness. I like that smell. It’s a smell I’d recognise anywhere. Then I could taste him. It seemed like the most intimate thing possible, to taste his lips, his tongue, the saliva inside his mouth. I was blind, but that didn’t matter. My other senses were alive like never before.

  That was when we first made love.

  “I heard dogs howling? Did you hear them?”

  “Wolves,” he said.

  “Wolves?”

  “I think so, chasing a bear or some sort of wild cat.”

  “I thought I was imagining it.”

  “No, I heard them.”

  “Imagine living in a place where there are wolves hiding in the daytime, but wandering the streets at night. It’s like something out of a fairytale.”

  Val held me closer so that my body followed the exact shape of his. There I was in the middle of nowhere, and I felt completely content. I hadn’t realised how lonely I’d been in London till then. I was a million miles from anywhere I knew, I didn’t speak the language, I didn’t have much money, but I’d never felt so comfortable in my life. Slowly, step by small step, I’d wandered into the unknown. The previous day my life had been in the hands of a turbaned man driving a clapped-out truck that wouldn’t get a roadworthy in Australia, that was crawling along a dirt track in the wilds of a totally foreign land, and needed a wedge under the wheel to stop it from rolling off the mountain. No one in the world knew where I was apart from Val. Any one of those men in the truck could decide to steal everything we had (not much), rape me, slit our throats. No one would have known.

  They hadn’t though. The driver had negotiated the mountains, got me to the next town, led me to a place where I could sleep. I was safe. I’d heard all kinds of bad things about Afghanistan on the road, and yet it had turned out to be the place where I felt the happiest in my whole life.

  It was just starting to get light. The room looked like one of those French paintings made up of dots. I could just make out the little camels on the carpet. I snuggled against the sleeping body next to me. I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

  Thirty-one

  Unchained Hearts

  “So you’re not a virgin,” Val said when we were back in the truck the next day.

  I smiled. “Obviously not.”

  “I mean you weren’t. Before.”

  “No.” It was strange having that conversation in front of fifteen turbaned men.

  “The boyfriend?”

  “No, not Terry. It was an accident. I was stupid.”

  I would tell him about the other time, but not just then.

  “So you never slept with the boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  When I started going out with Terry, I made it very clear I wasn’t “that sort of girl”. He’d never objected.

  The truck had nearly left without us that morning. Fakir didn’t wake us and we strolled out to find the truck and its passengers rocking back and forth, as I’d instructed them. We thought we’d paid to go all the way to Mazar-i-Sharif and we probably had, but our indecipherable tickets apparently said we were only going as far as Maimana. We had to pay another one hundred afghanis to go the rest of the way. We didn’t argue. It was our third day on the truck. As usual, there were a number of delays. We stopped for the passengers to pray by the side of the road. The truck got a flat tyre. At one village, someone climbed aboard with a smelly, hobbled goat. In the distance I saw black tents and camels. Val said they were nomads. We seemed to be driving further and further into the wilderness.

  There was one thing that was very different to the previous days. Val and I looked at each other more than we looked at the bleached landscape. We held hands, hidden by the folds of my skirt. We played variations of the five things game. I discovered his five favourite foods—avocado salad, cornflakes, egg sandwiches, bread and butter pudding and the yoghurt made by the chef at his mother’s restaurant. My five favourite pop groups were almost the same as Val’s least favourite. We listed our five best moments, our five worst. Val featured in both of my lists.

  Val’s worst moments were all about people leaving him behind—when his mother left him with a nanny when he was four and he thought she’d gone forever, when his grandmother died. I was beginning to understand why Alun’s disappearance was gnawing at him so. We stopped for lunch and I leaned down to get my purse from my suitcase.

  “Hold still,” Val said.

  He reached into the V of my blouse and I felt him pinch my skin. When he withdrew his hand, there was a huge flea between his index finger and thumb.

  “Must have been from that goat,” he said.

  He squashed the flea between his thumbnails leaving a stain of my blood, which he wiped on his jeans. Fakir was watching us.

  He smiled. After lunch the road gradually faded into the landscape and we drove across a trackless plain for about four hours. We didn’t see a single building, not so much as a sheep.

  Fakir was about our age. He asked us wordless questions. He struggled with the concept that Val and I were not married, not betrothed, not even from the same country.

  Late in the afternoon a bitumen road suddenly appeared. The truck hummed along the smooth surface at thirty-five miles per hour at least, and we arrived in Mazar-i-Sharif as it was getting dark.

  We said goodbye to Fakir and the driver and it was like farewelling old friends. They gave us directions to a hotel. We got lost and I was just about to suggest we go back the way we’d come, when two men in dark robes rushed up and started waving their arms, shaking their fists. I thought they were going to rob us, but their eyes were full of rage not need or greed. They shouted at us, loud and angry, more at me than Val. I clung to him, which only made then more furious. They didn’t hit us
, but they pushed us in front of them, hustling us along until we were in a busier street.

  The usual crowd formed to watch.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Val.

  “I think we wandered into the grounds of a mosque.”

  Then someone stepped out of the crowd and said something to the two dark-robed men. He managed to calm them down.

  “Hello, Val. Hello, Jackie.”

  It was Wasim. He smiled as if he’d been expecting to see us and calmly led us to a nearby restaurant.

  I didn’t recognise Alun at first. He was sitting cross-legged on a carpet-draped platform sipping tea. He had his back to us.

  “Alun?”

  He turned round.

  His face was a little thinner and not so pale. His hair was shorter and he was wearing a long blue Afghan shirt over baggy trousers. He also wore the sort of brown cap that I’d seen some Afghan men wearing. He came over and gave me a hug.

  “ Adelaide! What are you doing here?”

  Then he saw Val over my shoulder.

  “Looking for you,” Val said. “What the fuck do you think we’re doing?”

  “Why are you looking for me?” he said. “I’m not lost.”

  He drew Val into the hug.

  “We were worried about you,” I said. “You just disappeared.”

  “What did you think had happened to me?” Alun said.

  “You hear stories.”

  Alun was smiling at us, shaking his head, as if we were over anxious parents. “You two look terrible,” he said. “Come and have something to eat.”

  Wasim ordered food. The waiter brought rice with lamb and sultanas, a dish that looked like giant ravioli, baked eggplant, salad and lots of fresh bread. Alun had only been in Afghanistan a few days more than us, but he looked completely at home, as if he’d been there for years. He scooped up the food with chunks of bread. The Alun who refused to eat foreign food had vanished and been replaced by one who ate everything. I did too. After surviving on one meal a day for three days, I thought I was entitled to make a pig of myself.