Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

  Chapter Six

  Six forty-one a.m., official start time for car 82 as set out in the day's list.

  It was day three of the rally, day one of proper competition, West Baotou to Yinchuan. Total distance to cover, 618 kilometres.

  I felt better for some sleep and a bowl of warm rice porridge. I lined up with Maria Noor, wearing persimmon-red overalls today, and Carolyn, and Andrew Bedingham and Murdoch Laing, and a press of other navigators, all of us watching the rally clock on the marshal's table and waiting for our minute. It was barely light, and bobbing torches and car headlights heightened the atmosphere of drama. As the cars rolled away at one-minute intervals the crews still waiting patted their wings and shouted good luck! It was exciting, and also touching. A couple of tough days on the road had already welded some camaraderie out of the Beijing competitiveness.

  'Car 82.' As 6.40 clicked over to 41 I presented myself to the marshal. He stamped my road book, I took it, and sprinted to the head of the line where Phil was revving the engine.

  'Ready to go?'

  Squeeze into the seat, buckle the harness, zero upper and lower trip – a decisive double beep. 'Ready to go.'

  Now we were really doing it. The Amazon shot forward and my breath caught in my throat as I called the first instructions and distances. I was desperate not to misread the route notes and make us lose our way.

  'Point nine five k, straight over at lights.'

  'Okay.'

  We moved fast in the light traffic down a long, tree-lined avenue, overtaking bikes and three-wheelers. As we reached the lights I crossed out the instructions as completed and zeroed the intermediate trip, beep. I could already see the DB6 weaving through the traffic ahead of us.

  'Next one is point six five k, left at lights, shopping centre on right.'

  I was trying to stop distinguishing left from right by looking down at my hands to check which one holds the pen.

  'Okay,' Phil acknowledged the instruction every time so we both knew he had heard and understood it. Or 'got you', as a variation. Never 'right', Colin Bryce had warned us, because that might cause confusion.

  Beep. 'Point three five, straight over lights, Bank of China on corner.'

  'Okay.'

  Beep. 'One point one five, turn right at junction.'

  This was all right. We made it across town with the Aston still out in front of us. If I'd made a mistake, they'd made the same one.

  'Well done,' Phil said.

  Beyond West Baotou town the instructions came further apart and I had time to do the maths. Two hundred and thirty-five kilometres to the first time control of the day, at a place called Xinbao. Time allowance for the distance: a generous four hours and forty-three minutes, therefore we were due at 11.24. Not a single minute earlier or later. I set the kitchen timer on the dash to tick away the hours and minutes, showing us how much time we had left to run.

  'Land crab coming up behind,' Phil said. Andrew and David hammered by, giving us a wave. 'What do they think this is, a race?'

  We smiled at each other. It was the signal that Phil had surfaced for the day. Ever since I had joined him in Beijing he had been cheery and upbeat, even when he was worried about the car, which made him easy to be with but also oddly impervious and difficult to fathom – as I had noticed in our early dealings back in London. But now I thought I had discovered a single crack in his cheerful armour – he wasn't good in the mornings. After the alarm call he preferred to lie under the covers in a sullen, unmoving heap while I hummed around in the bathroom. He wouldn't get up until I was dressed, packed, and departing for breakfast, and then – presumably – he did everything in a scramble because he made it to breakfast not long after me.

  This arrangement also diminished the chances of my accidentally catching a glimpse of any portion of his flesh. He was endearingly modest in his personal bearing. For my part, after boarding school and years of Miss Selfridge communal changing rooms and two babies delivered in a National Health teaching hospital with a couple of rugby teams of medical students cheering me on, I wasn't much concerned about nakedness. But I took my cue from Phil and in our bedroom I shimmied around wrapped in towels and always changed behind the closed bathroom door, and I was careful never to leave any bits of lingerie lying about to embarrass him.

  'Is there any coffee?'

  It's the navigator's job to make sure the driver is comfortable. After the deficiencies of the first two days I'd taken care to go out into West Baotou the previous evening to stock up. I met a friendly young man who knew some English, who had patiently guided me around the little shops in search of bottled water and cans of Coke, and fruit and biscuits. And I'd filled the flask at breakfast.

