DOUBLE-DECKER
DIVERSIONS
A Montage of
Scenes from a Bus Journey
Once upon a desert
there was a two-bus coming along the road. A big grey smoke was billowing out
behind it. It made a strange and wonderful sight for the local Arabs. They had
never before seen a two-bus but that wasn't surprising because they lived in
the Syrian Desert and not in England where the people call such monsters
‘double-deckers’.
I am telling the
story as the bus moves across the desert’s shadow-less spaces. The mind cannot
find a perspective here, but floats in a collage of other scenes: those that
were, and those that might have been, picking events out of the stream of
consciousness as blue sky finds the clear spaces among the swirling
grain-clouds of the sandstorm. These are the highlights, popping into focus on
the desolate sand-screen beyond my stare. And those frames, scuttling across
the screen like beetles whose stone is lifted, are the irrepressible moments of
anguish.
In the beginning,
we were eight friends and a double-decker omnibus in an oily yard in London. The bus was
being converted into a two-storey caravan or ‘moving Hilton’ as one of our
later acquaintances referred to it, in preparation for a trip to the fabulous
East. For eighteen years it had plied along the promenade at Blackpool, carrying
tourists. Now, with a permanent complement of eight tourists it took the road
out of Calais, still at
promenade pace, the engine stuttering with a blocked fuel line.
On the seventh
day, we’re still in France, and I'm writing
‘Travels with a Bus in the Cevennes’ as we negotiate
the Gorges du Tarn. But here comes the local gendarme
on his moped, brandishing a black-gloved fist and expression to match. We must
not to try to take zis grand autobus
through the tunnels of the Gorges; they are like zis:
too low. He demonstrates with a palm hovering just above the road. We turn
round and go back, the gendarme leading his captured monster back through his
village, a triumphant gleam in his eye.
Gleams and
gendarmes: the insignia of other days of gloom. Gleams - the orange lamps in
the roof of the Monaco tunnel coming
closer: a burst of crackles and red sparks floating to the ground when we
knocked one down and the gendarmes came up the tunnel, running, because it was
blocked for 400 metres. They charged us
only for the broken lamp and escorted us through the city’s mountainous streets
to a secluded parking space saying that our previous choice, in the lush
grounds of the Casino, was perhaps a little naughty, no?
Gendarmes in Syria, too: the French
legacy of efficiency being stultified by the old desert dust. We're resting on
the crossing to Iraq. All is bright
and tranquil in the open desert, looking from my viewpoint, a sand dune, to the
black ribbon whereupon the bus. But here’s a vehicle approaching, a gleam of
steel as a soldier shuffles over the road, sub-machine gun at the ready;
sub-intelligent man: we’re spies and must be delivered, at gunpoint, to his
commanding officer, 70 miles behind us in an old mud fort. Seventy
miles to see his superior dismiss us with a wave, his aides sniggering at the
naiveté of our captor. We go on our way, the soldier still sitting
uncertainly on the top deck gripping his gun. We stop to let him return to his
camp; there he goes now, disappearing into the sand, without a wave or backward
glance. Does he care that he's cost us 12 gallons of diesel and will we have
enough fuel to carry us to the next town, two days away?
Fuel. Gathering winter clouds in Yugoslavia; we're chugging
fitfully into the gorges of the Lim with steep, banded walls on our right and
left. But, in front, narrows, where a grey, sunlit promontory rears across the
gorge and the pinched river rushes through in a big
foam. There is a small black pit in the rock, becoming larger as it speeds
towards us, engulfs us. Absorbs us. Ejects
us into the bright day. That tunnel was all right but the next is
rough-hewn - our anxious eyes turn to the roof coming closer in jagged lumps
until the ventilator grates on rock and someone shouts STOP through the
intercom. A hard time we had of it that Christmas. A long detour over the
mountains where the snow lay and the road just a beaten track linking isolated
Serbian settlements. The fuel system worse than before so that we had to
disconnect it and have a plastic hose feeding fuel directly to the injectors
from a jerrican by the front seat. We
sat, hunched and wrapped against the cold and dust in the lower saloon with
only big Tim on the top as a lookout, so that the risk of toppling over was
reduced. Later, we kept warm by running along beside the bus,
it was so slow, weltering among the ruts like a ship on high seas. Then a night
spent in Pljev1ja, a sooty town lodged in a fold of snowy hills. The people, I
think, mined coal and transported it in an endless, rumbling train of lorries. At evening, they paced the main street’s cobbled
gloom, or gossiped together, clumps of black greatcoats with frozen breath
clouds curling about them. And when at last we got back to the main road, it
was Christmas Eve and Belgrade was covered in
fresh snow. Dinner on the Day was on board bus, in fine style, but John sulked
in bed because of quarrels, taking no part in the festivities and saying his
Mother’s Cake was for when he’d forgiven us.
