Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

  The yellow Morgan had to retire from the rally with a blown V8 engine. David Brister and Keith Barton in their Rover were almost at the control in the short stage when a Pakistani Army Land Cruiser rounded a blind bend on the wrong side of the road and smashed into their right wing. They were unhurt, but the wing was squashed into the wheel, the headlamp, indicator, sidelight, spotlight and horns were demolished, and coolant was pouring out. To any outsider it would have seemed certain that their rally was over but David and Keith, a pair of British Airways pilots with technical resources as well as plenty of initiative, were determined not to give up without a struggle. As the rally pushed onward towards Quetta they spent the afternoon removing and patching up their holed radiator and engaging a passing tractor to pull the wing clear of their wheel. By the time dusk fell they had the car's engine going and they had lashed a 10-watt sidelight to the offside. It was just possible to drive the Rover, although the tracking was badly skewed, the radiator was unpressurised and the water pump was leaking. They filled and refilled it as they drove until their reserves of water were all gone, and then a thunderstorm came and they filled the empty bottles from puddles and limped onwards to Loralai, 260 kilometres short of Quetta. The next day, while what was left of the rally made for Zāhedān, they had the damaged wing bashed back into approximate shape while they changed the water pump and found a mechanic to solder and repressurise the radiator. By the end of the second afternoon the wing was replaced, one horn was salvaged and bolted into the headlamp hole, a sidelight was fixed on the repaired wing and the bonnet was hammered until it would open and close. They chased determinedly on in the wake of the rally and finally caught up beyond Zāhedān, three days after the Army assault.

  Nor were David and Keith the only ones to be suffering major setbacks that would, in the normal world, have brought their car to a final halt.

  Anton Aan de Stegge hit a rock in his big Citroen and smashed the disc brakes and his differential and disappeared for two days. Murdoch Laing's Aston had developed serious steering troubles and was also a couple of days behind. An Italian Lancia was undergoing a complete gearbox rebuild, Richard Clark's Buick had a main bearing failure, and the Doreys' Morris Minor had a holed piston. It seemed that Phil and I were lucky to be still sturdily en route to Zāhedān. We were physically exhausted and emotionally battered and marooned in separate silence, without any music to fill the space between us, but our Amazon at least was invincible.

  It was a long drive to the border, 633 km through inhospitable desert country without even a string of camels to enliven the view. The road was good for quite long stretches, and then suddenly the carriageway would be blocked by large rocks marking a sudden diversion into a rough unmade section that might last for 10 km before swinging into smooth asphalt again, presumably where more money became available. In daylight, without too much traffic in either direction, all this was boring but fairly easily negotiable. The only problem was the heat. In order to cool the engine as far as possible Phil drove with the heater and the fan going full blast. The temperature inside the car mounted to 116 degrees and I kept hearing Tony Barrett's voice rasping, 'The car's the star, love. The car's the star.'

  We reached the border at four o'clock. The field was widely strung out – rally officials at the Pakistan Out checkpoint told us that we were only the 24th car to pass through, even though we had been one of the very last to leave Quetta. We drove through a dusty compound, turned left, and came to the Iranian frontier.

  We were warmly greeted. Formalities were few, and quick. There was a reception committee to shake our hands and welcome us to Iran in the name of Allah, and smiling members of the Iranian Motor Federation to press gifts of flowers and cold drinks and snacks into our car. The three Iranian crews were mobbed by admirers and press. There was even a medical tent offering attention to those who were about to succumb to heat and dehydration, and for all the women a present of a shiny, silky fringed scarf in a remarkably hideous shade of brown. I accepted this poisoned chalice and meekly wound it around my head. I put on little white cotton socks that I had bought in the bazaar in Lahore, hiding my sandalled toes and ankles even though I was ready to melt in the heat. We filled up with free 90-octane fuel, accepted and gulped down more chilled cartons of grape juice, and turned towards Zāhedān. It was a short run on wide, beautifully silken, oil-money roads.

