3. The Dunciad

18 – 19 April 2004, İstanbul

It was to be one of those chapters in which nobody would be seen in a very good light. Certainly, the light was poor when we pulled into Sirkeci station in İstanbul. We were among the last to get off the train, and we were a very long way from the station. Many extra carriages had been added to the front of the train – which is probably why there had been so many long stops here and there. As we trudged and struggled towards the head of the train we met a fence running along the middle of the platform and, as we were on the left side of the platform, we took the left side of the fence. We got all the way to the station building before discovering our mistake. We were at a locked gate. It was at that moment that Mr Khoot appeared and said “This is a problem.” In Greece and Italy we were used to hearing “No problem” – even when there was a problem. In Turkey it seemed they had forgotten how to say “no”.

            So we had to walk the length of the platform three times instead of once. Moby Dick was protesting violently and I was exhausted by the effort to keep it going forward in an orderly manner, so, when a man came down the platform and greeted us cheerily and insisted on helping Finn with the bags, I knew we would have to pay for it one way or another, but my leg said don’t fight it. We followed him, almost gratefully, out to his taksi. We had no choice, really – he had our bags.

            We had fallen into an old trap. I had been forced into it once before, in the company of two nervous old ladies on arrival, very late, in Rhodes. I would not have gone for it then, except that my refusal would have left me alone. And there was another occasion on a trishaw in Benares when Finn’s father told the poor pedaller that he wouldn’t be paid a single brass razoo unless he took us to the ghastly, roach-infested sty he (Finn’s father) had picked out from his guidebook (Asia On the Smell of an Oily Rag – or something like that). In that particular case, the poor pedaller was right. In this case, the problem was that we were going to the Cordial House Hotel, and our taksi driver was touting for something that sounded like the And Hotel, to which he was utterly determined to take us.

“No,” I said. “We are booked at the Cordial House Hotel in…” I looked at my itinerary… “Peykame Sokak, Sultanahmet.”

“Oh, this is no good, the Cordial,” he told us confidentially. He was a benign uncle, saving us from a terrible mistake. “You must come to the And Hotel,” he insisted.

“We are meeting friends at the Cordial,” I said.

“How much you pay at this Cordial?” he said, obviously thinking the friends were my invention to put him off.

“I honestly don’t remember,” I said. “Not much.” It was true. I had made the booking (along with many others) on the internet in early February. Anything I said about the price might have been misleading. And, anyway, it was irrelevant. We were going to the Cordial.

“How much you pay there? I can give you better price. Just say how much.”

“Please just take us to the Cordial,” I said. “We have booked and paid for the room, and we are meeting friends there.”

“The And Hotel is much better,” he said. “It is right next to the Ayasofya.”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m sure it is, but we are going to the Cordial and if you won’t take us there we will get out of the car now.”

“Okay, okay, lady.” He said. He drove out of the station and turned down towards the Galata Bridge.

It is at times like this that I begin to feel some nostalgia for a time when travelers on the Orient Express got off the train and headed straight for the Pera Palas where you can still ask for Room 411 in which Agatha Christie stayed often and might well have written Murder on the Orient Express. But I have to deal with a much more egalitarian age – which was just as well: in a genteel age I would never have been in any position to write or travel, even with both legs in perfect walking order. I sighed. It was too late to think of murder – though the train had seemed old enough to have been left over from Agatha Christie’s day. Old enough, but without the class.

“This is my third visit to Turkey,” I tell the taksi driver, “so I know you’re going the wrong way. You should have gone straight up the hill.”

“No, no, no,” he says. “This is the way.” So we drive right round the waterfront and up into Sultanahmet from the other side. “Here is the Ayasofya,” he says, “And here is the And Hotel.” He stops outside it.

“We are going to the Cordial,” I say. “And if you don’t take us there immediately, we will not pay you anything at all.”

He starts driving and we are soon at the Cordial. It is on a steep and narrow one-way street, and he has to park the car a few meters past the door, on the other side of the road. He asks for eight Euros and I say that is far too much. “What you pay then?” he asks. I tell him I’ll pay five and I want change from twenty. In Euros. He says he doesn’t have that and tells me to get change in the hotel. He follows me in and talks, in Turkish, to the guy on the desk. He does not leave until he is satisfied that my “friends” are really here. After he has gone, I realize that he has managed a sleight of hand and taken an extra ten Euros off me. I can't believe I've let it happen.

