Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

  After the previous day's narrow escape with the gearbox we drove more steadily, but still made all the time controls with the greatest of ease. However, after a couple of conversations with more knowing crews I learned that the present relaxed pace would soon quicken.

  'Just you wait,' the Brodericks from the Anglia estate warned. Their car was called Arnie the Eco-Flow Anglia, which for a leaded-fuel 1967 car driving flat out (as Nigel Broderick always did) half-way around the world, might have seemed a slight contradiction in terms.

  Even now, when we had plenty of time in hand, Phil didn't like stopping, so there was barely an interval allowed for a pee and certainly no leisurely picnic lunch. He was always mindful that we might break down in the next half-hour, and wanted to keep as much spare time in hand as possible. The only breaks we had were the compulsory waits at time controls.

  Outside Lanzhou we were pulled off the road for refuelling and to wait for the police to run us in convoy into town. While Phil played frisbee on a grassy bank with JD and Dan and Simon Catt from the Mk 1 Cortina, I popped Phil's and my favourite Beautiful South tape into the player and had an impromptu aerobics session with Angela, and Adèle Cohen from the ailing Stutz.

  You have to wash the car, take the kiddies to the park – don't marry her . . . we sang, as we did our twists and stretches.

  The police whistles blew and the convoy suddenly shifted forward. Phil hopped into the driver's seat and turned the ignition on. Nothing. Dead as a doorknob. It wouldn't even respond to our efforts to bump start it. Doing the face thing, Phil threw up the bonnet and spotted the problem immediately. By playing the tape without running the engine, I had boiled the coil.

  We were getting a bit low on coils now. He replaced the boiled one with the only slightly gooey firework he had taken out in West Baotou and the car started up immediately. We joined the end of the convoy heading for the hotel. He was quite kind to me about it.

  With the prospect of a day off to come, everyone perked up that evening in Lanzhou. I had dinner with Carolyn who introduced me to her friends Howard Belim and Chris Taylor. They looked to be round about my age, even.

  ''68 Chevvy Camarov,' Chris and Howard said, in answer to the inevitable question. 'There aren't all that many cars that are big enough, you see.'

  I did see. They were both at least six and a half feet tall.

  Melissa Ong came to join us. Melissa was only in her early twenties but she was so spontaneous and affectionate that she had made friends right across all the rally age-groups. Her thick, glossy black hair was cut short like a schoolboy's at the nape of her neck with a long wedge left slanting across her eyes. Her skin was the colour of milk chocolate. Melissa was driving her own '63 Porsche 356SC coupé with her godfather, Colin Syn.

  After dinner we all went out to a bar in the town. We were joined by Phil Colley and Mick O'Malley, and RO's assistant, Sarah Catt. Sarah's father and brother, John and Simon, were serious rallyists who were driving the '64 Cortina. She was a rounded, pink-complexioned blonde who reminded me of a glass dish of strawberry ice-cream. She had one of those personalities that recruitment ads for ad-agency receptionists used to describe as 'bubbly'.

  Lanzhou lies in the Yellow River valley. Once the gateway to the Chinese Empire from the western approaches, it was a staging post on the route from Turkestan and Europe, and the eastern limit of the Muslim world. Now it is a big, industrial city, rapidly moving into the consumer era. The chosen bar featured karaoke, blue laser-lighting, tall and hideously uncomfortable metal stools grouped in booths, and deafening music. I thought it was more like Tokyo than Inner Mongolia.

  We ordered drinks. Eagerly ricocheting between Melissa and Sarah, Phil looked as happy as a dog with two strawberry choc-ices. I sat in a corner as far away from the music as possible and talked to Chris Taylor. He was so tall that he seemed to sit with his legs hooked at least twice around his stool. We discussed the rally, and then my anxieties about the potential dangers ahead of us. Chris told me about a friend of his who had recently died, in tragic circumstances. Ever since it happened, he said, he had felt that there was nothing in life to be fearful about. There was no point in worrying about anything; life was a matter to be thankful for and relaxed about and one might as well try to be happy.

