By the Seat of My Pants

by Lonely Planet

  After he had written down my current London address in case there were any problems and my permanent Australian address as the destination for the carpet, Josef asked us if we had been to the ancient city of Ephesus. Before we knew it, he was locking up the shop and we were piling into his little white Honda and racing through the streets of Selcuk and out to Ephesus with Turkish pop music blaring out the windows. We wandered around the ruins and chatted to Josef and Ali about life in Turkey. They both had many stories to tell and knew the history of the area.

  Then Josef surprised us again. ‘What are your plans for tonight, girls?’ he asked.

  We quickly exchanged do-we-want-to-hang-out-with-these-guys-tonight looks. After a quick analysis, I answered, ‘No plans.’

  ‘How about we go to Kusadasi to the discos?’ said Josef, with Ali smiling beside him. We had no plans to go to Kusadasi, but after more looking at each other, we all answered, ‘Why not?’

  Back at the hostel we put on our least smelly clothes and some make-up. On the eighteen-kilometre drive to Kusadasi the Turkish pop was so loud that all we could do was communicate with facial expressions, usually just looking at each other and giggling or slightly rolling our eyes like we couldn’t believe what we were doing. The music felt like it was lifting the car from the road with every beat.

  Josef and Ali knew exactly where they were heading and we looped through the cobbled lanes of Kusadasi past ancient doorways that were gateways to modern Western culture: discos. We passed a few small restaurants and bars before reaching a tiny doorway guarded by two strong bouncers. Our guides obviously knew them and there were more high-fives among the four of them. We were introduced to the doorman and lowered our heads to pass through to the unknown. The club had a strong, musky underground smell to it and tunes that had followed us around Turkey were being squeezed out of an oversized stereo. Lots of eighties neon lights showed us the way to the bar where we ordered rakis all around. We didn’t leave the club until the doorman told us they were closing and we had to leave.

  ‘Let’s go carpet-rolling back in Selcuk’, Ali said to Josef. This was the first time we had heard Ali say anything other than agreeing with Josef, so this made his suggestion even more intriguing.

  ‘What on earth is carpet-rolling? Do you want us to help you roll carpets for delivery?’ asked Rachel.

  ‘No, no, no’, laughed Josef. ‘Let’s go back to the shop and we will show you. Don’t worry, it is all safe’, he reassured us. Anna, Rachel and I were definitely not ready to sneak back into the hostel just yet, so we agreed to the ‘carpet-rolling’, whatever that might be.

  We climbed into Josef’s car and laughed our way back to Selcuk. The streets were very quiet and only a few streetlights were lit. Back at the shop Josef switched on all the lights and the colours of the carpets jumped out at us like fireworks. Ali and Josef ran out to the back of the shop and returned with a pink bike helmet and a massive roll of bubble wrap. For some reason this sight didn’t make us nervous but just made us laugh even more. ‘Ok, who wants to roll in the carpet?’ asked Josef.

  ‘How about you guys show us how it is done?’ said Anna.

  ‘Okay, we need to set up a carpet block down near the bushes at the end of the hill’, Josef said as he began carrying carpets out of the shop and making a blockade at the end of the street. Next Josef wrapped Ali toe to neck in bubble wrap and then in two very long carpet runners. Then Josef helped Ali out the door and lowered him down onto the street, using his body as a support to stop him from rolling all the way down.

  ‘Are you ready?’ Josef asked Ali.

  ‘Please be careful, guys. Do you know what you’re doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Ready!’ said Ali, and with this Josef moved his body and Ali was rolling flat out down the hill towards the carpet barrier. Josef was jumping up and down and clapping his hands with excitement. Anna, Rachel and I just watched. Ali hit the carpet barrier after at least forty metres of rolling uncontrollably and we all ran down to see how he was. ‘Wooowee, that was great!’ he said.

  I could not believe it when I was being wrapped in bubble wrap and pretending to be fussy about which carpet I would be rolled in. Both Rachel and Anna thought I was crazy and had their cameras at the ready. For some reason, the fact that I had purchased travel insurance at the airport made me feel better about my decision.

