Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

  In my high heels and with my briefcase in my hand I stalked past the other arches. At the far end of the alleyway I bumped into Tony. His face creased up with pleased surprise at the sight of me and he turned back to the brick mouth of the arch.

  'Phil? Phil! Boss is here!'

  Phil emerged in blue mechanic's overalls, his hair matted with oil, and mimed a kiss in the air so as not to smudge my incongruous silk crêpe.

  'Hello.'

  They were pleased I had come so soon after the car's arrival. They wanted me to admire what they had done, and to be happy with it, and this touched me. I was connected to the car, after all.

  It was under the next-door arch. Its appearance had changed dramatically. Instead of just being a shiny shell it now looked like a rally car, beautiful and mean at the same time. They had raised the suspension to give improved ground-clearance and the car stood poised on tiptoe like a big animal waiting to pounce.

  'It look like a scyared cyat,' Noddy grinned.

  There was bold blue lettering on the rear wings, 'Peking to Paris 1997', and our two names with the Union flag on both doors. The Terratrip for calculating distances was angle-mounted on the dash in front of the navigator's seat, the four-point safety harnesses were fixed in place, and in the space where the rear seats had been was the big supplementary fuel tank. Under the bonnet everything was clean and shiny. Phil leaned over and touched the different components to show me what they were.

  'Alternator, distributor, fuel filter.'

  He told me that this morning he had been reconditioning our prop-shaft. He was enjoying the garage, and working with Noddy and Geza in the ambience of radio music and tannin-encrusted mugs and boob calendars. Tony had even offered to pay him some money, because he was making himself so useful.

  We went around the corner to have a cup of tea together in the Turkish caff the boys used. We sat opposite each other in the floor-bolted seats, nursing the thick white mugs. Clearly there was something Phil wanted to talk to me about.

  'I think I should work full-time in the garage,' he said. 'I'm learning about Amazons all day, stripping them down, solving problems. I want to be sure I know all there is to know before we go.'

  I thought about all the problems he might indeed have to solve on his own, without the benefit of Noddy's patient expertise, beside the road somewhere in China or India. I admired his resolve.

  'I agree with you.'

  The problem was how he was going to support himself as a full-time mechanic without doing any supply teaching. Tony's contribution would go some way, not the full distance. I understood what he was asking me, and realised that he had swallowed his pride to do it, and that he was uncomfortable with this position. The ground shifted queasily as we regarded each other, apparently decked out as mechanic and madam in a city suit. Only this, of course, was a fluent misrepresentation of our real roles. From the moment when he had written his cheeky note, all the way through his insistence on a Volvo Amazon to his taking control of the mechanical preparations now, Phil had been subtly but insistently calling the shots. Ignorant about cars and adventuring I had tacitly agreed to wait and be told what to do, and where to sign, exactly as I was being told now.

  It was important that Phil should learn everything possible about Amazons, and this was the route by which we would achieve it. I thought I was a powerful woman, but the lack of practical skills – even a proper understanding of what was involved – neatly reduced me to mere buying power. The realisation made me angry and, as it probably always did, the feeling showed in my face.

  'How much do you need?'

  He named a small sum, weekly.

  'Okay,' I said stiffly. Even though I too wanted to do as much as could be done to ensure our success I felt, briefly, that I was being manipulated.

  We returned immediately to one of our endless discussions of what still needed to be done, and when, and how.

  Later that evening, when I was back home, Phil telephoned me.

  'Are you all right? You looked so vulnerable when you left the arches, walking away on your own.'

  'I'm not vulnerable.'

  'Oh. Okay then, I'm sorry.'

  The imbalance between us clearly bothered him, too.

  Five days later, as I was walking back from the gym still in my workout clothes, someone shouted my name from the end of the road. I looked round and saw Phil, in the car, waving at me. I sprinted back down the pavement and climbed into the navigator's seat.

  'Sorry. I'm really sweaty.'

  'You know what? This'll flatter you. I was looking and thinking "Who's that? She looks really fit." And then it turned out to be you.'

  'How amazing.'

  'I've come to give you a test drive.'

  'Move over, then.'

  I took the wheel of the Amazon for the first time in the back streets of Kentish Town. The competition clutch was wickedly fierce, especially between first and second, and I stalled several times at junctions. The unassisted steering felt heavy. The steering wheel itself was the original. It was big and cumbersome, and at the same time spindly under my hands. There also seemed to be a worrying amount of travel in the clutch and brake pedals.

  Phil said, 'You're doing really well. It's just that you're used to the automatic box in your BMW, and the power steering.'

  I glanced sideways to check the degree of sincerity in his reassurances.

  'It'll be fine. I just need to get used to driving it. I'd like to take it up to North Wales, to show my father.'

  The idea had just come to me. It was a familiar road, but a sufficiently long distance for the real problems to emerge, if there were going to be any.

  Phil inclined his head. 'Would you like me to come with you?'

  'Thanks. But no, I'll go on my own.'