  I told him that my experience was just the opposite. Tragedy made people tense and fearful, poised for the next blow because they knew with exactly what random viciousness the last one had fallen.

  The expression on Chris's pleasant, rounded, faintly lugubrious face didn't change. He reminded me, I suddenly realised, of Eeyore. Eeyore with a pink sun-flush from several days driving in the open Camaro.

  'Not my perception,' Chris said mildly. I envied him his optimistic disposition.

  This was the first conversation I had had about anything that mattered or touched me, since reaching China. I was very grateful for it – it made me feel that I wasn't, after all, entirely adrift in a miniature universe in which nobody cared for anything but carburettors and achieving the minimum number of penalty points. It was the kind of connection I had imagined before we set out.

  At last, driven out by the music, we moved on to another bar, this one just a couple of tables outside a shop in an alleyway. As soon as we sat down a crowd of Chinese gathered, perhaps fifty or sixty of them, to stand five deep around us. They wanted to look, and talk, and they were very cheerful and friendly. 'You my friend,' they kept saying, shaking our hands. 'We all friends, all people.'

  International amiability and equality was a seductive idea, here in Lanzhou, where the people all looked to be reasonably well-dressed and well-fed, and eager for the delights of karaoke and western fashions and whisky. It was less easy to imagine what life might have been like in some of the villages we had driven through today, and even more so a few miles down one of the turnings off the main roads that our police escorts kept so assiduously guarded. Translator Phil Colley told me that there are estimated to be somewhere between twenty and fifty million people in labour camps in China. Back on the road, on the way to Lanzhou, I remembered how we had driven through a cleft between two sandy hills, and had suddenly come upon a stretch of railway line. There was a work gang in action on the line, perhaps a hundred people pressed together, swinging their picks in rhythm with the overseers' whistles. It was like a scene from a film set in the American Deep South of a hundred years ago.

  At midnight I left the party in the alleyway bar and walked back to the hotel. The main street was deserted, with the neon advertisements flashing their garish come-ons to nobody. It felt completely safe to be walking alone.

  I spent the rest day in the hotel room, working and writing up my diaries and occasionally stopping to stare out of the twentieth-floor window. On my side of the glass was the complete familiarity of conference-hotel blandness, with table lamps and a mini-bar and padded headboards to the beds, and a marble bathroom with shower caps and a shoeshine kit, and on the other side there was the alien world of China. I could see the cocoa-brown low-rise city spreading to a ring of steep-sided mountains in the middle distance. The buildings were mostly concrete apartment blocks, six storeys high, with the occasional randomly-placed high-rise tower. Between the blocks there were a very few dusty trees, some shanty buildings, much litter and rubble and twists of rusting metal.

  If I looked straight down I could see the rally cars parked in the lee of the hotel. Phil was there working on the Amazon, and most of the other cars were in various stages of dismemberment. I could see Dan and JD in their overalls, and Geoff and Jennie Dorey working on their Morris Minor, and Dave Bull's big Rover P5, and the silver DB6. We had been warned by the organisers that we were almost all seriously overloaded and were risking not making it up to Tibet and over the Himalayas. As a shining example, the two American women who were driving a Hillman Hunter (the very one RO had wanted me and Phil to buy) were quoted to us as sharing one tube of toothpaste and one toothbrush, to save weight. When they reached the mountains they were plan
ning to jettison even those.

  'Wouldn't touch 'em even with yours,' Phil and JD and Dan cruelly chortled to each other.

  I went to see the rally MO at his daily clinic. It was time to do something about my own mechanical failure.

  Greg Williams was an accident and trauma specialist, who was also a climber and therefore knew about mountain sickness. He had done some obs. and gyn., he assured me, but I didn't get the impression that women's medicine was exactly a major interest of his.

  'Are you carrying any progesterone, Greg?' I asked. I knew they had oxygen, trauma gear, Diamox and Immodium in vast quantities, and two body bags.

  He blinked at me through his round glasses, as though I had asked for frankincense or myrrh.

  'No, I'm afraid not. What's the problem?'

