Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  “Oh, yeah?” I said. “How did that one go?”

  He wrinkled his face up into a Dopey grin. “Tut, tut, Mr. McPherson. Tit for tat. There are all kinds of rumours flying around about what happened in room 203 last night, after the lights went out. Since you were a participant, and since your original story concerning an orgy is highly suspect, I would implore you, for your own peace of mind, to set the record straight. ’ ’

  I laughed. Patrick raised his eyebrows again. Jenkins went to get himself a Trovas from the bar. As though someone had already told him what happened.

  “Out of mild curiosity, huh, Dr. Livingstone?” I said. “Yes, indeed,” said Patrick.

  “Well, sorry, Dr. Livingstone, the girls swore me to secrecy.”

  Patrick looked real disappointed. He was one of these busybody types who had to know everything that was going down. He was worse than Suzie, actually. I was just amazed that Suzie hadn’t told him all about it. But they weren’t on speaking terms, I guess, because of the way Patrick snored.

  Patrick said, “You aren’t the least bit curious about what that limerick said?”

  I said, “Listen, Patrick, I saved your ass back in Dubrovnik. The least you can do is tell me what the limerick said.”

  Patrick winced at the memory. “True enough,” he said. Jenkins came and sat back down, had a swallow of his beer. By this time it was almost sunset. It’d been a short day. The chai shop was beginning to fill up with people that looked like the neighbours in Rosemary’s Baby.

  Patrick said, “Well, I’ll be happy to tell you, Mr. McPherson, if you’ll tell me what exactly transpired in room 203 in the wee hours of this morning.”

  I said no deal. I said, “I’m psychic. I already know what the limericks say.”

  Patrick raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really. Would you care to prove that.”

  First I phoned up Dave. Then I said to Patrick, “Sure, which one you wanna hear?”

  “Well,” said Patrick. “How about that truly scatological ode concerning Mr. Cohen?”

  I said sure. “There once was a driver from Kiwi / Who slept all alone in his tee-pee / The girls on the bus / Say hey, what’s the fuss / His pee-pee is only a wee-wee.”

  Patrick looked impressed. He said, “I’m very impressed, Mr. McPherson.”

  And so we talked about the rest of the limericks, and none of them were very good. Suzie had this obsession with the penis, I think. All of them, well, two of them, mine and Patrick’s, “cast aspersions concerning the exact latitude and longitude of our penile erectitude,” as Patrick put it, and I’d write them down but Dave says that might mean the difference between this book getting into high school libraries and me scooping up lots of lire, and besides, limericks are always better in the reader’s imagination anyhow, or so says Dave.

  But I pretty well have to write down the limerick about Rockstar, because that one ended up causing more than a ripple or two in that travelling pond of jetsam and flotsam of ours, which Dave says doesn’t really work as a metaphor but I’ll fix it later.

  Here’s how the limerick went:

  “There once was an Aussie named Rockstar / Whose jewels are really bizarre / Don’t let out a snort / But he’s one bollock short / And the rest of it’s small as a scar.”

  We all agreed it wasn’t a classic. Jenkins said Rockstar is a tough rhyme, Suzie might’ve been better off going with Rob. Patrick just wanted to know if it was true. Jenkins said yeah. Patrick wanted to know how he knew.

  Jenkins pointed the neck of his Trovas at me. “Mick the psychic here let me in on it. He must be right. If anybody would have first-hand knowledge about it, it’d be Suzie.”

  “An astute observation, Mr. Jenkins,” said Patrick.

  “Try to keep it under your hat, though, Dr. Livingstone,”

  I said. “I also happen to know that Rockstar told Suzie he’d kill her if she told anybody about it. She was real drunk last night. She didn’t know what she was doing.”

  “This was early this morning, Mr. McPherson,” Patrick said.

  “Or she didn’t take him seriously enough,” said Jenkins.

  “What a strange conversation,” said Patrick. I could see the gears inside his head churning.

  It was right about then that I was going to tell them about Dana. But my beer was empty and my Marley was down to the butt.

