by Rosie Thomas
I crawled inside the shaky tent and into my sleeping bag, ignoring the layers of dirt that still clung to me. After a little while Phil followed suit. We lay in the dark and talked about the time we had lost, and promised each other that we would work our way back up the order again. Even though he was two feet away, Phil still seemed to radiate warmth. I stopped shivering. The regular rhythm of his breathing was soothing and I disengaged my mind from worry about what would happen tomorrow either inside the envelope of my body or outside it. I drifted into sleep, listening to the faint kiss of rain or sleet or snow on the nylon above my head.
Phil had left his boots, the only footwear he had with him, in the porch of the tent. I had pitched it so badly askew that the flap gaped open and in the morning they were full of snow.
Chapter Eight
'How do you feel?'
'Okay, thanks.'
There was snow on the ground as well as in Phil's boots, and icy water inside the tent because the flysheet had been touching the inner. It wasn't much of a hardship to get up and immediately get back in the car. The day's programme, Tuotuoheyan camp to Nagqu, inside Tibet proper, was 433 kilometres of steady climbing over the highest road in the world.
'I hope you have a better day today,' John Vipond said kindly at the control.
In the middle of the morning we reached the top of the Tanggu La pass, at 5,180 m or nearly 17,000 feet, and the highest rally time control point ever established. The car and Phil romped along, but I didn't experience the powerful rush of physical exuberance that I had enjoyed on the walk to Everest. Instead the loss of blood was beginning to make me feel hallucinatory, incorporeal, as if I might slip sideways out of myself or catch sight of the ground through the semi-transparent smudge of my foot.
The Frontera with the chequered flag was drawn up at the side of the road, with a folding table in front of it and two well-muffled marshals. When I got out of the car to run across to them, altitude made my breath snag in my chest. They gave my road book a special stamp – 'Roof of the World'. Beyond the control we stopped again to take photographs of the stupa at the highest point. It was swathed with tattered ribbons and the brave reds and blues and yellows of prayer flags. There were undulating brown-grey hills rising on either side to white peaks in the distance, and a wide sky full of towering clouds. The thin air was sweet and pure. The narrow dirt road bisecting this remote territory looked like an irrelevance rather than our lifeline.
'You've forgotten something,' a loud voice said. It was Mike Summerfield who had drawn up behind us in one of the support cars.
Phil and I glanced anxiously at each other. Our luggage? John Vipond's birthday? Some crucial bit of rally-behaviour that would lose us points? It turned out to be the latter. We had stopped the car but hadn't left the red OK sign prominently displayed.
'I want to see that OK every time you stop.' Mike wagged his finger at me. 'You, especially.'
All the organisers must have been warned about my problem, and now they were watching me in the expectation that I might keel over at any minute. It was embarrassing, but also in a way reassuring. It meant we were still on the rally. I just hoped that they hadn't shared the details of my malfunction with RO.
'I'm fine. I love high places,' I said brightly to Mike. In fact I was very uncomfortable. Sometimes the bleeding would stop, just to trick me into relaxing, and then there would be a sudden engulfing flood. I would have to sit still and wait until I could creep away to inspect the damage in private, which wasn't easy in a bare landscape dotted with flying rally cars where a coffee-table sized rock at the side of the road was regarded as adequate shelter for personal matters. I was beginning to feel like a pariah. Soon I would have to start ringing a bell and intoning 'Unclean . . .'
It was a long, demanding day. I did that afternoon's driving, another 235 km across windswept pastureland where the only living things visible in the landscape were huge herds of yak and sheep, and our strung-out chain of muddy, battered, indomitable old cars.
We reached another camp site, this time in the crooked arm of a wide river. We made a huddle of tents with JD and Dan and Melissa and Colin, and brewed up tea and more noodles. Colin felt the cold particularly acutely, and tried to persuade me to sell him the Rebecca Stephens sleeping bag, offering me even more than I had originally paid for it. He was out of luck – I wouldn't have traded it for the Porsche itself.
Phil fondly watched Melissa swinging back from the river with washing-up water.
'Here she comes. Porsche Spice.'
