by Rosie Thomas
Mark Thake appeared. He had just been introduced to the wife of one of the Iranian drivers. He told us that he had put out his hand to shake hers, then remembered the protocol and snatched it back. He tried to cover his embarrassment by giving her the double thumbs-up instead, and then recalling too late that that was a very rude gesture he fell back helplessly on the closed finger-and-thumb okay signal, which was the rudest of all.
He hopped about now with his hands buried in his armpits.
'Just off to have my arms cut off,' he said. Everyone hooted with laughter.
We made a lot of impervious rallyists jokes about women in Iran. I did it myself; in the car park that morning I had seen three young women in full black chuddars peering over the wall at us. I had been smoking and giggling with JD and Phil, and striding around so that my drapes slipped off my hair.
I waved across at them and grinned.
'Yeah, come on, girls. Come and live in the west. You can swan around as well, laughing with men you aren't married to and having a fag and a fun time.'
Except that it wasn't funny. Ever since we had entered Iran, I hadn't seen one woman walking tall with her head up and her shoulders back. They all scurried like eyes-down mice, hunched up and with their hands at their throats to keep their horrible wraps in place. Even little girls of seven and eight. Nor did one of them have the ease and grace of a nun in her habit. I couldn't see how any of this had anything to do with religious piety or spirituality, but it had plenty to do with repression.
I had struck up a conversation with one of our mackintoshed escorts, and tried to discover from her what their life was like.
'Of course we women have an equal voice here in Iran,' she insisted. 'And when we are at home, of course we wear whatever clothes we please.'
I was only a visitor, passing through at high speed and with no real knowledge or insight. But I thought that there was a wistful defiance in her eyes that was sadder than any of the truths she might have told me.
It was yet another night in another outlandish place, only half-glimpsed. In this bedroom out of a series of bedrooms the brass light fitment threw a dapple of crescent moons and stars over the cracked ceiling. I lay staring up at it for only a little while. I was beginning to learn Phil's trick of sleeping anywhere, whatever thoughts were running through my head.
Out of Esfahān, we were 21st. The yellow MG YB had slipped from 14th to 45th, and we had edged up one place accordingly.
'Just one more,' we encouraged each other. 'One more will be good enough.'
RO had been overheard trumpeting to someone that as a test of driving and endurance the rally ended at Istanbul, and from there on westwards it was just a matter of mechanical continuity. There were five more testing days, in that case.
Eşfahān to Hamadān turned out not to be testing, excepting our ability to entertain ourselves sufficiently to stay awake in the car. It was a long, featureless run through country that slowly turned from desert to sparsely populated farmland. We passed through Khomein, birthplace of the Ayatollah, which was marked by huge murals of the frowning visage, and even more roundabout statuary. These decorations were a striking feature of all the towns we passed through. Sometimes they were inspirational, perhaps huge shiny-yellow warrior figures helmeted like Star Wars storm troopers, or abstract, in the shape of monster arrangements of blue glass shards, or representational, such as vast metal tulips painted in coarse colours. Sometimes there were stainless steel fountains, or great slabs of livid stone. All the items of roundabout art had in common overblown scale and striking ugliness.
We reached Hamadān, and another outpost hotel. We had climbed into the hills and it was cooler here, with a clean wind blowing.
Phil was tired, for once too tired even to work on the car. He abandoned it, ate dinner, and went straight to bed. I worried about him for a little while, and then left him alone. I agreed to go with them when Dan and JD suggested a stroll around the town. Hamadān is a quiet university city. There was no apparent threat even in the dark and silent unpaved streets away from the main thoroughfare.
As we left the gates of the hotel I realised it was cold, and I needed a sweater. I called to Dan and JD that I would catch them up, and doubled back. They were perhaps a hundred and fifty metres ahead of me when I re-emerged into the empty street. I hurried after them, pulling my sweater over my head at the same time.
