Sugar Sugar by Carole Wilkinson

Author:Carole Wilkinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction/Biographical
ISBN: 17610
Publisher: Black Dog Books
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Nineteen

Middle of Nowhere

Iran was different to Turkey. The roads were better for a start. They were bituminised and well made. There were more vehicles and more crops growing in the fields—rice, wheat, some vegetables. More women too, all with long scarves draped over their heads, but not so worried about people seeing their faces. It was also hotter.

It seemed like days since we’d been able to cruise along a road at maximum speed. Val was a different person when he wasn’t anxious. As the miles clicked by and Tehran got closer, he finally started to loosen up. He talked without me having to encourage him.

He told me about his family, how he was an only child, and about his dad who used to be in the diplomatic service before he retired. Val had lived all over the world when he was a kid—Singapore, Zurich, Lima. He was used to travel, though it’d always been on planes and luxury liners before. His mother, it turned out, lived two streets away from me in Maida Vale, but whereas my house had been divided up to make ten bed-sits, she had the whole four floors to herself.

“Is that where you live when you’re in London?”

“Yes.”

“I might have passed you in the street or sat next to you on the Tube.”

“Maybe.”

Except in London he wouldn’t have struck up a conversation with me, and he wouldn’t be telling me all about himself. He wouldn’t have even noticed me.

When his parents split up, his mother bought a restaurant and turned it into a vegetarian place. Not because she was a vegetarian herself, but because she thought she could cash in on the trend. It was doing well.

Val even asked me about Adelaide.

Semaphore sounded like a colonial outpost when I described it to him—the Norfolk Island pines uniformly spaced along the foreshore, the Ferris wheel, the train that went down the middle of the road. Our house made of pressed-metal moulded to look like stone blocks, the buffalo grass lawn, the umbrella tree.

“I always remember it as sun-baked and summery, the sand too hot to walk on, the bitumen soft like toffee,” I said. “But it’s winter in Australia now. It’ll be cold and rainy. I got a letter from Mum just before I left. She said there’d been a storm and part of the jetty was washed away.”

We pretty much ignored Dolf. I hadn’t noticed that for once he wasn’t plinking away on his guitar. I feel bad about it now, but at the time I was preoccupied with getting to know Val. It wasn’t until we stopped for food that I noticed that Dolf was sprawled across the mattress, sweating and looking very sick.

“It’s a reaction to the cholera injection,” Val said.

I remembered that I’d got sick when I’d had mine. It had been like a sudden, bad dose of the flu. Except that I was able to get over it in my own bed with Mum bringing me thin soup, dry toast and orange juice.

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