Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

  'Meetings,' he sighed.

  Meetings was an understatement.

  We spent the whole of the rest of the day assembling in different airless places to have information handed out to us. China went about its business beyond the hotel doors, unobserved by me. There were competitor bulletins to be read and sessions where all the uniformed red-shirted officials addressed us about their various responsibilities and invited our questions. By 9 p.m. I was falling off my chair. Through the haze of my longing for sleep the queries from the floor seemed to dip into surrealism.

  'If it's freezing up on the Tibetan plateau, will the ground be too hard for us to hammer in our tent pegs?'

  'Is the currency the same in Nepal as in China?'

  'I have got. To go to. Bed,' I said to Phil, and crept away.

  Up in our Birmingham bedroom I laid out my clothes for the next morning – another legacy of long ago. It always seemed too much of a risk to lie down before a new day without the suit of armour pressed and waiting. I veiled the underclothes modestly with top garments and lay down to sleep. Instantly I was wide awake. I lay for an hour staring at the ceiling until Phil tiptoed in.

  'Still awake?'

  'Mm.'

  'Could you believe some of those questions?'

  'Nn.'

  He went into the bathroom to undress and perform the bedtime business. To hear a near-stranger instead of Caradoc cleaning his teeth and flushing the lavatory made me feel homesick. I glared even harder at the central light fitment. Phil came back and slid under the covers still wearing half his clothes.

  'Night.'

  'Night.'

  In the darkness I had a short, silent and cathartic cry to the accompaniment of his even breathing. We had almost two months of this odd intimacy still to come, and I was missing everyone I had left behind.

  Caradoc and I had been married for twenty-two years. We met in the lift of the publishing company where we both worked, when I was twenty-one. I was new to the company and didn't know anyone yet, and I had War and Peace at the top of my bag in which to immerse myself while I ate my sandwich. He glanced at the paperback and said, dismissively, 'You're reading that, are you?'

  We went out to lunch together and we have been together, on and off, ever since.

  It hasn't been a smooth progress for the entire route – how many relationships lasting that long can claim to have been? – and somewhere into the marriage we separated for almost a year. But we came back together in the end because we missed each other too much. Right from the beginning, we recognised and met a need in each other. Caradoc was given up for adoption as a baby of a year old, and was rejected by his adoptive parents when he was sixteen. After that he fended for himself, putting himself through Oxford and then hanging on to the thin security of jobs, more or less as I had done.

  So almost as soon as we knew each other, Caradoc and I went about constructing the family we had both been deprived of. We didn't have an easy boy-meets-girl beginning, and ours was a partnership threateningly based on weakness, but in the end we made a strength out of it because we understood and allowed for each other's histories. And, as I lay awake in the Beijing-Birmingham bedroom listening to Phil's breathing and thinking about my husband, I believed that we had at last achieved the inevitable post-passion and also post-betrayal plateau of a durable marriage. Caradoc was now a highly successful literary agent, and I was a writer with my own reputation. Our worlds connected and gave us plenty to gossip about over dinner. We liked the same things – books, and long walks on Sundays. We considered it important to show our children that they came first, above everything else, and we were pleased to give them the emotional and material security that we had lacked. It sounded comfortable and it usually was, and I valued our life beyond measure, but maybe I was also in Beijing in order to test myself inside that comfort and to take a different perspective on the old angles of domesticity.

  I probably wasn't the only competitor lying sleepless and missing home.

  The first thought that came when I opened my eyes the next morning was '22 hours to the off'.

  The car park at the Agricultural Museum was heavily guarded by armed police. We had to show our permits to be allowed in through the barred gates. The Volvo was parked somewhere in the middle, in a great serene phalanx of beautiful and exotic cars. I felt something like awe squeezing my throat as I walked slowly between them.