That evening, my friends Clive and Vic, go out for a late meal with us. Clive’s daughter, Danielle, who is around the same age as Finn, is jetlagged and already in bed. I’m starving. I don’t care what kind of restaurant it is. I’d settle for a McTurco at Macdonald’s. We don’t get as far as Macdonald’s because we meet a man standing outside a fried chicken restaurant. His place is about to close, but he reopens for us. He is a very good cook, he tells us, even though he is the manager. But other members of the staff reappear and we get a fine meal and the manager talks to us a lot. He wants to know all about my broken leg and he tells us that he had a broken leg when he was five, but his father, who was a wise man and a healer with six wives and 27 children (of which he was the youngest), did not take him to the hospital. Instead, he made a paste of grape mush and egg yolk with which he covered the leg before splinting it. The leg had healed really well. “Now,” he says, “I have only one wife and two sons, and when anything happens I go to the hospital.”

“Have you any daughters?” I ask, thinking that maybe the girls don’t count. But he tells me that, sadly, he hasn’t, and he can only afford one wife and two children.  It’s after midnight now, and he invites us to call in and have tea with him in the morning, so I’m thinking that he probably hasn’t the time or the energy to father more children anyway. The chicken is good, and I’m not obliged to berate myself for failing to eat traditional Turkish food, because I know that when Colonel Frederick Burnaby rode through Anatolia in 1876, he was disappointed in his expectation of being able to partake of game birds for his meals. “A goose or duck,” he said, “would have been an agreeable change to the chicken fare which awaited us in every village.”[1] If he had a special recipe, the Colonel was not sharing it. 

19 April 2004. It was Monday morning but, since traveling usually makes you forget what day it is, I couldn’t see how that could have affected Vicky or Finn, neither of whom wanted to wake up. So they missed out on breakfast – as did Clive and Danielle who, it turned out, had sat around waiting for me to come and get them. When I go to their room, Clive starts in about Vicky being witless – I can’t remember the exact word, but it didn’t auger well. Clive has an unrecognized anxiety disorder. I try to be reassuring.

We all agree to go for a ferry trip up the Bosphorus, but it’s raining a little and I decide to take a taxi because I don’t want my white whale to get wet. Nobody wants to come with me in the taxi, except Finn, but we need cash, so he sets off walking with the others who mean to call at a bank on the way.

The reception guy calls me a taksi and when it comes I find the driver is a halfwit whose only English word is problem. He has no idea what I could possibly mean by “Bosphorus ferry terminal”, he doesn’t recognize “boat” even when I try to draw the shape. Then I remember that the Turkish word is ferrybot, but no light-bulb flashes in his brain when I say that either. “Galata Bridge” produces nothing, and I couldn’t remember Eminönü. I have the bright idea that if I could get him to the train station I could point the way to the ferry terminal, but he has no idea about “railway station” or “train station” or “train”. I try “Sirkeci”, which is the location of the station, but that draws a blank as well, and I assume I’ve forgotten how to say it properly. I curse myself for having forgotten to bring my Turkish dictionary with me to Turkey. I curse myself for not even having a map. How stupid can you get? I ask myself. I can’t even insist on getting out and going back into the Cordial to get directions (or a taxi with an English-speaking driver), because he has been driving semi-aimlessly and I could not walk back to the hotel anyway. In desperation I try to navigate the way, but the one-way system in Sultanahmet has always confused me and I know we are going in the wrong direction, and I see no landmarks to get my bearings from. I’d just resort to going down hill – since Sultanahmet is a peninsular and most roads lead to the water, but the driver seems unwilling to do this – or even to understand where I’m pointing. He just keeps muttering “Problem, problem” and I begin to see him as a turkey gobbledegükler.

Eventually he stops at a place where people are about, and the third man he asks speaks English. I had begun to suspect that he had panicked at the very sight of me, and that even if I had started speaking perfect Turkish to him he would have heard a foreign gobbledegook every time I opened my mouth. It turns out to be worse than that. The guy on the street translates for me and there is still no comprehension. He doesn’t know where the boats leave for the Bosphorus. I explain that it is near the Galata Bridge and after what seems like an impossibly long set of instructions for such a very short ride, we set off hesitantly and we do arrive at the right place. I expect another argument over the fare, and I’m relieved when he charges only six million.

I half expect the others to have beaten me there, but there is no sign of them. As soon as I get out of the taxi in my pink coat I feel like a big blob of pink flesh – a veritable shark-magnet – and the sharks don’t even circle, they just come straight at me with their questions about where I’m going and what I want, and their interminable offers of everything from potentially useful information (like there’s only one Bosphorus ferry a day and you have just missed it, but the two hour boat tour leaves in 10 minutes and costs only…) to virtual abduction under the guise of friendly interest in your country of origin. Telling them that you are just waiting for friends is seen as either a little billygoat bluff to try to put them off the scent of your aloneness, or an even better opportunity for profit. When I get to the point of seriously considering hitting them with one of my crutches, I retire to a concrete barrier and perch my bottom on it – which is when one of the vast majority of genuinely nice Turkish men wheels out a chair for me to sit on, and after that the sharks leave me alone.

