Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

  'Just think, Madonna will be swimming in the same pool as I swam in.'

  'Mmm. Do you think she'll cut down those palm trees they planted along the drive?'

  We agreed that it would be a shame if she did because they lent such a pleasantly exotic touch to Hampstead Garden Suburb.

  Phil crashed into the room at 2.30.

  'Mmmmhhhhhhh. Night.'

  'Night.'

  The bright light of the morning didn't bring a lightening of mood. Rally Syndrome had thrown a really big dip at me, and Dr Ninety-dollar's pills definitely weren't working. I ordered tea and toast from room service and sat in bed with the tray on my knees watching Phil struggling back to consciousness. When he was awake enough to prop himself up I handed him a cup of tea. He looked about as fed up as I felt. When he saw that I wasn't going to get up and make myself scarce according to custom, he rolled out of bed in his usual semi-dressed state and prepared to pull on the rest of his clothes.

  I was used to living with Caradoc, who knew me so well. Ill or not, lonely or otherwise, I tried to remind myself that in Phil's eyes I was an older woman, established and successful and capable, with no reason to crave his or anyone else's affection or reassurance in a hotel bedroom in Tibet.

  'Okay?'

  'I'm fine. Thanks,' I sniffed. 'How are you?'

  'Got a bit of a hangover, actually.'

  He went into the bathroom and briskly locked the door.

  It was a day off from rallying for all of us. We went sightseeing in a series of taxis, with Melissa and Carolyn and all the others, to the Potala Palace. Phil got in a different taxi from me but otherwise he was just as cheery as he always was.

  The palace was an extraordinary sight. It was a series of vast grey-white blocks crowned with dark-red pagoda roofs and slotted with hundreds of tiny rectangular windows. It wasn't beautiful, but it was beyond spectacular. Its massive size, rearing on a great outcrop over the flat river basin and facing over to the ring of mountains that circled the plain, demanded that visitors tipped their heads back to take in the summit. The air was thin enough even at the base of it, and the contemplation of this further great height truly did take my breath away. From the very top, just discernible against the blue sky, we saw that the Chinese flag was now flying.

  We began the long climb up the steps to the side of the palace. I very quickly felt breathless and weak-kneed. It was an effort to make each upward step, and remembering how omnipotent I had felt on the road to Everest only underlined my present feebleness. I plodded on, pretending to dawdle to admire the view when I was really forced to a standstill by exhaustion and lack of oxygen. Dan and JD and Phil waited for me under the great gates at the top, and we passed into the courtyard of the palace together. The first thing I noticed was the fringes of pleated fabric fixed like pelmets over the windows. The wind lifted them and played underneath so the effect was like endlessly rippling waves. The second was the numbers of Chinese police and soldiers there were – not apparently doing anything, except standing and watching us.

  We climbed the steps and walked through the great dark-red doors. Apart from the guards there was almost no one around; a couple of Tibetans sloped unceremoniously across the courtyard and a pair of young monks in their red and saffron robes strolled past us. It couldn't have been more different from a western cathedral or palace of similar importance, flooded as they all are with sightseers and tour buses. Inside, as we drifted through the great silent warren of deserted interconnecting rooms, I felt like an invader. The light was dim, pierced with an occasional oblique shaft of light from a high window. There were pillars of gold and huge Buddhas and intricate thangka paintings on the walls. Every surface was painted in iridescent colours, viridian and magenta and saffron, crimson and sapphire and gold. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of incense.

  In front of the central, hugely ornate stupa a single monk was chanting. Lounging and watching him were four Chinese guards. Remembering the flag flying at the highest point of this great edifice, I knew that it was superfluous to feel like an invader because the invasion had already taken place. The Chinese weren't the first, either. The British, under Colonel Francis Younghusband, had achieved that distinction in 1904.

  We climbed wooden stairs and passed through wooden galleries to reach the palace roof. Below us was a wide, tree-lined square, almost deserted except for a few tiny criss-crossing cyclists. Lhasa stretched beyond it, the old city and the Jhokang Temple compressed by blocky, modern Chinese outskirts, and beyond that the flat river plain was encircled by high, cold, blue-grey mountains.

  Phil spent the afternoon in the hotel car-park, working on the car on advice from Trev who showed him how to change the needles and lean the mixture down even further to cope with the reduced air-pressure over the Himalayas and across in front of Everest. Otherwise, Trev said to our complete delight, everything under the bonnet looked good. The Amazon was surrounded on all sides by jacked-up cars – everyone was working to prepare themselves for the last demanding haul up and over to Kathmandu. I took out a tray of food to Phil and Trev from the hotel's Hard Yak Café – which truly would have been better named hard tack – and left them to it. I had asked the hotel receptionist to write 'pharmacy, please' and 'iron tablets' and 'food shop' on slips of paper, and armed with these I took a taxi to what I hoped would be the Tibetan equivalent of Boots.

  The driver cut through the old city. The streets were clean and open and there wasn't a western face to be seen. The square white buildings all had the same small-paned windows outlined in bright paint, and the window-sills and scrubbed steps had painted buckets and tin cans arranged on them, planted with geraniums and cosmos and nasturtiums and even runner beans, these cottage garden plants looking familiarly innocent in their exotic setting.