Cake in Istanbul a fortnight later
when most days were wet days but it’s a good place to get immersed in. We used
to wander under the domes of the Bazaar, at first buffeted by the lusty cries
of stallholders with special bargains for tourists: ‘You like sheepskin? Very good price’. Later, escaping into the
backwaters: gloomy passages where life was sluggish; only the tea boys dashed
to and fro, bearing dainty glasses to pantalooned old men sitting cross-legged
among their carpets, their rolls of silk or their displays of coarse cloths hanging
from the roof. One clear day we climbed to the top of the city’s Fire
Tower, finding old men brewing tea on the platform. We looked out and saw below
us the roof of the Bazaar, like an epidemic of bubbles; in the distance, where
the bubbles swelled big amid a stand of slender minarets, that’s the Blue
Mosque. We went to sit on a carpet under its blue mosaic vault, watching old
men twiddle their beads and bend their bodies to Mecca. But it was
mostly full of tourists and among them sidled oleaginous men with big smiles
and coat hanger moustaches, soliciting for girls, very good price.
Another
day: wending homewards in a postcard dusk; a violet sky behind the porcupine
silhouettes of the Blue Mosque and St. Sophia; the lamps beginning to cast
flickering shadows among the hanging garments in the clothes market, bringing
them to life; the massed oranges on the fruit stalls seeming larger and more
succulent; running the gauntlet of the raucous chanting of the vendors. Chanting. I have a picture of massed devotees in the yard of
the Great Mosque of Eyup. It was the Friday ceremony,
this one for women only, chanting responses to the metallic utterances of twin
loudspeakers, then bending their foreheads to the
ground in unison. In the cemetery, close ranks of yellowing turban-stones
listened impassively. In the ablutions courtyard an old rogue was selling
handfuls of seed: the pigeons did better than the beggars.
Pigeons in Naples, too: our dollars
skilfully plucked by the young foxes from the old town’s dens. That was John's
fault, but how was it we agreed? Greed?
Passing horrors
quickly to another at Regio, where the exit to the
ferry terminal was guarded by a low, too low bridge and the bus had to
backtrack to a port further north. We who stayed were stranded for fifteen
hours in a clouded city. The clouds were of tear gas: grenades bursting in the
alleys; the squares occupied by black-shirted riot squads: rank upon baleful
rank of glinting shields and helmet visors; shuttered shops and a clatter of
running feet; rifles being passed through a ground-floor window from an alley
in the working-class quarter. From the hillside rising over the town I looked
for Etna, and fancied I saw a cloud like a skullcap squatting ominously over
his crater. We climbed that - the bus and us. I can still smell the
differential burning on the long grind; or hear George and Hil
in the cab when the engine overheated and gave them a steaming; and John on top
screaming at George, the driver, when he failed to find first amid much crashing
of gears. We rested the bus the next day and slogged the final 1000 metres on
foot. Tim and I went together, crossing great pockmarked slopes of ash;
scrambled along black dykes of contorted lava; lunched on ciabatta and sardines
amid sulphur-rimmed cauldrons of evil steam. I would dash forward to snatch
photos of the orange, yellow and green fumes, in between gassings and before
black mushroom clouds from the active crater in the dark distance showered hot
cinders in our direction. At sunset we gathered to watch Vulcan's fireballs
spattering red against the darkening sky. Funny how I can still see a few
sparks when others have been absorbed by the night and quenched....
Our shadow before
us is lengthening as the desert sun drops behind us and the mirage weakens. The
images in my mind grow darker with the approaching reality of night; my eyes
are diverted from distant scenes to a concerted scrutiny of the desert for
signs of a place to park, and to sleep.