That's Another Story: The Autobiography (22 page)

However, we stayed the course and arrived in Istanbul, needing to stretch our legs but relatively unscathed. On our first day there we were walking down the main street when we heard a familiar cry. It was another couple whom we vaguely knew from Manchester Poly, walking along on the other side of the road. Rupert immediately introduced himself but we made our excuses, dived down a side alley and got away. We spotted them some two hours later, the four of them sitting at a pavement caf’, Rupert holding court, the guy slouched in his chair with a white sunhat pulled down over his face and the two women nodding but with a glazed look in their eyes.

On our return journey, the plan was to take a ferry from Igoumenitsa in Greece to Otranto in Italy. When we arrived on the dockside our boat was there waiting for us. Smaller than we had imagined, it was called
The Rumba
. This name turned out to be more appropriate than we could ever have anticipated. We sat there in the boiling, airless Mini, wondering where on earth the cars were meant to go, when a hole appeared in the side of the ship and all became clear. Once the car was sardined in on the little deck below, we scrambled up to the top deck so as to secure a place to sunbathe. It was a perfect Mediterranean day, with a cloudless blue sky and a sea that barely moved, and people were stripping down to their swimwear and stretching out on towels on the hot wooden deck. After the cramped, sweaty conditions of the car, I have to say it felt like the
QE2
.

Everything was perfect until we pulled in at our only port of call, which was Corfu Harbour. A few passengers embarked and then as we pulled out a wind came, seemingly from nowhere, to tickle the untroubled surface of the sea. To begin with this was a welcome relief from the relentless sun but, as we left the harbour behind, it began to pick up speed and white horses were starting to pop up everywhere around us. The water became choppy and turbulent, and people were putting their clothes back on. Within minutes it became very difficult to stand or walk about the deck as
The Rumba
lurched from port to starboard and then from bow to stern, shoving its windswept, laughing passengers into drunken little scurries to grab hold of whatever solid thing they could. This, I thought, was the Mediterranean Sea; this could not be a storm of any note; and surely it wouldn’t last that long?

Four hours later, when we should have been halfway through our journey, we had barely moved,
The Rumba
now being lifted up almost vertically, first on to one end and then the other, by huge dark waves and 80-mph winds. The deck was virtually deserted, everyone having taken refuge in the cramped little bar below, where apparently the floor was already covered with vomit that slid from side to side and aft to fore with every lurch of the boat. The only people left up on deck were a couple of young blokes, hardly able to stand, hanging on to the ship’s rail for grim death and retching over the side, blizzards of vomit flying on the wind; and me, lying on the deck, no longer in my bikini, but wrapped, shivering, in my sleeping bag, wretched and weak from continuous nausea.

Soon the blokes disappeared too, having staggered off to join everyone else, and I was alone, not daring to shift in case the vomiting should start again. DT had gone off to find somewhere for us to shelter, so when I felt a hand upon my shoulder, I thought it was him, come to get me and take me below.

‘Oh, missy! Blue sleeping bag - green face!’

It was one of the Greek sailors.

‘Come, I take you to lie down.’

‘Oh . . . oh . . . I don’t think I can move. I feel so sick.’

He had a kind, weather-beaten face, with a black hole in his mouth where a front tooth was missing, and I was too weak to argue.

‘Come.’

And with that he scooped me up in his arms and carried me down some stairs into a small cabin that smelt of oil and TCP, which immediately made me gag.

‘Come, you sleep here, the captain’s cabin.’

He lowered me gently on to a bunk, made me drink half a tumbler of water, pulled a coarse blanket up over me and stuck a piece of cotton wool in each of my ears. The blanket stank of a combination of diesel and a sharp, citrus aftershave, but I managed in my exhaustion to fall heavily into a deep sleep.

I had no idea how long I’d been asleep when an icy hand pushing back the hair from my forehead woke me up. I opened my eyes and it was pitch black; there was a smell of garlic, French cigarettes and that citrus aftershave. A face that I could barely make out, but I knew didn’t belong to my sailor friend or DT, was almost level with mine. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see the outline of a big, round face with a full beard.

‘I come sleep with you. This . . . my bed. I sleep now.’

And with that he began to get into the narrow bunk. I still felt very sick and my head was pounding as he squashed himself in beside me and began to kiss my face.

‘No, please . . . I am sick . . . please.’

‘It is OK. You are like daughter.’

I quickly turned my back on him, praying that this wouldn’t make matters worse.

‘I am very sick.’

When freezing fingers fumbled under my sweater and around my waist, I felt panic begin to rise, bringing with it a fresh wave of nausea. I shifted on to my back, trying to shove his hands away.

‘Is OK. I sleep with you . . . like daughter.’

Poor bloody daughter! I bet she doesn’t look forward to you coming home from the sea! The hands slid downwards.

‘Please, no . . . Stop it!’

Then it came to me, a trick I’d learnt at school. I took in a very deep breath, swallowing a good portion of the air, forcing it down into my stomach and then let out a long, loud, resounding burp. It stopped him in his tracks. Then I sat up, my head reeling with dizziness, and, partly leaning in his direction, I did it again.

‘Oh, I’m . . . going to be sick . . . sick . . . Please, sick . . . sick . . .’

He jumped from the bed and switched on the light. My assailant was a huge man wearing nothing but a Guernsey-type pullover and a very grubby-looking pair of powder-blue Y-fronts stuck into the crack of his not insubstantial bottom. With his back to me, he was rummaging through a heap of clutter on top of a small cabinet.

‘Wait, wait! I have . . .’