  After I was wrapped, I could move only my ankles and feet, so it was very difficult to jump onto the street. I remember being amazed at how quiet the street was – especially as we were making so much noise and I was sure we were causing a disturbance. Anna and Rachel walked down to wait at the bottom of the hill beside the carpet barrier, and I lay face down on the road with Josef’s legs wedged up against me, waiting to be released.

  What was I doing?

  ‘Are you ready?’ Josef asked.

  ‘No but yes’, I answered.

  Josef moved his feet from under me and jumped out of the way. Suddenly I was rolling down a hill in Selcuk wrapped in a carpet. I couldn’t see a thing and I had no idea which direction I was heading in.

  The next thing I knew I hit the barrier really hard and threw up on myself and on the carpet. Anna, Rachel and Ali rushed over to help me out of my carpet cocoon, and then I started laughing and laughing. I was embarrassed about the vomit, but Ali assured me it had happened before and that I shouldn’t worry about it.

  We carried all the carpets up the hill back to the shop and had a relaxing apple tea. I offered to clean the carpet but Josef said that his mother looked after that type of thing and that everything was okay.

  Two weeks after I returned to London, a deliveryman with a huge cylindrical package turned up at my door. I signed for the delivery and read the note attached: ‘Just in case you want to carpet-roll in London.’ On the back of the note was written, ‘This is the carpet you vomited on. I have sent the other one to Oz. Love, Josef.’

  Now I am back in Australia with two carpets – and no room for either of them at the moment. Since that adventure in Turkey my experience with carpet-sellers has stretched from my local department store to Morocco, but no one has matched Josef in knowing how to sell carpets and a good time. Every time I look at those carpets rolled up against the wall, they make me smile. There must be something in that apple tea.

  A MATTER OF TRUST

  MICHELLE WITTON

  Michelle Witton is an Australian actor/writer, currently based in London. She studied law in Australia and at Cambridge University, where she wrote and acted with the Footlights comedy revue. A well-travelled backpacker, Michelle’s travel stories and satire have been published in TNT Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald and Backpacker Essentials. This is the first time her work has appeared in book form. This story is dedicated to the man who assured her, ‘It never hurts to kick your toe on the moon’ – her father, Bill Witton (1932–2004).

  My watchband, already old when I started travelling, had served me well in the three months I’d been on the road, but it finally chose the Italian town of Lucca in which to end its short, though eventful, life. Luckily, I’d planned to stay a while in Lucca, visiting my friend Elizabetta and tending to necessary chores such as mending my dog-eared guidebook and spending quality time with a washing machine. Now I added finding a new watchband to the list.

  I’d grown fond of my maroon leather watchband and assumed it wouldn’t be too difficult to find one similar in Lucca, as its narrow cobbled streets were lined with leather-goods stores. But after a few days, I’d seen more handbags than I could have ever believed existed – and nothing resembling a watchband. In the heat of my fourth afternoon I stopped for a chocolate gelato and collapsed in the shade cast by a nearby wall. It led to an alley, and craning forward I saw a few shop windows further down. I sauntered towards them for no other reason than sheer bloody-mindedness to look in every shop, if that’s what it took.

  The window of the first store was so dirty I could barely see in. Yet as I cupped my hand to the glass and peered in
through the windowpane, there it was – a tray of leather watchbands! A woman in her sixties with a kindly face and dark grey curly hair stood behind the counter. Her generous bosom extended over her waist and flowery blue apron.

  ‘Buon giorno, signora’, I beamed when I entered the shop.

  ‘Buon giorno’, she replied with a friendly smile.

  Buon giorno, spaghetti, per favore, pronto and pesto marked the edge of the known world for my Italian. If any transaction was going to take place from here on, it was going to have to rely on sign language. ‘Per favore, signora’, I said and pointed to the window. The shopkeeper walked to the window and hovered, uncertain about which of the items I wanted to buy. They varied fantastically – the tray of watchbands, children’s colouring books, a blender, a teddy bear. The shopkeeper bent over and reached for the blender. ‘Non, non, signora.’ She stopped and looked back at me, questioningly. I pointed at my wrist and fished my broken watchband from my jeans pocket. Her eyes lit up and she disappeared again into the window and returned with the tray of watchbands.

