Last India Overland (50 page)

Next day, on the way to Lahore, Rockstar sat behind me, making little snuffling noises and whispering things like, I’m gonna kill ya, Muck-hole, gonna kill ya now, here comes the bullet, say hi to Charlie, won’t ya, when you get down to hell.

I laughed at most of it, hilarious stuff, but that only kind of egged Rockstar on, he started coming up with weirder things, like what he was going to do to my sister after he pissed on my grave, and that wasn’t so funny, so I told him to can it but he wouldn’t so I picked up Lucille who’d been feeling a little ignored and I banged out some rocking blues, John Lee Hooker style, and tried to use Rockstar’s gibbering for percussion and back beat. But it didn’t work too well.

What finally got him to stop was Suzie yelling for a loo-stop and maybe Pete didn’t hear her or he didn’t want to hear her but he didn’t stop, just kept driving, and finally Suzie got up off her seat, went down the aisle undoing her pants, pushing them down, panties, everything, so finally Pete put on the brakes, which spilled her down into the stairwell. When Pete finally got the bus stopped, we could hear her crying. Pete didn’t open up the doors, he just sat there gawking down at her. The rest of us went up to gawk as well. One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen, Suzie crumpled up at the bottom of the stairwell, sobbing to herself, letting everything go.

Kelly went and got a towel, three towels, from her bag, Charole got down beside and her and held her up, told Pete to open the doors, Pete did, and it took maybe ten or fifteen minutes for the two of them to get Suzie cleaned up, and Dave says when they were doing it, Suzie quit crying long enough to tell them Rockstar raped her the night before.

So that wasn’t a great day, that drive to Lahore, and I forgot all about the fact that Lahore was where I could find a decent dentist since the chilli capsicum was working so well.

Kind of funny thing happened, too, on the way to Lahore. Me and Kelly got to talking about our favourite movies. Hers was
North by North-west.
Mine was
Bonnie and Clyde.
And we were saying to each other, gee, wouldn’t it be great to see a movie again. Just to see those larger-than-life images up on the screen and smell popcorn in the air and feel that sticky floor underfoot. And on the main drag into Lahore, there it was, red and bright and white, a fucking movie marquee. With English words on it even.
Mighty Himalayan Man.

“We have to go see this movie,” I said to Kelly.

She looked at me and tried hard to smile. She had Suzie on her mind. “It’s a date,” she said.

Patrick heard this though. He looked back at us. “Is this a private excursion,” he said, “or can anyone come along?”

Which is when Dana looked back too, with a mean look in her eye. “Yeah, can anyone come along?” she said, more

to me than to Kelly.

I looked at Kelly. She said, in a half-hearted tone of voice, “The more the merrier.”

As we pull up in front of the International Hotel, Patrick asks us what the name of the movie is, and so we tell him. He says well, it’s certainly not the most auspicious of titles, but in the end I suppose it is quite acceptable, anything for a diversion, and so once we all got settled into our rooms and Kelly and Charole have a talk with Pete, they get a room with Suzie, this in the swankiest hotel on the trip, swankier than that hotel in Mashhad, we all head out into the streets, all of us except Pete and Rockstar, and Patrick flags down a couple tri-shaws, these little motorized scooters, open-air, sat three in the back if you squeezed in tight, and we went to see
Mighty Himalayan Man.

Weird theatre. Women had their own line-ups. These garish posters, all walls, pirates and apes and women in veils and dark-eyed men with swords and housewives smiling too broadly. But there is a popcorn maker. Got a box. Then into the dark. Only a few other Pakistanis. Watching the tragic tale of a misunderstood beast and the frail and lovely woman he falls in love with, while being chased and tormented by the males of her species. Kind of a King Kong rip-off without Fay Wray. A Tibetan movie in dubbed English with Urdu subtitles, not that the dialogue was all that important anyway. Dave says what Kelly was wishing was that I’d maybe held her hand, she was longing for contact with flesh, like the abominable snowman up on the screen, but me, I was caught up in seeing how much of King Kong the Tibetan moviemakers would actually rip-off, it was great to see something larger than life again. There weren’t many skyscrapers to be found in Himalayan jungle. What would they come up with for a big finale? Which is why, when everyone else had seen more than enough of the film, I said I wanted to stay and so Kelly stayed too and afterwards, over Spanish coffees in the cocktail lounge of the Lahore Hilton, Kelly said, well, I liked some of the photography, when they managed to keep the camera still, and several moments later, when the subject of the movie had been exhausted (it needed a big finale, I said), I asked Kelly what she and Charole talked to Pete about, and so she told me what Suzie told them, and Pete said well, he’s got to get the radiator fixed first thing in the morning so it’ll have to wait, but what’ll likely happen is that he’ll tip off the cops at the Indian border and they’ll find a little something on Rockstar that’ll happen to be illegal and that’ll be the last we see of Rockstar, just like that.