He could be very funny and sometimes quite witty. He was extremely popular with everyone who came into contact with him, competitors and support crews alike, and he responded to them all with the same slightly indiscriminate and arms-length cheery banter, just as he did with me.
The only person he reacted to slightly differently was Dan. They were friendly on the surface, and probably at the most fundamental level too, but the middle level was turbulent with tricky currents. Dan had been to public school and Oxford, and he had an easy, graceful manner through which he still managed to project the impression that he was rather sensitive and interesting. Phil thought, not altogether accurately, that Dan stood for a whole series of values that were the opposite of his own. In fact their backgrounds probably weren't that different – Phil had deliberately chosen to adopt a rough-diamond persona for himself. He had gone prole, as Melissa put it.
Dan was a management consultant, but he had read engineering. He knew a lot about cars in general and had built his Amazon for this rally, so he had more expertise than Phil in certain areas, although Phil also knew some things that Dan didn't. They needed one another's help on most days, and Team Amazon was a team more than just in name, but there was also a noticeable and occasionally uncomfortable rivalry between them. They were very competitive with each other – I knew how much Phil minded that we had now dropped so far behind our teammates in the running order. This situation wasn't improved by the emerging fact that every single one of the eligible young women on the road, including Sarah and Melissa and the two sharp American girls from the film crew, was attracted to Dan. He made no effort to do it, and claimed total loyalty to his girlfriend back in London, but he just flickered his dimple and they came running.
JD was apparently much more straightforward. He was ever-smiling, always laid back and good humoured and ready to joke, and just a little unvarying. He was only in his late twenties, and with his cropped hair and his earring – even though I had now spent long days getting to know him – he still seemed to me exactly like one of Charlie's mates from Camden Town or Bagley's club.
I liked watching all the social and sexual jockeying amongst the twenty- and thirty-somethings. Their constant company made me feel old, but also relieved that I was done with the chase. And they were so entertaining to be with, so funny and relaxed, that I wanted to go on being around them. Apart from raffish David Arrigo and a couple of others, I didn't make as many friends as I should have done amongst the pleasant, fiftyish Brit couples and pairs of men driving prized cars who would have made more logical companions for a middle-aged lady novelist. Our gang, with Chris and Howard and Carolyn, and Greg and the paramedics and Trev and Jingers, was already formed. It was a bit like being in with the bad lot at school: we were never going to win any form prizes (except perhaps for Adam and Jon) but we were having plenty of laughs.
At Nagqu I had dinner in the mess-tent with Adam and Jon, and Bill Ainscough from the 1929 Chrysler. I heard that Prince Idris had had an altitude-induced blackout at the wheel, and had run Humpty-Dumpty into the ditch and broken a shock-absorber. Herman the German and the La France had pulled out because Herman was ill. Numbers of other people were suffering the effects of altitude and were besieging the medics for hits of oxygen. RO was badly affected; he had got his Peugeot stuck so deep into the mud that he had needed a tow from a police jeep. Plenty of competitors' cars were having difficulties too, from a combination of the altitude, the terrible roads and
the 70-octane fuel. Time penalties were building up, although a full update on the order wouldn't be available before Lhasa. With the gas-lamps flaring and the hot, copious food served by the Nepali camp crew, and all this gossip and laughter, it was better than any London dinner party.
Afterwards I took the car to join the queue for fuel from the bowser. Tibetan families had materialised out of the darkness to stare silently at us. Men and women alike had their hair braided with brilliant silks and decorated with yak-bone ornaments, and they wore yakskin coats and boots. Tiny children with mucus-caked faces stared from their arms or the shelter of their skirts. The families walked impassively in and out of the lines of rare and beautiful cars and between the latest four-season tents stuffed with food and expensive warm clothing. From time to time their dark faces were illuminated by the swinging beams of passing head-torches, or the lights of a car pulling away from refuelling.
The sky was brilliant with stars. The frosty air rang with laughter from the mess tents, and the opulent revving of a Bentley or a Buick. When they saw any of us looking at them the Tibetans raised their bunched fingers and tapped their mouths, to show us that they were hungry.
