by Rosie Thomas
I checked my watch. 'Seventy-five minutes.'
'I'll have to get the wheel off. There's a leak from the hub, look.'
There was indeed a sinister black patch of oil. He jacked up the car and loosened the wheel nuts while I hovered. Dan and JD came back from the welding shop where they had had their shock mountings fixed. After some consultation they decided that it wasn't brake fluid, at least; most probably the felt gasket on the wheel bearing had gone and oil was seeping out. We would have to watch it carefully and hope to make a proper investigation during the rest day in Lahore, the day after tomorrow.
Our turn came for the off. It was a short stage, 33 kilometres in 34 minutes. Down the mountain again.
Beyond the start line there was a steep ramp, and with the loudspeaker fanfare ringing in our ears we set off smartly. Only the car refused to pull away. There was no power, and we only just made it to the top of the slope without stalling. On the flat beyond, we picked up momentum with agonising slowness and Andrew and David swept briskly by in the land crab. We looked at each other, eyes dilated with horror.
'What's happening?'
'Don't know.'
Gradually the engine picked up. We climbed the hill out of Nainital, watching the red and white rear end of car 83.
'Blockage in the fuel line, maybe,' Phil said. He was sweating.
The road began to descend. I tapped the timer.
'Twenty-nine minutes. Can you speed up?'
Phil turned up the music until it pumped through the car. It was his signal that he was ready to burn rubber.
It was the first very fast downhill section we had done. There were rally cars strung out all the way down, but we met nothing coming up the other way.
'Must have closed the road for us,' Phil muttered. He pulled out on to the opposite side and, in the face of the blind bends, overtook the Morrises and the Noors, and Murray and Amanda, and David Brister and Keith Barton in their Rover 110. I closed my eyes and forced them open again. There had been no indication that this was a closed stage. I wanted to see what was coming to meet us in case I spotted it a split-second before Phil did. Our tyres and brakes screamed, and the chassis rocked. The car's various ailments were forgotten. I was terrified that we were going to overturn or spin off the road, but I was also excited beyond measure.
This was the best, the very essence of what we had come for.
Phil was reckless but I trusted him to the last degree, life or death. I knew this road wasn't really closed, but together we made a conspiracy of risk.
Go, we kept saying as we cornered on the wrong side of the road. Go. Somehow the wheels held the asphalt.
We saw the monkey at the same instant. It had swung down from a tree to land in the middle of the road and its black mask turned towards us with an expression of quizzical surprise. We heard its cry, a high-pitched eeeek, and felt the bump beneath the wheels. I looked back.
'Phil, shouldn't we . . .? '
'What do you want to do, stop and find a vet?'
'All right. Just keep going.' I was getting as brutally focused as the rest of them.
I watched the flickering dots on the timer, and called the distances and the minutes left. One set of figures rose uncomfortably against the other. Nine minutes, 11k. Six minutes, 9 k.
Phil was inexorable. He would glimpse a car ahead of us, and at once he was pulling out to overtake. Nothing was going to stand in his way.
The timer beeped. Our 34 minutes were up, we still had 4 kilometres to go. Faster. The grassy banks and trees at the roadside became a green blur. A truck whirled towards us, we swerved to avoid it and immediately pulled out again, looking for the next car to overtake. I shivered with the fear of what we had been doing.
'There it is!'
The control was just ahead. We skidded in to the roadside, and I ran. We were stamped with a four-minute penalty.
With my heart still hammering I ran back to the car and jumped in, ready for the assault on the next stage. Beyond the control I caught a glimpse of Dan and JD standing beside their car, their faces a picture of gloom. Phil didn't stop to offer our help. I knew we should have stopped; I also knew that he couldn't, simply couldn't make himself. He was too high, too caught up, too driven. And so was I.
We hammered straight on, eating into the 130 kilometres that separated us from the next control, at Moradabad.
