Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  I said, “Well, I’m a little psychic myself, I mean.”

  First time ever I’d spilled my guts on that. It hadn’t taken long for Kelly to have an impact on my way of thinking.

  Turned out she wasn’t too impressed by my confession. She said, “Most people are psychic, to some degree.”

  “True. But I’m psychic to an extreme degree.”

  And even as I said it, I knew I was blowing a lot of poker pots. I could tell by the way Patrick’s eyes widened. “Okay,” she said, “what card am I thinking of?”

  I closed my eyes and turned on the little TV Dave bought from the Psychic Sears & Roebuck, and dancing there in front of my kitchen mirror was my good ol’ buddy, the Ace of Spades, teasing the curls in his Afro.

  “The Ace of Spades,” I said, and opened my eyes.

  Kelly went hmm and looked at Patrick. “The lad does have a certain talent,” she said.

  So at least I managed to get Kelly’s attention. Which is all I wanted to do. You have to start somewhere and I guess I wanted to get things started.

  She took off with Suzie shortly after that, to hit the sack, and I noticed about two minutes after they left that Rockstar slunk from the shadows near the bar and followed them to the barracks.

  Patrick and Dana got into a conversation about the year Dana spent working for Legal Aid in Halifax, how she helped put that daughter-molester guy in prison and how he swore some of his buddies would kill her before the year was over. I think I heard her tell that story to everyone on the bus. And Patrick told her this story about how he was in New York once and wandered into Harlem by mistake one early evening, and he was having some gumbo in a bar when some cops came in and slammed three black guys down on the floor and took away their knives, another story which he told me once and which I overheard him telling someone else three or four times. All of which got him and Dana talking about Harlem Globetrotters and apartheid, which is when I decided it was time to grab another bottle of wine and wander over to the barracks myself.

  When I got there, Suzie’s saying to Rockstar, in this real quiet voice, “Please get your bloody bags out of here.” Through the door, thanks to a flashlight Suzie’s holding, I can see Rockstar sitting on a bunk, his hands dangling down between his legs. He looks a tad depressed. He says, “But why can’t we share a bunk? I won’t be able to sleep with that bloody poofter snoring all night long.”

  Suzie says, “Please get out.”

  Rockstar says, “I love you. I want to sleep with you.” Suzie lets out with a shriek and a yell. “I don’t believe this!” Which is when Pete comes out of where he’s bunked in and asks Suzie what’s going on.

  “This bloody wanker,” she says, pointing the flashlight at Rockstar, “won’t get out of my room.”

  Pete goes over and sticks a finger in Rockstar’s face. “Listen, mate,” he says. “Make this trip any more difficult than it already is and you’ll be sorry, got that?”

  Rockstar just glares back at him, doesn’t say anything.

  By this time, Kelly and Teach are standing in the doorway in their nightclothes, long flannelettes, watching what’s going down.

  Pete walks between them, not even saying excuse me, and grabs Rockstar’s gear off whatever bunk it’s on and throws it out on the ground, then he throws Rockstar out, and heads back to the men’s barracks.

  Rockstar just lets himself lie there. He’s glaring at Suzie now.

  Suzie says to him, “If you can’t get it at home, you ain’t going to get it here,” and then she slams the door of the women’s barracks.

  I tip up my bottle of wine and have a swallow, and I offer the bottle to Rockstar, brothers-in-arms in the battle of the sexes and all that, and he kills the bottle in three or four swallows and then he smashes it on the ground and holds up the neck with the jagged edge. He looks at me and smiles his close-lipped smile, the one that makes him look a little like Lon Chaney. “I’m going to slice her bloody throat wide open,” he says, and then he gets up and walks away, towards the beach, his long greasy hair blowing in the chilly breeze that suddenly picks up from nowhere.

  I watch him until he’s swallowed up by the darkness and then I look over at the women’s barracks and I think about Kelly.

  Welcome aboard, Kelly, I say in a whisper. Which is about when the door to the women’s barracks blows open, maybe thanks to that chilly breeze.

