Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

  The lights of another town flicked past like ghosts and were gone. The road stretched ahead blindly to the black horizon.

  'How much longer?' she said.

  He didn 't even look at her.

  It was the same question she'd asked all the way, a hundred times in a hundred countries. From Lhasa to Lahore, from Pakistan to Paris, the same goddamn question. He pulled the last cigarette from the pack with his teeth and lit the match with his thumb nail. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs. It felt good.

  Women he thought. They came in different shapes and sizes and colours, but in the end they were all the same. Just women.

  She had her head tilted back on the seat, so he couldn't see her face. All he could see when he looked from the corner of his eye was the glow of the Amazon's dashboard on her Dolce & Gabbana T-shirt. The notebook lay spine-up over her left knee.

  The notebook. Six whole weeks of notes.

  Every time he moved a muscle, every time he broke wind, she'd noted it down. Sometimes it was all he could do not to grab it and throw it out the window. At night, in some godforsaken hotel room, with the floor awash with someone else's piss, he'd lain there, listening to her moaning on about Sainsbury's in her sleep to someone called Caradoc and wondering if she'd wake if he went to get it from the pocket of her jacket.

  She stirred and the notebook fell from her knee among the fruit and discarded Evian bottles at her feet.

  How much longer?' she asked.

  He sighed and looked at his watch.

  'It's time,' he said.

  'Thank God,' she said.

  And she took the two slices of cucumber off her eyes and sat up.

  Cucumber, he thought.

  This was all very funny and apposite. I was looking forward to sharing it with Phil. Smiling, I tucked the fax safely away and went to ask a man behind a bar if I could have a cup of coffee.

  'No,' he answered. Just no, that was all.

  'Are you closed?'

  Dave Bull leant beside me.

  'They're not closed. You're a woman, aren't you?'

  'Oh, I see. Okay, Dave. Since you have the good fortune to be a man, will you order me a cup of coffee?'

  'Of course I will.'

  A minute later the cup of tepid Nescafé was handed to him, and he handed it on to me. I went to sit on a lobby sofa and after a while John Vipond drifted over and sat beside me.

  'How are you?'

  'I'm fine,' I assured him, in case he was referring to my long-restored health. 'But I think the rally as a jolly adventure more or less ended for me at Quetta. And I know that quite a lot of people feel the same way.'

  'Why is that?'

  I stared. 'Because two people died.'

  I told him that I thought the Multan to Quetta timings had been too severe and the overall distance too long for one day. We should not have had to drive those treacherous roads in the dark, under pressure, particularly after what had happened to Nigel Challis's Land Rover on the way up to Nainital.

  John was sympathetic but also eloquently defensive of the organisation and planning. He assured me that no one was obliged to go for the sections as timed. Competitors were free to drive at whatever speed they considered to be safe for them and their cars, and it just happened that Josef Feit had been an aggressive and highly competitive driver.

  I liked John Vipond very much, but I thought he was wrong. It seemed to me that the mere imposition of tight timings made people want to go for them, particularly testosteronic young men like Phil and, presumably, the Feits. However, there was no future in arguing the point because I was only a novice, and John had years of motor-sports experience. I only added that all the crews I had spoken to since Quetta wanted there to be a brief gathering, a simple meeting somewhere at which we could all express our respects and sympathy. I didn't try to go into any of the business of how deeply I believed in it being better to acknowledge a loss than to pretend it had never occurred.

  John's sleepy eyes narrowed further.

  'This is rallying, Rosie. I am afraid that people do get killed. You have to put it behind you and carry on.'

  There seemed no point in discussing this any more, either. John moved away, but after a little while he did come back and murmur in my ear.

  'I have had a couple of words with people. We'll try to arrange something appropriate at Eşfahān, all right?'

  They never did, though. Or if they did, the invitation to participate never reached our little circle.

  Chris and Howard were high up the accommodation list and were in the right hotel. They swooped across the lobby now, spruce in their chinos and clean polo shirts, announcing that they had a taxi and a driver and were off to the Zāhedān Bazaar, so why didn't I go with them?