He turned to me, offering up a shiny, pink, conical-shaped paper party hat with a broken elastic chinstrap dangling from it. Then just as I was thinking that I couldn’t possibly have anything more to bring up, the water that the sailor had made me drink when he put me to bed came shooting up like a fire hydrant. As I grabbed the party hat in what turned out to be a futile gesture, the water spurted out of my mouth, forming a perfect arc over the top of it, to land, hot and splashing, on the bare feet of the man. He instantly jumped back, muttering something in Greek and, grabbing his shoes and trousers, he left, saying simply, ‘I go now.’

Yeah, you do that. And too weak to get up myself, I flopped back down in the bed and slept until morning.

Thirteen hours later, making it a journey of seventeen hours, we arrived in Otranto. The same bloke who had tried to molest me came and woke me up to disembark.

‘We here now. We in Italy. We in Otranto.’

He was wearing a big smile as if we had both been on a long and jolly journey to a favourite holiday destination and now, wasn’t it heaven, we had finally arrived. I got weakly to my feet, whereupon he gave me a huge hug and kissed me on the forehead.

‘You like my daughter.’

It took me days to recover, but needless to say I did and I have never really suffered from motion sickness in quite the same way since. Up until this point, a rowing boat on a fairly placid pond would send me staggering for the sick bag, but I guess where there’s adversity. . . .

During my last two years at the poly, I moved into a bedsit at the top of a tall Victorian house in Demesne Road, Whalley Range. DT had gone off to Bristol to do an MA and the two of us had decided that we would get married the following summer. Despite the fact that our street was in fact pronounced De Main Road, all the bus drivers shouted ‘Dmeznee!’ as the bus approached the stop. Once, when I took a cab from town driven by a West Indian man, he drove to the nearest busy road.

‘Oh, I thought you wanted the main road.’

Whalley Range was an area that had definitely seen better days. It was not a place to be out in, alone, after dark, as I soon discovered. I had been in my new bedsit only a short time when, as I was walking home, lugging three bags of shopping, a car drew up slowly alongside me. In my innocence I went over to see what the driver wanted, thinking he was lost or something.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked. He stared at me and I wondered for a minute whether I knew him from somewhere.

‘I don’t know. Am I?’

‘I beg your pardon?’

Then something caught my eye, a flash of white in his lap, and there, caught in the cold light of the street lamp, was a very small, soft willy, about the size of a child’s forefinger, nestling in the folds of his open flies. I looked back up at his face, expecting an expression that said, ‘Please take pity on me, I am so small.’ Instead I got one that said, ‘Yeah, baby! What do you think of that? Get in the car and let me do you some damage!’

‘Do you think I’m a prostitute?’ I was furious.

‘I think you might be a dirty bitch.’

‘Do you honestly think I’d be touting for trade, carrying three bags of groceries? What did you expect? A shag, with a couple of pounds of potatoes thrown in? And as for
that—
’ I looked down at the teeny willy again, ‘I should put it under your pillow and smoke it in the morning if I were you!’

And I scuttled off, gathering speed as I went, in case he should turn nasty, but thrilled that I’d managed to think of the derogatory punchline.

All of us in the house in ‘Dmeznee Road’ were from the polytechnic and the place was presided over by Dolores, a kind of caretaker who lived in a tiny, cramped room beneath the stairs in the basement. She held keys to the bedsits, kept a stash of shillings for when people’s meters ran out, cleaned the common areas and took in parcels, etc. She was Irish, probably around her mid to late fifties, a thin, reedy woman with ashen skin, and eyes made most alarmingly pale by the black, smudgy pencil line she drew around them; a woman, in fact, after my own heart. She had long, dyed, blue-black hair, which after a week or two of regrowth would sport snow-white roots; these she would often neglect for months, so that the contrast of the two colours gave her a badger-like appearance. She wore her hair pinned up and you could plot her movements through the house by following the trails of hairpins that fell from her beehive wherever she went. Failing that, you could track her by the smell of stale cigarettes, as she was never without a Rothmans Kingsize hanging, seemingly unsupported, from her bottom lip.

Dolores was lonely and would often hover about at the bottom of the basement stairs, purporting to dust but actually waiting to catch people as they came in from college, whereupon she would pounce with tales of woe, often connected with the men who passed with some regularity in and out of her life, each one leaving her disappointed, each one a ‘loser’ and a ‘no hoper’, and ‘all of them users’. On the odd occasion the echoes of a drunken row with one of her beaux would float up the stairwell, usually ending with his being turfed out into the street at some ungodly hour with a bone-shaking slam of the front door.

We all tried to avoid having to go down to her room, knowing that it could mean being trapped there for at least an hour or so. She had an amazing skill for keeping people metaphorically pinned to the wall, unable to utter more than the odd word, while she unleashed torrents of verbiage at them before they had time to think of an escape route.

One Saturday night I was cooking a meal for a friend, not a particularly comfortable experience for me at the best of times, when the electricity ran out, so I was forced to go down and cadge some shillings off her to feed into the meter. When she opened the door, she had the look a hunter might have on spotting a prize prey.

‘Hello! Are you not out this Saturday night?’ She’d already clasped hold of my arm to prevent any escape.

‘No. How are you?’

As soon as I said this, I knew it was a mistake.

‘I have cancer.’ Oh my God and it’s a big one.

‘Oh . . . oh . . . I . . . I’m so . . . I’m so sorry.’

‘Yes, I had this pain in my chest for weeks and I finally went along to the doctor and . . .’

I didn’t speak for another sixty-five minutes. Halfway through her monologue, around the part where she was describing what they had found on her first set of X-rays, I remembered that I’d left the sweet and sour pork that I’d been cooking bubbling away on top of the gas stove. I had to listen while she told me, verbatim, what the doctor had said of her prognosis, what the actual operation and her subsequent recovery would entail, plus the details of her Uncle Pat’s tumour, its removal and his eventual demise, before I managed to free my arm and get a word in edgeways about the imminent fire that was about to break out in the attic at the top of the house.