  I told him that I had been bleeding, way off schedule, ever since Beijing. In the last two days the blood loss had become worryingly heavy. Progesterone would probably slow or stop the flow.

  Greg thought for a moment and then advised me to talk to the other women competitors. For reasons connected with the effects of altitude, those taking the pill had been advised to switch to the progesterone-only version. I might well be able to borrow some from one of them, and then get my own medication couriered out to Lhasa.

  'Thanks. I'll try that,' I said. Greg's phone rang and he excused himself to pick it up. A torrent of heavily-accented Germanic English poured out of the earpiece. Greg listened, anxiously frowning.

  'I see . . . I see . . . mmm. Oh dear . . . Come up to my clinic now and I'll take a look . . . no . . . no, I'm sorry . . . no, I can't visit you in your room . . . Yes, I know it's a personal matter. I'm a doctor . . . No, I'm running a surgery, I can't leave it to come to your room . . . No, paying me won't make any difference . . . I'm sorry . . . it isn't a question of how much money . . . No. No, I'm very sorry, I just can't do that.'

  He scratched at his crew-cut and worriedly pushed his specs back to the bridge of his nose. He looked like a hedgehog.

  The voice on the end of the line suddenly changed in timbre. I could hear cackles of laughter.

  'Fuck you, Mark,' Greg said. 'I owe you one.'

  He replaced the receiver. Mark Thake was his roommate, a shaven-headed army paramedic who was part of the medical team.

  'He got me there,' Greg said ruefully. 'Pretending to be a German with a boil on his penis.'

  I thanked him for his help and went down to the car park to see what Phil was up to.

  He was fairly pleased with himself. Colin Syn had been shopping and had bought us two new heavy-duty Chinese ignition coils, which were apparently much better whilst still costing much less than the Halfords ones. There was no more leaking from the gearbox, and he had had the rally mechanics over to monitor the back axle clunk. Trev and Jingers were still with him, murmuring over the car like two mother cats with a well-licked kitten. Phil introduced us and we shook hands. Trev was a robustly friendly Brummie with tattoos and a wide smile that revealed a gold tooth. Apparently the support crews all called him Dad. Jingers was much younger, antipodean, always in shorts and one of those wide-brimmed Aussie hats. I liked them instantly. Phil had wisely made firm friends with both of them.

  'She's good,' Phil said happily. 'No major problems. Not like some people.'

  He nodded at the scenes of carnage in the car park. There were car parts and discarded spares and bits of engine as far as the eye could see.

  'All we've got to decide about is the rear protection plate.'

  We had two specially-made and hugely strong steel plates protecting the underside of the car from protruding boulders and flying rocks. The only real function of the back one was to protect the lower, supplementary petrol tank. The question now was whether or not to jettison this second plate, which weighed approximately the same as me and therefore added up to quite a lot of toothbrushes, not to mention copies of Vogue. If the tank did get cracked we were carrying sealant, and could make sure always to have a jerrycan of fuel aboard in the unlucky event of the main tank being empty at the same time. If the worst happened and the tank got holed beyond repair, we would still have a range of almost five hundred kilometres on the main one.

  Off with it, we agreed. Phil undid it and left the massive thing leaning against the fence along with the discards from other crews – spare wheels, differentials, back axles. The rally was stripping itself down, ready for the high mountains.

  I went back to the room to telephone my London gynaecologist for advice. The hospital told me he was operating, but agreed to put me through to the theatres. From the other side of the world I could hear nurses' shoes squeaking on lino floors as they hurried round in search of him.

  'This lady is calling from Inner Mongolia,' I heard a voice say.

  When he came on the line I explained the problem. I could imagine his reassuring presence, doubly so in his theatre scrub suit. Everything would be all right now.

  There was a second or two of windy transatlantic quiet, and then my doctor said, 'I think you should come home.'

  'What?'

  'Peri-menopausal bleeding can be serious. Without examining you I can't tell exactly what's causing it and if you do have a bad bleed out there, somewhere inaccessible, without proper medical cover, it could even be fatal.' This was the gist of what he told me, very gently but firmly. 'I think you should get yourself back to Beijing as quickly as possible, and then on the first flight to Heathrow.'