The flush and elation of high intimacy that had coloured the hill section slowly ebbed. I rested my head against the window glass and stared out. I had misread my partner, I thought. I had had him down for an easygoing adventurer, a bland evader of responsibilities who preferred to wander instead of engaging with the world or its occupants. But that drive down from Nainital had revealed him more nakedly than any soul-baring session could have done. Phil was no team-player. He was a loner, and he was burned up by his determination to succeed to the point where, when he was aiming for something, nothing else counted. Certainly not risk, or stacked odds. I had thought I had become driven, out of a sense of deep inadequacy, into never missing a work deadline, or cooking a poor meal, or failing to reach the top of Kalapathar even if it meant crawling there on my hands and knees. But my need to succeed was no match for Phil's. We were alike in our tenacity, even though we were dissimilar in everything else. And just possibly somewhere inside, that was very well defended, he might even be as fearful as me.
After a while, he realised I had been silent for a long time.
'Have I done something to upset you?' he asked, acknowledging the different ground that had existed between us since Kathmandu.
I shook my head. 'No. I've just been thinking about some things.'
'Okay.' He fumbled in the bag of essentials that was wedged in the space between our seats, found a cigarette and lit it, and gave it to me.
'Thank you.'
We reached Moradabad. It was a terrible place, defiled with rubbish and excrement, swarming with flies, teeming with unhappy people who glued themselves to our windows and reached thin brown hands inside to pilfer our belongings. I couldn't find any corner offering enough privacy to have a pee. When I came back to the car I found that the slice of Nainital sponge cake I had wrapped in a paper napkin had turned into a brown, seething heap of ants.
Dan and JD rolled up.
'What happened?' I asked Dan.
'The welding we had done this morning lasted precisely four km down that hill. We're having to go very carefully.'
'I'm sorry we didn't stop.'
He smiled, the dimple deepening.
'I didn't mind. JD took it badly.'
I went to apologise to JD.
'Don't worry.'
It was a long, hot, congested, ugly drive onwards to Delhi. The traffic obeyed no rules. At one point Phil was overtaking a truck, and three pudgy teenage boys in a souped-up bubblegum-pink car darted between the truck and the Amazon. Metal scraped metal, and then the boys pulled in in front of us and slowed down, weaving from side to side so we couldn't overtake. All this in a seething rush of other vehicles. They slowed further, and when Phil pulled alongside to overtake they accelerated, with jeering blasts on the horn and fat-faced taunting grins.
Phil wound down the window and unleashed a torrent of four-letter words and obscene gestures.
At once the driver slammed on his brakes and swaggered out of his girly pink car, beckoning Phil out too. They were spoiled boys, overweight and unfit and Phil could easily have killed all three of them. I had to restrain him physically by grabbing hold of his sleeve and hauling him back into the car.
'Please don't. Please, just drive on.'
The one he whacked the hardest would certainly turn out to be the son of the local police chief or criminal don and a night in the cells wouldn't do anything to advance our place on the leader board.
'Please, Phil. I've always wanted to see Delhi. Don't deprive me of it now.'
He wound up the window in their grinning faces. He was vibrating with rage, frightening even me.
&n
bsp; 'All right. All right. Little fuckers.'
In the rear view mirror as we accelerated away I thought I saw three moon-faces wobble in relief.
We reached Delhi in the thick of the evening traffic. Wherever the proud Lutyens avenues and monuments were, I didn't see them.
Chapter Eleven
It was already dark when we left the car. There was going to be no sightseeing in Delhi.
The hotel bar was packed with people recounting stories of the descent from Nainital and stoking themselves up with beer because the next day we would be dry in Pakistan. Paula Broderick was telling everyone within earshot about how she and Nigel had spun right off the road in Arnie the Eco-Flow Anglia, and had still come in only 5 minutes over time. Anton Aan de Stegge, a huge bear of a man, reclined in his seat with a ham-sized fist masking half his face. He had the dryest sense of humour I had ever come across. Phil grinned happily at me across the table. He was pleased with our day's performance, and relieved that the leak from the rear hub wasn't getting any worse, and we had been so wound up together in the day's competition that the threads of it were still drawn tight between us. It was good to feel that at least he and I made a team, at this minute anyway, even though our loyalty to the other half of Team Amazon hadn't been particularly impressive.