  From the centre, where two straight roads intersect north-south and east-west, the village looked the same as I always remembered it. Caerwys was originally laid out as a Roman encampment, a crossroads within a rough square of enclosing roads. The name itself is supposed to mean 'camp on the river Wys'.

  The village lies in a cup of land between the Clwydian hills and the coast, under the hunched shoulder of a mountain, 'the Mountain' as we always called it, proprietarily. It's a small-scale, pretty, domestic landscape that lacks the fertile sweep of the Cheshire plain to the east or the grandeur of Snowdonia to the west. I was born there, and I lived in Caerwys until I left home at eighteen. Every contour of the hills and fields and stone walls is familiar, and so are the flat faces of the houses lining the village streets. They are plain, square houses with four windows and a door in the middle, like a child's sketch of a house. Some are stone-built, others are in the local harsh red Ruabon brick. Most of them have purply slate roofs crowned with chimneys like buckled top-hats, and even in June the milky air is residually scented with coal-smoke.

  In the 1950s it was a small farming community more or less governed by the hierarchies of Chapel, Church, Women's Institute and parish council. Chester and Liverpool were distant, exotic cities, and an ambitious day's outing meant a trip to Rhyl or maybe Bettws-y-Coed. Nowadays there are plenty of commuters to Liverpool, and Manchester airport is less than an hour away by motorway, but when I was a child half of the houses didn't have indoor sanitation or even running water. The village pump stood against the wall of our house and one of my head's ingrained noises, which I can still recall with perfect clarity, is the clatter of the pump handle turning and then the rush of water into a galvanised bucket. The other is the clink of our front-door latch lifting and the swift following creak of the hinges. Nobody ever locked their doors in those days. People would knock and walk in, straight off the street.

  'It's only me,' someone would say cosily, a body following a craning head into the room and bringing a knife-edge of cold air along with them. 'Is Pete in?'

  Pete was, is, my father. He was an electrician, a gifted fixer and improviser, and the question was usually followed by a request for him to attend immediately to
some failing milking machine or ancient smouldering one-bar electric fire, or even a long-case clock. Just as the cobbler's children go barefoot, so our childhood was a matter of coaxing the bare wires at the end of domestic appliance leads into the holes of a spluttering wall-socket. The missing plugs had all been appended to other people's electric irons and twin-tub washing machines.

  The chafing of utter familiarity against the dislocation of long absence is experienced by every returning exile. As I drove the Amazon into Caerwys I was nine years old all over again, and also sharply conscious that in reality I would soon be fifty, that my own children were almost grown up, and that there was no stepping back into that Welsh childhood however well I knew the ochre outlines of the lichen patches on the roof opposite my old bedroom window.

  Our old house stands almost in the middle of the village. It has walls four feet thick and was once the jail-house. There is a story that an underground passage links it with the court-house, two hundred yards away. My sister and brother and I loved this idea but we never found the passage, for all the wet afternoons spent probing the chinks in the downstairs floors with long sticks. The house was heated with coal fires and in winter it was as cold as Siberia any more than two feet from the brass fender. On December and January mornings we used to wake up to find the blooms of ice flowers inside our bedroom windows. My father and his second wife decided years ago that the battle against the cold was too much for them and moved to a modern bungalow at the top of the main street.

  I drove up there now. The Amazon made a showy roar, but there was no one to hear it or see it. At six o'clock on a summer's evening the intersecting streets were deserted, more or less as usual. I can still remember the ache, the physical ache of childhood boredom, at the sight of those dull streets with not even a dog stirring. No wonder I dreamed of Everest.

  My father appeared at the door as I edged the car up the steepish slope to his up-and-over garage door. I forgot the clutch and the Amazon promptly bucked and stalled an inch away from his paintwork.

  'Hello, darling,' he said. He was breathing hard, sucking air into his lungs with a visible effort after walking the ten feet from his armchair.

  I was more than happy to get out of the car. Even though I had driven it flat out, notwithstanding Phil's firm and reiterated advice to nurse it along, it had been a four-hour journey from London. There was still no heat or noise insulation inside the metal shell and the transmission tunnel radiated as much heat as one of Pete's own mended one-bar fires. My head was ringing with the amplified noise of the engine.

  'Hello, Dad. How are you? You look well.'

  I hugged him, trying to gauge whether he was thinner or frailer than the last time I had seen him, perhaps eighteen months before. He was already wandering around to the front of the car so I released the bonnet catch.

  'What do you think?'

  'Marvellous. Marvellous.'

  We inspected the innards together. I listened to his wheezing chest as we bent over the engine. He was seventy-seven, approaching the age when physical infirmity is a proper concern between father and daughter, but my anxiety about him was oddly blunted. I had lived with it for too long and it had ingrown over the years, ossifying into a sad and muted resentment.

