Last India Overland

by Craig Grant

  That night in bed I tried calling up Dave, just to get his point of view on things, but he told me straight out that he didn’t care for Kelly much at all, he preferred an earthy type like Dana.

  The next day I caught a cab and went looking for a doctor, but it was Friday and Friday is Sunday in the Moslem world. I even tried going to Emergency at one of the hospitals, but they were up to their necks in car accident victims and knifings and accidental drownings.

  When I got back to the hotel, Kelly and Jenkins had gone to some restaurant together, according to Charole, so I didn’t even see her that day.

  On Saturday, Dana came down to breakfast. She had a bit more colour in her face, but not much. She was able to travel, though, and so we hit the road, and our first stop that day was another graveyard.

  from Kelly’s diary

  Nov. 4

  Very restless night. The floor outside the door creaked all night, the plumbing howled & around about midnight the curse descended. Morning came way too early. Then F. came knocking. Asked me if I’d mind going for dinner with him. Probably to make C. jealous & I said no, but he persisted. He was wet from the rain. He looked like a lost little lamb. I said yes. He said he’d make the reservations. I told him to keep the budget in mind. He said he would. All this while C. listened. So I told her I thought she was being very insensitive to him. She said he’d been completely insensitive to who she is, so why not? And so, over salad, and the finest souvlaki F’s ever tasted, nice and juicy, medium rare, lots of blood oozing out, at the Parisienne, a smoky dim-lit place with a picture near its door of several Turkish women, all of them wearing blue or black veils, F told me he was trying hard to see things from C’s point of view, but he couldn’t. Then he knocked back a double raki & cried a few tears. There’s something strange about this raki, I’m thinking, when a Turkish woman covered with veils slinks onto the dance floor right near our table & begins taking them off slowly, one by one, with a slow wink in F’s direction. I was just a little relieved. I wasn’t in the mood for sad tales of romantic woe. So this is the Islamic world, I said. While a breast shimmied into view. F seemed more than a little intrigued by the show. When he asked if I’d like to leave, I told him, no, I’d like to finish my salad. She was beautiful. I’m starting to think I’m turning into a hinge. It was nice to feel turned on. I took my time eating my salad. F. took his time eating his souvlaki. When we got back to the hotel, I went to see D. Asked Pete if we could speak to D alone when I saw the distraught look on her face. Pete said sure & he picked up his Heineken. D. said Pete’s mother was some radical anti-abortionist down in Tasmania & didn’t like what she’d done & started to cry. All this rain, all these tears. Asked her if she wanted to talk about it. I pictured some dark alley behind a mosque, & told her so. She managed to laugh, said it was this camel butcher & she was done on the table near the pot roasts. Then she said Pete had loaned her some money & a Turkish dr. did it. She said it was incredibly painful, like something digging at your insides with a fork. Not nearly enough morphine, she said. This last 48 hrs. has completely blunted my appetite for sex. It’s late. I can hear Freddy Freak creeping past our door. S. has her camp knife open & under her pillow. My candle’s throwing shadows like bat wings across the ceiling as it dies in its wax.

  Mick

  When we pulled into Gallipoli, Pete got on the blower and rattled off stats about how many Aussies and Kiwis got mowed down by Turkish snipers in the hills as they tried to gain a beachhead back in World War I. He called it the most bloody, fucked-up fiasco in modern warfare, and he blamed it on what he called fat limey generals back in London who didn’t know their butts from holes in the ground. Of course, Patrick thought Pete was trying to goad him some, so he took exception, said something about how it was likely not quite that simple, but Pete ignored him and slammed open the doors.

  The last thing I wanted to do was walk around in a graveyard in the rain. I’d gotten on the bus before Kelly, leaving it up to her as to where she’d sit, and she sat with Dana. Which was fair enough. Dana looked like she could use the company. But that was the day a cold hit me and so I was a little depressed, and walking through that graveyard and looking down the slope of hill toward the Mediterranean where the massacre had happened didn’t help my mood much at all. Everything, clouds, water, gunmetal grey. Kelly and Dana a little ways away from me, their hair blowing in the wind and Dana looking like a warmed-up cadaver and Rockstar sneaking up behind them with his SX-70 to take their picture. Which got a scowl out of Kelly that should’ve dropped him dead in his tracks. And then there was Pete, standing for a long time near this one grave that had the name Cohen on it, I checked it out before I got back on the bus. But the main thing was that fucking rain, coming down cold like frozen bullets. The kind of day that makes you want to kick back on a couch and suck on a hot buttered rum.