Dan and JD had nursed their car along all day, and now they had taken it to a welding shop to have the lower shock mounting fixed yet again. They weren't alone. Danny deVito was having the engine mounts of his 2CV welded – his engine had been held in place all day just by his co-driver's leather belt. Josef Feit, who drove a VW cabriolet, took over the welding gear and insisted on doing all the work himself to fix his exhaust back in place, oblivious to the uproar this caused amongst the local mechanics. His co-driver was his son, René, and in the bright scarlet race overalls they both wore they looked noticeably alike. Somewhere in Tibet they had picked up a yak's skull complete with horns, and fixed it to the front of the Volkswagen. When they came up behind us I always thought that the horns looked in the mirror like the handlebars of a Harley Davidson sprouting from the hybridising metal.
After dinner the day's order was pinned up on the rally notice board. Phil and I had been waiting and watching for it, and we pressed eagerly forward in the crowd to read the results.
We were up to 39th place. I could see Phil counting and calculating. We were still fourth Volvo out of five, but we were now only five places and 23 minutes behind Dan and JD.
First place was held by John and Simon Catt in the Cortina. Over the twenty days of the rally so far, they had only dropped three minutes. After their spin off the road the Brodericks were down to third, Chris and Howard were seventh, Murray and Amanda sixteenth and Carolyn and David Tremain eighteenth. Three of the top ten places were held by the Iranian Peykan crews. They did drive fast, but also very effectively.
'If only we hadn't had that bloody distributor failure in China,' Phil muttered. 'We'd be in the top ten as well.'
'But anyone who's had a mechanical problem will say exactly the same. The main thing is we're still on for the gold.'
We had begun to talk about what result we were aiming for. At first, we had only acknowledged that we wanted to get to Paris. Just to reach the Place de la Concorde on 18 October would be enough. Then there had been our brief flare of naked ambition at Golmud, rapidly extinguished, when we had thought of winning. Now, privately to each other, we agreed that we wanted a gold medal – and also to finish in the top twenty.
'We can do it,' Phil said. 'The car can do it, and so can we.'
The day's bulletin also announced that our morning call would be at 3 a.m. The Indians closed their border with Pakistan at 4.30 p.m., and with more than 500 km to travel to the frontier, the organisers were starting cars from 4.01 a.m., four per minute, to give us all the best possible chance of getting across in time.
It seemed I had hardly closed my eyes before having to open them again and begin another day. Delhi to Lahore.
I went to buy bottles of water and Coca-Cola from the hotel shop, to combat the dehydration that was one of the most uncomfortable side-effects of too many hot hours in the car. It was still pitch dark when I tottered outside with my bags and an armful of plastic bottles.
The Amazon had gone. It wasn't in the parking slot where we had left it the night before, and I couldn't see it on my panicky tour of the rest of the car park. I ran back to the foyer and out again, and asked everyone I met if they had seen Phil or the car. No one had.
That's it, I thought. He's cracked, and either done a runner or gone back to hide in bed. I knew he had at least got up, at the customary last moment, because I had caught a glimpse of him at breakfast.
I ran down to the hotel gate, where cars where streaming out towards the start point. The bastard, I thought. If he's gone off without me . . .
In the end I bumped into a porter who had carried Phil's bags for him. He led me to a corner behind a hotel van, and there was the Amazon hidden in its shadow. Gripped by morning inertia, Phil was sitting inside fiddling with his camera.
'Sorry. I moved it again last night.'
Hot with relief and swept with a backwash of anger, I demanded 'Why?'
'Because I went for fuel, okay?'
The bottles began to slip out of my overladen arms.
'Help me.'
Too late. They crashed around me and burst over my feet in a series of little spouts and fountains. Still enraged, I threw the last two at him. They also burst and Phil had to spend the rest of the day sitting in trousers on a car seat that were both soaked in Coca-Cola.