  After my mother died I was always afraid that my father would die or disappear just as suddenly as she had done, but I could never tell him about my fears or ask for his reassurance. I didn't know how to begin, what shape to give the words. We didn't talk about things like that, ever. Probably no one spoke of them in Caerwys in the 1950s, and so I lived with long nights of staring into the bedroom darkness and counting my own breaths, looking for the wash of car headlights over the bedroom ceiling, waiting for him to come home from wherever he had been. Every late night I was sure that he was dead in a road accident, or murdered. I knew, in daylight at least, that my terrors were irrational and that only made them more fearsome because I couldn't explain them to myself. I thought I was mad and guilty and full of shameful secrets, and my instinct was to conceal this deviance at all costs. I tried hard to be normal, to make myself normal by an effort of will. I did this by pretending that nothing at all was wrong, which meant not saying much about anything to anyone in case something incriminating came spilling out.

  In this way I learned not to reveal my feelings or to ask my father for anything, and by doing so I put distance and silence between us when we could have been a comfort to each other. And so I suppose, if such things are anyone's fault, the loss of love between us was mine. I must have been a very peculiar and unlovable adolescent, stiff-necked behind my careful defences. I suppose he learned not to take a very keen interest in my doings or achievements, such as they were, because I fended him off so insistently.

  As I am discovering now with my own children, there is a watershed that they hurtle towards all the time that they are growing up, and then with a sudden rush they are flung over the weir into the confusion of separation, and then at last – with luck – they float on out into the calm waters as responsible adults. I suppose for most children this happens in the late teens. In my case it happened much earlier, perhaps when I was fourteen or fifteen. I knew from then on that I was in charge of my own destiny and I couldn't look to anyone else for help. My father had two other children, five and six years younger than me, and was about to acquire three stepchildren, so the diminishment of responsibility for the one older one must have been a relief.

  Unfortunately, the conviction that I had to negotiate my own survival didn't make me an embryo entrepreneur or driven success machine. It just made me obsessively cautious. All through my teens and twenties I never took a single risk. Everest and everything it stood for was the exact opposite of what I craved, but in my heart I must still have hoarded the glory and the challenge of the mountain. In the meantime I clung to order and safety and routine – to the outward reassurance of domestic tidiness, clean clothes, punctuality, all as a way of regulating the threatening world. Even now, it's difficult to go to bed without polishing the kettle and emptying the bins.

  As the years went by my father and I developed a formal, polite relationship more appropriate to distant acquaintances than blood relations.

  With the new frankness of my generation and our let's-talk theories of human relationships I might have made it something different, I might have coaxed something different out of the pair of us, but I never did. The blood-blister of resentment thickened under my skin.

  Even so I knew how much I loved him, and how inarticulately. Instead of saving anything now I showed him the steel-cased double fuel lines, running inside the car as a protection against rocks and rough roads. I pointed out the fuel tanks that would give us a daily range of more than 700 km, and the dual wiring system, and the steel underbody plates.

  'Marvellous,' he repeated, his face alight with interest. He has a natural understanding of all mechanical devices, a rare affinity not inherited by one of his children. 'It's a marvellous thing you're doing.'

  His pleasure in my car was a joy.

  Edith his wife came out to find us, and peered in through the car windows at the bare metal.

  'Did you really drive all the way up from London in this thing?'

  'I'm going to drive half-way around the world in it.'

  'Rather you than me, love.' She laughed.

  Edith is merry and loyal and a good woman. My father is lucky to have her.

  'Are you two ever going to come in?'

  Pete closed the bonnet with obvious reluctance. We went into the house and the first of a chain of cups of tea were brewed and handed around. Through the picture-window lined with tiger begonias in polished pots, I surveyed the deserted street. In the far distance a lone child on a bicycle traced slow figures-of-eight, every movement eloquent with boredom.

  'What's going on up here, then?'

  They filled me in on the details of village events. Someone had put plastic-framed windows in an old stone house, someone else had fallen downstairs in an
alcoholic stupor, babies had been born and an old school-friend of Pete's had died. It didn't sound very much for an interval of eighteen months, but everyone was familiar with what little news there was. Thank God for London and all big cities and traffic and restaurants, and the blessed gift of anonymity.

  Later, at Pete's request, we went in the Amazon to visit some friends of his who lived half a dozen miles away. He drove us there, squeezing himself with difficulty into the space between the seat and the roll cage. Edith gamely hunched up beside the fuel tank in the rear, insisting that I'd better sit next to him to tell him what to do.

  'I've been driving for more than sixty bloody years,' he grumbled. 'Do you think I don't know what to do?'

  I warned him what a pig the clutch was, but even so it took him by surprise. The car bucked and stalled, just as it did for me at the beginning. He sat hunched forward, his breathing worsening. His hands looked ribbed and old, gripping the wheel too tightly so the bifurcations in the knucklebones showed. I glanced round to see if Edith was concerned for him, but she was looking out of the window. And once we were under way Pete handled the car with ease, as just another familiar piece of machinery that would do as he directed.

  The friends were politely interested in the car and the rally. We stayed for long enough to drink another cup of tea, then walked out into the soft twilight. I made to cross round to the passenger side again but Pete held the keys out to me.

  'You do it,' he said abruptly.

  We didn't discuss it any further, but even this oblique admission of his weariness made concern catch in my throat. I did care about him, more than I knew.