  'Here.'

  Phil drank it. 'Are you okay?' he asked me routinely.

  'Railway crossing coming up in one k.'

  'Got you.'

  'Yes, thanks,' I answered, although in fact I was beginning to worry about a small problem.

  'Good. How far to the control?'

  I checked the upper trip for the total. We had travelled 110 kilometres already. 'Two two five. Hours of time left.'

  'Let's have some music.'

  I chose a tape. I had brought Radiohead and Alisha's Attic and even some of Charlie's hardcore mix tapes as part of my contribution. It turned out, though, that what Phil liked was the Eagles, B52s and old reggae. We sang along now, oooh, oooh, the Isreeealites. It was a tape that Noddy had made for us. Wake up in the morning, same thing for breakfast . . .

  This is how it would be all the long way ahead, I thought happily, in the grip of Rally Syndrome once more. Phil and me and the Amazon. Bowling around the world together, winning the rally, the best team there ever could be. I forgot that I had ever felt homesick.

  Everyone was going fast today. We overtook the Dangerfields, and Mick Flick in his blue and white works Mercedes 220, number 74, and then the Dangerfields overtook us again. We were coming up to a steady stream of vintageants, who had started first but moved more slowly, with longer time allowances. We swept past the Railton Straight 8, and then Adam and Jon with a fusillade of hooting and gesturing. The roads were lined with onlookers all along the way, but in the towns the crowds swelled alarmingly. In a place called Linhe there must have been hundreds of thousands of people spilling off the sidewalks and into the road. Tiny children tottered at the front and cyclists nudged their front wheels into our path. The way narrowed to less than the width of the Amazon and the police linked arms and tried to force the people back to let us through.

  Hello! Welcome! English people! Speak English!

  Radiant, inquisitive smiles filled the open windows. Dozens of hands pushed flowers at us, and pieces of paper to be autographed, and tried to shake our hands or grab a souvenir off the dash. It was awesome, and overwhelming, and extremely frightening. Phil kept his thumb on the horn. He was sweating and staring, dreading that the toddler just in front would be the one to break free of its mother and throw itself under our wheels.

  Hello! Good car! Welcome!

  There was no air. We were inching forward through a sea of bodies and clapping hands. Hands drummed on the roof and the wings. The noise was as deafening as the roar of surf, and the arms coming through the windows were tendrils of weed, pulling us down . . .

  I felt tears starting up behind my sunglasses, partly out of amazed gratitude for such a welcome, partly out of raw fear. In this multitude we were going to be submerged, or we were going to run over someone. The moon-faced policemen were suddenly our allies, roughly manhandling people out of our path. We became part of a solid line of rally cars, battered by the waves of people.

  It took a long time to negotiate our way out of Linhe.

  A little way up the road we had to have a rest stop. Phil folded his arms across the wheel and laid his head on them. His hair was matted with sweat.

  'Jesus,' he whispered.

  Every town we passed through was almost the same. At the end of the day we learned that about a
million people had turned out to watch us go by.

  We still made the 11.24 control and each of that day's subsequent controls with plenty of time to spare. The routine was to pull off the road, joining the line of other cars, and wait for your minute to come up. It was a good time to wander up and down talking to the other crews and exchanging titbits of gossip. Lord Montagu had broken down irretrievably. His car was being towed back to Beijing for shipping home, and he had hitched a ride for himself in the Rolls Royce Phantom V. Three cars were now officially retired, and also the Jag Mark VII had a broken suspension arm, the Stutz was suffering complicated electrical problems, and Jennifer and Francesca had been pulled up by a broken shock-absorber. There were several boiling radiators. It was a punishingly hot, airless day.

  I drove the next section through flat, dull country alongside the Yellow River. Sometimes the road was wide and open, but nearly always busy with streams of blue-painted wagons loaded with coal. The grass verges all along the way were grey and gritty with shed coal dust. There were farm wagons too, heavy with hay, and tricycle carts, but relatively few private cars. At other times the surface would deteriorate without warning, breaking down into unmade sections, or lapsing into vicious potholes. At the speed we were travelling, driving required constant vigilance, and lots of gear changes and braking. I became aware that Phil was unhappy.