I wait and wait.

Eventually Vicky arrives – alone.

“Where are the others?” I ask.

“Well,” she says slowly, as if buying time to think up some way of breaking it to me gently. “I don’t know.”

“Why,” I ask. “What the hell happened?”

We are both stressed, but Vic feigns an air of unconcern that alarms me. It takes me a while to get the story out of her. She and Finn had gone into a bank and found a queue half a mile long and, after half a minute, they had opted not to wait. Going back out to where Clive and Dani were waiting, they found Clive with a knowing look on his face.

“What happened?” he says without waiting for an answer. “Found they couldn’t speak English, eh? I could have told you that.”

At which Finn mutters something like “I can’t stand anymore of this”, and walks off.

They wait for him for five minutes and then move on to another bank where Vic does her money changing and then can’t find Clive and Dani. She waits five minutes for them, then gives up and makes her way to the wharf alone.

We are standing there talking the pros and cons of any possible further actions (with me trying to conceal the panic I am feeling about my son having disappeared on his first day in İstanbul), when Clive and Dani turn up.

“Okay,” says Clive, “what’s the plan then?”

“There are two problems,” I say. “The first problem is that Finn is not here. The sec….”

“That’s good,” says Clive, “one less person to worry about.”

“You might very well think so,” I say, “but I don’t think you can really expect me to see it like that.” I wonder how he’d see it if his daughter, Dani, were the “one less person”.

He starts up again, getting increasingly agitated. “Well, he’s just gone off sulking, and isn’t this just typical behaviour for him? So if we let him get away with this, it is going to happen all the time and we can’t just keep farting around looking for him. So what’s the plan? When does the boat leave?”

“That’s problem number two,” I say. “I’m told the boat left at ten and the only alternative is a two hour boat tour which would cost a lot more and be a lot less interesting.”

“What’s the plan then?” he shouts. “Come on, you have to have a plan. We can’t just stand around here wasting time.”

I open my mouth to speak, but he cuts me off. You must understand that Clive is, at times, very good company – or I would not ever have had anything to do with him, and certainly would never have arranged to meet him here – but I see, now, that this is not going to be one of those times. It is not at all beyond him to have decided in advance that our little party is not going to work, and to have unconsciously done the self-fulfilling-prophesy thing.

“Come on then, what’s the plan? We’re never going to get round Turkey like this, so what are you going to do?”

I am thinking that I need to find Finn, because I won’t enjoy anything else I might do anyway.  “Well, I say, “I think I ha…”

“Danielle and I have to eat,” he cuts in, “because we didn’t have breakfast, so what’s the plan? Come on then.”

“As I was sa…”

“Come on then. What are we going to do? Tell us now.”

I recognize Clive’s anxiety disorder – though he refuses to acknowledge it himself – but I’m finding it hard to be sympathetic. This time I don’t even bother to open my mouth. I just look at him. He stands there with his face practically quivering with incoherent and unspoken demands.

“Have you quite finished?” I say. I’m wondering what he thinks I could possibly say in the face of that barrage. It also occurs to me to look and see if there are any flecks of foam coming from his mouth. Then I begin to see that this is some kind of unconscious ploy on his part. One less person to worry about. He doesn’t like there being five of us. He fears it is out of control and he’s trying to force the issue. He wants me to choose between him and Finn.

I should have been decisive and reassuring, though I don’t think that really would have salvaged the situation. I have a few anxieties of my own. I try to stay calm. “I don’t see how it is my fault that you didn’t avail yourself of the free breakfast,” I say. “As for the plan – my first priority has to be finding out what Finn’s problem is – though, on that score, I might suggest that, if you have any more wrong-headed ideas about Finn’s or Vicky’s problems, you don’t mouth off any smart-arsed opinions about them…”

He looked astonished. “What d’you mean by that?” he says.

“…like your I-could-have-told-you-so about the people in the bank not speaking English…”

“Well, I had already discovered that.”

“…but they had simply decided that the queue was too long. And if you knew that they didn’t speak English in that bank, why did you let them waste their time – and yours and mine – in the first place?”

The truth, I later realized, was that Clive had put some distance between us and them. Even on arrival at Singapore, he had avoided Vicky because he’d got some silly idea that she might want to tag along with them – though she, like most people who stopover in Singapore, had a hotel and a tour already booked and paid for. On arrival in Istanbul, Vic had organized the transport to the hotel and invited Clive and Dani to join her, which they did, but that didn’t mean that Clive was ready to include Vic and Finn in any camaraderie or togetherness. Clive was annoyed that they had gone into the bank without asking his advice first, but he had been so busy shutting the two of them out of his own twosome, that they didn’t find the prospect of breaking though the communication barrier very rewarding.

