Border Crossing

by Rosie Thomas

  Eight-thirty a.m., after another restless night's sleep in another comfortless room, with Phil's steady breathing and the Terratrip's monotonous note in my head.

  'Ready to go?'

  'Ready.'

  Beep.

  Six hundred and seventy-five kilometres onwards to Eşfahān, one of the most ancient cities of Iran. Three stages: 4 hours 35 minutes, 2 hours 51 minutes and 2 hours 2 minutes allowed. If we made our times we were due into Eşfahān at two minutes to six. A cool morning, with the blankness of pent-up heat waiting in the sky.

  'Three point three five. Turn left at crossroad before airport gates.'

  'Got you.'

  The traffic was heavy, mostly fast private cars and big Volvo trucks, some with UAE plates, but it was easy driving because the Iranian roads were so good. It was reassuring to bowl along knowing for certain that there were no huge potholes waiting to assault the half-shafts, and no punishing unmade sections opening their jaws around the next bend. It was easy to make the time allowances. The first stop was Mehriz, a closed-up roadside café in the heart of nowhere. We were almost there, with more than an hour in hand, when we came up behind Jon and Adam. Jon suddenly stood up in the navigator's seat and held a mineral water bottle tilted over his head. A silver and diamond plume of water arched backwards and sprayed our windscreen.

  Phil turned to me. 'Quick. Find a plastic bag.'

  I rummaged in the deep litter on the floor of the car and found one.

  'Fill it up.'

  I tipped a bottle, and handed the white plastic bladder to him. He put his foot down and pulled level with the Bentley.

  Jon?' he called conversationally. Both the Bentley boys turned their heads to look at us. Phil lobbed the bag of water, with perfect aim. It exploded in their faces and we drove into Mehriz choking with laughter.

  'You wait, Phil McCracken,' Jon threatened when he pulled in after us.

  It was the beginning of the Water Wars, which later escalated into the Sanitary Bag Battles. It was to this level that Iran and its privations reduced us.

  The Mehriz café had a long arched arcade down one side, providing a ribbon of shelter against the white sunlight. Dan was reclining there reading Birdsong next to Chris, who had Melissa propped beside him. The Dangerfields were there, and the three American disability lawyers from the red and white Willys station wagon, and Carolyn. In the middle of the featureless landscape outside I could see Lord Montagu looking helpless, with a roll of white lavatory paper in his hand. Phil was playing frisbee, oblivious to the heat, with JD and Simon Catt.

  I felt a sudden throb of affection for all these people and their foibles, and their cars which had grown as familiar as the furniture of my own bedroom. We had come a long way together. Quetta and its aftermath had after all forged a new bond of companionship between us.

  'Hello,' a familiar voice said. I turned round and saw Anton.

  'Anton! I thought you were out! What happened?'

  'Uh, there was only the one stone in 16,000 kilometres and I hit it. The brake disc broke off, and the differential casing, it was a terrible mess. I thought, I'm out now and I might as well go home.'

  'We heard that much.'

  'But 10 minutes later I was on my satellite phone ordering this part and that part, and 2 hours after my man was on a flight from Amsterdam to Karachi. He flew 15 hours and had a 10-hour wait in Karachi for a connection to Quetta. We put the car on a truck and it took 20 hours to reach Quetta. We got tired of it and got out at Loralai to take a taxi, and the guy had four flat tyres one after the other. He ran out of spares at two o'clock in the morning and had to go off for a wheel so we stopped at a mud hut, and the people there got up and let us sleep three hours in their bed.

  'When we reach Quetta it was eight o'clock in the morning, and the driver had the last flat tyre 500 metres from the hotel. Everyone was checking out and I told the people, "We want to check in". And so we mend the car with the parts from Holland, and we drive on and now we are here.'

  This certainly put our anxiety about some grooves in the brake drum into brighter perspective.

  'You deserve to win now.'

  Anton laughed with bearish abandon. 'I don't know about win. But it is very good to be here with all you people again. Rosie, you look lovely in this Islamic dress.'