  The door banging against the wall raises the hair on the back of my neck. I almost expect to see someone, maybe Kelly, come walking out like the Bride of Frankenstein, her arms straight out, long, bony fingers drooping down. But instead it’s Suzie, stripped down to her T-shirt and panties, who closes the door.

  “Goodnight, Suzie,” I say.

  She didn’t say goodnight back. Maybe she didn’t hear me.

  ITALY

  Venice

  Day 7 A Free Day

  Points: 1. Venice isn’t as romantic and pretty as it used to be. It seems to be sinking faster every year, the canals are polluted, there’s more motorboats than gondolas on the water. But it still has a certain mystique, and you can’t beat the fettucini in meat sauce at the Caffe Florian or the coffee at Caffe Quandri.

  2. After you take them to St. Mark’s Square to see the bell tower and the glass-blowing factory, let them run wild. But before they run off, advise them that a map is fairly much a necessary purchase in Venice. Then again, if there’s a few on board you wouldn’t mind never seeing again, maybe you’ll want to keep that piece of information to yourself.

  3. If they’re still in sight, tell them that they could do worse things than climb the bell tower, if they want an excellent view of Venice. It’s 324 ft. high and those bronze figures chime out the time every hour.

  4. Other things they might want to see: the Palazzo Ducale, where the doges once lived and where the Tintoretto masterpiece, Paradise, is on display; the Rialto Bridge and the Bridge of Sighs; Harry’s Bar, where Hemingway used to go to get boozed up, the entrance is on Calle San Marco; more churches than you can shake a nun’s wimple at, but the biggie, of course, is St. Mark’s, and one church a day is usually enough for most people.

  Patrick’s daybook entry

  And on the seventh day of the Great Indian Trek we did not rest. Instead we rose with the morning sun and journeyed by motorboat through Grand Canal traffic, causing, I suspect, some slight consternation aboard the single gondola we saw. I have read that motorboats on Venice’s romantic byways are threatening to literally swamp the city’s gondola industry, an occurrence, no doubt, which will please the new pope, whoever he will be, since the city’s conception rate might well be swamped accordingly. Ah, yes. Far fewer enticing late night gondola rides home, when many a Catholic virgin’s sanctity has been imperilled by the discreet turning of an oarsman’s head. Yes, the cost of progress is high, but the cost of its bastard son, sweet Art, is higher still, as we discovered this morning on the Piazza San Marco. While the bronze captains on the bell tower chimed out the hour, we made our careful way across the fecal-dappled square to a glass factory, where a room full of exquisite glass reminded me of my mother’s prize-winning roses. Consequendy, I purchased a vase or two. Thereafter the day revolved around pizza at the Tavernetta de Carlo e Renzo (a disappointment was the general consensus), a glass of Bardolino at Harry’s Bar (where Hemingway’s ghost could be seen in a back booth, quite deep in his cups) and the task of making our two new passengers welcome (which is no task at all). (Although it is incumbent upon me to report that one of them, it would seem, has already fallen’ under the errant and malevolent sway of one Michael McPherson. They are late, and so we wait. And wait. . . .)

  Mick

  The next day, on the boat down to St. Mark’s Square, I sat across from Kelly and watched her peel an orange with her chewed-down fingernails. I could feel the citrus acid creeping under my own fingernails. Which as much as told me that we had a pretty strong psychic connection.

  I asked her if she needed any help with that piece of fru
it.

  She said, “No thanks, it’s just a Zen exercise I do. Some mornings I comb my hair with a spoon, some mornings I do this.”

  She offered me half her orange. I said no thanks, I don’t like the taste of anything healthy.

  She laughed at that.

  But she didn’t offer anybody else any, not even Charole, who was sitting next to Jenkins, looking sad.

  Well, it was kind of a sad-looking day, actually. Clouds had moved in overnight and they seemed to be floating just above the city’s church spires.

  When we got to St. Mark’s Square, Pete took us to a glass 75

  factory where we saw a guy with a long pair of pliers make a vase in a blast furnace. Afterward Patrick whipped out his Chargex and spent a few million lire on vases which he had sent back to England.

  “There’ll always be a Mothering Sunday,” he said as he signed the slip.