  “And then, of course,” I said, stubbing out my Marley, “there’s what happened in room 203 last night, which has a direct bearing on all this. Too bad I’m sworn to secrecy.”

  I smiled at Patrick, excused myself, and went looking for Kelly.

  (a large postcard with the Blue Mosque on the front of it, which continues onto an aerogramme)

  Nov. 2 Istanbul

  Dear Dex, Hi, got your letter on Hallowe’en. Made me miss going to movies. Made me miss bright winter weather. Here it’s raining & we keep ourselves entertained by buying things we don’t need (like worry beads—have you ever known me to worry?) & writing limericks on the bus window (1 of our troupe, named Patrick, didn’t take kindly to the limerick about him & thinks there should be “a concerted effort to ostracize the culprit from bus society”) & visiting Turkish baths, manned, so to speak, & so the rumour goes, by lesbian masseuses (and yes, I do believe a pass was made my way, but as you recall, I was never very good at catching things, besides a cold, in all those schoolyard games) & getting abortions. (That’s right, 1 of our troupe decided to miss the baths & get an abortion instead: it left her weak but didn’t seem to faze her much. She said she’s had one before. Only

  2 people made anything out of it, a Baha’i woman named Mary, and Patrick again, an Anglo-Catholic. Both feel a woman should have no control over her body, including those women who don’t happen to believe in a higher power. We’ll still be fighting over this one long after the nuclear freeze is down to 1 or 2 ballistic ice cubes.) Tomorrow Topkapi Palace is on the agenda & after that some sunny Med. beaches, or so our driver has promised us. Take care, K.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Nov. 2

  D. went to a dr. yesterday, to take care of her “problem.” She looks in real rough shape. Like life has been drained out of her. The buzz is still about how Mick sent Freddy Freak & Co. packing; he’s gained a sort of strange hero status, but he’s wearing it well. Outside of Topkapi Palace he apologized for his hasty exit & tonight we have a date to see a belly dancer. The late afternoon twilight through the dirty window is a deadly depressing grey.

  Mick

  I didn’t find her. Turned out Kelly, Charole and Suzie talked to Jenkins and Patrick on the way back from the baths and went looking for some baths themselves. So I was at a loose end for all of three minutes. Then Dave called me up. Asked me to go see Dana. I said what for? He said because I’m asking you to. I told him I wasn’t in the mood. He said please. I said why. He said I’ll owe you one in the long run. He said how many times have I asked you to do something? He said this would mean a lot to him. I asked him why. He said because from where he sits, he can see how he and Dana were lovers in nineteenth-century New Mexico. He rode with Billy the Kid and Dana was a whore with a heart of platinum in a town called Las Cruces. When he got bit by a snake, she sucked the poison out.

  I figured that if Dave was going to go to the trouble of making up a romantic little story like that, I might as well humour him. I went up to Pete’s room, knocked on the door. He answered it, looking more haggard than usual, unshaven, bags under his eyes that looked loaded with oil.

  “Thought I’d just drop by and see how Dana was doing,” I said.

  “Did you tell anybody about this?” he said.

  “Not a single soul, Pete,” I said.

  He said, “Not even Charole and Kelly?”

  I said, “Nope, scout’s honour.” Keeping to myself what the old man would sometimes add on: Rex is on her too, bitch must be in heat.

  Pete thought about that and then he said, “Sure, come on in.”

  It was your standard San
ta Sophia room. Dirty carpet, chipped dresser drawers, holes in the wall, two sagging beds.

  one of them sagging more than the other, thanks to Dana.

  Pete told me she was still pretty drugged up but she was awake. Her face puffy and pale and looking like it belonged to a little china doll, under the remnants of make-up she’d put on the day before.

  Her eyes kind of floated towards me when I sat down beside her. “Hi, Mick,” she said in a real weak voice, and tried to smile.

  “Hi, yourself,” I said. “You don’t look too healthy.” “I’m okay,” she said. “How did you do that the other night?”

  I knew what she talking about. “Little trick I picked up in high school.” I figured I’d keep the fact that I had the dose a secret as long as I could. Which wouldn’t be long, I figured, knowing the bus.

