Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

  I woke up very early. It was daybreak and the tent was suffused with a faint yellow glow. My first half-conscious awareness was of Everest so close at hand in the dawn light. And after that there were no thoughts of the view – only the sickening realisation that my sleeping bag was a swamp of blood. I was having a uterine haemorrhage.

  Phil was a blond-crested chrysalis a foot away from me in his sleeping bag. I reached out and shook him awake.

  'It's happening. Help me.'

  'What do you need? The doctor?'

  'No. Get some hot water and towels.' But we were camping; there were no such luxuries available. 'Just anything absorbent.'

  Phil pulled on his outer clothes and scrambled out of the tent. I tried to mop up with what was at hand. It was a frightening sight. I remembered the last two of Maria's pills, and scrabbled in my washbag for them. Phil came back with a Thermos of hot water begged from the Nepali kitchen boys, a handful of his clean T-shirts, and my Lhasa sanitary supplies from the car. He pushed everything at me through the tent flap. If he was disturbed by the sight of all the gore he gave no sign of it.

  'Sort yourself out,' he ordered, and withdrew his head.

  I used the hot water, and made a wadding of sanitary towels and T-shirts – my own, not his. Trying to think what else I could do I pulled his half-empty kitbag across and shoved it under my hips to raise them higher than my head. I muffled myself in my down jacket and the usable half of my sleeping bag, and lay on my back to wait. I could feel the blood still welling.

  Tears ran out of the corners of my eyes and trickled into my hair. I was thinking about Charlie, eighteen plus two days and at the beginning of everything in his life, and my fifteen-year-old Flora asleep in her bed in London.

  I was going to the in a tent, without kissing them goodbye.

  Such a waste, a stupid waste, just for the sake of a meaningless car rally.

  The worst of it was the repetition, the way the implacable loop of history went round and around. My mother had left without saying goodbye and now I might leave her grandchildren in the same way when that very thing had been the biggest of all the fears I had suffered for the two of them.

  On the last evening she was alive my mother had asked me to fetch something for her from upstairs and I, sulky child aged ten, had refused to do it. The last thing I said to her was No. Before she went out that same evening she hugged me and I said nothing in response, and I can still remember the pale green jumper she was wearing, and how narrow her shoulders seemed, and the fragility of her thin arms. We have both inherited her bony body, my sister and I. When we compare photographs now – the few creased pictures of her that we share between us – there are the same deep scoops behind the collarbones and the identical knobs of bone at the base of the throat.

  I didn't want to go away and leave my sister either, my alter ego, who knew as exactly as I did the bad experiences that had moulded us into our awkward selves.

  My mother went out to the house of some friends that night, and died there. I never knew exactly how or why, and because I was never told it became impossible to ask. We never reminisced about her and all the memories were locked up in a cupboard that was probably labelled, with the kindest intentions, 'Better not to dwell.'

  I was sent away to a boarding school that specialised in regimes of Victorian brutality, and my father's mother came to look after my sister and brother.

  Afterwards the history bundled up with my mother in the recesses of that cupboard seemed so dark that there was only one certainty – that whatever had happened to her was somehow my fault. I had said No, not just once but probably a million times, and so she had gone.

  The determination to do the best for my own children, the importance that motherhood itself assumed for me, was an act of atonement. I had to do it correctly, to make their world as right for them as mine had been all wrong, and that anxiety was born with Charlie and it swelled and grew ominously and increasingly irrational until Flora was ten, the same age that I had been. Her tenth year was the darkest period of my life: fear for her submerged itself under the skin of my apparently perfectly ordered world and became depression that stalked and harried me right to the edge of reason.

  Having come back from that brink was one of the reasons why I felt so strong. We had passed the point of danger, and every extra month and year I had with Flora was a bonus. She would be more all right than I had been by the same measure of days.

  Now I had become so confident that I was able to take risks. I had made the trip to see my mountain after all, at almost fifty, and the hard white face of it was standing out there beyond my tent flap. I knew objectively that what I was doing was dangerous, but I had managed to equate that danger with daily risks like crossing the road – thus wrapping up fate's random viciousness in a protective coat of cliché.

