Last India Overland (29 page)

I told him I’d do that and I mentioned it to Suzie when I saw her in the hall, I didn’t say a thing about the limericks,

wasn’t in the mood, and I mentioned it to Patrick when I went up to the room, and that was all I needed to do.

When I did get to the room, Rockstar wasn’t back yet. He didn’t get back until around two in the morning when the rest of us were asleep.

He didn’t turn on the light so he did some crashing around before he hit the sack and I could feel his vibes, your basic dark forces shooting death rays into some Intergalactic House of Virgins.

I phoned up Dave and asked him what Rockstar had been up to. Dave said he did finally get a massage, a very short massage, and after he screamed at the whole baths that they were all a bunch of bloody poofters, he drop-kicked a couple masseurs and generally made a nuisance of himself before a whole crowd of naked or half-naked Turks finally shoved him out into the street. At which time he swallowed half the hash he had left and immediately got lost trying to find his way back to the hotel.

So Rockstar didn’t have a very good day.

The next morning he was the first one up.

He shook me awake. “We leaving this bloody city today, Muckle?” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “We’re going to see Topkapi Palace at nine.”

“What the fuck’s Topkapi Palace?” he said.

“I think it’s got a diamond or something,” I said.

I’d seen the movie, back when I was a kid. Pete Ustinov was in it. I thought he was great in
Blackbeard’s Ghost.

Everyone was down at the bus at nine. Everyone except Dana, of course. Maybe because they’d all missed Pete, they hadn’t seen him in a while. Maybe because they all wanted to see the Topkapi diamond. Of course, Kelly and Charole had gone to visit Dana on their own and word had got around without any help from me that she was in rough shape, and her name wasn’t even brought up.

Speaking of rough shape, that’s what I’m in according to Soon. This morning she said that I’m not really responding to treatment the way I should. She said she’s a little concerned. I appreciate that. Dave phoned me up and said well, since that’s the case, maybe I’d better get my rear in gear and finish this book before I die. Thanks, Dave, I needed that little kick

in the pants.

I don’t think he was serious though. Not completely serious.

The thing about Topkapi Palace was that the diamond was a fake and it was your basic museum, with glass cases full of pottery and old weapons. I hate museums.

This one, though, had a couple things that were kind of different. One was a big boulder with a hole in it. If you stuck your hand in the hole and it came out wet you were going to get married within a year. Everybody’s hands came out bone dry except for Kelly’s and Charole’s.

And the other thing was the mark of the devil that was supposedly way up high on this pillar. The tour guide pointed it out, but I didn’t see it. When we moved on, Rockstar stayed behind, staring up at where it was supposed to be, and that was the last we saw of Rockstar that day.

On the way back to the bus, I fell into step beside Kelly and asked her if we could have a little private chat some place.

She said, “Pete says we’re all going to some*

from Kelly’s diary

Nov. 3

Over a free drink last night mostly Tang & lime juice, I think, at the nightclub on the top floor of the Galata Tower, Istanbul stretching forever like a crippled L.A. through the windows, Mick said to me that he liked me an awful lot & he was sorry for the fiasco, he gets like this when he drinks too much raki, he actually blacks out. He said he didn’t remember much that happened between Freddy Freak saying goodbye and Freddy Freak saying hello again. He seemed to be serious. I told him nothing happened, and he seemed to be happy to hear this, and suggested we take another shot at it. I told him the next new moon was only 4 weeks away. He smiled. Relieved, I think. He said great, it’s a date. Then the belly dancer came over & sat on his lap. Another camera saying hi, remember me, right in my face. Latest on the rumour mill: one of S’s limericks suggested that R. has only 1 testicle. None of the limericks, apparently, were about me or C. or F. The general consensus is S. has gone too far this time. Pete definitely wasn’t pleased about having his keys stolen. C heard him rag her out, he made her cry.

Mick

“...affair with my photography professor. I got too involved, that’s all. I stopped thinking straight.”

She didn’t look at me while she gave me this little speech. She was moving the Chianti bottle with the candle in it from side to side slowly.

She said, “You know it’s funny, one’s vision of the world. If I look at this in a certain way, there’s three flames.” “Find a mirror,” I said, “and you’ll find a lot more.” She smiled at that. Over in front of the stage, the belly dancer was swaying and gyrating to the tune of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Around the Old Oak Tree.” Dave says that’s an important detail to remember thanks to some hostage-taking that’s going to happen next year in Iran that’s going to last four hundred and forty-four days. Dave says my millions of readers will know what I’m talking about.

Kelly said, “All I’m saying is that I’m not taking this friendship of ours lightly and you’re probably letting yourself in for a lot of grief and soul-searching and all that other boring kind of stuff. I wish I could promise you great sex or something but that would be unfair of me.”

I said, “Every time you get involved with someone, there’s always liabilities. There’s always some fly in the ointment. Nobody has it easy, not that I’ve seen. Everybody you meet is like a whole new desert and there’s usually an oasis in there somewhere if you bother to travel the distance. My past ain’t all peaches and cream either. It seems to me we’ve both been down a highway with some of the same pit stops. Like, I appreciate what you’re saying, fair warning, etc., but I don’t have any problem with any of it. I felt a spark of something the first time I laid eyes on you and it’s a spark I haven’t felt too often in this life. For me, that’s the important thing.” Kelly looked at me for a long moment and then went back

to looking at the candle flame. She looked a little confused.

I finished off my Turkey Libra and I was thinking about ordering another one, either that or telling Kelly I loved her and getting the damn thing off my chest, when the belly dancer slithered and swayed towards me and suddenly plunked herself down on my lap. Next thing I know there’s a geek in a monkey suit taking my picture and flashbulbs are doing a gigolo twist across my eyeballs.

The belly dancer’s close to forty and there’s a couple moles beneath her three inches of make-up. She grinds her butt into my crotch, and says, oohhh, as though something there gave her a special thrill, and then she kisses me while those flashbulbs explode once more.

She looks at Kelly and gives her a big grin. “Very sexy man,” she says. “He make you happy?”

Kelly, deadpan as a gut-shot devil, says, “We really haven’t had the chance to find out yet.”

That gets another oohhh out of the belly dancer, and she says, “Maybe tonight,” and then she’s off my lap and heading in the direction of Patrick’s table. When she sits on his lap, Patrick lets out a groan like she maybe sat on a hard-on.

Well, the belly dancer was wrong, it didn’t happen that night. I was going to mention to Kelly that we could maybe pay for a room and have it to ourselves, back at the Santa Sophia, but then the waiter came by and I ordered a Turkey Libra instead, and shortly after that Pete was herding us out to the elevator and back to the bus.

On the bus, Jenkins, who looked real heartbroke, sat across from us and tried to make polite chit-chat about the view from the nightclub and how he should try falling in love with a belly dancer sometime, just to see what it’s like.

That night in bed I tried calling up Dave, just to get his point of view on things, but he told me straight out that he didn’t care for Kelly much at all, he preferred an earthy type like Dana.

The next day I caught a cab and went looking for a doctor, but it was Friday and Friday is Sunday in the Moslem world. I even tried going to Emergency at one of the hospitals, but they were up to their necks in car accident victims and knifings and accidental drownings.

When I got back to the hotel, Kelly and Jenkins had gone to some restaurant together, according to Charole, so I didn’t even see her that day.

On Saturday, Dana came down to breakfast. She had a bit more colour in her face, but not much. She was able to travel, though, and so we hit the road, and our first stop that day was another graveyard.

from Kelly’s diary

Nov. 4

Very restless night. The floor outside the door creaked all night, the plumbing howled & around about midnight the curse descended. Morning came way too early. Then F. came knocking. Asked me if I’d mind going for dinner with him. Probably to make C. jealous & I said no, but he persisted. He was wet from the rain. He looked like a lost little lamb. I said yes. He said he’d make the reservations. I told him to keep the budget in mind. He said he would. All this while C. listened. So I told her I thought she was being very insensitive to him. She said he’d been completely insensitive to who she is, so why not? And so, over salad, and the finest souvlaki F’s ever tasted, nice and juicy, medium rare, lots of blood oozing out, at the Parisienne, a smoky dim-lit place with a picture near its door of several Turkish women, all of them wearing blue or black veils, F told me he was trying hard to see things from C’s point of view, but he couldn’t. Then he knocked back a double raki & cried a few tears. There’s something strange about this raki, I’m thinking, when a Turkish woman covered with veils slinks onto the dance floor right near our table & begins taking them off slowly, one by one, with a slow wink in F’s direction. I was just a little relieved. I wasn’t in the mood for sad tales of romantic woe. So this is the Islamic world, I said. While a breast shimmied into view. F seemed more than a little intrigued by the show. When he asked if I’d like to leave, I told him, no, I’d like to finish my salad. She was beautiful. I’m starting to think I’m turning into a hinge. It was nice to feel turned on. I took my time eating my salad. F. took his time eating his souvlaki. When we got back to the hotel, I went to see D. Asked Pete if we could speak to D alone when I saw the distraught look on her face. Pete said sure & he picked up his Heineken. D. said Pete’s mother was some radical anti-abortionist down in Tasmania & didn’t like what she’d done & started to cry. All this rain, all these tears. Asked her if she wanted to talk about it. I pictured some dark alley behind a mosque, & told her so. She managed to laugh, said it was this camel butcher & she was done on the table near the pot roasts. Then she said Pete had loaned her some money & a Turkish dr. did it. She said it was incredibly painful, like something digging at your insides with a fork. Not nearly enough morphine, she said. This last 48 hrs. has completely blunted my appetite for sex. It’s late. I can hear Freddy Freak creeping past our door. S. has her camp knife open & under her pillow. My candle’s throwing shadows like bat wings across the ceiling as it dies in its wax.

Mick

When we pulled into Gallipoli, Pete got on the blower and rattled off stats about how many Aussies and Kiwis got mowed down by Turkish snipers in the hills as they tried to gain a beachhead back in World War I. He called it the most bloody, fucked-up fiasco in modern warfare, and he blamed it on what he called fat limey generals back in London who didn’t know their butts from holes in the ground. Of course, Patrick thought Pete was trying to goad him some, so he took exception, said something about how it was likely not quite that simple, but Pete ignored him and slammed open the doors.

The last thing I wanted to do was walk around in a graveyard in the rain. I’d gotten on the bus before Kelly, leaving it up to her as to where she’d sit, and she sat with Dana. Which was fair enough. Dana looked like she could use the company. But that was the day a cold hit me and so I was a little depressed, and walking through that graveyard and looking down the slope of hill toward the Mediterranean where the massacre had happened didn’t help my mood much at all. Everything, clouds, water, gunmetal grey. Kelly and Dana a little ways away from me, their hair blowing in the wind and Dana looking like a warmed-up cadaver and Rockstar sneaking up behind them with his SX-70 to take their picture. Which got a scowl out of Kelly that should’ve dropped him dead in his tracks. And then there was Pete, standing for a long time near this one grave that had the name Cohen on it, I checked it out before I got back on the bus. But the main thing was that fucking rain, coming down cold like frozen bullets. The kind of day that makes you want to kick back on a couch and suck on a hot buttered rum.

When we were back on the road, I picked up Lucille and sang Jackson Browne’s “Song for Adam,” one of the saddest songs I know, and then Suzie came back and asked me if I knew how to play a song called “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda” by a guy named Eric Bogle, and I said nope, and she said that was okay, she knew the lyrics and I could probably play along with it reed easy, and then she launched into this real tear-jerker about an Aussie soldier who got his legs blown off at Gallipoli and so he couldn’t go waltzing Matilda no more when he got back to Australia.

Suzie sang it in a nice, high voice, perfect pitch. I was surprised at how good she sounded, and she was right about how easy the song was to play along with.