  That night Dave told me a little story about Patrick and his Chargex. How it was ten thousand pounds over limit. How he was sending all this stuff he bought on the trip—he must’ve bought about a dozen Persian carpets when we were in Turkey and Iran—back to his girl friend in Somerset who happened to have some good connections. She’d take a cut and send Patrick’s share back to him. Not a bad scam.

  After the blast furnace, Pete told us we had another one of his free days. Which usually turned out to be anything but.

  He told us to make sure to buy a map so we didn’t get lost and to be at the dock at four-thirty if we wanted a ride back to the campground.

  It was Patrick’s idea to find a pizza joint. And Kelly was up for that. But everybody else had other things they wanted to do. Except maybe Rockstar. But Patrick made a point of not asking him along.

  We found a nice little place on the edge of St. Mark’s Square with all the atmosphere, as Patrick put it, of a Fellini greasy spoon. Red and white checked tablecloths, vases with roses, and a guy who took our pictures and sold them to us on the back of matchpacks. Kelly made a face when he took her picture. Kind of stretched her mouth open and crossed her eyes.

  Why she made that face, as I found out later, is because she had this thing about cameras. It’s why she didn’t bring one along with her on the trip. And I think she liked the fact that I hadn’t either.

  Since she didn’t want to buy the matchpack, I bought it. I wonder where I lost that matchpack. Dave says Kashmir Valley. Lake Dal’s waters.

  Yeah, right. Where I lost more than a matchpack.

  As for the pizza, great. Nice thin crust, tasty pepperoni. Best pizza I ever had. But I chalked it up to Kelly’s influence. Everything had become just a little bit nicer, it seemed to me, since she’d arrived on the scene.

  We didn’t talk about much over that lunch. Mainly movies, Montana, and the best restaurants we’ve ever eaten in. And afterwards, when Patrick asked us if we were interested in finding Harry’s Bar where Hemingway used to drink, and the Bridge of Sighs, Kelly and I said no thanks at the same time.

  And so we ended up wandering through the streets of Venice by ourselves. All these high dark alleys with clotheslines stretched across them. It reminded me of that spooky Donald Sutherland movie, Don’t Look Now.

  Especially after we ended up in this churchyard where there were three nuns sitting stark still on a dais in their black habits. They looked almost dead. Like maybe their throats had been slit and the blood had poured out and turned black when it dried.

  “Eerie city,” said Kelly. “I’m not sure if I like it or not.” “I know I don’t’ I said. “It’s got death vibes.”

  “It’s the water, right?” she said. “The water creeping up, inch by inch, every year.”

  I said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Like sand in an hourglass, and the days of our lives, the way a bar of soap gets smaller and a river widens,” she said.

  I looked at her. She smiled. She was trying to be funny, I thought, so I smiled too. I felt like I was walking on either eggshells or razors. The dark reflections in the puddles we walked through looked more like razors.

  “I’m a morbid person, Mick,” she said. “You really don’t want to make friends with me.”

  “You got that wrong,” I said. “I’m morbid too. All I ever do is think about death.”

  “You’re humouring me,” she said.

  “No, I’m not,” I said.

  We kept glancing at each other as we walked along, which usually isn’t something people do. Usually they look at the ground or straight ahead.

  We walked along in silence for a while, gazing up at the high alleys. People’s underwear hanging still.

  Finally Kelly said, “Actually, I wouldn’t mind seeing the Bridge of Sighs.”

  So we weren’t going to talk about death.

  “Have you ever seen the movie, A Little Romance?” she asked.

  I said yeah.

  She said she loved the movie. She said she’s seen almost every movie Laurence Olivier’s been in.

  I said I liked him a lot in Marathon Man.

  “He was sinister in that one,” said Kelly. “But convincing. Now I think of his face every time I go to a dentist. Which has made for a nice change.”

  It took us a while to find the Bridge of Sighs, and for those people who haven’t seen A Little Romance, it’s about these two teenagers who decide they have to go to Venice and kiss on the Bridge of Sighs to seal their love, which is of your basic Romeo and Juliet variety, parents disapprove, etc. and Laurence Olivier helps them do it.

