Bill gazed over my shoulder. “How are you going to describe the classical sites?”
“I drove by Mount Olympus and around the Acropolis, didn’t I? I’ll make the rest of it up.”
We set off north, to make the ferry to Italy in the evening, snacking at midday in a café bouncing with twangy local music, Bill filling up on sweet cakes and buckets of coffee, which didn’t stop him sleeping, though he did close his eyes as we went through ashy tree-spotted mountains to Joannina, where I parked by the lake and loaded two crates of Fix beer into the boot.
We floated on to Igoumenitsa, heavy rain falling halfway to the col, where a bus lay on its side, though no one was in it. The road was alpine in places, the Rolls, as if laying the road for its own individual use, turning every hairpin bend above canyons and valleys on its way to the coast.
At half past four we found the main street of the port lined with ticket agencies, and we were told at each that there would be no room on any boat across the Adriatic that night. One however said they might be able to do something for us if we came back at six.
After a few cold drinks we went back to the same place and were given tickets to put us on the waiting list, though with no guarantee we’d get on board anything till tomorrow. “We should have booked a month ago,” Bill said. “Everybody seems to be going over the water tonight.”
The hundred pounds I’d paid to be put on the list seemed a lot, though not if we got away in the next few hours. If Sophie was waiting for me in bed I hoped the crossing would come as soon as possible. We sat in the car, hundreds of other drivers having the same problem, a solid lock of waiting traffic by the dock gates. When the tout back at the office told us our total fare would come to six thousand dracks Bill got out his razor as if to cut a thread loose from his jacket. “Tell him we want to sail in the ship, not buy it.”
The man, whose name was Basil, agreed that it seemed a lot. “But there’s no place left on the ship to Bari. Unless you take a four-berth cabin.”
“We’ll go back through Belgrade,” Bill said.
Basil didn’t like that idea, as I had known he wouldn’t. “I could get you on the Neptune, which leaves at twelve-thirty. But you still have to pay for a four-berth cabin.”
“We’ll take it,” I said, before Bill could open his mouth.
He worked out the adjustments and confirmed our places, then gave me a thousand dracks back because it wasn’t the same style of accommodation as he’d thought.
“How do you know the tickets aren’t fakes?” Bill said outside.
“I think I’m a better judge of human nature than you.”
“I’ll only believe they aren’t when the sea’s all around us,” he said.
The Bari boat was supposed to leave at nine, but having been told at twenty past nine that it wouldn’t be, we locked the car and went to eat octopus and boiled potatoes in a cookshop. Smoking our cigars, we edged back to the Rolls. At eleven the Bari boat, which we’d missed getting tickets for, was announced as being five hours late, and that our ship The Neptune would leave before it, though if it was full when it came in from Patras nobody would get on.
“Michael, I think I’m getting a bit confused. Shall I tell you what we would have done in a situation like this in the army?”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“I’ll tell you anyway. See that passport control box at the edge of the scrum? I’d rev up this car, and charge. I’d frighten every other bloke out of the way till I got there.”
“You’re not going to do it.”
“I have another scheme up my sleeve. Listen to this. We drive down the coast towards Patras, pay a local man to row us to the Neptune as it comes by, get on board, and hi-jack it so that the captain takes us to Southampton. I’d nip up the side of the ship like a snake out of boiling water, find a way up to the bridge, and cut his …”
I gave a fair imitation of Sidney Blood: “Shut the fuck up.”
“That’s as may be, but look at the hundreds of cars around us. How are we going to get through?”
He was right. A solid mass, and we didn’t doubt there’d be a problem when the disentangling began. Lightning flickered along the hangar roofs, arc lights glowed over heaped up luggage racks. At half past eleven there were no ships in any direction, but we were jamlocked and nothing could move anyway. Agencies along the golden mile were still selling tickets whether anybody would get on a boat or not.
At forty-five minutes after midnight the Epirus came in for Bari (before the Neptune for Brindisi) and cars began farting and belching, a few getting sorted by the dock gates. Half an hour later I started the engine, and inched along when I could, cutting in on other cars.
Bill’s competitive spirit compelled him to wave a spanner out of the window. And help me along. “If there’s a fight, I’m with you. I’ll smash every windscreen in sight.”
Yard by yard the ticket and passport gate came closer. A posh English Vauxhall was having difficulty finding a place in line because a German car wouldn’t give way. Maybe I wouldn’t, in his place, but the driver of the GB car was a middle-aged steady looking chap with short grey hair, and the youngish woman by his side determined me to help. Not far from the control booth I held everybody else off and made sure they slid into the queue, getting a wave of gratitude from the man and a smile from his passenger.
I had only to keep my place, and by half past one was through the dock gates, into a vast ill-lit area in which we were the only car. “Now where do we go?”
We were on the quay, but still no other cars were in sight. The queue had melted away. How had it happened? I didn’t want to go over the edge and into the sea. My faculties ticked away in seconds, till I made out the entrances to two ships in the darkness, which must be, I thought, the Epirus and the Neptune. Perhaps my sight was going, knackered after driving two hundred miles into this Balkan cock-up.
A dock bloke I couldn’t see shouted, probably curses, but I couldn’t care less as I drove up the planks of what I assumed to be the Epirus, into a vast empty space as big as the Albert Hall (the one in Nottingham) till more spectacular shouts convinced me I was on the wrong ferry, at which I did a smart three-point turn, and trundled down the ramp, passing a BMW coming up whose driver didn’t yet know he was in the wrong ship either. I shot along the level quay towards a matelot, who waved me into the Neptune.
“Good lad, Michael,” was praise indeed from Bill, who had known when to keep silent. “I only wish the boat would take us on a cruise instead of to Brindisi. Or is it Bari? I don’t think I know anymore.”
We went upstairs with our overnight kit to find the purser, who showed us to a four-berth cabin that he said nobody else would be in. After we’d taken turns to wash and shave Bill got bollock-naked into a top bunk and told me to wake him when the ship tied up in Italy.
I dressed and went on deck to watch the rest of the loading. Coming as we had, from the light of passport control into blackness, drivers were still heading for the Epirus and coming out again, while others boarding the Neptune full of hope for some sleep at last shot back onto the quay and made against the grain to get to the Epirus on which they had been booked. Above the noise of klaxons and the despairing screeches of dock workers rose a poisonous miasma of petrol fumes, to counter which I lit one of Moggerhanger’s best cigars.