  Zāhedān itself appeared to be a dusty, unremarkable collection of concrete blocks set around busy roundabouts decorated with portentously ugly modern sculptures. We found the rally headquarters hotel, which was fully occupied by officials and media crews and the rest, and were directed onwards to our allotted place in the third hotel in town. There was no parking permitted there, so we waited in the wilting sun for a shuttle bus to take us.

  We found a dingy, brown-plastic-veneer, neon-lit establishment on a four-lane highway which our room directly overlooked without the insulation of curtains. There were two beds, an empty but volcanically noisy old refrigerator, bare lightbulbs, and a box bathroom acrid with the Soho-alley scent of urine. After I had squatted over the hole I discovered the reason for the smell. The flush worked on an interesting reverse principle – one tug of the string and water welled up and washed the contents of the pan over the tiled floor, which then dried in the sticky heat. Phil had a scoring system for the relative luxury of hotels, called the Fluffy Towel Index. This one scored nil. There were no towels, fluffy or otherwise. Nor were there any facilities for doing laundry or changing money.

  Downstairs, we discovered that we didn't really know any of the other crews who were sharing our romantic hideaway. I introduced myself to Kurt and Roswitha Dichtl, who were driving an immaculate 1950 Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn, and Andrew Snelling who was one of a three-man crew in a 1966 Wolseley. Andrew looked as if he had a permanent head-cold, but he was very friendly. The couple who were his co-drivers were having a loudly acrimonious argument in the lobby and he was happy to find a separate focus for his attention. We sat around a plastic flower arrangement, waiting for dinner and smoking because there was no other form of gratification available. I would have swapped the Rebecca Stephens sleeping bag for three ice-cold vodka martinis to be drunk in rapid succession.

  Two more people arrived. They were Francis and Casper Noz, father and son, whose 1928 Ford Model A hadn't made it out of Beijing. They had been following the rally ever since in a series of taxis, although they had hopped on a plane to cross the Himalayas. Even though they had struck out personally both Nozes still had plenty of advice to offer the rest of us about our cars and the competition.

  Dinner was barley soup, chicken and rice, and Coca-Cola. It would have been a lugubrious occasion if Phil hadn't decided to snap into tour-leader mode and jolly everyone along with some teasing banter. I was probably the only one among the company to find this intensely irritating. I abandoned the fibrous chicken and went upstairs to call home.

  Caradoc had not yet received the daily fax bulletin. He hadn't heard about the deaths on the road to Quetta. I described what had happened, spilling out the words, and it was a relief to give voice to all the fears and forebodings clustered around yesterday and today, for all their irrationality and self-centredness and black roots buried in the unaccommodating past. I could hear the concern in his voice when he answered.

  'Do you want to come home?'

  I did, more than anything, and yet I did not. I was crawling up Kalapathar, in double-quick time. I was lonelier and more homesick than I had been since I was a small girl at boarding school, but there was absolutely no option except to carry on. At least the Zāhedān hotel from hell was more luxurious and welcoming that an English girls' school, and the food was distinctly better. I might be muffled up in long robes and a veil, but I didn't have to wear thigh-chafing divided skirts and an Aertex shirt, or lose hearty games of hockey in sub-zero temperatures, or walk around town in an ankle-length Harris tweed cloak and a grey felt po hat for the amusement of the local talent. And the bathroom might st
ink but I could use it to wash my hair whenever I felt like it instead of having to wait in greasy misery for Matron to supervise the fortnightly sluice. It was the British officer's prisoner-of-war defence, and it worked. Nothing would ever be as bad as public school. I felt suddenly much more cheerful.

  'I can't come home before Paris,' I said.

  Caradoc didn't try to persuade me to go or to stay, nor did he deprecate my wallowing guilty fears. He simply listened to them. We knew each other well, and it was the greatest comfort not to have to pretend to be brave or resourceful for his benefit. I had been living alongside strangers for what felt like a very long time, and trying to be cheerful and practical, neither of which attributes came very naturally to me. So even at this distance the give-and-take affectionate shorthand of marital intimacy was as comforting as a blanket. It was no sugary match of perfection, I knew how quickly our affection for each other could flip into irritation and then anger, but somehow the balance seemed always to tip the right way in the end.