  When we got there Patrick was still on the bridge, all by himself, taking pictures of the canal.

  Kelly said, “Let’s wait until Patrick’s gone.”

  I almost said any particular reason? But decided against it. Instead I said okay. Like the old man always used to say, the two most important words when you’re involved with a woman are yes, dear.

  While we waited in the shadows of an alley for Patrick to take off, I asked Kelly if she’d seen Don’t Look Now.

  She said yeah.

  I said, “Quite the movie, huh?”

  She seemed to freeze for just a minute, didn’t say anything. Finally she said, in this cold voice, “If you’re thinking of the sex scene in that movie—” Then she caught herself. Said she was sorry, then she looked at me.

  She said, “Mick, I’m going to be up front with you right from the start. I sense sexual tension here. Which isn’t all that unusual. You’re male. I’m female. And I like you, that’s the first thing I want to say. But I don’t want to mislead you in any way. Something happened to me about a year ago that put my libido on hold. I’m only interested in exploring the realms of the subconscious, not the realms of the physical.”

  I shrugged my shoulders as casually as I could. “That’s fine with me,” I said. “I’m scared of sex myself.”

  She cocked her head to the left. Her eyes seemed far back in her head, thanks to those glasses. Made them seem weird, like a frog’s almost, except they were still sexy in some way, so I think witch’s eyes might be closer to it, yeah, definitely witch’s eyes.

  “Why are you scared of sex?” she said.

  I said, “It’s the way women always grind a knee into your groin to check you out as soon as they get your pants off.” I shrugged my shoulders again, wondered where the hell that statement came from. It didn’t sound like something Dave would say. And decided to clam up.

  We looked back at the bridge. Patrick was gone. It was just an empty bridge and all that grey sky beyond. I felt the hairs on my skin prickle up and I shivered, the way I always shiver when, as Dave once put it, I brush against a ghost. The way everyone shivers, he says.

  Kelly said, “Well, let’s walk across the Bridge of Sighs.” Then she laughed, to herself more than anything else.

  “Get the feeling we’re in a play?” I said.

  She looked at me. “Always,” she said. “Some macabre puppet play, where the strings are piano wire and there’s these strange beings called the Masters of Karma doing
all the pulling. To fully answer your question.”

  So yeah, Kelly was one weird chick.

  I always fall in love with weird chicks, as Rice-Eater once put it.

  And so Kelly and I walked out across the Bridge of Sighs, and when we got to the top of the bridge we stopped and looked out at this one lonely gondola at the far end of the canal, coming towards us.

  We leaned on the stone rail and watched it come. And while it came, Kelly said to me, “Since you’re a psychic, you probably know why my id has fled.”

  I looked at her out of the comer of my eye. She kept staring straight ahead.

  I didn’t say anything, I called up Dave. And against the back of my eyelids, in this small room, that’s the sense I have of it, this TV screen suddenly switches on after a brief explosion of white light and I see this darkness, and the darkness quickly gives way to what looks like a candle flame and the flame gets brighter and I see it’s a bonfire, and I see two figures around it. I see the bonfire reflected in Kelly’s glasses and the sides of some glasses, wine glasses maybe, getting tipped up, and then there’s something like flash bulbs going off.

  I can’t make any sense of it.

  “I don’t know,” I say to her. “This psychic stuff, it’s what they call inexact. All I’m getting is a bonfire, wine bottles and a camera, on what looks like a beach. You and this other guy. Looks like a professor or something.”

  “My photography professor,” says Kelly.

  I turn to look at her. All the blood has drained from her face and there’s just skull left there, covered by skin, and those glasses and those eyes.

  She looks away. That gondola’s gotten a whole bunch nearer. It’s Tim and Teach coming at us, I can see that now, and Kelly and I don’t say a word the whole time they get nearer. It’s just a little uncomfortable, because they recognize us and we can’t walk away and so we stay there, and when they get close we wave, and Teach shouts up, to Kelly more than me, enjoying Venice? and Kelly says yes, you? and Teach says oh, very much so, and then they disappear underneath the bridge, and Kelly says, “They’ll be kissing now, and we spoiled it for them.” In this low whisper.