  'Now you are just being a flatterer.'

  The afternoon was more desert. The emptiness, and Iran itself, seemed to drive us in on ourselves within the boiling capsule of the car. Being spread between so many hotels at night meant that there was less socialising, and even in the scattered outposts there was no lubricating alcohol to bring the diminished groups together. It seemed that I had hardly spoken more than a few words to anyone except Phil for days. My headscarf made me feel deaf and blinkered, as if my senses were actually impaired. Beyond the windows there was nothing to see. The road was dead straight and spirit-level flat and on either side there was only a colourless expanse of dirt in all directions. A sandstorm blew up and the air became thick and yellow and the sun turned to a blurred disc of metal hanging in the murk dead ahead of us. It was like driving through simmering smog.

  The absence of stimuli was almost hallucinatory. I began to feel that there was no one left alive, nothing moving in the world but Phil and me and the car and the greedy wind.

  'It's funny. It's quite different but it reminds me of when I was working as a pearl diver off Western Australia.'

  He was right, it was like being at sea.

  He lit a cigarette. I remembered Nick Evans's fax, still in my pocket, and smiled. I was a long way from Dolce & Gabbana and I hadn't been able to pick up even half a cucumber in Zāhedān.

  'We were on the boat for six weeks at a stretch. Four divers, four crew. The divers worked underwater for eight hours a day, hunting for shell. Very isolated, very intense. I think we all turned quite strange. I remember having very vivid dreams.'

  'How did you find the shells?'

  'You learned what to look for. Just a bump in the sand, the right shape and size.'

  'Were you lonely?'

  He looked at me. 'Yes, I suppose.'

  He talked for quite a long time about the past. He had lived under a tree in a car park in Dorset for a whole summer and taught windsurfing off the beach. He told me about leaving home and going to Australia and moving on from there to the Virgin Islands, and a friend of his who worked flying helicopters for Branson on Necker Island.

  'I had a shower in Di's bathroom,' he said.

  I thought that this all sounded daring and solitary, and comfortless except for the usurping of a Princess's bathroom, and painfully devoid of ties.

  I wondered why and then thought that I would probably never find out. I just knew that I liked him, whatever.

  The surreal desert road arrowed westwards, and the kilometres flickered upwards on the trip. I thought that we had made a new manoeuvre in our dance, one that made us move more comfortably together. I kept my fingers tucked down the side of his seat to maintain the new connection.

  'I learned to dive too, when I was a girl.' In the rural confines of North Wales.

  'Yes?'

  Ianto's parents had a big house on a trout lake that lay enclosed in a private bowl of pine trees. They were friends of my father's. Long ago Ianto's father had almost married my father's sister. Sam and Penny were rather rich. The house had two staircases, and a drawing-room with silk cushions, and Penny was glamorous and impeccably chic. She always made her son's girl-friend feel very young and rather grubby, which is just what I was.

  Ianto belonged to the local sub-aqua club, and the members used to come on Friday evenings to dive in the glassy lake. I did my first open-water dive there, and I remember the trout suspended motionless like stuffed fish in a green tank, and the fat black eels sidewinding through the weeds on the bottom. After that there was a summer of drift dives in the spiralling bubbles of currents that ripped through the Menai Straits, and long weekends exploring the wrecks off remote beac
hes down the Lleyn peninsula.

  I was just out of boarding school, and making the heady discovery that I wasn't an unlovable ugly duckling any longer. At least as far as men were concerned. Grabbing with two fists at this sudden huge supply of attention and potential affection, I went diving because there were so many men and the only other woman was Ianto's sister Shan, not because I particularly enjoyed the sport itself. The truth was that I found it rather frightening. The equipment was very primitive in those days – no self-clearing regulator, no buoyancy control jacket, only cumbersome lead weights for buoyancy adjustment. The lifejacket was either inflated by mouth, or in an emergency by firing a gas canister which then had to be replaced. Masks were stiff plastic and wetsuits were leaky neoprene. Shan's and my made-to-measure one-piece suits were the first the manufacturers had ever attempted for women. They had problems with cutting the upper half.