  'Change up. You should be in third by now.'

  'Okay,' I would say meekly, and do as I was told.

  'Too fast. You were going too fast for that bend. That was why you had to brake while you were cornering.'

  'Sorry.'

  In the end I was asking him, 'Brake now? Is that okay?'

  'Yes. Well done.'

  'Thank you.'

  I might have been back in driving school, and yet I had had my licence while Phil was still in his pram. I told myself that he knew the car much better than I did, and he drove it better because he had built it and had been so possessive about it for all those months before we left. I insisted to myself that I didn't mind that at all.

  'You see, driving the way you do isn't good for the car. You are too heavy on the brakes and you change gear too sharply. Everything you do should be smooooth.'

  'The way you do it,' I snapped.

  He shot a look at me, half wary and half irritable. 'If you like. I'm just used to it. Otherwise something will break, and we won't get to Paris.'

  'Okay. I'll try, all right?'

  But I was already in a position that promised trouble. I remembered that on the walk to Everest, I had been responsible for myself and for the effort of putting one foot in front of the other. The determination and the ultimate satisfaction of it had been all mine. Now, on this different adventure I was the dependant half of a team, and we were in a car. The classic setting for male–female discord.

  My spirits sank.

  It was exactly like being married, I thought. We were a couple out on a Sunday drive, bickering about her driving – the very reason why I had decided in the first place that Caradoc and I shouldn't make the trip together. Now Phil had slipped effortlessly into the husband role, and to my chagrin I was the anxious wife.

  'You'll be fine. Listen, can you hear that clunk? When you drop into low gear? It's coming from around the back axle.'

  I couldn't hear any bloody clunk. The whole noise of the car was an atonal symphony of thumps and grinds. I was bathed in sweat, and my problem was getting worse by the minute.

  'Yes. I've been listening to it. What d'you think it is?'

  'I don't know. Could be the diff. I'll have to take a good look when we get in. Second. Get into second.'

  Flustered, I could only find fourth. The car shuddered and rattled. As soon as I could, I pulled into the side of the road. Three rally cars immediately shot by and Phil looked anxiously after them. He was holding up the back cover of the route notes which showed a huge red OK and a thumbs-up graphic. This was required procedure, to indicate to other cars and the support crews that we weren't in trouble.

  'You drive,' I said flatly.

  'Oh, come on. I'm sorry, okay? You're really good, you just need a bit of practice.'

  I knew I wasn't really good, so now he was definitely being patronising.

  'You drive.'

  I got out and made him change over. We pressed on to the next control and wearily joined the heat-shimmering column of metal waiting to check in. Even after passing some time chatting to other crews and having a car-heated can of Coke, we still had eleven minutes to go before we were due. I knew, because I was watching the timer. But Phil picked up my road book and announced that he was going to walk up to the control and get it stamped.

  Blood hummed in my ears.

  I wasn't going to accept that my only role was signing cheques. He was the crew leader and he could be the driver if he insisted, relegating me from co-driver to navigator, but he couldn't take the navigator's responsibilities from me as well.

  I waited until he came sauntering back.

  'We have to have a talk, Phil.'

  I saw his smile fade, and all the pleasant lines of his face tighten into watchfulness. I understood that Phil didn't like to talk. He would prefer to duck behind a bit of banter and evade the threat of a confrontation. He got into the driver's seat and we set off on the last section of the day's drive, 165 kilometres to the overnight stop at Yinchuan.

  'I was talking to Dan about the driving,' he offered. 'He says he feels just the same about his car. Protective. He doesn't like JD driving it, in case he breaks something.'

  'I understand that. I'll try to be a better driver. But you can't take over everything. This is my adventure as well as yours.'

  'I know. I know. I take your point, and I'm sorry.'

  We touched hands, briefly, acknowledging a truce. We were out here on our own together and we needed one another. We'd had our first disagreement and we had been able to fix it, just like fixing the car, so we could drive on for another day.