“Ha, as if they’d have taken notice!” he says. “But anyway, what do we do now?”

“I suggest that you and Danielle go and get some food. And after that, I suggest you do whatever you like. I’ll see you later.”

I feel a bit sorry for Danielle. She’s a lovely girl, and her face has fallen somewhat. But I am more than a bit sorry about Finn. I hope he’s back at the hotel.

Vic stands there asking me why this could be happening. “Clive was so much better yesterday,” she tells me. “When we went into the leather shop, while Dani and I were looking at stuff and trying things on, he was sitting back there, laughing and joking and drinking down the apple tea, foot up on the table like he was quite the lord. A jolly time was had by all.”

I can see Clive setting himself apart, being entertained at everyone else’s expense, not seeing that Vic is generous precisely where he is mean – at giving others the benefit of any doubt. Had I thought that these two might learn from each other? Was I mad?

But my focus is on finding Finn, so we get a taxi and, this time, the driver has no idea where the Cordial House Hotel is. With some difficulty we manage to get him to understand that it is in Sultanahmet. We show him the address in the book but he claims he can’t read English. The address is actually in Turkish. I figure that the driver can’t read Turkish either. He drives us up to the Blue Mosque and Vic points out the way, but he says that there is a problem in that the tramlines are in the way and he can’t drive along them. Other cars don’t appear to have this problem, I notice, but maybe a taksi has a special disability. He refuses to take us any further, so we get out. I think we should refuse to pay him, but Vic pays him anyway. So I have to pay her my share.

We are walking through the gardens when Vic is waylaid by one of those horribly friendly fellows who feign interest in where you come from. I try to shake off the shark by keeping on walking, but they both follow me. I don’t actually know where the hotel is, so I can only walk round the gardens. Vic is excited and vivacious. She has no idea that she is a flirt, but her response to the attentions of a man is electric. I am getting increasingly irritated. Next thing she’s all set to go off with him to his tile shop. No obligation to buy, of course. But she doesn’t want to go alone. I remind her, just a little frigidly, that I am going to find Finn and that I do not want to walk further than is necessary. She dutifully tears herself away from the disappointed man, as though sacrificing something splendid.

“Please, Vic,” I say, “you really mustn’t get sucked in by these guys. They are not being friendly at all, they just want to sell you something. We haven’t got the time or the money. Don’t even make eye contact with them, they’re just con-artists out to sell you something.”

She has her own ideas about this. “I don’t want to be unfriendly,” she says, “If they’re just con-artists, I think I should be allowed to find that out for myself.”

“Not when we’re trying to find Finn, and not when I’m in such a lot of pain,” I say.

As if suddenly brought back to reality from a lovely romance, Vic is all thoughtful, and she decides that I should stay waiting by the German Fountain while she goes back to the hotel to get Finn – if he’s there. “Don’t move from this spot,” she says, laughing, as she turns to go. I sit in what once was the Hippodrome, scene of (among many important events) the mass slaughter, in 1826 of the revolting Janissaries when they finally got too big for their boots and were – um – disbanded by Sultan Mahmut II, 500 years after his forefather had created them. I try to imagine all the people who have walked here in the last few thousand years. I fail to see even myself here on former occasions.

I think about why it is that Vic can’t see the con. She seems to want to throw herself into the Turkish experience without realizing that it is nothing but the tourist counterfeit. Rotorua was my hometown, but Vic has little experience of tourism, little awareness of the plastic tiki syndrome. I’ve since felt somewhat gratified to read Andrew Finkel, longtime İstanbul journalist and an editor of Cornucopia (that fabulous magazine of “Turkey for Connoisseurs”), write that he recognizes that it is “a particular form of vanity to be quite so irritated” by those “whose offer of friendship is a thinly concealed ruse to flog a bronze-plated samovar”, and that he feels “personally affronted” by being mistaken for a “hapless” tourist. “What pains me even more,” he says, “is the way visitors to Istanbul actually enjoy the experience of being accosted by strangers as an initiation into Oriental charm.”

So I am guilty of a particular form of vanity, but I am in excellent company there, whereas Vic is just “some hapless tourist”. But Vic’s enjoyment is validated by numbers – a miniscule percentage of whom wake up robbed of all but their identity. I get out my notebook and try to distract myself by writing a story. Vic does not come back.

Vic does not come back.                            

