Magic Bus (6 page)

‘… Try to set the night on fire.'

Suddenly we're on the beach, in the open, in a convergence of flames and figures. Hundreds of shadows throb and stamp in the flickering light. Chanting men carry burning torches above their heads. Half-naked women circle, whirl around a portable sound machine.

‘Now
this
is a happening,' yells Penny, her spirits lifting with the volume.

The noise is tremendous, a deafening wall of sound that beats
like a pulse. Bodies gyrate along the goat paths, thrash over millennia of detritus. Dreadlocked Kiwis kiss, black Canadians run into the sea, a lithe German couple rock together on the smooth, osseous pebbles. I won't be surprised if the uproar rouses Ken Kesey from his grave. In 1966, he was one of the main promoters of the seminal Trips Festival that gave birth to the dance, disco then trance scenes. But he'd find similarities between the two events superficial. Few of these reeling hedonists – the sons and daughters of rich consumer societies – share their predecessors' spiritual or social ambitions.

‘Dance?' Jeff calls to Debbie, and they fall into the press of flesh, sharing a wild, ecstatic grin. Mary recognizes a face from their Istanbul hostel. Penny smoothes the wrinkles out of her skirt, lifts her arms above her head and shimmies around the rim of the circle. Terry squats on the beach and lights a cigarette. I look at the hundreds of faces and don't see a single Turk.

By the crackle of a fire I shout into an Aussie's ear.

‘Mate, there's always a free bed at Treehouses,' he assures me. ‘Or at least half of one. Kadir had four hundred people staying one night last week.'

A few numbers later, the music eases off a couple of notches, maybe in deference to the sea turtles which nest along the Cirali shore. Or maybe not. Jeff and Debbie take a break from the dancing. Mary strolls over to join us, having scored a little grass. Penny sways back into sight calling, ‘I'm not stoned, it's my hip.'

The girls want to smoke, and we recongregate in a circle. Penny sinks cross-legged on to the beach as they ply her with questions about her decision to come to Asia.

‘By '68 San Fran was falling apart,' she says, wiping a sheen of perspiration from her forehead. ‘People wanted to escape from the cycle of karma. Sitars were all the rage. The Beatles had checked out Rishikesh. Leary was tripping through the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
.'

Timothy Leary was the Harvard psychology professor who linked LSD and Tibetan Buddhism, espousing drug use as a means of altering consciousness.

‘Most of all, we had Ginsberg's example of living in India. That was the big enchilada.'

I add, ‘In his journal, Ginsberg wrote, “It's my promised land. I'm wandering in India, it's like a new earth – I'm happy.”'

‘We felt like there was a current drawing us east.'

As Penny talks, the dance beat recedes further, yielding to the sound of cicadas. Laughter and murmurs of English conversation lift up from other groups gathered around the scattered fires. We could be at Big Sur or on Ko Samui. Turkey feels miles away.

‘So, after Woodstock, we took off for Europe, me and Orrin, my final and best husband. He was a painter and performance artist but cut out when he started to make money. He didn't like the discipline of booking galleries.'

‘What was travelling like then?' asks Mary, passing the smoke.

‘I remember Rome, tripping down the Spanish Steps with beach tar on my feet,' says Penny with calm happiness, snapping her bangles, pulling again at strands of hair. ‘I remember going down tree-lined streets in Austria picking cherries, eating them there and then, the red juice dripping down my blouse. I remember stealing a chicken in Yugoslavia and spit-roasting it feathers and all.' She drags long on the joint, holds it in, drifts on, ‘I remember wind-up gramophones, sweet cardamom ice cream, dancing in the desert, skinny-dipping in a sea like this… with a Black Watch of Turks, as I called them, looking down at us from the cliff. But most of all I remember Nepal coloured jade and silver. We arrived there at monsoon time with water on the paddy fields and the palaces like wedding cakes.'

‘Penny lived in Nepal for nine years,' I say.

‘In a haze of beauty. India blew our minds but Nepal was flipping paradise on earth. Those days were the happiest, the most magical, of my life.'

Tree frogs croak in the breaks between songs. New kids join the party, returning hungry from a night trek to the Chimaera, the plume of natural gas flames on one of the foothills of nearby Mount Olympos. The smell of grilling meat and herbs melds with marijuana smoke. Beer bottles clink in a cooler. Two
naked children doze on a raised, cushioned
kösk
under an orange tree.

‘Then Orrin snuffed it,' says Penny.

We don't respond, youth losing its voice at the mention of death.