It was a painful juxtaposition. There was an imperviousness about this collective dash across the world because the blinkers of money and the demands of competition too often closed off our perspectives. It wasn't that most of us didn't feel sympathy for the Tibetans, or recognise our own good fortune. It was just that there wasn't time. There was never time to look properly, or reflect, or to linger and learn more.
At last, we were on the home run to Lhasa. After breakfast at Nagqu I met curly Rick the paramedic making a tour of the camp.
'I'm just checking up to make sure everyone's okay this morning. How are you, Rosie?'
I stretched him a wide smile. 'I'm absolutely fine.'
In fact I thought I could just about make it to Lhasa and the medicine.
It was an easier day's driving than the last two. In the morning we climbed up and over another pass, the Kyogche La, at 4,900 metres, and in the afternoon we began the descent into a broad river valley. The scenery changed from the flat, windswept moonscape of the high plateau to a more fertile and intimate landscape, with cornfields and vegetable crops lining the road, and numerous little whitewashed settlements. The backdrop of high silver mountains provided a startling contrast in scale to this domestic picture. We passed a monk at the side of the road. He stood up, walked a step and then sank to his hands and knees to touch his forehead to the ground, then stood again and walked another step before prostrating himself once more. His hands were protected with pads of cloth. He was on the way to Lhasa.
Phil wouldn't stop to take any photographs of the scenery or the people that afternoon.
'I want to get you to Lhasa as quickly as possible,' he said, and this glimpse of his concern touched me.
The day's last time control was just outside Lhasa and for the second day running we incurred no time penalties. It seemed reasonable to hope that as other crews were penalised we might have begun to creep upwards again from our present low point of sixtieth place.
Ever since I had first imagined how the rally might be, driving down from the plateau into Lhasa had been the experience that I had fixed on to be the most exotic and thrilling, the quintessence of the trip. We sat forward in our seats now, waiting for it and peering ahead for the first glimpse of the city. The first sign was a slight increase in traffic: there were a few farm wagons, bicycles, a couple of buses, even one or two private cars. The road widened and the surface improved dramatically, and the settlements came closer and closer together until they ran into one thin line. A few people gathered at the sides of the road to watch us go by, almost the first spectators we had drawn since Golmud. The road became a broad avenue, lined with trees. The verges were planted with flowers, cosmos and marigolds, the colours dimmed by a veil of dust. Whitewashed village houses gave way to the now-familiar concrete blocks of Chinese apartments, just like in Lanzhou or Golmud. In the bright sunshine it felt suddenly more as if we were entering some medium-sized eastern Mediterranean town instead of the capital of Tibet.
Then Phil leant forward. 'There it is.' He pressed his finger to the windscreen and I followed the direction he was pointing in. The Potala Palace reared up, a massive grey-white monolith against the blue sky. A second later it had disappeared again behind another dun-coloured concrete block.
The route notes brought us neatly to our destination: the Holiday Inn, Lhasa. It was modern, concrete, featureless except for a row of flagpoles lining the entrance. Sighing with relief I switched off the Terratrip and the upper and lower figures faded into blankness. Every night the zeroing beep of the trip stalked my dreams. But we were here now. All would be well.
I almost ran into the lobby and up to the reception desk. There were piles of messages and faxes waiting for arriving rally crews, but none for me. In disbelief I made the receptionist check again. Phil went to find the manager and asked him to look for my package too, but there was nothing to be found.
Fighting the fear that I was going to collapse, I went upstairs and managed to put a call through to Caradoc in London. He was even more distraught than I was. He explained that he had tried everything and everyone, including the Chinese Embassy and the Foreign Office, but it had turned out to be politically and logistically impossible to get a delivery of any kind couriered into Lhasa, even a package containing urgently needed medicines. The nearest point he could send it to was Kathmandu, and Kathmandu was five nights distant from here on the other side of the Himalayas.
I was right back to where I had been in Golmud, faced with the decision of whether to risk everything and drive on, or to head for the airport and home. This was the worst moment of the trip so far.