The man materialised from behind a little kiosk selling magazines and coffee. He was middle-aged, middle-sized, bearded, unremarkable. He walked briskly and purposefully straight towards me, and as he pushed by his shoulder struck mine. I was still tangled up in knitwear, and moving too slowly to avoid him. I was caught off balance, and as I spun back to face the hotel again he shoved his hand up between my legs, high and hard, and pinched. I was wearing loose trousers and it was only a momentary connection, far from the worst sexual assault I had suffered in my life, although I would hate it to have happened to my daughter. But there was a level of cheap and sneering lust combined with such dismissive arrogance in the gesture that it made anger choke off my breath. He was already melting into the shadows under the trees, but I wanted to run after him and smack the back of my hand across his bearded maw until the blood ran and his teeth broke. I clenched and unclenched my fists, panting, staring into the darkness. The man had gone.
This was what happened, Prohibition-like, when you forced your women into submission and denial. Sex just bobbed up elsewhere as lechery and violence and sexual degradation. And it was men and the prevailing culture that were degraded by the momentary collision, not me or any other woman on earth.
I pulled my clothes tighter around me and marched on after Dan and JD. We had a pleasant walk around the town, although there was no café or public meeting place to make a focal point of it. The other people in the streets were nearly all studious-looking young men, books under their arms, with not a single young woman student amongst them. Of course there was not.
We had received nothing but courtesy and kindness from our hosts, and friendly warmth from almost all the individuals we had come into contact with, but I wouldn't be sorry to leave Iran behind. One more day, Hamadān to Tabriz, and then home free into Turkey.
Over breakfast at Hamadān we heard from Mohsen Eijadi, one of the Iranian drivers, that there was a short, tough second stage in the day's route. Gossip about the details was already spreading and at the start line there was a definite change in the atmosphere. The long, wearisome days of featureless desert driving had sapped everyone and had produced very few changes in the order. Now people were briskly checking their watches against the rally clock and frowning intently over the route notes.
'Here's a chance for us,' Phil said. A night's sleep had done him good. He was fully revved up, flexing his fingers on the wheel as we waited for our minute at the end of the day's first stage.
A man nicknamed Too-Tall Don, a huge American journalist in a somewhat unlucky Packard, loomed up at the Amazon's window.
'Got an e-mail for you, Rosie.' The paper fluttered in the wind. 'From Beverly Hills.'
My old friend Richard Sparks was sending me love and good luck via Don's website e-mail address.
I read the message hungrily and then stared ahead through the flyspotted windscreen at the dusty road, and the tattered and unshaven crews with their broken cars. David Brister's Rover looked as if it had come through hell-fire.
Oh God, I yearned. Beverly Hills.
Time to go again. Beep.
One hundred and two km, one hour seventeen minutes.
Phil had worked out a strategy; we'd drive the flat section full out and maybe win ourselves a few minutes in hand for when we came to the 28 km hairpin-climb at the end of the stage. He went off from the start like a bullet, left hand reaching out to turn up the volume on the tape player.
'Okay, yeahhhh . . . '
It was the first adrenalin buzz we'd had for days.
The trip flickered busily and I called the distances, just l
ike back in Tibet. How far behind us, how long ago.
The road surface was impeccable, and there was almost no traffic. We realised even before we reached the hill climb that we were going to clean the section with ease and so, therefore, was almost everyone else.
'Fuck it,' Phil said resignedly.
The time control came into sight, and we were 25 minutes inside our time. It was a pretty little whitewashed stone teahouse at the head of a pass. The altitude was 2,300 metres, our highest point in Iran. There was a fierce wind blowing, rattling the leaves on the trees outside the teahouse and bringing a strong scent of autumn.
All the way across Iran, Iran Air had been providing us every morning with neatly packed airline lunch boxes. En route from somewhere to somewhere in the sky we would probably have yawned and discarded them, but now we seized them eagerly. Investigation of the contents was one of the day's high points. Today, however, I had forgotten to pick our boxes up from the pile at the start line and Phil was not well pleased. I left the car and ran into the teahouse to see if I could find him a replacement meal.