I begin to get really concerned. Why hasn’t she come back? If Finn hadn’t been at the hotel, she would have come back almost immediately. Wouldn’t she? If Finn were there, why would he not come back with her? I begin to think of all the terrible reasons why he might not come back with her. Imagination is both the gift and the curse of the writer.

I want to walk back to the hotel, but there is a problem. The problem is that I don’t have much of a clue about the precise location of the hotel, and, incredibly, I had set out that morning without even the address of the jolly place. Finn and I had arrived there in the dark by the roundabout route of a crook taxi driver. I had left with a taxi driver who hadn’t a clue where he was going and was forced, by the one-way street, to set off in the wrong direction. I’m reasonably sure I could have found it if I’d been able to walk freely, but with a painfully broken knee and my energy drained by an Addisonian response to stress, I worried that I was beginning to bear a strong resemblance to a Skoda that the ex and I had once owned. It broke down spectacularly in the most inconvenient places. The throttle-cable broken at night on the Kaikoura Coast, the engine seized in the middle of the Homer Tunnel on the way to Milford Sound.

I’m really upset now. Not only am I anxious for Finn, but I’m also wondering if Vic has turned very blonde and sidled off with a salesman. I’m seriously worried about my own rapid physical collapse under the stress. I need to get back to the hotel fast, but I’m not sure that I have the cash to pay for a taxi, even though I know that it can’t be far to the hotel. There is still the problem of the bloody tramlines.

Eventually I decide to ask a taxi driver if he speaks English. He does. So I ask him if he knows where the Cordial House Hotel is. I tell him I’ve forgotten the name of the street. He tells me to sit in the car while he finds out where the hotel is. I feel like a big dummy who ought not to have gone out alone without a big label tied to my lapel. I can’t believe I’m this disoriented in a place I know quite well. I know the Cordial is on a steep little street off Divan Yolu, but I can’t even remember the name Divan Yolu – and anyway, the trams go up Divan Yolu. The taxi driver is back in a minute and we set off on another roundabout route, at the end of which he asks for eight million Turkish Lira. Actually, the hotel is only about 600 metres from where we started, and I can’t blame him for trying to take advantage of the dummy shark-magnet, but this is too much, even for the roundabout route. I tell him that he’s a cheat and a thief, that I don’t appreciate being “taken for a ride,” that I don’t have the money to be overcharged because I’ve already been cleaned out by a cheating taxi driver, but I give him 2,250,000 TL and a few Euro coins (probably more than enough, though they never liked foreign coins). I say I don’t have anything else and I struggle to get the white whale out of the car, but he seems not to mind because comes round and gives me his arm and solicitously helps me into the hotel.

I am relieved to find Vic and Finn in the room. Both look troubled. “Finn was upset,” Vic tells me. “I was afraid to leave him.”

He’d come back to the hotel hoping I’d still be here. When he found that I wasn’t, he’d gone down to the wharf and found we weren’t there either, so he’d come back to the hotel and started packing. He’d been searching my bags trying to find information and tickets, when Vic arrived. He’d found the strange knife he’d bought from a street stall on the steps up to Prague Castle. Vic is worried by the knife, but I’m not. He’s decided to go back to New Zealand because he can’t stand the idea of a month with Clive. I assure him that I can’t stand the idea either and I’ve more or less decided that it isn’t going to happen.

Before I had left New Zealand in February, Clive had asked me what he was supposed to do if some accident or health disaster prevented me from making it as far as Turkey. He’d be left holding a ticket to İstanbul with no means of touring the country. I’d pointed out that Turkey has an excellent bus network and he could go almost anywhere. I could now see that, if my car trip was Plan A, he had immediately started on Plan B, thought it might get lonely, decided to ask his daughter along, and, in the process, put Plan A in jeopardy – especially since he’d neglected to tell me about bringing Dani. 

It was quite reasonable that Clive should have a Plan B. He had financed my second trip to Turkey and he’d carried my bag and given me his arm. Then he’d been forced to suffer the disappointment of his tour being cut horribly short by my injury in a fall at one of the rare moments that he was not in attendance. Poor Clive. I’d been in so much pain that there was no question of my going anywhere but home. He, on the other hand, had seemed to have a choice: he could go on with the others or accompany me home. But he’d bowed to the inevitable, and there had been only a few crucial moments when his bowing had lacked grace.

Before those few crucial moments he had been a mostly excellent traveling companion. It was true that he had taken sudden unshakeable dislikes to certain of our fellow travelers. One of the hazards of the bus tour is the irrepressible fart escaping into the aisle before an exit into the open air can be managed. One of our fellows had chosen to disguise this unhappy state by leaning over to talk to someone on the other side of the aisle, and farting fulsomely in Clive’s face. Clive had taken this as an expression of supreme disrespect and, while he would not stoop to repayment in kind, the farting fellow was never to be forgiven. It did not auger well for his future relations with Finn and Vic.