  When we were back on the road, I picked up Lucille and sang Jackson Browne’s “Song for Adam,” one of the saddest songs I know, and then Suzie came back and asked me if I knew how to play a song called “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” by a guy named Eric Bogle, and I said nope, and she said that was okay, she knew the lyrics and I could probably play along with it reed easy, and then she launched into this real tear-jerker about an Aussie soldier who got his legs blown off at Gallipoli and so he couldn’t go waltzing Matilda no more when he got back to Australia.

  Suzie sang it in a nice, high voice, perfect pitch. I was surprised at how good she sounded, and she was right about how easy the song was to play along with.

  Afterwards everyone clapped, even Tim and Teach. Teach even dabbed at some tears in her eyes. Charole wanted us to do it again, and so we did, and it sounded even better the second time because I knew what was coming. And somehow that made the day a little better.

  And as we drove along the coast, we left those rain clouds behind, and by the time we got to Canakkale, we could see the sun about to set, and everyone cheered.

  But then we had to put up those wet tents. Inside they smelt like dead dog.

  I noticed that Dana wasn’t sharing a tent with Patrick and Suzie any more, she helped Kelly and Charole put up theirs.

  I really didn’t think too much of it at the time. I was too busy sneezing.

  I’ve still got that cold. Soon says it’s because my body’s so run down. She says I’ve got huge red blood cells that are eating my white blood cells, or is it the other way around? It’s something she sees in the blood tests, she says, of people who drink too much Mekong rum.

  Well, I didn’t drink any rum that night in Canakkale. I drank raki. Not much. Not enough that’d allow Dave to slide behind the driver’s wheel or anything. It was Jenkins’s raki, and he drank a lot of it, and I got to hear about every time his heart was broke in two since the time he was six. Seventeen times. By the seventeenth time, he was laughing about it.

  “Know what your problem is, Jenkins?” I said to him.

  He thought about it. “Nope. What’s my problem, Mick?”

  “You’re too much of a romantic,” I said. “You got to learn how to slide, you got to learn how to rock and roll.” Me, the big expert.

  He looked into his raki, knocked it back, said, “Yeah, you’re probably right, but I wouldn’t take back any of it, it was all worth the risk. Someone told me that the one who leaves you is just that much preparation for the one who’s next in line.”

  I thought about Jenkins saying that this morning, when Soon gave me my breakfast of Metronidazole, and I asked her what she thought of it.

  She gave me the sweetest smile and said it’s probably true, she’s not sure, she’s only really been in love once.

  “Still in love with him, are you?” I said.

  She said yes.

  I asked her how old she was. She looks maybe twenty-five. She said she’s thirty, and asked me how old I was. Told her I just turned twenty-four.

  She didn’t say anything but I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking I was as good a candidate
for rat bait as she’s seen in a while, I might as well be sixty-four.

  Suzie’s daybook entry

  If we wait for you-know-who and you-know-who to write daybook entries there won’t be anything else written in this. Bloody nerdballs. They remind me of the guys in school who’d get everybody else in shit with the teacher and we’d all have to stay after school or miss the whatever. Wherever you go you can’t get away from them. You go into the loo and they’ve left the seat up. That’s one good thing about Turkish Delights at least, there’s no lids to leave up. When you go to a flick they always eat the popcorn too loud, they don’t know that you’re supposed to suck on it until it’s down to the kernel. They never pull their weight. So I know, I get carried away, and I shouldn’t have written those limericks, but thanks, Pete, for washing them off so fast, and thanks, Patrick, for spreading them around like you did, so now everyone knows. This is really one great troupe, I can’t believe it. At least we’re out of that bloody Istanbul. I’ve never seen a filthier city in my life. It needed a good washing. Now we’re on our way to Can-something-or-other. One thing about one of the you-know-who’s, he can play guitar. It’s a good thing they’re good for something at least. I love that song. I think it’s the best song ever written by anybody anywhere. At least all those guys didn’t die for nothing.