I just shook my head and laughed.

“So what does the Great McPherson perceive in his crystal ball, concerning this endeavour?” she said.

Dave rang me up and said it wasn’t going to happen.

“It ain’t going to happen,” I said.

Kelly said, “Well, we’ll see.”

Then there’s a long silence before she says, “Mick, let’s talk about sex.”

Something kicked into debonair gear and I’m the epitome of suave and masculine sophistication. I say sure, glad to, because I can see what it is Kelly wants, I can feel the ache inside her of wanting to be setded down with someone in front of the boob tube, little dinners out every once in a while, heavy discussions about what movie to see next, and sex maybe three times a week, sometimes in the afternoon, and kids, after a while, but not too soon. I’d gone that route, kind of, with the infamous Peggy dil-Schmidt, and that little romance led straight to a chair and a knotted nylon, and that’s the way things were headed with Nancy Pickles, except I took a little detour straight to this hospital bed.

She said, “I am curious to know what it’s like, before I die, to have really good sex with someone I love. I mean on a consistent basis. Have you ever had that?” She gazes at me, a frank, pure Kelly gaze.

I said, “I don’t think so. Came close a couple times. Like last night. But for something like that, like, I think it probably takes a while.”

“True,” she said, “but everyone has to start somewhere.

And this whole business with Suzie____” She let the thought

trail away.

I said, “We can’t let the real world kill the old sense of romance, can we?”

“That’s it, exactly,” she said. “Every once in a while I feel like throwing in the towel, admitting defeat, let it all get sucked away down the drain, but there’s this voice in my head that tells me to hang in there, a soul mate might be around the next corner, and so I do.” She took a sip of her Spanish coffee, licked at the sugar on the rim, looked back at me, said, “I have my doubts about you, Mick, but you don’t judge me, and I can relate to your self-destructive tendencies, I’ve got them myself. So when we get to those houseboats in the Kashmir Valley, why don’t we pretend we’re soul mates, that we’ve been married for years, that the trust between us is like a solid iron kettle full of hot mulled wine?”

I laughed. She smiled.

“Just for the hell of it,” she said.

I take out my chilli capsicum, give my tooth a squirt. Rub my ribs. They were aching some, right above my heart.

I finally say, “Yeah, let’s give it a shot. Just for the hell of it.”

There was a brief silence while Kelly looked into her coffee. Then she said, “I suppose we should talk about birth control.” I said, “Maybe we should’ve talked about that last night.” She said, “What’s romance without a little risk?”

I said, “Okay, let’s talk about birth control.”

She said, “If it’s alright with you, I’d just as soon not use any.”

I said, “Why not?”

She said, “Because I’ve got this romantic notion. We have to give the Fates a chance, every once in a while, without modern plastic technology intervening.”

“I get your drift,” I said.

“Don’t worry about strings,” she said. “If there does happen to be one strong swimmer, it’s my responsibility.” “Whatever you say,” I said.

“I should tell you though, I’m at the peak of my cycle, and Venus is close to my Jupiter in my Fifth House of children.” She gave me an impish smile.

“Thanks for the info,” I said.

After that there was a little lull in the conversation so I switched it back to movies, to the first ones we’d seen.

First one Kelly ever saw was a Disney flick,
The Incredible Journey.
The first one I ever saw was a Tarzan movie, don’t remember its name but it had this scary scene in it where this bad guy walked into a pit of quicksand and slowly started sinking. He went down screaming. Last thing we see is his hand then his fingers then nothing.

Then Kelly and I walked back to the hotel, holding hands, and outside her room she went up on her tiptoes and kissed me goodnight on the mouth.

See you in the morning, she said, her eyes still looking at me as she slowly closed the door.

Suzie’s daybook entry

Dec. 3

What day is it today? It’s bloody Sunday? I hate these bloody Moslem countries where everything’s open on Sunday and nothing’s open on Friday, it screws everything up. It gets me all confused and worried and anxious. Just like I hate nerdball men who think don’t means donut and they decide they’re feeling hungry. They think can’t is cunt and won’t is I want you, I need you, let’s find a haystack. There’s nerdball men like that all over the place, you can’t get away from them. I hate them. Just like I hate these free days. I’d rather keep this bloody bus full of wank-off artists on the road and get this trip over with. I just want to be sitting at a table filling my fat face with mom’s Christmas pudding. But instead Pete wants us to go play squash. I hate nerdball men who always want us women to do what they want us to do. I’m not going to go play squash so somebody else can put down here who won what if they think it’s so important. I’ll talk about Dara instead. When Pete told us we were going to Dara, Patrick said what the fuck’s Dara? Took the words out of my mouth, mate. I’ve been there and I still don’t know what it was. There were lots of guns and lots of drugs and it looked like a couple guys had been in a mule accident somewhere in the hills. When I get back home I’m going to tell my mom I was on a bus full of drug addicts and one-bollock rapists.* I’m sure that’ll make her real happy.