  This was different to Brooklands, which had been a show-off display in an unreal setting. This was business, now. The cars all displayed their rally plates and their Chinese licence plates, and their bold black competition numbers on the door panels. They were loaded and ready to go: ropes were coiled between brackets, shovels were lashed to boot lids, headlamps and fog lights were either cross-taped or glittering with protective grilles. It made me think of Prince Borghese and the others, on the rainy morning ninety years ago, waiting for the wife of the First Secretary of the French legation to lower the flag and start them off on the absurd journey.

  Nineteen hours.

  The first real shiver of nervous anticipation crawled up my spine.

  I looked at an exquisite bright scarlet Allard M-type coupé, and then at Prince Idris Shah's 1932 Ford Model B with its name, Humpty Dumpty, painted over the rear window. There was the Amazon belonging to the matched pair of women, Jennifer and Francesca, with their mechanic busily at work underneath it. There was the dark grey Dutch Amazon too, driven by Harm Haukes and Tonnie de Witt. Together with Bart Rietbergen and his co-driver in a 1965 PV544, Jennifer and Francesca had formed a team and named it Flying Volvos. They asked Dan and JD to join too, murmuring 'don't mention it to anyone else', but the boys had loyally decided to hang with Phil and me. In a massive burst of creativity we named ours Team Amazon.

  Phil took a piece of string out of his pocket and we crept around the other three Amazons. Discreetly he used the string to measure the distance from the ground to the door sills. Even fully loaded as it was now, our car had the best clearance of the four. We sat on the dusty gravel, contemplating its underside as lovingly as Ettore Guizzardi himself.

  'Can we do it?' I asked, thinking of all the way we had to go.

  'Yeah. We're going to make it,' Phil answered, as he always did.

  We ran a final check of the spares and our camping kit, and made some last rearrangements to even the weight distribution. Mick O'Malley gave us our competition numbers and I stuck the big black 8 and 2 on the doors. Phil was reluctant to leave but we had to go back to the Beijing Hotel to do our formal signing on as competitors. After that, I thought, it would definitely be time to see the sights.

  The traffic was a steaming stationary mass. The afternoon was almost over before we were finished with the signing on, and the light was already fading from yellow to grey tinged with violet. The city looked less brash now, with the advertising posters that dominated every perspective losing some of their stridency and the night's neon signs not yet illuminated. We left the hotel and walked out together, choosing at random a street that ran at right angles from Dongchang'an. At once, a single block away from the main thoroughfare, we discovered a different Beijing from the noisy version that was galloping into consumer culture only a hundred metres away. Here there were dirty alleyways lined with bicycle repair shops, where dogs nosed in the street debris and old ladies sitting wide-legged on stools fanned themselves in open doorways. Round-faced babies smiled seraphically in the dirt.

  As we lost ourselves in blind turnings between high walls we were greeted with stares of mild curiosity and then, when Phil did his energetic meet-the-people routine of smiling and shaking hands and calling 'Nihao', there were sudden beaming grins. More people edged out of shops and doorways to look at us, and little girls giggled behind their hands. The Chinese in the streets were friendly and interested. We couldn't exchange a word of conversation, let alone ask them what they thought of the world, but in that brief encounter there was none of the threat that goes with resentment.

  '
Tiananmen?' we asked, pivoting in a circle and shrugging to show that we were lost. Two bicyclists detached themselves from a laughing group and led us back to Dongchang'an. The square was an open space of sky away to our right.

  The light was fading gently. When we reached Tiananmen we saw an awkward, flat plain fringed on three sides by blocky buildings that seemed too low for the scale of it. On the fourth side were the liver-red walls and pagoda-roofed gates of the Forbidden City. A huge, waxy-faced picture of Mao gazed impassively over the tide of tourists. Hundreds of Chinese families and couples jostled to take one another's pictures on the bridge beneath the unbending stare. Beyond, behind the walls, I could just see trees and gardens and a tantalising glimpse of the perspectives inside the City. But I knew without even suggesting it that there was now no time even for the quickest visit.

  We turned back to the square and the crowds converging on the flagpole facing the portrait of Mao. A detachment of soldiers marched smartly up. Every dusk and dawn the Chinese flag is lowered and raised and the ceremony draws a great crowd of onlookers. They waited and watched with intense concentration, except for a knot of teenage girls at the fringe of the crowd who were easily distracted into blushes and giggles when Phil smiled and winked at them.