On the other hand Clive has attributes to recommend him. His intelligence is considerable – though quirky (which can be fun). He has a wicked sense of humour (which he sometimes takes too far). He’s not mean. He’s not faddish about food. He drinks little, never gambles, has no religion or superstitions or holy cows. He is utterly reliable. He has no strong opinions about possible itineraries. He is good with gadgets, electrics, electronics and logistics. He likes to go out on reconnaissance strolls and discover where everything is. While he seems to have no fears for his personal safety, he remains cautious. His fair skin and mousey hair do not seem foreign to the Turks – possibly because he dresses like them, has a Hitler moustache and, notwithstanding his height, is naturally inconspicuous. Perhaps the farting fellow had failed to see him.

I feel I owe Clive a trip around Turkey.

Oh dear, our first day back in Turkey and it’s all turning to pus. And to make matters infinitely worse, my foot has become foully infected where the cast has rubbed all the skin off over my big toe, and the back of my thigh is raw at the top where it has been repeatedly pinched between the cast and every toilet seat I’ve sat on in the last three days. I decide that the white whale has to come off my leg.

Since Finn has uncovered the knife, I pick it up and start hacking at the top of the cast down the middle of the thigh. Finn and Vic look on without knowing quite what to say. Finn understands, but Vic is shocked. Her sister is a doctor, so she thinks that I should not do anything without taking medical advice. I explain to her that no doctor would advise taking the cast off, because such advice might come back and bite them in the bum. They would advise either spending time (which we didn’t have) in hospital, or going straight home to New Zealand. Our trip would be kaput either way.

I explain that I have thought very seriously about my options, and I realize that the decision to go on with the trip could have dire consequences. However, when I consider the alternative – going straight back to New Zealand − I know that I would be so unhappy about having mortgaged my house and spent so much money on a trip, on car hire (for which I’m absolutely sure I will never get a refund), only to have to forego the principal purpose of that trip, that I’d probably end up feeling suicidal. As things stand, I know that there will be things I’ll not be able to do, but I’m going to make the most of what I can do. I’ve had a lot of practice at that already.

But the cast must come off. Infection would certainly end in death, so I don’t really have a choice there either. Untreated cellulitis had the potential to kill me quickly. A fracture wasn’t all that bad. So I go back to work with the knife. It doesn’t work very well and I find I can do better with kitchen scissors, but then they get stuck. I send Finn and Vic downstairs to the kitchen to see if they can borrow a knife with a serrated edge. They come back empty-handed. One of the gates of the Grand Bazaar is quite close to the Cordial, so I send them off to look for a tiny saw. After they’ve gone I realize that I need a Swiss Army knife. I hope that Finn will think of it.

I sit and wait with growing impatience. Once I’ve decided I need to do something, I want to do it immediately. Besides, I haven’t had a shower in days, so the stench of infection in my foot is not the only whiff I’m getting. I start working away with the Prague knife again.

Vic and Finn are both the kind of person who always take longer to do something than you think the task requires. By the time they get back with – yes – a Swiss Army-style pocketknife, I’ve managed to cut all the way down to my instep. It has taken three hours. Finn finishes off the foot and prises the cast open so I can get my leg out. It had taken less than three days for the skin on my leg to go scaly. I mean peeling-off scaly.

I knew to be wary of plaster casts because, about twelve years before, I had been unbalanced by a tree-root at a garden party. Not being able to feel my feet meant that I didn’t get the signals that would allow me to compensate for any unexpectedly uneven surface. On that occasion, my legs had simply crumpled beneath me and I’d plopped down on my bottom without spilling more than a piece of lettuce from my lunch plate. It was only later in the evening that I began to feel unwell. In the morning I felt terrible, so I went out to do some gardening (such work being a usually reliable painkiller), but found I couldn't use the spade properly and I had to keep thrusting it into the ground with my hands because my feet wobbled. When I gave up in disgust and crawled inside to have a bath, I noticed my right ankle was virtually black and I couldn’t wash it off.

I’d broken the bottom off the fibular. They put it in a cast, but after a while the foot and ankle became ulcerated, so they took the cast off and dressed all the wounds and then put another cast on, made me stay in hospital overnight while the cast dried, then they cut “windows” in the cast so that the wounds could be redressed. But that didn’t work either, and in the end I’d begged them to take the cast off, because it was much more troublesome than the fracture.

Well, now that this cast was off, I was going to wash myself. There was no way I could stand in a shower and do that, but Clive and Dani’s room had an ensuite with a bath. I figured that it was time to sort things out with Clive anyway.