  Even though I had made a handful of valuable friends amongst the minority of sane, sensitive people on this trip, living amongst the petrol-heads and self-publicists and win-at-all-costs wankers of one sort or another who formed the rest of the company was making me appreciate my clever and cultivated husband more than I had done for years. So that was a positive gain, at least.

  'Will you try to take care?' he asked.

  'Yes,' I promised, for what that was worth.

  The news from home was that the children were happy and busy and well. Caradoc was dutifully ironing and making shepherd's pies for the freezer. This little picture made me smile. And he told me that I had been invited to chair the judges of the next year's Betty Trask Award. This lucrative prize for unpublished first novels had been won by our friend John Lanchester a couple of years before with his blackly amusing The Debt to Pleasure, and I was immediately looking forward to reading and arguing the merits of a big batch of possible successors.

  Out there, I thought, there still is a world where people sit in the Groucho or Soho House, gossiping over glasses of wine and sniping about one another's books and reviews and agents and publishers, eating chargrilled tuna and wasabi before stumbling out into Old Compton Street to hail a taxi to take them home. Soon, I would be readmitted into it. There would be no more carburettor conversations, no more dust or time cards, no more counting the minutes or hearing the beep in my dreams.

  I told Caradoc that he wasn't to worry about me, or to tell the children what had happened outside Quetta, and we said a cheerful goodnight. I ventured into the bathroom as briefly as possible, opened the bedroom window to let in some air and then hastily shut it against the traffic noise, swallowed a sleeping pill, rammed in my earplugs and went to sleep.

  It was a rest day but Phil was up at six the next morning. I unstuck my eyes to peer at him. The room was full of grey, glutinous light and the renewed shriek and hydraulic hiss of traffic. Heat was already seeping through the window frame.

  'Where are you going?'

  'There are about eighty cars all wanting help from the Peykan mechanics. I want to be first in the queue.'

  'What would you like me to do?' I asked.

  'You've got your own work.'

  Translated, I thought this probably meant 'Keep well out of my way.'

  'Okay.'

  I lay down, pulled the covers over my head and willed myself back to sleep. When I woke up again I felt completely disorientated. The noise in the room and the heat were overwhelming. Slowly I remembered where I was and what the day would probably involve and even though I hadn't had a drink for nearly a week depression took hold of me, a physical assault like the worst hangover. I crept out of bed and the smell in the bathroom grabbed me by the throat. I dragged on the long skirt, the long-sleeved shirt, the white cotton socks and swathed my head in the clammy headscarf. It kept sliding off my wiry curls and I had to secure it with a series of ravishing hairgrips. One glance in the mirror was enough to send me spiralling into the depths of Rally Syndrome. I looked like an amateur production of Mother Courage.

  I went downstairs to breakfast, but the oilcloth-covered tables in the basement eating area – dining was too elegant a concept – were wiped bare except for a few crusty smears. There were no rally competitors to be seen anywhere. I went back up to the reception desk and found the hapless, bespectacled young man from Tehrān who had been attached to us as tour interpreter and general facilitator. He was assisted by a pair of women, moon-faced in their tight blue swathes of headgear. Under the voluminous folds they appeared to be wearing ankle-length grey gaberdine mackintoshes. I almost fainted with heat just through looking at them. All three spoke excellent English, and they answered my tetchy questions with polite regret.

  Unfortunately, breakfast was over. It was ten o'clock, I must understand. Lunch would naturally be served at lunch-time. There was nobody about because most of the honoured rally competitors had taken the shuttle bus to the car compound or the HQ hotel. Unfortunately I could not do the same because the bus had now departed with the remaining rally competitors for an interesting sightseeing tour of the Zāhedān environs. The shuttle would start running again at 4 p.m.