  I blinked out at the vista of cocoa-coloured concrete and dirt-thickened air, trying to make sense of what he was saying. He was advising me to pull out of the rally and creep back home.

  'I can't do that. I really can't. I want to go on.'

  I couldn't let Phil down, for a start, or Tony and the boys at the garage, or any of the other people who had encouraged us and helped us to get this far. Not because of some shaming peri-menopausal bleeding I couldn't, anyway, not a mere four days into China. And of course my doctor was going to advocate the safest course – he could hardly give me a blithe go-ahead to drive a couple of days beyond helicopter rescue range and then ascend to 17,000 feet.

  It was almost funny, I thought, that I had considered every possible contingency and emergency that might arise except the breakdown of my own health. I had done all that weight-training and running and boxing, and I was fitter than I had ever been in my life, and now I was being told that I was taking an unacceptable risk just by doing what I had been preparing for for more than eight months. I felt angry that this physical failure should happen now, of all times, and also stricken with a cringing sense of inevitability, that this was just my luck.

  'I'm definitely going on,' I said harshly.

  'Are you sure?'

  'Certain,' I lied.

  'You don't want to hear me say this, but your children still need you.'

  'I know. I'll be okay. Will you write me a prescription for what I need and give it to my husband, so he can get the medicine couriered out to Lhasa for me?'

  'Of course. I wish you weren't doing it, but good luck.'

  After that I talked to Caradoc.

  'What do you think I should do?'

  He answered immediately. 'I don't want you to give up unless you feel you have to. I know how miserable you'll be if you have to fly home.'

  He was generous. It would have been much easier for him, of course, to insist on the truth, that he and the children needed me, and that I was to take no physical risks whatsoever. But he hadn't questioned my determination to do the rally in the first place, and he went on supporting my involvement as he had done from the first mention of it. I had the doubts and the failures of confidence, and Caradoc reassured and encouraged me. If he did have a selfish consideration, it was probably preferring not to have to live with my disappointment for as long as it would take me to get over it.

  'Let's talk about what we can do,' he suggested.

  We went carefully through the practicalities of my situation, looking at the risks as clear-sightedly a
s we could. I was strong, and the bleeding might stop tomorrow. I had come this far, and it wasn't so much further to Lhasa. From Lhasa onwards I would have the medication, and once I reached Kathmandu I would be moving closer all the time to home and to civilisation.

  I talked and listened, and remembered all the other serious joint decisions we had made over the years.

  In the end we agreed that it was right for me to go on. Or, at least, that it would be wrong for me to give up.

  The next place where we would be able to communicate with one another was Lhasa, four remote nights and five days' driving from Lanzhou. Caradoc promised once more that he would send out the progesterone and iron pills that I needed, and after that there wasn't much else to say. It was difficult to hang up and break the connection. I found myself gripping the receiver so tightly that my fingers went white, as if the force would bring him closer.

  It was time for another Chinese buffet dinner. Fortified by a day's work on their cars and by brave decisions about jettisoning unnecessary weight, crews descended on the vats of unidentifiable meat and seething dishes of greens. I decided that I had better at least eat as much as I could get down, and loaded my plate with what appeared the nearest equivalents to liver and spinach. Dave Bull was stricken with traveller's gut and turned queasily away from my food mountain. He prodded at a tiny bowl of boiled rice and wondered how many minutes would elapse before he saw it again.

  From Lanzhou to our first campsite at Koko Nor we drove 475 kilometres from another 6.41 a.m. start. The road snaked from left to right and back again across the Yellow River, and led us into Xining.

  As Phil drove and I prodded the measuring beeps out of the Terratrip, I explained to him about the bleeding. I'd come to the conclusion that I'd have to tell him, in case a real emergency did overtake me, but I had been dreading the conversation. I felt embarrassed, and also ashamed of being the one to jeopardise our chances with some tiresome women's complaint.