  TURKEY

  Canakkale-Kusadasi

  Day 2314

  Departure: 7:30 a.m.

  Route: Troy—Dremit—Pergamon—Izmir—Selcuk Camp: Shell Genco—beach, bar, restaurant, free hot showers. Points: 1. Don’t build up their expectations for the Trojan Horse, it ain’t anything special.

  2. There’s a good waterfront butcher in Izmir, the fish is fresh and cheap.

  3. You might want to make Bergama for lunch, have it in the ruins near the Acropolis near the Altar of Zeus. It’s not a bad view. You’ve got the marketplace to the south, the Royal Gardens to the north and the Doric temple of Athena flanked by the palace on the east, while to the west you’ve got the remains of an old Roman amphitheatre.

  4. But the best ruins on the trip have to be the ruins of Ephesus. You can tell them your boss said so. There’s just something about that place. The breeze whispering through those Cypress trees, rustling the leaves, while all those old skeletons of buildings, the odeom and the theatre and the library especially, heave up into the air. It’s kind of eerie, especially around sunset. Almost enough to make you believe in ghosts. Of course the famous thing about Ephesus is the Temple of Diana, or Artemis, depending on your mythological persuasion, and this is where Paul wrote his so-called “captivity epistles,” where he tried to persuade the Jews and us Gentiles to get along and tried to convince us that a moral response to the Word of Christ is the best response. Some say Ephesus is where Paul and Mary lived out the last days of their lives. There’s a lot of legends connected to Ephesus, but the one I kind of like concerns the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, who were seven Christian kids who hid themselves in a cave back during the Decian persecution (you remember that—250 A.D.) but someone found out where they were hiding and blocked up the cave. And so they fell asleep, in what you call your mutual embrace. Two hundred years later a herdsman found them and woke them and sent one of them out to find food, since they were just a little hungry. The kid’s amazed. They’re yakking about Christ in the bakery. They’re yakking about Christ in the butcher shop. Just like he’s the latest rock star. But he was too amazed. He aroused suspicion, someone called the cops, he spilled his story, and so everyone went out to the cave, including the emperor, Theodosius II. The kids tell their story and everyone thinks, well, hey, God must’ve wrought this miracle just to prove he can resurrect the dead, and then the kids went back to sleep.

  Mick

  This morning I woke up with a feeling that it wouldn’t be a bad day. And I was right. First thing that happened was Soon came in and gave me a sponge bath and laughed and giggled at my erection. (It’s not the first time it’s been laughed and giggled at.) And then I managed to talk her into getting me some bennies, or whatever they call them here in Thai, because I needed the energy to keep writing.

  Soon’s pretty impressed by the fact that I’m sitting here churning out what she thinks is a novel. I’m pretty impressed by the fact that I’m sitting here churning out what Dave says I should call a memoir, strictly speaking, though I can let Soon think what she likes.

  Anyway she got the bennies and I did a hundred pages that day, way into the night by candlelight, and I slept the sleep of the Trojan dead—phrase is Dave’s idea—until I felt Dave clawing at my mind’s little trapdoor and my hand felt seized up, I couldn’t move it, I thought he was trying another takeover.

  Fuck off, I said, fuck off, and I got my movement back in my arm, and then Soon came in, with that happy little smile of hers, and said, “Time to change your sheets, writer.”

  There’s something about clean sheets. Just like there’s something about slipping into a brand new sleeping bag for the first time. A nice cozy feeling, like your tumtum’s full of your mom’s hot apple pie and ice cream.

  It ain’t the same feeling when you’re easing yourself into a second-hand sleeping bag for the first time. It’s a case of the willies, basically. You imagine somebody shooting off a thousand cum-shots into the woolly eiderdown. You imagine some jerk-off with crabs and fleas and a bad case of psoriasis. You imagine toenail clippings, snot.