  The point was that I was strong enough to go adventuring, or thought I was. Entering the rally in the first place was like waving a jaunty handkerchief in the face of fate, and at Golmud and Lhasa I had kept it fluttering. But the loop of history had cunningly worked itself around again.

  I thought suddenly, I won't let it. If I'm strong then it won't happen.

  The hair behind my ears was soaked with tears, I was reluctant to move an inch in case my innards collapsed, and I was cold. But I was less afraid now.

  I wouldn't let it happen.

  Between the firing up and revving of car engines I could hear the Nepali boys clattering pans and laughing as they prepared breakfast, and I remembered the Tibetan families walking with their hungry children between the Bentleys and Aston Martins, and the overturned truck beyond Koko Nor.

  I realised the bleeding was easing a little.

  Phil came back with an enamel mug of hot tea and put it into my hand. Poor Phil. He had brought a rubbish bag too, for all the bloodstained debris.

  'How are you feeling?'

  'I'll be okay. This didn't happen to Rebecca Stephens.'

  'Or Prince Borghese. What do you want to do?'

  'I want to get to Kathmandu.'

  'Can you make it?'

  'Yes.'

  Luckily we had a luxuriously late start that morning – 9.42, still almost two hours off. I lay without moving and waited to see what my body would do, and I thought about home and all the passages and negotiations and alterations that had brought me from there to here. At last the bleeding slowed enough to allow me to get up very slowly and put on a random assemblage of clothes.

  I got carefully into the navigator's seat with the route notes on my lap. Phil had done everything else. Behind me he struck the tent and bundled it into the boot, and we were prepared for the road. Two hundred and sixty-seven kilometres in the day, divided into three sections. The middle stage was another short one – 35 km up to a pass at 5,050 m, with an allowance of 30 minutes.

  When our departure minute came up Phil took the book to the marshals for stamping. He ran back to the car and looked at me.

  'Ready to go?'

  I nodded. I was holding myself as if I were a cracked egg.

  We bumped across the wide plain, and I looked back for a last glimpse of the mountain. Within a hundred metres of the start we had to cross a river. Water rose to the car's axles and the front bumper pushed out a bow-wave. Somehow, we were still rallying. We overtook car 62, Jennifer and Francesca, on the opposite bank.

  The first stage was easy enough and we reached the time control with 19 minutes in hand. Phil pulled into the line of cars drawn up at the side of the road and we settled down to wait. The next thing we saw was a car coming down the hill towards us, moving very fast, with the headlights full on.

  It was unnervingly reminiscent of Mick Flick's Mercedes flying back from the accident at Koko Nor.

  'Something has happened,' I said.

  The car braked in front of the marshals at the control. It was another Mercedes, the black one crewed by three Germans, car number 70. One of the officials was Greg Williams and we saw him run to the Fronte
ra and jump in to tail the Mercedes back the way it had come.

  'An accident.'

  We sat in silence in the line of motionless cars, waiting for news. It was impossible not to think of everyone we knew who was ahead of us in the order, and to dread what might be happening along the road. A few minutes later the Frontera came racing past again and I caught a glimpse of Greg's hedgehog head bent inside it.

  Then the second marshal walked down the line. The Mercedes had been cornering on a blind bend when a road-worker had stepped straight out in front of it. The driver had never stood a chance of avoiding him. The man was badly hurt, we were told, but not dead. Greg had taken him in the Frontera to a medical post.

  The day's competition was cancelled. We were to proceed in our own time to what would have been the control point at the top of the pass, and from there down to the overnight stop at Choksam.

  Phil drove slowly away.

  'Will he die?'

  'I suppose so. Like the truck men probably died.'

  Even in depression, I had never felt the thread that connects life to whatever lies beyond it to be drawn as tight as it was that morning.