  My driver pulled up in front of a big neon-lit shop on the corner of a concrete block. It was definitely a pharmacy: the female assistants wore white coats and there were antiseptic-looking shelves with sliding glass doors. A course of iron tablets was no problem. A young woman glanced at the slip of paper and came back at once with an ornate package. Inside were twenty-four lurid orange vials, and even some English dosage instructions. I had run out of sanitary supplies. Imagining that I would be able to select what I needed off a shelf I hadn't asked the receptionist to write this down for me, and now I looked wildly around for something promising to point at. There was nothing at all, and the assistant was looking quizzically at me.

  'Er . . .'

  I indicated a pen and she gave me a scrap of paper.

  'Er . . .'

  I gnawed the pen for a minute and then drew a tampon. The assistant frowned and three of her colleagues fluttered across to see if they could help. Their mystified faces bent like flowers over my tampon sketch. No light dawned.

  There was nothing for it but to try mime. I pointed at the drawing and acted out an insertion. Thank God I hadn't brought Phil and Dan with me.

  The shop assistants reached no higher than my shoulder. I felt huge, distorted, like Alice after she had taken the growing potion. In a minute my head would hit the ceiling and my neck would bend in a loop, like in the Tenniel illustration. The tiny women blinked up at the huge westerner who was jabbing a finger at her private parts. The first one began to giggle and then the next, and then a wave of mirth engulfed the shop. I had by now drawn quite a crowd and the taxi-driver strolled in to join the party.

  I grabbed the paper again and this time tried an artistic representation of a sanitary towel. It was like taking part in some surreal parlour game with incomprehensible rules. The shop was full of gasping people who were holding their sides and wiping their eyes. I was ready to run when an older woman took my arm. She choked down her mirth and led me kindly out of the shop and down the street to a dingy open-fronted kiosk. The glass counter was piled with dusty Coke tins, smeary packages of children's ankle socks and packets of 555 cigarettes. From under the counter the kiosk woman produced a squashy packet of the old-fashio
ned kind, with loops, the sort that I hadn't set eyes on since I was a schoolgirl. Eagerly I tucked it under my arm and gestured for a couple more packets while we were about it. The women murmured to each other in disbelief as I handed over the yuan notes. I thanked them both profusely and sank into the taxi. Boots was ticked off the list and now it was time to turn my attention to Sainsbury's. I was looking for in-car supplies to keep Phil stoked up all the way down to Kathmandu.

  The 'food shop' the taxi-driver took me to turned out to be a cavernous concrete and corrugated-iron shed on the edge of the old city. Within it was a rectangle of sloping counters backed by wooden shelves, manned by sad people who sat on stools and looked as if they hadn't moved for hours on end. The food on sale consisted mostly of dusty sweets and a few packets of biscuits; on the shelves were cans of food with torn and stained labels. There was no fruit, either fresh or dried, no bread or crackers or even noodles. The only other customers were old women who shuffled along the displays of merchandise, suspiciously prodding at the sweets and biscuits.

  More or less at random I picked up some biscuits and filled a tin dish with a double handful of sweets. I held them up but no one offered to take my money in exchange. So I walked to the nearest stool-sitter and pushed the goods towards him. He responded with a vicious and unmistakable negative, almost spitting with vehemence. I looked around again, and then understood. The shop was a co-operative: each of the people on stools had a tiny stall all of his own, even though the wares were identical and identically uninviting, and I had tried to pay one of them for goods from a rival, absent operator.

  The poverty of the set-up was almost blinding. Some of the vendors had two tins and a small heap of sweets to sell. I wondered how much they had to pay, and to whom, for the privilege of offering their goods in this place.

  Hastily I bought a random selection of sugery stuff and gave the stallholder all the yuan I had with me except for my taxi fare. He was too sad-looking even to acknowledge it.

  On the way back to the Holiday Inn I stared into all the shop windows we passed, looking for a food market, but I didn't see one anywhere. How did these people eat? Where did they buy nourishing food for their children?

  There must have been an answer, but I never found it. The next morning when the rally clock ticked to 8.42 exactly, car 82 was leaving yet another half-glimpsed and completely unfathomed place behind it in a pall of dust. There was no time, no energy, no curiosity left over for anything else. In the few brief minutes that did offer an opportunity for reflection, I felt ashamed that every day that we drove was a vulgar, callous display of wealth and power. But I couldn't stop. None of us could stop. The rally was all-consuming.

  That day, on the road onwards from Lhasa to Xigatse, I understood why long-distance classic rallying can become addictive.

  Twenty-seven cars had reached Lhasa without incurring any time penalty. According to plan and the route notes, there had been two different itineraries for the day – one for the vintage cars, and a higher, longer and more difficult one for the classics. Unfortunately a landslide had recently blocked the higher road and it was now impassable, so all the cars would have to take the lower route. The organisers decided that they would take this opportunity to make matters more interesting for us all. They divided the distance into four stages, they shortened the time allowances for each of them, and they started the classics first, so there wouldn't be a slew of fast and slow cars fighting for places on every bend.