  At Yinchuan that night, we had a good dinner. The restaurant was a series of small rooms, each enclosing a table for ten. Considerately asking one another whether we were all right, whether this was what the other wanted, Phil and I found ourselves sitting with Prince Idris Shah and his co-driver Richard Curtis, who I now noticed bore a very strong physical resemblance to Caradoc. They had the same shiny dark boot-button eyes like an expensive teddy bear's, and close-cropped greying hair like plush fur. They were the same height and build, too, although when Richard and I started talking the resemblance diminished because Richard's voice was much lighter and his businessman's view of the world more traditional.

  There were also three drily amusing American disability lawyers from car 99, a Willys jeep station wagon. They made sly cracks about RO and China and the ongoing effects of Beijing diarrhoea with such straight faces that it was hard to tell whether or not they were being deliberately funny. The remaining places were taken by David Bull from Halifax, his wife Angela Riley, and Angela's mother Helen. Helen was in her 70s; she looked frail, but turned out to be completely indomitable. Angela was a forthright Yorkshire accountant and Dave, with a rogue's smile and a line in sharp northern witticisms, was in the garage business. Looking round the circle of faces, with the lawyers and the mountain guide and the accountant and the novelist, as well as the car mechanic and the determined old lady and the Crown Prince of Malaysia, I thought it was either a pleasingly cosmopolitan gathering or the cast of a very complicated joke.

  Pretty waitresses filed in with the food. They showed us what to do, with much giggling and blushing. It was a Mongolian barbecue, a big pot of simmering soup with bowls of tiny mushrooms and dumplings and slivers of lamb and fresh greens to skewer and cook in the broth. Perfect. It was a very jolly meal – chopsticks are good icebreakers and Dave Bull could have had a second career as a stand-up comedian. It was good for us to meet new people. After three long days locked in the car together Phil and I were suffering from too much close focus.

 
He went off on his own after dinner to work on the car. Later he reported that the clunk was probably a loose rear shock that had been making the back axle judder. He had tightened it up. Much more worryingly, he had found that the drain plug on the side of the gearbox had worked loose. We had been hammering along at high speeds for a day and a half during which almost all of the oil had drained out of the gearbox. He borrowed a plastic siphon from Melissa Ong and topped the box up with a litre of engine oil. If it didn't leak out overnight, and if we nursed the car along to Lanzhou tomorrow, he would have a whole day to put all these worrying mechanical problems to rights.

  I had my own scrap of news to relay to him. I had been nosing around the hotel lobby, trying to send a fax home, when I had overheard a conversation between RO and Thomas Noor. RO said that he and the rally mechanics had just made a tour of the car park, drawing up a list of the cars they thought would get to Paris.

  'Twenty-nine,' RO announced. 'That's what we reckon. Only twenty-nine. Yours is one of them,' he assured Thomas.

  Since he had slammed the phone down and threatened me during the visa crisis I had maintained a rigid policy of pretending that RO didn't exist. Not that he would have noticed. But I couldn't keep my mouth shut now. I bobbed up in front of him.

  'What about us? Are we on the list?'

  He turned on me, eyes bulging.

  'That's an inside secret I couldn't possibly share with you.'

  Phil listened to this story. His response was utterly characteristic. 'Tosser. If we're not on his list we should be. Don't worry, we'll make it.' He lowered himself into bed, half-dressed, ready for coma mode. 'Night.'

  'Night.'

  I lay awake, worrying about my personal mechanical defect.

  Between Yinchuan and Lanzhou the scenery changed from ugly industrial to semi-desert. We were crossing the edge of the Gobi Desert, through wide paddy fields and broad plains backed by low bluish hills. Sometimes there were wide sweeps of sand and huge dunes, with occasional brown villages of square mud-block houses reminiscent of southern Morocco. On the road we met camel trains and plodding donkeys as well as the ubiquitous blue coal wagons. In even the remotest villages, hordes of people lined the roadside to watch us go by. They had wide, flat faces with Mongolian features now. Seamed skin and bad teeth marred all the adults, but the babies and children were exquisitely beautiful. Old and young stared impassively at us at first, but as soon as we smiled their faces broke immediately into dazzling smiles of response.