Next day. Dave? Right. Squash. Pete drops us off at some squash courts. He’s got time so he has a game, game with me, and he hits a wild one, I have to lunge for it, needs a backhand and I hit him in the nose with my racket. Pete got pissed off. He thought I did it on purpose. It was just an accident. Then he takes off to get the radiator fixed. I went and found a phone. Dave told me I should try to get that tooth fixed. What happens, he said, if I run out of chilli capsicum? So I tried phoning up a few dentists but the Lahore Lug-nuts had beat the Aussie Axle-rods in a soccer or rugby game the night before and the city decided to take a holiday. At least the dentists did. Don’t know how Pete managed to fix the radiator. Probably by greasing a few palms. Downtown after squash, the only thing open was a drug store. Literally. It sold drugs. So everyone got stoned. Except Rockstar and Suzie, who took off somewhere by themselves, weird, I thought, Suzie going off with Rockstar, not a brain in her head, she was asking for trouble. The rest of us, zonk city. Well. Half-zonk city. I didn’t take much of the opium Patrick bought, didn’t feel like having Dave take over and fuck up my life some more. Didn’t even get a buzz. Kelly did though. She clammed up tight, didn’t say a word for two hours, while Patrick and Charole and Dana got into a heavy discussion about Milk Duds, fur balls and whether or not it was the Year of the Horse or Year of the Snake and after that it was back to the hotel, where Pete was waiting to take us on a tour of Lahore, which I skipped.

from Kelly’s diary

Dec. 3

Μ & I had a date last night. Kind of date I never would’ve dreamed of in high school. Saw a movie that milked the old beauty & the beast cliche of every nuance, & then afterwards, among potted palms and some of Lahore’s effluvial affluence (Pat.’s phrase), we talked about things that mattered. There’s hope. But they say there’s always hope. This morning before breakfast, Pete came to our room & gave S. & me some opium. If we ever happen to have a chance, he said, stick some of this in R.’s clothes. Pete really isn’t the most intelligent guy in the world, but I kept my mouth shut, & S. seemed to think it was a great idea. Pete then dropped all of us off, R. included, at some squash courts & played 1 game & then took off to get the radiator fixed. First D. beat me, then C. beat me. Mick finally let me win a game. Then we decided to get tri-shaws, my kind of vehicle, the wind in my hair, always a hair’s breadth away from a traffic disaster, down to the mall. S took a tri-shaw with Rob, acting very very friendly, giving herself up to the cause. She claims he raped her in Peshawar. The reason for the opium plant. She still isn’t back. As for the rest of us, we sniffed out a gov’t agency like a liquor vendor. Except it sells drugs—opium, hash. Skin felt like papyrus. I could feel all my organs working, the blood pulsing through the arteries. Everything slowly slowing down, beginning to rot like the dead & dying flowers. Pat., high, chattered away, I wanted to sew his mouth shut. But it was weak stuff, the high’s long gone, & S. has just walked in. R caught her in the act of trying to slide the opium into a jeans pocket. He took it wrong, thought it was a present. He didn’t get mad, she said, he just ate the opium, even offered to share it with her. Pete then returned with the bus, the radiator’s fixed, took us on a tour of the city. Guide & everything. Right now we’re at the tomb of the Emperor Jahangir. I can feel the ghosts. Concrete death, sitting like a Buddha, staring. We’ve seen another fort, blood soaked into its walls, walls bleeding, the Budshahi Mosque, Wazir Khan’s Mosque, other tombs belonging to Anarkali & Noor Jahan. All these tombs, all these reminders of death, everywhere we go. Starting to get depressing. I’m looking back with fondness to that night in Istanbul when F. & I watched the Lady of the Veils. She was lively at least. Just had supper at the Nemat Kadah. Delicious chicken mussallam & nans, all washed down with more opium tea. Rob, stoned, was on his best behaviour, talking to me about how difficult it is to photocopy colours without letting them bleed. He used to work in a print shop. When he talks to me, he has kind brown eyes. But still intense, & nervous. Something creeping behind the pupils.