Clive is as nice as pie when I knock on his door. Yes, it’s fine to use their shower/bath. “Just don’t break anything,” he says as I am shutting the bathroom door. I have to wonder a bit about this, because I can’t imagine what I might break. The first thing that happens, though, is that the towel rail comes away from the wall in my hand. I hear laughter from the bedroom.

I’m not good in a shower at the best of times these days, so I’d not really had a good wash since we stayed at the Youth Hostel in Venice, where Finn and I were assigned a ground floor room with a disabled bathroom. A bathroom for the disabled. The shower there was great – it had a fold-down seat. I’d wondered why all showers don’t have such things – and my leg wasn’t even broken at that stage. Here, though, I could at least sit in the bath. It was damned awkward and painful getting my very swollen, and not very bendy, leg in and out of it, but I got the grime off and cleaned the small wounds I’d made with the Praha knife as well as the wounds the cast had made. Now I had to sort Clive.

This proved to be more awkward and painful. Clive’s amiable front concealed a turmoil of negative expectations, and his face hardened as soon as I broached the subject. Our trip came away in my hand like the towel-rail, but this time no one was laughing. He launched into a long spiel about Vic being a liability. He and Dani and Vic had gone for a walk around İstanbul the previous afternoon (while Finn and I were still inching our way through northern Greece and Turkey on the train) and Clive had found Vic’s behaviour terrifying. Clive thinks that all women are mad anyway, but Vic’s somewhat impulsive and erratic manner, her frequent shrieks of excited laughter, her passion for shopping and her willingness to be led off to out-of-the-way shops by men offering spurious friendship, convinced him that her madness was positively dangerous and that she would cause endless trouble getting lost. A liability. Nothing but trouble.

I pointed out that I’d known Vic for a very long time and was pretty well acquainted with her foibles, but also with her endearing qualities. And what did he expect me to do: tell her Sorry Vic, Clive thinks you’re a liability, so having come all this way alone to join us, you now have to accept that we are cutting you adrift? And what about Finn? I suppose he thought I should send Finn home too. Trouble is, since he and Dani don’t drive, and since I now can’t drive either, Finn and Vic are our only drivers.

Privately, I felt Clive’s problem with Vic had more to do with another of his anxieties, but he wasn’t letting even himself know that. One of the reasons that Vic had decided to come with us was that she had spent the previous year battling cancer. She’d had an aggressive lymphoma growing on her neck and then her femur had collapsed and she now had a large steel pin in her leg. Her hair was growing back after the chemotherapy and her leg was getting stronger, but she was still very thin and she still had the odd fingerprint of Death on her. Clive was acquainted with the fingerprints. Both of his younger sisters had been afflicted with cancer, and it was not much more than a year since his favourite sister had died of it. I could understand why Clive might want to avoid Vic, but that was no reason for me to abandon her.

Clive, meanwhile, was rambling on about how Finn was going to run off all the time, and if I was going to sympathize with this kind of behaviour, it was just going to get completely out of hand.

“You don’t think,” I asked, “that your own behaviour might leave quite a bit to be desired?”

“What behaviour is that?” he said, looking at me as if he thought I had just gone out of my tiny mind.

“Well,” I said, “nutting off like that at me this morning. I wouldn’t be able to tolerate that for long. And your attitude to Finn and Vicky…”

“Oh what rubbish, Vivienne, this is just the usual sort of nonsense you always come up with.”

“Oh,” I said, “so I’m a liability too now, eh?”

“Well. You shouldn’t talk such nonsense.” Clive is very fond of the word nonsense. The actions of very few people, apart from himself and his late father, are exempt from Clive’s nonsense verdict. Thinking back, I’d say that all women, as well as being mad, were full of it. Men occasionally produced nonsense, but systems never did − especially if they had anything to do with medicine. Clive’s father was a doctor, so, although he almost never saw a doctor himself (or maybe because he almost never saw a doctor himself), Clive knew that doctors were rational and so were their systems. Unless they were female. My own doctor was a woman who may have once made a pass at Clive (she’d been a friend of his dead sister). That’s how he knew she was full of it. Nonsense. But I digress. 

“Clive,” I said, “I find it almost impossible to deal with you because your own behaviour is never up for discussion.”

“What behaviour? Come on, what behaviour?” He was sitting forward on the hotel bed, jabbing his index finger at me.

“I…”

“Just what am I doing except trying to maximize the experience for everybody?” he demanded.

“….” I had managed only to open my mouth this time.

“So what are you going to do about it, Vivienne?” The finger jabbed. “Come on, tell me what you are going to do to ensure that everyone’s experience is maximized?” Jab.