  She laid the tray on the glass shop counter between us. Almost immediately I spied a maroon band. Perfect! I pointed at it excitedly, ‘Grazie, signora!’ The shopkeeper picked up the tray and, her plump fingers having some difficulty, slowly detached the maroon band. I put my watch on the counter. The shopkeeper scooped it up, along with the new watchband, inspected both closely and began to try to fit the watchband to my watch. ‘Grazie, grazie, signora’, I said, hoping that she’d put down my watch and let me deal with the fitting later.

  ‘Non, non’, she replied and determinedly continued fiddling.

  This was my first chance to look at the store beyond the contents of its front window and it’s fair to say that for its sheer diversity of stock – and sheer disorganisation – I’d seen nothing like it before. It wasn’t a second-hand store – most things were still in their plastic wrapping – but the line it drew between convenience shop and junk store was very, very faint. There was a half-deflated paddling pool teetering precariously on the edge of a shelf, cascading over a row of large blond and blank-eyed baby dolls. Men’s suit coats hung over a pile of bicycle wheels. Under the front counter, a stack of children’s Ninja Turtle cartoon sticker-books were fanned out next to an expensive men’s pen.

  The shopkeeper stopped fiddling with the watchband and suddenly looked at me. ‘American?’

  ‘Non, signora – Australian.’

  ‘Aust-rali-en?’ She looked at me blankly.

  ‘Si, signora. Australian’, I smiled. It was 2000 and the Olympics had just opened in Sydney. I put my arms in front of me like paws and said, ‘Australia. Olympics, signora’, while jumping up and down like a kangaroo.

  ‘Australia. Si, si’, she laughed. She then said a sentence in which I caught only the words ‘familia’ and ‘Melbourne’. Melbourne has a large Italian community and it seemed she was telling me it included her family.

  ‘Mia chiama Michelle’, I said, pointing to myself.

  ‘Maria’, the shopkeeper smiled back. Shortly afterwards, defeated in her attempts to fit the watchband, Maria let out a resigned sign.

  ‘Quanto costa, signora?’ I asked.

  ‘Non’, she replied and the determined glint returned to her eye. She’d had an idea. Maria held up one of her hands, five fingers splayed.

  ‘Cinque minuti’, she said.

  ‘Five minutes?’ What on earth, I wondered, was going to happen in five minutes?

  Maria came from behind the shop counter, took me by the arm and led me outside to the front step. In the alley, against her shop’s whitewashed front wall, leaned a very rusty bike. ‘Cinque minuti’, she said again, and pointed at the bike. She walked a few steps towards the bike, pointed to it and to herself, then motioned away down the alley with one arm, while holding up my watch in her other hand.

  This pantomime was open to numerous interpretations, but one thing was clear: I had little or no say in what was about to happen. Maria was going to get on her bike and disappear down the alley for five minutes – and take my watch with her.

  ‘Grazie, signora, non, non’, I said, trying to dissuade Maria from her plan.

  ‘Non, non’, she laughed and took me back inside. She untied her apron and folded it on the counter. But if Maria was going somewhere for five minutes, what was I going to do in the meantime?

  ‘Mi scusa, signora?’ I pointed to Maria, pointed at the door and mimed locking the door. I pointed to myself and then to the alley. I assumed that Maria would lock her shop and I’d wait outside until she returned. If she returned.

  ‘Non, non’, she laughed. Well, I certainly didn’t want to be locked inside the shop!

  Maria beckoned me behind the counter. Perhaps she wanted to show me something? She pointed at the cash register, laid a motherly hand on my shoulder and waddled towards the door. I was so stunned that the realisation that Maria had given me her shop to look after didn’t hit me for a minute or two, until well after her bike had disappeared. So here I was, with Italian-language skills largely derived from a Pizza Hut menu, the newly appointed deputy manager of an Italian shop. Santa Maria! Supposing someone actually came in – a real customer – how was I meant to sell anything?

  During university I’d worked weekends in a department store. I looked at the cash register. This was at least a bit familiar to me. But the warm glow of familiarity waned when I realised that Maria’s cash register had been manufactured sometime in the nineteenth century and still had a lot in common with the abacus. Still, Maria would have locked the register, surely? She couldn’t expect me to sell anything. But no. I looked up and there, on top of the register, were the keys. And nestled on the edge of the shelf beneath it was – Maria’s purse.