  Flocks of birds on their way to roost whirled against the pearly sky, and two or three kites hovered in the windless heat. But according to the digital clock next to the flagpole it was still some time to sunset. Phil was looking at his watch. He wanted to go back for one last communion with the car. I knew if he didn't make it, and if something went wrong in the next few days, it would be because this final check hadn't been completed. We made yet another journey by taxi through the clogged arteries of Beijing. The neon signs for Coca-Cola and cocktail bars were blinking on everywhere.

  The car park at the Agricultural Museum was in darkness, and the police guards were reluctant to let us in. Once we had persuaded them, we worked for an hour by torchlight, tightening the last bolts and checking again that there were no leaks. It was eerie to be there in the ranks of silent cars, all of them hunkered down over their own history and waiting for the new episode that was about to be written. I drifted between them, touching the dust covers that shrouded the grandest ones, running my fingers over the chrome and tracing the drivers' names on the wings. A policeman came across and warningly shone his torch straight into my face.

  As we left, at last, a truck was turning in through the gates with a car winched behind it. It was the Portuguese entry, a 1932 Ford Model B saloon that had blown a head gasket on the way in from the docks – the first major casualty of the event, although two or three other cars had also had to be towed into Beijing and one of the Aston Martins had suffered a small fire.

  It was midnight before I closed my eyes in bed. My last thought of the day, like the first, was to count the handful of hours that were left.

  The alarm call came at 4.30 a.m., and we were eating breakfast by five. The atmosphere in the barn-like breakfast room crackled with the static electricity of tension and excitement. It was noisy, because voices were slightly raised, and when I walked down the lines of place settings I could hear snatches of conversation, the same edgy, veiled competitive talk I had been hearing ever since I had arrived in Beijing.

  The three Iranian crews were intimidatingly decked out in race overalls in team Peykan Hunter colours of blue and cream, and Paul Minassian and Paul Grogan from Marche ou Crève – the hot-looking and well fancied Peugeot 404 – were also in race overalls. For myself, in the overstuffed recesses of my kitbag I had found a pair of baggy black trousers and a sadly crumpled black T-shirt to wear. It was 6 September, the day of Princess Diana's funeral. We were a long way from home, and everything that was happening that day in London.

  After breakfast there were buses to take us back to the Agricultural Museum car park for the last time. We packed into them with our luggage, and drove through the thick purple dawn. The city was very quiet, for once. There were small groups of people meditating under the trees in dusty parks, and solitary men doing t'ai chi exercises, and gnat-like bicycles in ones and twos instead of great swarms.

  By 6.30 a.m. the cars were rolling out of the park, in approximate number sequence. Lord Montagu headed the order in car number 1, the 1915 Vauxhall Prince Henry, with his long-suffering mechanic perched in the navigator's seat. There was a great noise of chugging and roaring as almost one hundred engines were fired and eagerly revved up. Our Amazon started first off and sounded sweet and even-tempered.

  Phil and I had been given a nominal start time of 7.24, and even though we loaded and reloaded our hand-luggage twice over to even the weight distribution to Phil's complete satisfaction, we still had more than an hour to kill before our minute. I sat in the navigator's seat, pressing myself into the tight, black padded shell of it. The sides hugged my hips reassuringly, and we had a little Velcro-fixed inflatable cushion apiece to provide adjustable lower back support. We'd done what we could to make sure that we would be comfortable, despite Tony's lack of enthusiasm for the matter.

  Sitting there, watching the vintage cars pulling away one by one at the start of their journey, I tried to imagine the road ahead, and failed altogether.

  I couldn't think how Phil and I were going to cover such an immense distance in our Amazon, let alone how some of these ancient machines were going to do it. They were either desperately frail-looking, like David Arrigo's little red Allard, or seemingly as primitive as dinosaurs, like Etienne Veen's massive 1927 630K Mercedes from Holland. Etienne and his English co-driver Robert Dean were wearing white leather motoring helmets and goggles. They gave us a gauntleted wave as they crossed the start line, car number 7.