  Diving was uncomfortable, quite a lot of the time, and the waters were dark and cold. But just occasionally there were flashes of awe or elation that made the rest endurable, and anyway I knew I wouldn't have been happy sitting on the beach waiting for the boat to bring the boys ashore again.

  There was a boating accident at a seaside resort. A pleasure craft struck one of the piers of a bridge and sank immediately, and twelve people were drowned. Back then in North Wales there were no police divers, and the only option was to call in the local diving club to recover the bodies. We groped underwater, roped in a line, in twelve inches of visibility. Grains of sand whirled in the tidal shifts, dancing magnified beyond the screen of my mask. It was like a desert sandstorm. That was why it had come into my head, after so long. I had never seen a dead body before and my breath sucking in and out of the demand valve seemed to roar with terror in my ears.

  In the end we recovered the last two people, a mother and son. The discovery itself was sad, not terrifying at all. But I had nightmares for months afterwards. Dread of drowning made sexy, carefree diving weekends into paradoxical ordeals.

  More fear. I had always been afraid of something. I had been hunched up with fear, maybe all the time since my mother died, right up until the walk to Everest. And then in sight of the mountain the weight of it had lifted off my shoulders and I had briefly walked free.

  I thought yet again about Chris Taylor and the talk we had had way back in Lanzhou, and I envied all over again his perception that if the worst had already happened there was nothing else to shrink from.

  I was still afraid: I was scared right now, of death by the roadside, of loss and loneliness and failure and despair. Probably that would never change.

  But then, I thought, I had come on the rally for those very reasons. Taking risks and surviving them was a way of bare-knuckling dread into a corner. I could also watch other people and listen and make discoveries, because they revealed more of themselves when they were under pressure, or afraid too, and that went with the job I did. Spinning stories out of ordinary lives, and making ordinary affairs significant. The alchemy of fiction.

  If I sat in my bedroom and wrapped myself in an eiderdown for protection, or tried to do the same for my children – well, then, the ceiling would probably fall down on our heads, and we wouldn't be having any fun either. Nor would I ever have any new ideas.

  I glanced sidelong at Phil and he nudged against my hand.

  'How far to go?'

  I looked at the trip and the route notes.

  'Just about 10 ks.'

  The desert was slowly unclasping its grip. There were one-storey concrete buildings interspersed with mud huts, and low walls, and a glittering modern bridge in the distance.

  We arrived in Eşfahān in the same yellow light that seemed to have followed us half across the world, and as it slowly faded to grey and birds came to roost on the tangled overhead wires we were overtaken by the pleasant melancholy of evening, and of arriving late in yet another unknown place.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Eşfahān was good. We had another rest day.

  Phil spent the morning massaging the car again. A little leak had developed from the radiator and he was busy with sealant and a spanner check. There were plenty of other people working alongside him under the shade of the trees in the garden of the Abbasi Hotel. The yellow MG had come to Eşfahān on the back of a truck, the Jaguar Mk VII had terminal problems, David Arrigo and the Allard had fallen days behind, and even Adam's Bentley Le Mans had an ailing clutch. Jon and Adam were in their overalls, working on it with the help of Robert Dean and Bill Ainscough. Beyond the railings, a great crowd of solemn men gathered to watch the foreigners and their busy dismembering of cars.

  I found a helpful member of the Iranian Motor Federation, our hosts, who escorted me to the correct bank to change dollars.

  Inside the bank, in the foreign exchange department, there were seething mobs of people with no notion of queuing, all of them thrusting pink forms at blank-faced cashiers. Some of the tellers, surprisingly, were attractive young women who eyed me in my oily veil and approximation of suitable dress, and giggled behind their hands while my guide explained what I wanted.

  The transaction was complicated. There wasn't a computer console to be seen anywhere. The lack of technological advancement seemed extraordinary in the central bank in a major city. First a form was filled in by hand over two carbons, and then the sheets of carbon paper were removed and smoothed out for re-use. Then the forms were transferred behind the counter to another clerk, in another cubicle, who crunched the numbers using an old hand-cranked adding machine. Sweating in the press of unshaven men and sharp-elbowed black-shrouded old women, I reflected sourly that there hadn't been much of an onward march here from the abacuses and pieces of silver in the market place at Bam.