  “That was funny,” she said. “So scared, then laughing.” She closed her eyes and seemed to drift away.

  “What happened?” I said to Pete.

  “Nothing,” said Pete. “It went alright. It ain’t like getting a tooth pulled, you know.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If I was in her shoes I would’ve waited until I got back to Halifax.”

  “She ain’t going back to Halifax for a while,” said Pete. “She’s going to spend six months in Russia after the trip.”

  I said, “Oh.” I guess I’d known that.

  There was a little silence for a while. Just to break it, I said, “Took her to an American doctor, did you?”

  Pete laughed. “You kidding? Those guys would want an arm and a leg. ”

  So that pretty much answered a question I had in my mind, and I said to myself, well, if I ever need a doctor on this trip, I’ll find him on my own. And of course I did end up needing a doctor.

  I should’ve gone looking for a doctor right then, for the dose. But I didn’t. After all, it was late, they were all home eating kebab and souvlaki, is what I told myself.

  When I got up to leave, Pete said, “Tell anyone you see that if they want to see Topkapi Palace to be down by the bus tomorrow morning at nine.”

  I told him I’d do that and I mentioned it to Suzie when I saw her in the hall, I didn’t say a thing about the limericks,

  wasn’t in the mood, and I mentioned it to Patrick when I went up to the room, and that was all I needed to do.

  When I did get to the room, Rockstar wasn’t back yet. He didn’t get back until around two in the morning when the rest of us were asleep.

  He didn’t turn on the light so he did some crashing around before he hit the sack and I could feel his vibes, your basic dark forces shooting death rays into some Intergalactic House of Virgins.

  I phoned up Dave and asked him what Rockstar had been up to. Dave said he did finally get a massage, a very short massage, and after he screamed at the whole baths that they were all a bunch of bloody poofters, he drop-kicked a couple masseurs and generally made a nuisance of himself before a whole crowd of naked or half-naked Turks finally shoved him out into the street. At which time he swallowed half the hash he had left and immediately got lost trying to find his way back to the hotel.

  So Rockstar didn’t have a very good day.

  The next morning he was the first one up.

  He shook me awake. “We leaving this bloody city today, Muckle?” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “We’re going to see Topkapi Palace at nine.”

  “What the fuck’s Topkapi Palace?” he said.

  “I think it’s got a diamond or something,” I said.

  I’d seen the movie, back when I was a kid. Pete Ustinov was in it. I thought he was great in Blackbeard’s Ghost.

  Everyone was down at the bus at nine. Everyone except Dana, of course. Maybe because they’d all missed Pete, they hadn’t seen him in a while. Maybe because they all wanted to see the Topkapi diamond. Of course, Kelly and Charole had gone to visit Dana on their own and word had got around without any help from me that she was in rough shape, and her name wasn’t even brought up.

  Speaking of rough shape, that’s what I’m in according to Soon. This morning she said that I’m not really responding to treatment the way I should. She said she’s a little concerned. I appreciate that. Dave phoned me up and said well, since that’s the case, maybe I’d better get my rear in gear and finish this book before I die. Thanks, Dave, I needed that little kick

  in the pants.

  I don’t think he was serious though. Not completely serious.

  The thing about Topkapi Palace was that the diamond was a fake and it was your basic museum, with glass cases full of pottery and old weapons. I hate museums.

  This one, though, had a couple things that were kind of different. One was a big boulder with a hole in it. If you stuck your hand in the hole and it came out wet you were going to get married within a year. Everybody’s hands came out bone dry except for Kelly’s and Charole’s.

  And the other thing was the mark of the devil that was supposedly way up high on this pillar. The tour guide pointed it out, but I didn’t see it. When we moved on, Rockstar stayed behind, staring up at where it was supposed to be, and that was the last we saw of Rockstar that day.

  On the way back to the bus, I fell into step beside Kelly and asked her if we could have a little private chat some place.