  Since this morning, I had learned that Zāhedān was indeed a dangerous place. Its position close to the border with Afghanistan as well as Baluchistan meant that there was traffic in arms and drugs and other contraband, and there was plenty of violence in the town itself. The guides at the hotel this morning had been protective rather than restrictive in not allowing me to go out and wander around alone. However, I thought I would probably be safe enough in a taxi with two giants to protect me, so I told the Camaro boys I'd love to go shopping with them.

  We were on the way down the steps to the taxi when we met Phil trailing in. He was covered in oil and he looked entirely exhausted and dejected. But, meanly, all I could think was that he had been having a sociable time with the other blokes in the car pound, borrowing each other's grease guns and forging mechanical meta-friendships, while I had been stranded all day in a stifling hotel room.

  'Phil, you're wearing my hat,' I snapped at him.

  He was. It was a green baseball cap, with sentimental value, that I kept tucked behind the roll bar above my seat. It now had a row of oily finger marks all across the peak, and I didn't rate my chances of ever seeing it again if it remained in Phil's possession. He had lost all his own hats, and his socks and underpants, and his set of car keys. He now used my keys, and appeared to manage without smalls.

  'Sorry,' he said stiffly.

  'I'm going shopping with Chris and Howard,' I said, and stalked off.

  It took me an hour to start feeling ashamed, but when remorse came it bit deep. I might be lonely and anxious, but it was no excuse for harshness. I resolved to try to get the negative feelings under control and to be a better partner for the rest of the trip.

  The bazaar turned out to be a grubby two-floor mall, almost deserted except for a couple of soldiers with semiautomatic rifles slung at the ready. It was dark when we reached it. There wasn't a woman to be seen anywhere, not in any of the shops or seedy cafés or walking between them. The men looked at me, even though I was dressed in the height of propriety, and whistled between their teeth or muttered in low voices. We bought some provisions, but beyond that I wasn't looking for plastic shoes or gaudy gold jewellery and there was nothing else to buy. The three of us mooched along, pretending to be interested in the shop window displays, attracting uncomfortable amounts of attention from the few passersby. Howard lingered at a collection of lampshades and domestic ornaments, delighted by the full-on kitsch of the merchandise, but Chris and I wanted to go. The atmosphere was too threatening to be comfortable. Suddenly there was a scuffle behind us.

  There was a man with a gun. It looked the same as the soldiers' guns, except that this one was being waved at us. The soldiers themselves were looking on in bored passivity.

  Living in Camden Town, I was well used to the daily appearance of care in the community cases. It seemed to me that this was plainly a madman with a replica weapon, or otherwise he wouldn't be allowed to brandish it in public. But Chris and Howard, resident in nice expensive rural neighbourhoods, were less sanguine.

  'Run!' they shouted. And did so. I looked round. The maniac was following us, shouting incoherently. Chris and Howard were a hundred metres down the road, sprinting in the direction of the waiting taxi.

  '
Run, Rosie!' they yelled over their shoulders.

  I was encumbered by a long skirt, little white socks and strappy sandals and a flapping veil, and two plastic carrier bags of in-car provisions for Phil. I tittupped across the street, heels clicking on the asphalt. I didn't know if the gunman was still at my back or not, but I kept moving as fast as I could. It did cross my mind that if Phil were here he wouldn't have run off ahead. He would probably have performed some SAS-style manoeuvre for wresting plastic AK47s from Zāhedān care in the communities, and said 'Nice one' as he sat on the poor creature's chest.

  I reached the taxi in the wake of Chris and Howard.

  'That was close,' they puffed.

  'It was a replica,' I said. 'It must have been.'

  'I wouldn't like to have taken a bet, looking down the wrong end of it,' Howard retorted as we zoomed away. Neither of them was laughing. I began to think that they might have been right, and a cold drip of retrospective terror trickled all the way down my spine.

  The taxi dropped me off at the hotel from hell. Phil had already eaten with the land crab boys and Andrew Snelling. Dinner was barley soup, chicken and rice, and Coca-Cola. I realised that I didn't mind so much about having missed breakfast.