  Finally the details of my transaction were referred to Mr Big behind a desk who nodded and signed and then the focus of the action returned to the first cubicle, where the currency was produced and counted out. Four hundred dollars made a wad of rials about three inches thick. I needed the cash to buy us a new cassette player.

  By the time my friendly guide and I emerged at the other end of this process it was midday, the shops were closing and it was too late to find an electrical supplier. Phil and I would have to chance it on our own this afternoon. I thanked my escort and warmly shook his hand, only remembering afterwards that women aren't supposed to put out their hands and touch strange men. He took it very well.

  In the afternoon, miraculous to tell, Phil and I went sightseeing. There was much to see in Eşfahān, the ancient city of Persia.

  At the heart of the city was a great square, now named for the Ayatollah Khomeini. At either end, the Shah's polo goalposts still stood planted in the scrubby grass and in the thick afternoon heat it was easy to hear the crack of mallets and the furious drumming of ponies' hooves. At one end of the square the sky was blocked by the domes of a great mosque. We paid our entrance fee and went inside.

  It was no longer used as a place of worship, and it was almost deserted except for wandering tourists, but it retained an atmosphere that was both serene and spiritual. It was high, and cool, and vivid with the aquamarine and turquoise and sage and straw-gold tiles of the region. The pierced screens covering the windows filtered the light in intricate patterns, and under the central dome a stone marked the place where you could stand, and clap your hands once, and listen to the sevenfold echo that was delivered in return.

  Outside again, we threaded our way across the square between the little boys who were playing football, and ducked into the old bazaar. It was just reopening for the evening and the alleyways lined with stalls were quiet under an arched stone roof. It was the best bazaar yet. There were things that even Phil, the king of material dis-encumbrance, wanted to buy, and we wandered up and down in the insulated, shadowy coolness looking at jewellery and glass and old ceramics and inlaid work and brass and fussy Persian carpets. Afterwards, with our purchases, we climbed some spiral stairs to a tiny café with a balcony, just wide enough for a cushion
ed and carpeted bench, looking west over the square.

  We drank black tea and ate cloying sugary pastries and watched the sun set behind the domes and minarets. Three sunburned English boys clambered out on to the balcony and sat on the carpets beside us. They ordered a hookah, and passed the mouthpiece around between them. The water bubbling in the bowl sounded exactly like a diver's breaths through a regulator and I began to think that the sun and the desert and the view had touched me to the point where everything began to sound like everything else and the loops and circuits of history and association were finally closing in to cut me off.

  But then the boys began to talk loudly about a diving holiday they had had in the Red Sea.

  'Always the same,' Phil muttered on the other side of me. 'Just like every group I've ever led. They never talk about where they are, only where they've been. And sex, and food. In that order.'

  He had had enough of watching the light on the old stone. He didn't have the highest boredom threshold in the world, and he wanted to move on. With a last look at the turquoise domes turning to ash-grey, and the abandoned polo goals with all their melancholy associations of another age, I followed him down the twisting stairs again. We found a taxi driver to take us to the Tottenham Court Road of Eşfahān.

  'Fifty dollars,' the shopkeeper in the biggest, brashest shop beamed at us.

  The cassette player was gold, with gold filigree knobs. It was the very thing, and I was too taken with it even to try bargaining. I counted out the money, Phil took the machine back to the car and wired it in, and it kept us happy with tunes on the road from that day onwards.

  The hotel in Esfahān had once been a caravanserai, and after that a magnificent establishment where the Shah kept his own suite of rooms. It was run down and faded now, and although there were a hundred waiters and porters they were all surly and inefficient. But it was still good to eat dinner and laugh and talk in the huge, lamplit central garden and afterwards to retire to the arched recess at the far end to recline on cushions and pass the hookah pipe around.