  After a while we exchanged a few sentences about the ethics of rallying at full speed along these roads, using people's villages as a race track, but we didn't say much. We both knew what we felt about the plight of the Tibetans, and the uncomfortable contrast between their lives and our royal and impervious progress. The fact that we were racing, sending ripples of threat radiating out from our convoy as well as making a barefaced display of privilege, was another unpalatable truth that had hit home too late. I just knew that for all the adrenalin thrill that it generated, I wouldn't be happy to enter another international event like this one.

  It was yet another blinding drive, up endless elbow bends lacing the mountainside, to the top of the pass. At the summit we found John Vipond and Mike Summerfield checking the cars through the cancelled time control, both of them looking miserable and cold. Phil stopped the car and, just to demonstrate that I could, I strolled casually back up the road to offer them a hot drink. They accepted eagerly.

  Phil had gone quiet. Today's accident had affected him almost as badly as the truck disaster, and his way of dealing with distress was to close up on it. We sat in the car drinking soup and staring through the fogged windscreen at the panorama of mountains. Our temperamental differences had never seemed more apparent. My way of salving this raw day was to talk about what had happened. If Caradoc had been sitting next to me we would have gone over it again and again, until we had absorbed what it meant.

  After a long time Phil admitted cautiously, 'I'm not usually with someone long enough to share my feelings.' And then, backing away from the admission, he began laughing. 'Anyway, I'm shallow.'

  'I don't think so.'

  Over the brow of the hill and past the time control came the Bentley Le Mans with Adam and Jon in their goggles and gauntlets. They pulled up in front and came round one to each side of the car, pushing their faces up against the windows and mugging at us. As always they made us giggle and lifted our spirits.

  The afternoon's driving took us down through a new landscape. We left the aridity of the plateau behind and began dropping down through steep, wooded gorges stitched with white threads of waterfalls. Sometimes the cleft widened and a bridge spanned the milk-white water of a river. It grew steadily warmer too, and the sky faded behind low, damp-laden clouds. The air began to smell of moisture and woodsmoke, and I looked at the inside of the car and saw through lowland eyes the thick layers of grey dust that caked everything and penetrated our clothes and stiffened our hair. It was as though we were drifting down from the surface of the moon.

  In the late afternoon we reached the hotel at Choksam. It was a cinderblock structure with lines of unlit cells like a severe penal unit in central Africa, and it made the place in Golmud look like the New York Four Seasons. The farmyard of a parking space outside was already wedged solid with cars, and with crews putting up tents rather than risk a night in the cell block.

  Ever enterprising, Phil went off in search of a better option while I sat and groused with Andrew Bedingham. A couple of minutes later he came back.

  'There's a little area round there. At least it's quiet.'

  He drove the car up a steep ramp into a yard enclosed by what looked like rancid stables, although these turned out to be annexe rooms to the hotel that were occupied by Chinese guests who had been displaced by the rally. There was just room to park two or three cars and pitch the tents. Phil waved Dan and JD alongside us and then hovered on the look-out for Melissa and Colin.

  'She'll be along in a minute,' he said happily, as he did whenever we stopped anywhere.

  The Porsche rolled in a little later, with Colin blinking in owlish misery through his rimless glasses. He didn't like camping, but the rest of us were happy enough to be there. We put up the tents and brewed tea. There was even a standpipe gushing cleanish water into a drinking trough, so we could wash our hands and faces. Phil stuck his head under the flood and raked his hair into a gleaming wedge. I felt like celebrating my survival this far, so I burrowed through the layers of dust in my kitbag and triumphandy pulled out Vogue. We were up and over the mountains now so Phil couldn't complain too much about the excess weight I'd been smuggling. Melissa and I sat on a rock together and pored over the shining pages.

  'Love those grey tweed Calvins, look.'

  'Mmm. I wore flares the last time around, I'm not doing it again.'

  'Boot-cut, you mean.'

  'Flares to me. Oh, divine Manolos.'

  Steely spike heels to strut and twirl in, a million miles from the present world of mud and dust. A quartet of black pigs rooted inquisitively at the skirts of our tents, and Dan and JD and Phil lounged on the tarpaulin and laughed at the women's fancies. It was a nice moment.