  After the chaos of Multan to Quetta, a new leader board was published as at Zāhedān. There were a great many changes to the old order.

  Seventy cars were still classified, plus another twelve in the touring category. Car 82 was in 22nd place, and we were now top Volvo. Harm and Tonnie were four places behind us, and Dan and JD nine. After the broken wheels, poor Kermit had dropped behind even Jennifer and Francesca. Top position was now held by two characters in a Willys jeep. One of the mechanics had muttered weeks back to Phil and me that it was full of Cosworth parts.

  The next day, from an 8.30 start, we set off yet again.

  That morning was the first time I felt that we had come far enough and that I didn't want to rally any further, through any more endless dangerous days. I was too tired and sad. No night's sleep seemed long enough to rub out our weariness.

  Waiting in the line for our minute I turned to Dan. He was generous with his expressions of physical affection: Melissa was always curling up on his lap, and now he wrapped his arms around me and rocked me backwards and forwards.

  'Cheer up,' he said. I leant my head against his shoulder and sniffed. I was tired of my lachrymose self, as well.

  Beep.

  We had 558 km to travel, in three stages, across the Dasht-e-Lūt desert to Kermān. The desert was hot and hostile. High winds swept across it and leached the moisture out of lips and cheeks until they cracked in painful protest. There were acres of gritty scrub blistered with hummocks and scrubby thorn bushes, and then patches of sand where vast, silvery mirage lakes shimmered under the heat-drained sky. Camels stalked at the roadside. Once, we passed a dead one lying in the road with its stiff legs extended. Sometimes we saw barchan dunes. These great arcs of sand built up behind some obstacle that the wind couldn't shift, a rock or a bush, and grain by grain the mountain swelled behind it, a steep crescent enclosing the rock and a huge, perfectly graded slope facing into the wind. When the wind changed, the dune nudged round into a different alignment. The flawless architecture of wind and sand was implacable and magnificent.

  Phil turned suddenly and looked at me.

  'Do you want to talk about it?'

  'Yes.' We had barely spoken since Quetta. I was so surprised and disarmed by the invitation that the words flooded out instantly, quite unrehearsed. I told him that I was hurt when we couldn't comfort each other on the night of the accident, and that I had minded being cut adrift at Zāhedān, and that I was sorry I had been horrible about a stupid hat when he was tired from working on our car.

  Phil sighed. 'I don't particularly want to climb into bed with you, because of what will inevitably happen if I do.'

  I thought a bit harder about what I really wanted. I thought it was simple affection and warmth but perhaps the distinction was becoming blurred for me too. We had been away from home for a month and I felt as if I had been living alongside Phil, in our parody of a marriage, for longer than a lifetime. He was staring angrily at the road.

  'Body language says everything. I saw you with Dan this morning. You leaned towards him and smiled, and I felt like shit. I haven't seen you smile for days.'

  It was my turn to sigh. It would have to be Dan that he resented, of course. In our inverted way, even though we couldn't get along smoothly together we were jealous of each other's affections. I was certainly jealous because he liked Melissa so much.

  'Phil, I want reassurance and affirmation that you can't give me. I don't even know what you want, but you probably aren't getting it either. Maybe this partnership has just failed.'

  'That's putting it very strongly,' he said. 'Listen, do you want to call it a day and go home? You're the boss. Sack me if you don't think I'm doing the job.'

  'Of course you're doing the job,' I muttered. 'We're in 22nd place, aren't we?'

  We looked at each other and Phil grinned.

  'Yeah. I don't think we've failed, even if you do.'

  I sneaked out my hand and stuck my fingers between his hip and the lip of the seat, and he obligingly shifted his position to make room. It was a nice, warm, unthreat-ening place without any suggestive associations to bother either of us. I liked to feel connected to him, and through him to the Amazon, and we drove on in restored harmony. It was a resolution of sorts.

  'I wish we had some music,' I said.

  Phil grinned again. 'It's a pity the best in-car entertainment is off limits.'

  'We can buy a new tape deck in Eşfahān,' I responded primly.