  It’s not a good thing to think like that. Kelly said to me once that thoughts have power and it’s best to control them, keep them positive.

  What I should’ve been thinking is, hey, some cute, browneyed blonde used to own the sleeping bag. She bathed three times a day and covered her body with baby powder afterwards and she had the sleeping bag fumigated and dry-cleaned twice before she sold it to that camel-jockey.

  When I woke up the next morning, I woke up scratching. Which isn’t all that unusual. But I was scratching all over.

  I got out of the sleeping bag, went to the tent flap to get some light, and looked at my body. There were tiny litde welts all over. Even my ugly, which was gummed up worse than ever, had little bites on it.

  I let out a long, slow groan.

  I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be a good day.

  And I was right.

  What happened is this: first thing after breakfast Pete takes us out to see the Trojan Horse, which looks like a huge Aurora plastic model, and then he drives us into Troy for lunch. He parks at the Troy Mobil, so he can change the oil, and after he tells us that one of the three chai shops in town was fairly safe but he forgot exactly which one, he crawls underneath the bus.

  Since I ain’t exactly in a chipper mood, I pick the one that nobody else picks, and Jenkins, who wasn’t exactly an expert at picking up antisocial vibes, tags along.

  The chai shop has little cartons of yoghurt in the window with flies buzzing around the scum on top and the place is empty, but that’s okay with me. When I get in an antisocial mood, we’re talking suicidal.

  A huge lump of a woman waddles out of the kitchen and takes our order and me and Jenkins kind of stare at the flies for a while and talk about music, mosdy Bob Marley, and I’m telling Jenkins that according to my psychic sources, most of the Wailers are going to be dead in ten years, Bob’s going to fry his brain with pot and the rest are going to get murdered, and he’s giving me this sceptical look, but I rattle on. This is all stuff Dave fed me one night, think it was in Zadar. It all has to do with the Apocalypse, I told him. It’s like Dylan said, the wheel’s still spinning, though Dave tells me it’s going to eventually stop on John Lennon’s name. And I went into my little Athens spiel about Elvis, how he’s the perfect martyr for our world, a martyr for the overindulgent, though Dave tells me he had a twin brother who died at birth too, and it was the influence of that dead brother’s psyche that got Elvis hooked on Hershey bars after he hit thirty.

  Jenkins is just grinning a bit, humouring me, when the woman brings out our camel kidney soup and camel
curd salad and a kebab for Jenkins that looks like it might be a camel’s ugly. The salad is pretty heavy on the black olives and I’m chewing on some of that when something suddenly goes crunch. Even Jenkins hears it. And I get this sickening taste of metal in my mouth.

  My tongue does some probing. What it finds is a hole with sharp little edges. It’s a big hole.

  “What’s the matter?” says Jenkins.

  I dig around in my cheek until I find the filling. I show it to Jenkins. He stares at it for a moment.

  “That’s a big one,” he says.

  I say yeah. All of a sudden that kebab really does look like some lopped-off camel’s penis. The lettuce looks like green shards of glass. The soup looks like a bowl of blood. Acid flash.

  I let the implications sink in for a few minutes until Jenkins finishes his kebab. Me, I’ve lost my appetite.

  When we get back to the bus, I show the filling to Pete and ask him if he knows where there’s a decent dentist.

  He wipes his hands on an oily rag and kind of grins at me.

  “I think you’re out of luck, mate,” he says. “There ain’t even a horse dentist between here and Lahore.”

  from Kelly’s diary

  Nov. 5

  Yesterday it was cemeteries in the rain. A wonderful falling star last night. Today it’s a twentieth century Trojan horse &

  M. losing a filling. He gargled with raki all afternoon. At Ephesus I did a dance in the spot where the Temple of Diana once stood. At suppertime C. asked D. how she was feeling. D said her fillings were fine. Now C. is giving D. a haircut by candlelight. Talk of a perfect world where the men are caged, the Goddess is back in her rightful place of power & there’s sperm banks in every mall. D talked about the lesbian phase she went through at university, C. & I all ears.