  Over 'dinner' in the Choksam Hotel that night David Burlinson told me that I would have to pay a thousand pounds to the Chinese authorities for a 'special visa service fee' – the same special visa service which had made my preparations to enter the country so relaxed and enjoyable and which was of course now operating in reverse, to make it difficult for me to leave without paying for all the attention I had received. In fact, I learned that Exodus had kindly settled up on my behalf and all I had to do was take out my chequebook and reimburse them on the spot. At that moment it seemed a bargain price to pay for the privilege of getting out of China.

  I crawled into the tent early that night. I was still bleeding intermittently and I wondered how much I actually had left circulating in my veins. I felt weirdly transparent and increasingly lightheaded. But tomorrow we would be in Kathmandu, with its teeming streets and grinning people. My medicine would be at the Yak and Yeti Hotel, and even if it wasn't I believed that in the haphazard hippy-scented shops of Thamel you could buy whatever you needed. Kathmandu beckoned with the crooked fingers of civilisation, and only last year it had seemed to me to be the farthest outpost of the exotic.

  The darkness was full of questing pig noises.

  There was no rallying the next day either, because it had been decided that the Chinese border formalities were likely to be too time-consuming to allow everyone enough leeway to drive the distance. Phil was disappointed. Bad roads, he had decided, were good for us. Everest Camp to Choksam had taken its toll even without the element of competition. Four cars would be making the journey to Kathmandu on the back of trucks, including the Chewy pick-up and Anthony Buckingham's DB5 which had now succumbed to terminal suspension problems.

  This must surely mean, Phil and I reckoned, that when the new order appeared at Kathmandu we would be up somewhere in the '40s. Back in the top half of the sporting category . . .

  The drive from Choksam down to the Nepal frontier at the Friendship Bridge was the most testing yet. The rally left the night halt in a long, snaking convoy to wind down a track that was no more than a rock-strewn, mud-smeared ledge nibbled out of a series of precipices an
d steep forests. It was raining and the wipers dolorously arced across the windscreen. Low cloud came billowing up the gorge from the warm lands below. At one point the track passed under a waterfall – the drivers of open cars either scrambled for umbrellas or opted to accelerate and pass under it at full speed – and at another point a huge queue built up at a landslide.

  Gossip about the landslide had been circulating for days. The seriousness of it had been reported in the news bulletins sent home, and even discussed on the Internet. At one point it had been stated that the road was completely blocked and the rally was therefore unlikely to make any further progress. As always in connection with the planning and organisation of the event it was difficult to winnow a few grains of truth out of the rumours, but it did seem that the collapse of the road had been a disaster that actually threatened to halt all onward progress. RO had therefore paid some unspecified (but reportedly huge) sum of money to the Chinese who were supposed to provide round-the-clock manual labour to shift the mud and rock. In fact the track was half cleared. There was now a way around the massive rockfall that was just wide enough for a car to pass, not wide enough for a truck. The drop to the side – Phil's side, luckily for me – was very steep.

  Some drivers chose to negotiate the obstacle very slowly, others gamely put their foot down. When our turn came I kept my eyes closed.

  'What was all that about?' Phil crowed as we swung round to the other side. 'Was that it, then?'

  I opened my eyes and laughed. It was such a characteristic moment. He was a cocky little fucker precisely because he was so confident of his own practical abilities – and I had affectionately told him so on the funny night back in the Golmud Four Seasons – but he was so definitively the right stuff that you couldn't help loving him.

  We bumped and slithered on down to Zhangmu, the straggling border town. The one road leading to the frontier was a long ribbon of rally cars waiting for their turn at the customs post and we joined the end of the line with Dan and JD behind us, and Melissa and Colin behind them. The unmade street, pocked with stones and sticky with mud, was lined with little open shops. Tins of food and bottles of Pepsi, packs of cigarettes and rolls of lavatory paper, were laid out on shelves with rather appealing attention to colour and form, and looped strings hanging in front of the shops were pegged with socks and dishcloths. The family washing was usually strung out too, distinguishable from the merchandise by being just slightly dirtier.