  The first stage, 68 kilometres out to Lhasa Bridge across the broad Tibet river, was uneventful. There was even time to look at the scenery, as spectacular river gorges widened out into golden cornfields interspersed with fertile yak- and sheep-grazed pastures. The second stage was harder. It was 33 km of rocky dirt-track, and we had a time allowance of 29 minutes. I had dutifully copied all the amendments for the day into road book and route notes, but I hadn't done the maths in advance – and so didn't have a minimum average speed for the stage in mind. We set out cautiously because the road was so treacherous – potholes suddenly gaped in front of us and massive rocks reared out of nowhere, and Phil was always careful to protect the car as far as possible. Then, with a nasty start, I realised how much time had elapsed and how far we still had to go.

  'Faster. We'll have to go faster.'

  Phil put his foot down. The potholes and rocks and blind bends whirled towards us much more threateningly and every decision became a split-second one: whether to ride on top of the bumps or to drive down into the trenches, whether to overtake a truck on this bend while we still had the power to do it or whether to play safe and wait until the road was clear, whether to accelerate and hope to achieve enough momentum to bounce over an obstacle, or whether to be prudent and brake. The front wheels would lock into a pair of ruts while the back end slid sideways, and every time we came up behind a slower car we were blinded by a thick veil of choking dust.

  Phil gave it every particle of his concentration and energy, working at it so hard that I could feel the snap of each decision radiating out of him. It would be too easy to make a wrong choice and break a wheel or a half-shaft or to skid straight off at a bend and end up nose down in a ditch.

  I jabbed at the trip, trying to pin-point exactly where we were over the distance, and I watched the minutes flick away on the timer, and kept computing the minimum speed we would have to keep up to bring us in under time.

  We made it, on the minute. Immediately, without time to draw breath, it was time to set off again.

  As soon as I added it up I saw that this stage would be even tougher. Sixty-five kilometres in 52 minutes, and the road was deteriorating all the time.

  'As fast as you can,' I called out.

  'Hold tight,' Phil said grimly.

  We were already overtaking cars ahead of us in the order. Every time it was a plunge into grey-white swirls of dust, and we would both strain forward to catch a glimpse of the car just in front and of the truck that might always be coming the other way.

  Watching the clock I kept shouting 'Faster!' and with every other breath I qualified the order with 'Be careful!'

  We turned the music up so it was pounding. Phil kept his thumb hard on the horn and powered the car round the bends, wrenching the wheel from side to side. He yelled at the slower cars as we bounced behind and jockeyed for a chance to slip by.

  'Eat dirt!' we howled as we roared past them.

  We overtook Dan and JD, who had started 12 minutes ahead of us. I caught a glimpse of Dan's face, a crescent of anxiety, but they were still moving even if slowly.

  We glanced at each other. 'Will they be okay?'

  'Yes.' There was no stopping.

  Once we hit the lip of a crater and all four wheels left the track.

  'Shiiiiiiit!' Phil shouted. We smacked the ground with a jolt that shook our teeth and bones, but somehow the car kept running. There were still 27 km to go and only 19 minutes left; we were skidding past streams and then a waterfall, the crown of the road was studded with stones to stop cars speeding on the bends just as we were doing.

  'How long?'

  'Just keep going. Fast as you can.'

  We were already going faster than I would have thought possible in a thirty-six-year-old car on an open dirt road where the view ahead was hardly more than a peek through a hanging pall of dust. I watched the trip and the timer, barely able to draw a breath. No one had overtaken us, no one was going any faster or harder than we were, but I still knew we couldn't make it. The question was: by how long wouldn't we make it?

  'How far?'

  'Ten k. Nine point eight k . . .'

  Beepbeepbeepbeepbeep. It was the timer on the dash. Out of time.

  'Fuck . . .'

  Phil leaned forward, pushing his right foot harder down.

  'Eight to the TC.'

  At last, over the brow of a hill there was a village ahead of us. The control was there, I could see cars skidding away from it and the sun glinting off them as they accelerated sharply a
way. Everyone was late, everyone was pushing it.

  When I ran up to the marshal, the rally clock was showing 11.29. We had a nine-minute penalty.

  'Plenty of other people did worse,' I panted to Phil as I dived back into the car again and he shot away almost before the door was closed.

  The last stage was all the way to Xigatse. It was much easier, only 76 km and 91 minutes to do it in, but we still gave it all we had. We were in the swing of it.

  We got in with plenty of time to spare, one of the first cars to reach the Xigatse Hotel. Phil swung the car into the almost empty car park and switched off the engine. Our ears were ringing with the noise. When we looked at each other, we were still jerky with adrenalin and shaking with the demands of the road. We had completed one of the toughest days of the entire event. We had been wedged in the car together for all those hours of mutual effort, shouting and pushing forward and watching the clock and wincing at every blow to our car, until we had forgotten that we were two separate people. Now, suddenly, after the intimacy we were almost shy. We clapped hands, very slowly, and smiled.

  'You were great,' I told him honestly.

  Phil leaned across and gave me a kiss. 'So were you.'

  I understood what rallying was all about.