  I was sorry to see from the final start list that neither the duke, the butler nor the Ford Galaxy had made it to Beijing.

  We drank coffee from our flask, and let the minutes tick by. Once the vintageants were away the classic cars began to roll. Looking down the line I could see our team-mates Dan and JD in number 69. Their Amazon was blue and white, hand-painted.

  'Dulux Nightshade, in fact,' Dan had announced. 'Very attractive colour.'

  The other Volvo team had had nice Flying Volvo team stickers made up for their cars, but Team Amazon somehow hadn't got around to it. We'd have to make up for it with team spirit.

  Dan and JD crossed the line and disappeared beyond the crowd of spectators. The line of waiting cars steadily diminished.

  The next but one ahead of us, number 80, was a chocolate-brown Mercedes 250 convertible, driven by Thomas and Maria Noor under the French and German flags. Beautiful Maria was also wearing overalls, but hers were black and figure-hugging. I saw Phil looking with interest at the gilt zips on her back pockets. Immediately in front of us was an immaculate silver-grey British DB6, driven by John Goldsmith and Murdoch Laing, and directly behind us came a red and white 1800 Austin Maxi, always referred to by Phil as 'the land crab'. (When I asked him why he said that it was because it looked like a crab, of course. Of course. Except that to me it just looked like a red and white car). The crew were David Wilks and Andrew Bedingham. These people would be our neighbours and companions in the dawn starts, every morning for the next forty-five days.

  The Aston Martin nosed forward. And then it was our turn.

  The start line was a blur of faces. The marshal at the control desk handed me a yellow spiral-bound book of time cards entitled Road Book 1, Peking–Kathmandu. The timing of the start was awry because the police were making demands that the organisers hadn't anticipated, so I didn't even notice what the minute of our departure actually was when the great moment finally arrived. The first time-control stamp was thumped unceremoniously in its place on the first time card in our road book and we were waved hastily through. There was some clapping, a forest of onlookers ahead of us with a narrow channel bisecting it, and a policeman pointing the direction we were to follow. Phil negotiated a route through the crowd and we accelerated in the wake of the DB6.

 
We were on our way. Another very slightly anticlimactic moment after so much anticipation. Our next stop would be the official start at the Great Wall, 75 kilometres away.

  There were police everywhere, at every junction, all the way out of Beijing. Horns sounded in salute and people hung out of buses to wave us on our way. Phil pressed a road tape into the cassette player and seventies rock music – usefully acceptable to both of us – boomed out. When I peered ahead I could see the line of rally cars, strung out through the traffic, and I felt a frisson of pride at the sight. The worries about the car's durability, about money and responsibility, about Phil and me, even the visa crisis, were briefly forgotten.

  We were here, we were driving out of Beijing in the early morning traffic and there were hundreds of people lining the roads to watch us. I felt a grin split my face, and when I looked at Phil I saw that he was wearing one too. We wished each other good luck.

  My first job on the road was to calibrate the Terratrip. JD had explained to me how it was done. The rally computer mounted on the dash in front of the navigator's seat displayed two sets of distances. The upper one would give the total distance travelled from the day's start point, and the lower one would show the intermediates, the distances between each successive instruction in the route notes. When we were finally clear of Beijing the expressway opened up ahead. The police had cleared the outside lane for us, and suddenly the rally was surging forward in a rush of speed with police outriders at the head of the convoy. At 1-kilometre intervals along the roadside there were marker posts, and I used these to take half a dozen trip readings and averaged them out before entering the mean value into the computer's memory. The next step was to zero both readings as we passed a marker, and watch the digits flicker until we reached the next one. They both changed to a reading of 01.00 reassuringly close to the post.

  So far so good. One of my little jobs in the car park had been to attach a strip of Velcro to the dash, and next I arranged my pens and kitchen timer and calculator and highlighters and specs cases within easy reach along the length of it.