I went to find Phil to tell him what had happened. He put a consoling and concerned face on it, but I knew how tiresome all of this must be for him. I could imagine how he must be wishing to have some robust bloke like Dan or DJ for a partner instead of me. He must feel that he was obliged to look after me instead of romping around with the rest of the kids his age. I felt ashamed and inadequate and oddly floppy, and at the same time angry with fate and my body for playing such a cruel trick on us. Phil's invariable advice was never to touch alcohol in high places, but now he took me to the hotel bar for a beer and I drank it, thinking to hell with the altitude, I couldn't feel any worse than I did already. Our table was at the side of a corridor down which arriving crews were heading for their rooms and hot showers. Phil greeted them all and the atmosphere of happy relief and anticipation was miserably at odds with the way I felt.
'Sorry,' I said ungraciously to Phil.
'Look, we'll sort something out. There must be a western doctor in Lhasa somewhere. I'll find one and get you to see him.'
I was beginning to know him better. He was always at his best when there was a task to be done or a problem to be solved, and reticent when it came to emotional exchanges. Whenever I wanted a friendly hug and some honest affectionate talk, the gap between us – whether age, or gender, or just intuition – always seemed at its widest.
Obviously I couldn't ask Greg for help, or hint to him that Maria's pills weren't strong enough to stop the bleeding, let alone indicate that the medicine hadn't arrived in Lhasa after all. He and the marshals would bump me off the rally again faster than I could say Tampax. Instead Phil did as he said he would: from the helpful English-speaking receptionists he discovered that there was a Chinese doctor attached to the hotel, and that he was even at that moment holding his clinic in the building. Phil gave me the room number.
'Do you want me to come with you?' he asked, his face tightening up in nervous anticipation of what that might involve.
'No. I'll be fine.'
I wandered down the corridors and found the room. The door was opened by a very small man in a white coat. Inside was an ordinary bedroom, with a doctor's big black bag open in front of the dressing-table mirror. On the
bed, very decoratively arranged, was a pretty girl in a tight cheongsam. I started to back out, mumbling apologies and twisting round to check the room number, but the man took my arm and indicated that I was to sit down. It was plain that he didn't speak or understand a syllable of English.
I tried to describe what was wrong, and got nowhere. I took out the strip of Maria's pills, of which there were now only two left, and showed it to him. I made what I hoped were signs plainly indicating 'give me plenty more of these and make them very, very strong medicine'. His face cleared with slightly worrying rapidity and he smiled broadly. Out of his bag he took an ordinary brown envelope, and a twist of crinkly white paper – the kind that quarter-pounds of boiled sweets were measured into in exchange for pocket money in the 1950s, ten years at least before Phil and the rest of them saw the light of day. Out of the envelope and into the paper twist the doctor counted thirty-six tiny, powdery white pills. He handed them to me, nodding encouragement. I took two of them between thumb and forefinger and popped them into my mouth with a questioning tilt of the head. The nodding speeded up.
Oh well, I thought, and swallowed. Probably not arsenic or Ecstasy. Most likely, baking powder.
The doctor drew his pad towards him and in a firm clear script wrote $90. I paid him, cash. The girl on the bed – nurse, chaperone – drew herself into a seductive S-shape as I left.
I had dinner and went to bed early. Phil and the young things headed out for a bar and then a night-club for some dancing. I spent most of the late evening fielding telephone calls from home. Phil's girlfriend Philippa was very anxious to speak to him; Tony Barrett rang for news of the car and Phil. I told him about the wrongly-sited ignition coil and the chain of disasters that had followed on from the overheating.
'Sorry about that,' he said, sounding nothing of the kind.
Caradoc called again. In some respects he and Phil were oddly similar – certainly Caradoc was also more comfortable when there was a problem, like the withheld visa, to be worried at and worked through. To be powerless was his worst case, and his inability to get my medicine into Tibet had upset him deeply. He was seriously anxious about me now, and the distance and danger and our inability to touch or help each other chafed us badly. He wanted me to come home safely, but he didn't want me to pull out of the rally. I wanted to go on at all costs, but I wanted to be with him because I felt weak and I missed him so much. It wasn't a comfortable call for either of us. When I spoke in turn to Charlie and Flora I tried to keep the stress out of my voice. Charlie told me how Arsenal were continuing their season, and Flora was full of the news that Madonna might be buying a London house from the parents of a friend of hers.