It was a revelation. There was a glass counter and blue-painted tables and metal chairs, like a Greek kafenion. Greg was sitting happily at the marshal's desk with a glass of tea in front of him. I bought great papery sheets of the local delicious unleavened bread, a dish of fresh honey in the comb, and a double handful of dusty, intensely sweet tomatoes. Lunch fit for a king, I thought. Intending to run the fifty metres to the car to fetch Phil, I set the food down on a table and asked the navigator ahead of me in the line to keep an eye on it in case a gust of wind lifted the sheets of bread and blew them away like kites.
'Why should I?' he snapped.
I thought he was joking. 'Because you are my friend,' I countered.
'But my time is before yours. Why should I stay to guard your things?'
I swallowed my smile. 'Never mind, then. Just let it blow away.' I ran to the car and back. When I reached Greg with my road book for stamping he scratched his prickles sympathetically.
'What was all that about?'
'Dunno.'
There was ample time allowed for the next section so we sat outside under the tree to eat and drink mugs of strong black tea. Phil wasn't over-enchanted by my lunch provisions, being more of an enthusiast for sausage, egg and chips, but Howard and Chris loafed by and helped to finish up the food. They always loafed everywhere, with an air of baffled and faintly aloof amusement, and yet still managed to be riding high in 7th place.
After we moved on, Phil saw that I was upset by the meaningless dispute with the other navigator. Tiny events assumed disproportionate significance in this isolated bubble of endless forward momentum and I sat with my head turned away, snuffling a bit. At length he pulled in to the side and switched off the engine.
'It's an easy road. Why don't you drive for a while?'
By way of comfort he was offering me the best solace he could come up with, a second chance to drive the Amazon. It was a sweet gesture. Sort of.
'No thanks.'
'Go on. Just for 10 ks,' he cajoled.
I wanted to accept, but I didn't want to drive. In fact, worse than not wanting to, I didn't think I could even get it into first and pulling away from a standstill without a series of hops and a shaming stall. I doubted I'd even have the confidence to pilot my own sleek and easy car down to Sainsbury's once we got home. If we ever got home.
'No thanks.'
'Well, all right. If you're sure you don't want to.' His relief was plain to see.
We covered the uneventful distance to Tabriz. Apart from an unfurling menu of sudden new anxieties about the car, the only thing we had to worry about was the stone-throwing. In the worst places we had to negotiate a hail of rocks, which was unpleasant enough for us but must have been terrifying for the crews in open cars. Most of the perpetrators were sad-looking undernourished children, not thugs at all. Phil developed a technique of driving threateningly straight at them and sending them scattering through the scrubby roadside bushes, skinny bare legs and arms flailing as they raced away. Once we caught up with the father of one of these children, although the boy himself escaped.
'We are guests in your country, and you throw stones at us?' I wondered.
'Sorry,' the man said, the word contradicting his demeanour which suggested infidel, and a woman to compound the offence. It was yet another face of Iran, the obverse of the official courtesy and smooth welcome extended to the rally as a whole.
As we approached Tabriz we met the first heavy traffic for days. Private cars with two or three youngish men in them drew level with us for a good look, and then set out to prove by accelerating, cutting in, undertaking and hooting, that they could drive faster and more daringly than us. We thought even more eagerly of tomorrow, and the border.
The hotel in Tabriz offered secure parking, and Phil rolled up his sleeves at once. The list of worries now included the front wheel bearing, a leak from the diff, another leak from the gearbox, a wobble in the steering, a leaking and possibly holed rear fuel tank, and a cracked distributor cap. Dan needed to change his worn front brake pads but he had lost his spares, along with the tent, back in Tibet. Phil gave him ours, which may have compensated in part for our deficiency in team spirit in the middle of the journey, wherever it had been. When I tried to think back on the way we had come and remember what had happened where, it felt like looking down a long, convoluted tunnel toothed with rocks and pierced with shafts of sunshine. I noticed that I was already beginning to think of it in the past tense.