  The day's highlight was the second time control at a place called Arg-e-Bam, the Fort of Bam. True to form, I hadn't had time to read up on the Fort in advance but I knew vaguely that it was a sight worth seeing. When we reached it rally cars were drawn up all down the side of the road and crews were climbing some brown steps that led through a small arched doorway in a high, brown, crenellated wall. Phil parked under a palm tree behind one of the official Fronteras. As we watched, two of the mechanics spilled out of the back and one of them clasped his hands around the other's throat.

  'Don't fuck me off, asshole,' the aggressor spat, then released his prey and stalked off. The other one dazedly shook himself.

  Phil and I raised our eyebrows at each other. The heat and the tension were getting to everyone, not just us. At least we hadn't been reduced to physical violence. Yet. I demurely arranged my veil and drapes and sunglasses and stepped out into the crucifying sun.

  Beyond the archway and up some steps to a rampart an astonishing vista spread out. Bam was a huge citadel, acres of sere avenues and steps and houses and domes and squares, all made of mud and excavated from the burning sand. It was a dung and straw Pompeii, full of vanished histories, too dry and hot to be properly explored. I stood in the scrap of shade beneath the enclosing wall, looking down on the twelfth-century streets and imagining them swarming with traders and soldiers and prostitutes and merchants and donkeys and mangy dogs, and their shouts and pipe music and the smells of oil and spices and camel dung. I lingered, making up stories in my head, with Melissa sitting on the wall beside me. In a skimpy white headscarf and a tunic and baggy pants even the radiant Porsche Spice looked flattened. She said that for a reason she couldn't quite pin-point, Bam made her think not of old stories but of being taken rather roughly from behind.

  We had all been away from home for a long time.

  I looked down the steps to see Phil, wearing his Sheikh of Araby headdress and Oakley shades and a camera round his neck, beckoning me back to the car. We drove on through the desert to Kermān.

  Yet again, we were out in the flophouse. At least we could park right at the steps this time. Phil decided that the car was due for a serious checking over, and he had it jacked up and the rear wheels off almost before they stopped turning. I went inside for cold Coca-Colas and when I
came back he was stretching his lower lip downwards and showing his bottom teeth. I hadn't seen him do the face thing for weeks, and my heart sank.

  He pointed. 'Look at that.'

  The shiny internal ring of the left brake drum was gouged with deep, gritty grooves. I understood, when he explained, that the rivets in the brake shoes had worked proud and had scored the drum. I ran the tip of my forefinger around the damage.

  'Does it matter?'

  'Reduced brake power.'

  'What needs to be done?'

  'Change the shoes on both sides. I think we'll have to get Tony to send a new drum out to Istanbul. We'll have to nurse the brakes until then.'

  'Okay.'

  Dan and JD had nosed in beside us, and they had their bonnet up and a knot of drivers with mechanical interests was gathering to peer into the engine. They had been having peculiar difficulties all day – the car would only run smoothly at high speed.

  I guessed that it was going to be a long evening without much opportunity for lingering over the dinner-table. I was proved absolutely right.

  Dan's problem was finally diagnosed as a jammed-open carburettor, and satisfactorily fixed. Phil serviced our brakes and changed the fuel filter and doggedly worked over the rest of the car. I passed the spanners and found the grease gun and cleaned the plugs and fetched drinks and did whatever else I could to make myself useful to Team Amazon. I was very slow at the simple tasks I was given and I pondered the merits of feeling mechanically inadequate as against completely redundant if I didn't help out at all.

  Swift, desert darkness fell and we continued our efforts by the light of head torches. Bats threaded overhead and beyond the hotel railings a crowd of dark-faced men and boys stood silently watching us.

  When I finally gave in and headed inside, I passed Jolijn Rietbergen sitting on the steps in the cool night air. She pointed a stern finger at me.

  'Bed,' she advised.

  I must have looked entirely frightful. Not least because I was wearing Phil's oil-stiff khaki trousers, a beaten T-shirt, and a flowing white headdress secured with hairgrips and decorated with black fingerprints. My hands and nails looked as if I had taken up employment as a spadeless gravedigger. Actually, I was past caring. The car was fit to drive tomorrow, at least, and we would be another day closer to home.