  Okay, I was in charge, though it felt more like I was propelled back twenty-five years to the world of children’s dress-ups and playing ‘shops’. I smoothed my rumpled top, trying to look as efficiently salesperson-like as I could after living out of a backpack for three months. Casting my eyes over the store from my new vantage point behind the counter, I took a quick mental inventory of my stock. As I’d suspected, it consisted of basically, well, everything – including the kitchen sink. I frantically delved into the shallows of my Italian to rehearse potential ‘shopping dialogues’. It was hopeless, I didn’t know the words for any of my merchandise. There was a high probability that ‘Ninja Turtle’ was going to be ‘Ninja Turtle’ in any language, so at least I could sell the sticker books. I was going to have to really push the sticker books on anyone who walked through the door.

  Some minutes passed and, having rehearsed a few sales phrases, I began to quietly hope that I would get some customers. But the alley was empty. A cat lolled in the sun by the door, lazily licking its paws. Then there was the noise of feet on the doorstep and a couple walked in. They were well-dressed, middle-aged – and Italian. My heart was pounding. ‘Buon giorno signor, signora’, I smiled, and even found myself adding a little curtsey – which was really overdoing customer service for this neck of Tuscany.

  ‘Buon giorno’, the gentleman replied, taking a moment to unbutton his suit coat. His partner had seen something at the rear of the store that had caught her eye.

  ‘Giovanni!’ his partner beckoned him, and an animated conversation ensued about a dinner service or a crow bar, I couldn’t see well enough to tell which. The general gist of the conversation seemed to be that she wanted whatever it was – and he didn’t. Great! We were speeding into ‘shop-assistant-as-counsellor’ territory. I’d worked in interior decorating and seen it all before, one half of a couple wanting to paint the bathroom Honeydew Lemon, the other wanting Midnight Black – and neither giving ground. ‘Can you believe it!’ the woman would turn to me, waving a colour chart in fury. ‘He wants to paint the bathroom this! Can you talk some sense into him, because I’ve given up!’

  The couple’s animated conversation resulted in much waving of arms by both parties and a victory, it seemed, f
or the husband. The couple left my shop with a ‘Grazie, signora’, – without purchasing either the dinner service or the crow bar. Maria’s cinque minuti were seeming more like dieci minuti, but just as the couple left, Maria’s beaming face popped back through the door and in her outstretched hand was – my watch!

  ‘Grazie, signora!’ I said with relief, both at seeing my watch and at being able to resign from my duties as deputy store manager.

  I strapped my new maroon watchband around my wrist, paid Maria and, with many thanks and fond waves, ran to Elizabetta’s apartment.

  ‘Betta,’ I called, running in through the door, ‘the most amazing thing just happened!’

  Over coffee, I told my friend of my adventure. I was disappointed to find she thought it nothing exceptional.

  ‘But Betta, she let me look after her shop! She even left her purse there!’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she?’

  ‘But I was a total stranger! I could have taken her purse, the money in the cash register…’

  ‘Yes, but you’re not that kind of person.’

  ‘She couldn’t have known that. I could have taken off with the lot!’

  ‘But you didn’t, did you?’

  As far as Betta, or evidently Maria, was concerned, there was absolutely no reason why one wouldn’t trust a stranger to mind their shop. Regardless, I felt proud that Maria had trusted me. In London, such unquestioning trust seems to come not just from another culture, but from another time. Rarely do we trust completely even those we call our friends, let alone strangers. Maria’s watchband served me well until it too broke. Now I keep it in my box of mementoes to remind me of the time when I went looking for a watchband in Lucca and found something far more remarkable – absolute trust.

  NAKED IN OAXACA

  LAURA RESAU

  Laura Resau has lived and travelled extensively in Oaxaca, Mexico, and is currently working on a collection of stories about her experiences there. She teaches college anthropology and ESL (English as a Second Language) in Colorado, and her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous magazines, including Brain, Child, Cicada and Cricket. The temazcal adventure recounted in ‘Naked in Oaxaca’ inspired Laura’s Master’s thesis in cultural anthropology. Her young adult novel set in Oaxaca, tentatively entitled What the Moon Saw, will be published by Delacorte Press in 2006.