‘That that’s my name, that’s all.’
The interviewer sniffles.
‘Really?’
‘Yup.’
‘Well OK, Joe. What do you expect from the drive tomorrow?’
‘I haven’t had time yet to pick up the road book, I still have to eat and fill the tank, and the clutch is slipping.’
‘It’s going to be a real killer, I can tell you that much already: five hundred kilometres to Sabha, lots of rocks and across the sand hills of Murzuk Erg. How does that sound?’
‘It’ll work out.’
‘Good luck tomorrow, Joe. See you in Sabha.’
Joe walks away from the lamps, we see highlights from earlier that day, including a Dutch construction supervisor wrestling his motorcycle up a sand dune. He finally makes it to the camp two hours before Joe.
There’s a clear difference between the amateurs and the professional entries; the pros always arrive early at the camp, where their backup crews are waiting. They shower, put on clean clothes and appear before the cameras spick and span. The amateurs don’t have crews, often not even a mechanic. And because they usually arrive late at the camp, they’re the ones who show the desert most. They’re dirty, tired and rattled, and often sleep only a couple of hours a night. At five in the morning they’re awakened by the first Antonov transport planes leaving for the next camp, where a little city — complete with kitchens, toilets, a press tent, huge satellite dishes and even a fully equipped operating room — arises in the desert within a few hours. One hour later everything is already covered in dust and sand, the cursing from the press tent knows many languages.
Joe holds his own, the race heads northeast, and he completes one of the most difficult stretches of the rally with no real setbacks. Just after sunset he reaches Sabha. The camera crew is starting to warm to the idea of a Dutch driver in a bulldozer: that morning they filmed his departure from camp, and they’re waiting for him when he arrives. The scoop is raised on the front of the dozer, high in the cab Joe gives them the thumbs-up. Two ladder-like constructions have been attached to the side of the machine so he can free himself from the sand if he gets stuck; hanging on the back are two huge spare tyres.
The drivers are exhausted, bruised and lame. There are lots of accidents, one driver has been killed.
On Saturday afternoon P.J. drops in unexpectedly. She’s in Lomark for her mother’s birthday on Sunday. She’s wearing a coat with a silvery fur collar, and she shakes the water from her hair. I make tea and am grateful to see her.
‘Are you following Joe a little?’ she asks.
Glistening drops of rainwater are hanging from both ear-lobes. Every night, I write. He’s fantastic.
Together we look at the classroom map of Africa. Yesterday Joe left Sabha in the Libyan desert: the map shows no human settlements until the oasis at Siwa, just across the border with Egypt, where hopefully he will arrive tomorrow. It’s one vast, empty ocean, Joe is all alone between the sand and the stars.
‘He’s only called twice,’ P.J. says. ‘Once from France and the other time from Tunisia, or wherever it was. It feels like he’d be closer if he was on the moon.’
We drink tea, P.J. practices rolling cigarettes for me. The rollups are sort of wrinkly, but I’ll smoke them with love.
‘Do you write about him, about Joe?’
Indeed, I’ve started writing again, to ward off the emptiness. But I’m not sure I approve of my tone. The prose is as rectilinear as the border between Libya and Egypt, and perhaps equally void of illusions.
‘Could I read it? What are you laughing about?’
Thought you’d never ask.
‘Yeah, really? Is it OK?’
One condition — from start to finish.
‘Oh, I’d love that, I want to hear you talk. Do you know what I mean? For me, those books are your voice.’
A few minutes later she’s lying on her stomach on the rug with a pile of notebooks in front of her. The stove is lit, I smoke and watch her read, she’s put my desk lamp on the floor beside her and flips the pages at regular intervals. When she laughs I knock on the table; I want to know what she’s reading.
‘The way you write is so funny’, she says. ‘Especially about Christof, you’re really too hard on him. He’s such a sweetheart.’
I think about Joe, thundering eastward at that moment through a world of sand and stone, alone with his thoughts and his eyes on the tracks in front of him. P.J. makes little noises as she reads. I wish I had written more in order to keep her here, this steady happiness should last forever. I try to figure out how much time she’ll need, at least ten hours I reckon, maybe longer. On her left is the pile she still has to read, on her right the ones she’s already had, the ones about the time Joe’s bomb went off in the boy’s bathroom at school, the warm glow of the early years, before she arrived. P.J. herself appears in book eleven or twelve. She won’t get that far today; she asks me what time it is and is shocked when she sees the kitchen clock.
‘Is it OK if I come by tomorrow, early, Frankie? It’s so. . fantastic, I wish I could read it all at once.’
That evening I see that Joe is still in the race; he’s had a fairly easy day and looks content. The program has promoted him to the subject of a daily item called ‘Speedboat in the Sand’. It lasts barely ninety seconds, recaps what he did that day and ends with a short interview in which Joe delivers a few pithy remarks. Tonight he’s wearing a T-shirt from Santing Painters, with a logo advertising the discount winter rates.
‘It’s actually more a battle against boredom,’ is how he summarizes the rally for us. ‘You don’t see anyone all day, the only person you can talk to is yourself, and at night you rub salve on your butt against the bedsores. Like living in a blind alley, if you ask me.’
The bedsore salve he got from me, I had a couple of tubes lying around that weren’t too far past their expiration date.
‘You don’t feel all alone, now do you, Joe?’ the interviewer badgers.
‘As long as you don’t lose your way, you’re never alone.’
Ma, on the couch beside me, nods.
‘Joe puts things really well.’
The next morning I shower at my parents’, pick up around the garden house and wait for P.J. Whether I’m expecting visitors, Ma wants to know. Around four in the afternoon darkness begins to fall and my cigarettes are finished. I’ve just started in on my fourth bottle of beer when the door opens and P.J. comes in. She doesn’t explain why she’s so late, I signal to her to get herself a beer. She opens the fridge, takes a bottle and pops the swing-top like a real pro.
Congratulations on your mom’s birthday, I write.
‘Pfff, we’ve got family over, real Afrikaners, all they talk about is that country. It’s completely exhausting. Hey, did you see it, “Speedboat in the Sand”?’
In his element.
‘He makes me laugh so hard, everything he says is so atypical for that whole clique.’
She rummages in her bag, pulls out a book, Herodotus’ Histories. She opens it and looks for something.
‘My father looked it up,’ she says. ‘About the Western Desert in Egypt, where Joe is now. Here, from page twenty-four on.’
I read about Cambyses, a ruler in some age or other who sends a big army into the desert to enslave a tribe called the Ammonians:
. . the force which was sent against the Ammonians started from Thebes with guides, and can be traced as far as the town of Oasis, which. . is seven days’ journey across the sand from Thebes. The place is known in Greece as the Island of the Blessed. General report has it that the army got as far as this, but of its subsequent fate there is no news whatever. It never reached the Ammonians and it never returned to Egypt. There is, however, a story told by the Ammonians themselves and by others who heard it from them, that when the men had left Oasis, and in their march across the desert had reached a point about midway between the town and the Ammonian border, a southerly wind of extreme violence drove the sand over them in heaps as they were taking their noonday meal, so that they disappeared forever.