Phil was hungry, and therefore irritable. I went inside to see what I could do.
The Water Wars were at their height. The Bentley boys had discovered that plastic sanitary bags made the best bombs, but supplies were running low. Jon Turner intercepted Melissa who was crossing the lobby and steered her to the reception desk, one arm protectively around her shoulders.
'My wife is having a very heavy period,' he explained to the clerk. 'Could she please have two dozen sanitary bags?'
The wars showed signs of escalating even further. John Vipond had made the mistake of looking up when his name was called from a balcony overhead. He caught a bucketful of water full in the face.
One of our guides explained that there would be no food in the hotel until dinner, but he found me a little toothless old man and assured me that my new friend would take me out to buy whatever I needed. It was a religious festival, and the shops were already closing. But my guide seemed to know everyone in town and he tapped on the door of a closed café and persuaded the owner to let us in. I ordered chicken salad sandwiches by pointing to the first English-language item on the plastic menu and holding up three fingers. When they arrived, amazingly, they were huge, juicy subs, loaded with meat and mayo. On the way back to the hotel, we passed a street vendor with a brazier and a big vat of what looked like maroon plush croquet balls. I pointed and raised my eyebrows, and Mr Toothless grinned an expanse of gum and helped me organise the right show of rials to buy one. The object was hot and sticky and I bit into it with care. It was a braised beetroot in thick sweet and sour sauce, and utterly delicious.
My friend wouldn't take any money for his time, or even a pack of Marlboro. He patted my arm, just as if I were an equal instead of a woman, and waved goodbye. With the American-style sandwiches in my hand I realised we were getting close to the wicked and wonderful west again. Tomorrow, alcohol.
The weary faced, overalled three-quarters of Team Amazon was pleased with the subs and cold tins of Coke, but they were less interested in the beetroot even though I carved it into appetising slices with my penknife. In the end I ate the whole thing myself, and made a mental note that if I got up in the night I wasn't to assume in a panic that I was having another haemorrhage.
Phil handed me a brown plastic cup with four knobs on the top. It was the distributor cap, and it did indeed have a hairline crack in it. My next assignment was either to find somewhere to buy a replacement, or to mend th
e existing one. Nail varnish or Araldite were quoted as the best glues.
One of the Iranian Motor Federation members was just setting out for a motor spares outlet with a long shopping list, and he obligingly took our distributor cap with him. In the meantime I turned to a back-up quest for nail varnish. I thought Jennie Dorey might be the best bet, and went to look for her.
The Doreys had had their Morris Minor engine rebuilt, with a welded piston. They were back in the running from Tabriz, but sadly they were now near the bottom of the order along with the Packard, the Mark VII Jag, the Buick, two of the three Astons and David's Allard.
'What colour would you like?' Jennie beamed.
The new distributor cap arrived along with the soup at dinner. The replacement looked identical – same colour, same number of knobs – and I was very pleased with my arrangements. But Phil announced that it was minutely the wrong size. He had already glued the cracked one, having found some Araldite, which I thought was a pity. I liked the idea of rallying with Jennie Dorey's Red Hot Red holding us together.
We did have another spare cap, but it wouldn't function with our present ignition system. Phil glanced furtively over his shoulder as he explained this. Our electronic ignition was our one single tiny infringement of the rules, which barred non-standard modifications. To worry about this detail seemed to me to be an irrelevance, in view of the rumours which were gathering momentum about some of the other cars which had never been scrutineered before the start. The gossip centred on the front-running Willys jeep, and two American 1950 Ford Club Coupés which were whispered to be megabucks sports cars inside heritage shells. I had never seen under the bonnet of any of them, and even if I had done and they had had the innards of a Ferrari Testarossa bolted in there I wouldn't have known the difference, or cared particularly. But some people who were playing by the rules did care, very much.