  She said, “Pete says we’re all going to some*

  from Kelly’s diary

  Nov. 3

  Over a free drink last night mostly Tang & lime juice, I think, at the nightclub on the top floor of the Galata Tower, Istanbul stretching forever like a crippled L.A. through the windows, Mick said to me that he liked me an awful lot & he was sorry for the fiasco, he gets like this when he drinks too much raki, he actually blacks out. He said he didn’t remember much that happened between Freddy Freak saying goodbye and Freddy Freak saying hello again. He seemed to be serious. I told him nothing happened, and he seemed to be happy to hear this, and suggested we take another shot at it. I told him the next new moon was only 4 weeks away. He smiled. Relieved, I think. He said great, it’s a date. Then the belly dancer came over & sat on his lap. Another camera saying hi, remember me, right in my face. Latest on the rumour mill: one of S’s limericks suggested that R. has only 1 testicle. None of the limericks, apparently, were about me or C. or F. The general consensus is S. has gone too far this time. Pete definitely wasn’t pleased about having his keys stolen. C heard him rag her out, he made her cry.

  Mick

  “...affair with my photography professor. I got too involved, that’s all. I stopped thinking straight.”

  She didn’t look at me while she gave me this little speech. She was moving the Chianti bottle with the candle in it from side to side slowly.

  She said, “You know it’s funny, one’s vision of the world. If I look at this in a certain way, there’s three flames.” “Find a mirror,” I said, “and you’ll find a lot more.” She smiled at that. Over in front of the stage, the belly dancer was swaying and gyrating to the tune of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Around the Old Oak Tree.” Dave says that’s an important detail to remember thanks to some hostage-taking that’s going to happen next year in Iran that’s going to last four hundred and forty-four days. Dave says my millions of readers will know what I’m talking about.

  Kelly said, “All I’m saying is that I’m not taking this friendship of ours lightly and you’re probably letting yourself in for a lot of grief and soul-searching and all that other boring kind of stuff. I wish I could promise you great sex or something but that would be unfair of me.”

  I said, “Every time you get involved with someone, there’s always liabilities. There’s always some fly in the ointment. Nobody has it easy, not that I’ve seen. Everybody you meet is like a whole new desert and there’s usually an oasis in there somewhere if you bother to travel the distance. My past ain’t all peaches and cream either. It seems to me we’ve both been down a highway with some of the same pit stops. Like, I appreciate what you’re saying, fa
ir warning, etc., but I don’t have any problem with any of it. I felt a spark of something the first time I laid eyes on you and it’s a spark I haven’t felt too often in this life. For me, that’s the important thing.” Kelly looked at me for a long moment and then went back

  to looking at the candle flame. She looked a little confused.

  I finished off my Turkey Libra and I was thinking about ordering another one, either that or telling Kelly I loved her and getting the damn thing off my chest, when the belly dancer slithered and swayed towards me and suddenly plunked herself down on my lap. Next thing I know there’s a geek in a monkey suit taking my picture and flashbulbs are doing a gigolo twist across my eyeballs.

  The belly dancer’s close to forty and there’s a couple moles beneath her three inches of make-up. She grinds her butt into my crotch, and says, oohhh, as though something there gave her a special thrill, and then she kisses me while those flashbulbs explode once more.

  She looks at Kelly and gives her a big grin. “Very sexy man,” she says. “He make you happy?”

  Kelly, deadpan as a gut-shot devil, says, “We really haven’t had the chance to find out yet.”

  That gets another oohhh out of the belly dancer, and she says, “Maybe tonight,” and then she’s off my lap and heading in the direction of Patrick’s table. When she sits on his lap, Patrick lets out a groan like she maybe sat on a hard-on.

  Well, the belly dancer was wrong, it didn’t happen that night. I was going to mention to Kelly that we could maybe pay for a room and have it to ourselves, back at the Santa Sophia, but then the waiter came by and I ordered a Turkey Libra instead, and shortly after that Pete was herding us out to the elevator and back to the bus.

  On the bus, Jenkins, who looked real heartbroke, sat across from us and tried to make polite chit-chat about the view from the nightclub and how he should try falling in love with a belly dancer sometime, just to see what it’s like.