A bad start to the morning.
Pre-dawn, and deserted central Delhi was dotted with rally cars trying to find their way to the start at India Gate via the gnomic instructions in the route book. In tetchy silence we did the circuit of the Rajaji Marg roundabout twice, neck and neck with David Brister and Keith Barton in car 39.
We finally located the start and got away on our minute, 4.17 a.m. We had been given an overall time allowance of 10 hours to get ourselves over the border and into Lahore. We drove a long way without speaking except to exchange route information.
'Sorry,' I said humbly, at last. I held my hand out and Phil took it.
'Look,' he said. 'I'll be your whipping boy, if that's what you want. But it's my job to get this car to Paris.' It was becoming his mantra.
We weren't arguing about the car, of course, or Coke bottle missiles, or bad tempers, but about the space between us.
I sighed. 'You're nobody's whipping boy. Least of all mine. I would just be happier if we could talk to each other.'
'We do talk, don't we? But . . . I try to protect you from things, as well.'
'What sort of things?'
He shifted in his sticky seat and in the end I dragged the admission out of him as if it were some long-buried horror. He had seen John Vipond laughing at my driving on the Friendship Bridge. Jennifer and Francesca had confided to him in some friendly moment that they didn't like me. I was surprised by the latter because I had never exchanged more than two words with either of them, but I was much more surprised that such small things mattered to Phil. He was much more vulnerable to criticism than I had realised – even criticism so indirect that it only related to his temporary partner.
'I couldn't care less about what they think,' I said.
He took his eyes off the road for a minute and glanced at me in disbelief.
I went on determinedly, 'I care about the people I love, and what they think of me. I care about what you think, because I admire you and you are important to me.'
I couldn't think of a way to be more honest. He made some non-committal response so I tried a less personal angle.
'I'm a writer, aren't I? I write about people's lives and emotions. They are my stock-in-trade.'
'Plenty of material here, then.'
Phil jerked his chin, and I couldn't tell whether it was at the road and the rally cars hopefully streaming towards Pakistan, or at the
interior of car 82. But the alignment between us had changed yet again. As if we were completing some complicated dance measure, we would make a reciprocal forwards movement, to the point where we almost met, and then an unexpected twirl would send us ricocheting sideways or backwards all over again.
It was a hideous drive, north-westwards through the shrieking traffic. We passed through Ambala and Ludhiana to Amritsar, weaving dangerously in and out of the trucks and tuktuks and buses in the towns, skirting the camels and buffalo carts and teetering haywagons on the country roads. Somewhere along the way our overdrive stopped working, which left us without the benefit of a fifth gear. The brightest spot of the whole alarming journey was on the outskirts of Ludhiana when we passed what must have been a dye-works. Up on the flat roof the lengths of turban fabric had been hung out to dry. They shimmered in thick bands of every colour, palest lemon and cerise and turquoise and lavender, like a glimpse of a midsummer garden in this landscape of dirt and concrete and squalor.
We reached the Indian frontier in good time, ahead of most of the field. Those behind us were less lucky because the queues began to build up, but we cleared the Indian formalities in less than two hours. It was the same tedious procedure of waiting for obstructive officialdom, but it was made lively for us because Adam and Jon were next in the line. They hailed us with their traditional greeting.
'Ben Doone and Phil McCracken!'
'Hooray Henrys!' Phil called back.
I leaned against the long sleek nose of the Bentley. Their names were neatly white-painted on the side: Adam 'Tubby' Hartley & Jonathan 'Tubby' Turner. Naturally they were both whippet-thin.
Jon put his arm round Phil's shoulders.
'Tell me something, Phil. Do you know what they call an Irishman in a conservatory?'
'Nope.'
'Paddy O'Doors.'
'Okay. A man with a plank on his head?'
'Edward.'
'Three planks?'
'Dunno.'
'Edward Woodward.'
We were reeling with laughter. It must have been the sun. Stern, turbanned policemen scrutinised our documents.