“…”

“Come on!”

Maybe the magazine of his finger-gun was finally empty since the hail of bullets seemed to have sputtered out, so I thought it might be safe to open my mouth again.  “So you think that the quality of everyone’s experience is my sole responsibility? You might think about the effect your own behaviour is having on everyone.”

“What behaviour? Come on.” The finger-gun again.

“This behaviour,” I said, “this barrage of accusations, this finger in my face. It seems to me that the best way of maximizing everyone’s experience is to let you follow your Plan B, because it is just this kind of carry-on which will spoil everyone’s trip – not least of all your own. It’s sure wrecking mine. I just can’t face a month being preoccupied with trying to keep the peace between you and Finn and Vic.”

He’d gone quiet now. He seemed to realize that he had probably overdone it.

“I think,” I said, “that, really, you don’t want to come with us. You don’t want to go the way we are going. I think you opted for Plan B the moment you decided to bring Dani without mentioning it to me.”

“I was going to tell you.”

“No you weren’t. You told Vic not to tell me. You told me, after Vic emailed me, that you’d meant it to be a surprise. I was very happy to have Dani come, but you should have discussed it with me.”

“But I did,” he said. “I hadn’t even bought the tickets when I talked to Vicky.”

“Wasn’t it a bit late to discuss it with me after you’d bought the tickets? Did you mean to tell me the way you meant to tell your mother last time we came to Turkey?”

Last time, we’d been committed to an organized tour many months before the departure date, but he had refused to tell his mother – with whom he lived – until a few days before he was to leave. His reason was that she would worry unnecessarily about it, or maybe make some kind of fuss. I thought that she might like to make some alternative plans for while he was away, so I told her two months before we left. She decided to keep her mouth shut and wait for him to speak, but she wondered if she should feign surprise when he told her. Instead, she had a good laugh at him when it came out.

He didn’t seem much taken aback by the question, but it did betray him into a particularly irrational response. “Yes,” he said, “And for exactly the same reasons.”

“What?” I laughed, “So that I wouldn’t worry unnecessarily about it? You must be joking!”

“Because it might not have happened, so there was no point in telling you until I was sure it was going to happen.”

“Hang on,” I said, “Don’t you think you ought to have asked me if it was okay first?”

“Well, we had Plan B if it wasn’t.”

“We’ve gone round in a circle and we’re still lost,” I said. “Bringing Dani without asking me was pretty well guaranteeing Plan B, and demonstrating a distinct lack of commitment to our car trip. Can you honestly say you really want to come in the car with Finn and Vic?

There was a little silence. Dani, who had been feigning sleep on the far bed, stirred.

“Yes,” he said, “I do want to come in the car with you.”

“Even,” I asked, “if Finn sulks and runs off, if Vic is a liability who will get lost, and I am full of the usual nonsense? I’m sorry, Clive, but there are three fundamental reasons why it isn’t going to work: your attitude to Finn, your attitude to Vic, and your attitude to me.”

“Yes,’ said a small voice from under the bedclothes.

“I’m sorry Dani,” I said. “This has nothing to do with you. I would love to have you come with us. But you can see why it won’t work with Clive now?”

“Yes,” she said.

I felt clean but unhappy as I hobbled back along the corridor. I hated the way things could turn bad like that. If, when I’d planned the trip, I’d known there was a possibility of Dani coming, I would never have suggested that Vicky join us. But at that stage, I didn’t think Clive would come either. If only the silly sod had let me know what he was thinking. As it was, a few days before we left New Zealand, Vicky had called me to say she was coming. Clive, on the other hand, had waited until we were well into our trip before he emailed me to say “I think I will come.” Not a hint about Dani.

When I told Finn and Vic of my decision, Vic asked if I had any regrets about it. I did, of course, but none of this was her fault, and I did feel some relief that it would be just the three of us, so I said that I had no regrets. I had seriously considered staying in the Greek hospital or the İstanbul International for that extra tomography and the possible operation. Maybe week or two would have done the trick. It wouldn’t have put us out too much, to have waited a week or two. But Vicky had finite leave from her job, and she had a week in Egypt booked after the month in Turkey. She had committed a huge percentage of her very limited resources to this trip. I couldn’t let her down.

But, who was I kidding? Oh yes, it would have been so easy to put it all down to Vic. But I knew very well that tomography alone would make no difference, and that an operation in Turkey would have meant things far scarier than I was prepared to consider. The car hire firm would have reneged and they would not have refunded my four grand. As for the couple of weeks delay? I would have been packed off home with a bum leg and a suicidal depression. The minute I limped horribly into that hospital, my trip would have been over.