  I asked if I could change some dollars into rials at the hotel desk, so that I could buy fruit and bottled water. I learned that unfortunately this would not be possible. Looking out of the window, across the solid river of trucks and cars, I saw that there was a bank directly opposite. Surely I would be able to change dollars there? All three shook their heads regretfully. Unfortunately I could not use that particular bank. Arrangements had been made elsewhere.

  Very well, I said. Perhaps they could call a taxi to take me to the bank where the arrangements had been made, so that I could change money to buy what I needed?

  Unfortunately, they sighed in unison, that would not be possible.

  'Why not?'

  Because it would be too dangerous.

  Very well, I said. I would walk to the rally headquarters. Remembering last night's bus journey I thought it couldn't be more than a kilometre. The trio moved in unison to bar the door.

  'No,' they said firmly. That would not be possible.

  'Why not?'

  Because it would be much too dangerous.

  Light was slowly beginning to dawn. I was a virtual prisoner in this facility-free hotel. No food, no fruit, no company, no transport. With gentle courtesy, one of the mackintosh women brought me a glass of warm Coca-Cola and I trailed back to the stifling bedroom with it. I spent the morning writing notes with my earplugs in, thinking, and trying to count my blessings. I might be briefly stranded here, but at least I wasn't an Iranian woman.

  At one o'clock I went ravenously downstairs again and, to my great delight, found David and Sheila Morris already at the table. Lunch was barley soup, chicken and rice and Coca-Cola. We talked about the accident, and I learned that they were as shocked as I was by the deaths of the two men, and the absence of information from the organisers, as well as the lack of a focus for our respect and sympathy. Bound up in a headscarf, Sheila's high-cheekboned face was a tense mask of unhappiness.

  'I just want to go home, now,' she told me. 'The pleasure of it is all over. We didn't come to race at the speeds we had to do to Quetta. We didn't expect to drive in the dark, on those roads.'

  'Neither did I. I want to go home too,' I sighed. I prodded at my unyielding chicken. 'This place doesn't help morale, either. Why do all the paid employees get to stay in the comfortable hotels while we are shoved out into the fleapits?'

  David's habitually mild expression turned angry. 'I must say, this is the first business I've ever known where the customer comes last.'

  It was true. I understood perfectly that the competitors were allotted rooms in the order in which they had paid their money, but I hadn't taken account of the fact that the staff and supporters took priority even over the crews at the head of the list. Phil was particularly bitter about this. He had worked on enough tours,
and he knew that he always took the worst room, not the best.

  I plodded back up to my cell and did some more work.

  For long stretches of the journey I had felt that it was an imposition to be a writer because I had to spend so much time recording what I saw and felt instead of experiencing it directly. The veil of enforced objectivity went on cutting me off from the purest sensations. At home it was different because I was always listening in and watching out for scenes that would trigger off ideas. I sat on trains and stood in queues with my notebook in my pocket, eavesdropping for the slice of life that would set off the shiver down my back that presages a story. To be an observer rather than a participant suited me well, and I was as comfortable with that metaphorical veil as I was uncomfortable with the actual slippery, unwieldy, blinkering head-drapes forced upon us in Iran.

  But the mad adventure of the rally had been quite different. I was a participant willy-nilly, and there had been so many choking feelings from delight to despair and so many sensations to be absorbed that I longed to give myself up to them completely. The demanding immediacy of it all had left me unwilling and almost unable to stockpile and analyse and discard. But this afternoon I found real solace in writing. I sat on my bed because there was nowhere else, with my spiral notebook on my knees, and wrote about Iran and Quetta and isolation and home, in a hot jumble of unconsidered words, and the sweat from my fingers made the pages ripple and blurred the blue feint lines.

  At four o'clock, as if I was escaping from Alcatraz, I took the restored shuttle bus to the Tourist Hotel where Rally HQ was based. The lobby was a sea of red-shirted officials. It wasn't the New York Four Seasons any more than Golmud or Choksam had been, but at least it was air-conditioned. There was a fax waiting for me from my friend and fellow novelist Nick Evans. It was a parody of genre writing and it was about notebooks, and it made me laugh a lot. It went like this: