Last India Overland (30 page)

Afterwards everyone clapped, even Tim and Teach. Teach even dabbed at some tears in her eyes. Charole wanted us to do it again, and so we did, and it sounded even better the second time because I knew what was coming. And somehow that made the day a little better.

And as we drove along the coast, we left those rain clouds behind, and by the time we got to Canakkale, we could see the sun about to set, and everyone cheered.

But then we had to put up those wet tents. Inside they smelt like dead dog.

I noticed that Dana wasn’t sharing a tent with Patrick and Suzie any more, she helped Kelly and Charole put up theirs.

I really didn’t think too much of it at the time. I was too busy sneezing.

I’ve still got that cold. Soon says it’s because my body’s so run down. She says I’ve got huge red blood cells that are eating my white blood cells, or is it the other way around? It’s something she sees in the blood tests, she says, of people who drink too much Mekong rum.

Well, I didn’t drink any rum that night in Canakkale. I drank raki. Not much. Not enough that’d allow Dave to slide behind the driver’s wheel or anything. It was Jenkins’s raki, and he drank a lot of it, and I got to hear about every time his heart was broke in two since the time he was six. Seventeen times. By the seventeenth time, he was laughing about it.

“Know what your problem is, Jenkins?” I said to him.

He thought about it. “Nope. What’s my problem, Mick?”

“You’re too much of a romantic,” I said. “You got to learn how to slide, you got to learn how to rock and roll.” Me, the big expert.

He looked into his raki, knocked it back, said, “Yeah, you’re probably right, but I wouldn’t take back any of it, it was all worth the risk. Someone told me that the one who leaves you is just that much preparation for the one who’s next in line.”

I thought about Jenkins saying that this morning, when Soon gave me my breakfast of Metronidazole, and I asked her what she thought of it.

She gave me the sweetest smile and said it’s probably true, she’s not sure, she’s only really been in love once.

“Still in love with him, are you?” I said.

She said yes.

I asked her how old she was. She looks maybe twenty-five. She said she’s thirty, and asked me how old I was. Told her I just turned twenty-four.

She didn’t say anything but I knew what she was thinking. She was thinking I was as good a candidate for rat bait as she’s seen in a while, I might as well be sixty-four.

Suzie’s daybook entry

If we wait for you-know-who and you-know-who to write daybook entries there won’t be anything else written in this. Bloody nerdballs. They remind me of the guys in school who’d get everybody else in shit with the teacher and we’d all have to stay after school or miss the whatever. Wherever you go you can’t get away from them. You go into the loo and they’ve left the seat up. That’s one good thing about Turkish Delights at least, there’s no lids to leave up. When you go to a flick they always eat the popcorn too loud, they don’t know that you’re supposed to suck on it until it’s down to the kernel. They never pull their weight. So I know, I get carried away, and I shouldn’t have written those limericks, but thanks, Pete, for washing them off so fast, and thanks, Patrick, for spreading them around like you did, so now everyone knows. This is really one great troupe, I can’t believe it. At least we’re out of that bloody Istanbul. I’ve never seen a filthier city in my life. It needed a good washing. Now we’re on our way to Can-something-or-other. One thing about one of the you-know-who’s, he can play guitar. It’s a good thing they’re good for something at least. I love that song. I think it’s the best song ever written by anybody anywhere. At least all those guys didn’t die for nothing.

TURKEY

Canakkale-Kusadasi

Day 23
¹⁴

Departure: 7:30 a.m.

Route: Troy—Dremit—Pergamon—Izmir—Selcuk Camp: Shell Genco—beach, bar, restaurant, free hot showers. Points: 1. Don’t build up their expectations for the Trojan Horse, it ain’t anything special.

2.    There’s a good waterfront butcher in Izmir, the fish is fresh and cheap.

3.    You might want to make Bergama for lunch, have it in the ruins near the Acropolis near the Altar of Zeus. It’s not a bad view. You’ve got the marketplace to the south, the Royal Gardens to the north and the Doric temple of Athena flanked by the palace on the east, while to the west you’ve got the remains of an old Roman amphitheatre.

4.    But the best ruins on the trip have to be the ruins of Ephesus. You can tell them your boss said so. There’s just something about that place. The breeze whispering through those Cypress trees, rustling the leaves, while all those old skeletons of buildings, the odeom and the theatre and the library especially, heave up into the air. It’s kind of eerie, especially around sunset. Almost enough to make you believe in ghosts. Of course the famous thing about Ephesus is the Temple of Diana, or Artemis, depending on your mythological persuasion, and this is where Paul wrote his so-called “captivity epistles,” where he tried to persuade the Jews and us Gentiles to get along and tried to convince us that a moral response to the Word of Christ is the best response. Some say Ephesus is where Paul and Mary lived out the last days of their lives. There’s a lot of legends connected to Ephesus, but the one I kind of like concerns the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, who were seven Christian kids who hid themselves in a cave back during the Decian persecution (you remember that—250 A.D.) but someone found out where they were hiding and blocked up the cave. And so they fell asleep, in what you call your mutual embrace. Two hundred years later a herdsman found them and woke them and sent one of them out to find food, since they were just a little hungry. The kid’s amazed. They’re yakking about Christ in the bakery. They’re yakking about Christ in the butcher shop. Just like he’s the latest rock star. But he was too amazed. He aroused suspicion, someone called the cops, he spilled his story, and so everyone went out to the cave, including the emperor, Theodosius II. The kids tell their story and everyone thinks, well, hey, God must’ve wrought this miracle just to prove he can resurrect the dead, and then the kids went back to sleep.

Mick

This morning I woke up with a feeling that it wouldn’t be a bad day. And I was right. First thing that happened was Soon came in and gave me a sponge bath and laughed and giggled at my erection. (It’s not the first time it’s been laughed and giggled at.) And then I managed to talk her into getting me some bennies, or whatever they call them here in Thai, because I needed the energy to keep writing.

Soon’s pretty impressed by the fact that I’m sitting here churning out what she thinks is a novel. I’m pretty impressed by the fact that I’m sitting here churning out what Dave says I should call a memoir, strictly speaking, though I can let Soon think what she likes.

Anyway she got the bennies and I did a hundred pages that day, way into the night by candlelight, and I slept the sleep of the Trojan dead—phrase is Dave’s idea—until I felt Dave clawing at my mind’s little trapdoor and my hand felt seized up, I couldn’t move it, I thought he was trying another takeover.

Fuck off, I said, fuck off, and I got my movement back in my arm, and then Soon came in, with that happy little smile of hers, and said, “Time to change your sheets, writer.”

There’s something about clean sheets. Just like there’s something about slipping into a brand new sleeping bag for the first time. A nice cozy feeling, like your tumtum’s full of your mom’s hot apple pie and ice cream.

It ain’t the same feeling when you’re easing yourself into a second-hand sleeping bag for the first time. It’s a case of the willies, basically. You imagine somebody shooting off a thousand cum-shots into the woolly eiderdown. You imagine some jerk-off with crabs and fleas and a bad case of psoriasis. You imagine toenail clippings, snot.

It’s not a good thing to think like that. Kelly said to me once that thoughts have power and it’s best to control them, keep them positive.

What I should’ve been thinking is, hey, some cute, browneyed blonde used to own the sleeping bag. She bathed three times a day and covered her body with baby powder afterwards and she had the sleeping bag fumigated and dry-cleaned twice before she sold it to that camel-jockey.

When I woke up the next morning, I woke up scratching. Which isn’t all that unusual. But I was scratching all over.

I got out of the sleeping bag, went to the tent flap to get some light, and looked at my body. There were tiny litde welts all over. Even my ugly, which was gummed up worse than ever, had little bites on it.

I let out a long, slow groan.

I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be a good day.

And I was right.

What happened is this: first thing after breakfast Pete takes us out to see the Trojan Horse, which looks like a huge Aurora plastic model, and then he drives us into Troy for lunch. He parks at the Troy Mobil, so he can change the oil, and after he tells us that one of the three chai shops in town was fairly safe but he forgot exactly which one, he crawls underneath the bus.

Since I ain’t exactly in a chipper mood, I pick the one that nobody else picks, and Jenkins, who wasn’t exactly an expert at picking up antisocial vibes, tags along.

The chai shop has little cartons of yoghurt in the window with flies buzzing around the scum on top and the place is empty, but that’s okay with me. When I get in an antisocial mood, we’re talking suicidal.

A huge lump of a woman waddles out of the kitchen and takes our order and me and Jenkins kind of stare at the flies for a while and talk about music, mosdy Bob Marley, and I’m telling Jenkins that according to my psychic sources, most of the Wailers are going to be dead in ten years, Bob’s going to fry his brain with pot and the rest are going to get murdered, and he’s giving me this sceptical look, but I rattle on. This is all stuff Dave fed me one night, think it was in Zadar. It all has to do with the Apocalypse, I told him. It’s like Dylan said, the wheel’s still spinning, though Dave tells me it’s going to eventually stop on John Lennon’s name. And I went into my little Athens spiel about Elvis, how he’s the perfect martyr for our world, a martyr for the overindulgent, though Dave tells me he had a twin brother who died at birth too, and it was the influence of that dead brother’s psyche that got Elvis hooked on Hershey bars after he hit thirty.

Jenkins is just grinning a bit, humouring me, when the woman brings out our camel kidney soup and camel curd salad and a kebab for Jenkins that looks like it might be a camel’s ugly. The salad is pretty heavy on the black olives and I’m chewing on some of that when something suddenly goes crunch. Even Jenkins hears it. And I get this sickening taste of metal in my mouth.

My tongue does some probing. What it finds is a hole with sharp little edges. It’s a big hole.

“What’s the matter?” says Jenkins.

I dig around in my cheek until I find the filling. I show it to Jenkins. He stares at it for a moment.

“That’s a big one,” he says.

I say yeah. All of a sudden that kebab really does look like some lopped-off camel’s penis. The lettuce looks like green shards of glass. The soup looks like a bowl of blood. Acid flash.

I let the implications sink in for a few minutes until Jenkins finishes his kebab. Me, I’ve lost my appetite.

When we get back to the bus, I show the filling to Pete and ask him if he knows where there’s a decent dentist.

He wipes his hands on an oily rag and kind of grins at me.

“I think you’re out of luck, mate,” he says. “There ain’t even a horse dentist between here and Lahore.”

from Kelly’s diary

Nov. 5

Yesterday it was cemeteries in the rain. A wonderful falling star last night. Today it’s a twentieth century Trojan horse &

M. losing a filling. He gargled with raki all afternoon. At Ephesus I did a dance in the spot where the Temple of Diana once stood. At suppertime C. asked D. how she was feeling. D said her fillings were fine. Now C. is giving D. a haircut by candlelight. Talk of a perfect world where the men are caged, the Goddess is back in her rightful place of power & there’s sperm banks in every mall. D talked about the lesbian phase she went through at university, C. & I all ears.

Mick

I gargled raki all the way to Kusadasi, and since it would’ye been a crime to waste it, especially since it was Patrick’s raki, I swallowed the raki, and so maybe that’s why I don’t remember a whole hell of a lot about that trip to Kusadasi. I don’t know. Maybe Dave took over. He’s not saying. I remember we saw an awful lot of ruins and I remember a high cliff and Kelly in her one-piece swimsuit, Dana in her bikini and Rockstar standing at the top of the cliff, taking forever to dive. I remember my cannonball, and thinking there might be sharks or sharp spears of rock under the waters. I remember that salt water in my nose, like a sniff of burnt-out match.

I remember drinking lots of funny sounding drinks at the camp cantina afterwards with Patrick while he wrote a daybook entry, and Suzie coming up to him afterwards and giving him shit because it wasn’t his turn, giving me shit because I still hadn’t got around to taking my turn. Don’t know why I didn’t. I guess writing something stupid in some book just wasn’t high on my list of priorities but Suzie really took that book seriously. Because, of course, she was hoping to win it in the raffle at the end of the trip.