‘And I ran away from Kathmandu. I became a nobody, needing a new hip, living with my souvenirs in sheltered housing in Battersea.' She reaches into her rucksack, between the tissues, tarots and Tylenol, and extracts a crumpled paisley handkerchief. ‘Life became so… quiet. As quiet as the grave. And much too safe.'

Now I understand her tears, her protectiveness of the past. I try to ease her distress by saying, ‘After this holiday you'll have new memories to take home.'

‘I don't have a home any more.'

‘You moved out?'

‘As we grew older, things started to get tough for us in Nepal; aches and pains and disappointment. For the first time in his life Orrin got frightened. He started hoarding stuff. He lay down everything we owned: the LPs, the wine, even the ham in aspic. Lay them down for tomorrow, to be opened and rolled on the palate at some later date, to be put on the turntable in the future. The enjoyment was supposed to be heightened because of association and time. But then Orrin died and the point of saving was lost. I found myself back in England, in an old folks' home, a tomb for ancient Britons.' She stops, allows herself a little cry, then leans back with the end of the joint and gazes skywards, trying to make out stars. ‘So I let it all go.'

‘All go?'

‘Last week I packed this bag. Stacked all our crap in the middle of the room. Then I walked out, leaving the door wide open, and went straight to Heathrow; destination: Istanbul.'

We stare at her in disbelief, shocked and fascinated.

‘Who knows what happened to all that stuff. I hope someone made use of it. Someone who deserved it. I certainly wasn't having any fun – stuck inside that place, surrounded by things. Maybe
right now someone is listening to my autographed copy of the
White Album
.'

After her moment of exuberance Penny sighs. Her head falls to her chest. I see her old frame begin to shake as if by an earth tremor. In a moment she's gasping for air, unable to fill her lungs. I put an arm around her shoulders and help her back into a sitting position. The tears flare like tiny jewels on her cheeks. She stares at the bonfire, tries to roll a cigarette, spills the tobacco on to the pebbles. She runs her fingers through her grey hair. Debbie takes Jeff's hand.

‘I wasn't on anything,' Penny confesses to us when she catches her breath, reading my thoughts. ‘I just got depressed living alone in a box in London, living for
stuff
. That was never the dream.'

Beyond our circle, the incomers have turned up the volume. The night's tempo lifts again as the revellers expand the dance, looping around our fire, drawing us unwittingly back into the deafening chaos. Sparks sail above the dark bay, into the high hills.

‘For love is as strong as death, passion fierce as the grave,' whispers Penny. ‘Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.'

I can hardly hear her voice above the raw pulse of music. Her face is in shadow, as pale as chalk. Her hair has fallen out of its clips and over her neck.

‘Ginsberg?' asks Mary.

‘Song of Solomon,' says Terry in recognition.

Then Penny seizes my hand and pulls me to my feet. She staggers ahead and I let her guide me into the heart of the dance, into the whirlpool of writhing, leaping, living bodies.

We are up at dawn, driving into a white sunrise, tracing a crescent above a searing sea. The coast road curves high above the shore, dropping into fishing villages skimmed by a sheen of tourism like the blue chintz on old chairs at the Restaurant Paradise. In Kemer, a lone angler throws his line over the rocks, lemon-yellow beach apartments at his back. A proud young Turkish woman, skin dove-brown, long black hair uncovered, kicks into the sea in her apricot bikini. Behind her, broad grandmothers ride out to the fields sitting two abreast in tractor hoppers. Corner shops sell donkey yokes and
Bain de soleil
. Skeletons of new holiday homes climb the scrubby hill like en suite Lycian rock tombs.

All morning Penny remains subdued, perhaps because of our early start, more probably because of her dramatic departure from England. She still believed that property is theft. We left the revellers asleep at Treehouses and set out eastwards on our own. I was anxious to get back on the trail. By sunset, we'll reach her destination. Our last journey together in Turkey stirs my emotions, not least because I'm wary of her intentions in Cappadocia. I don't offer to play her ‘Anarchy in the UK'.

More by luck than design – each shared taxi waiting to fill up before departing – a succession of
dolmu
ş
rides connects us with Antalya, the eastern Turkish heart of beach tourism. Here, Russian sun-seekers tan to leather around the pools at the vast Kremlin Palace, a confection of faux-Soviet holiday apartments with ersatz, onion-domed St Basil's Cathedral. Syrians bake fully clothed by the water, their
chadors
caked with wet sand. Iranian girls belly-dance on public beaches while in the blocks behind them Iranian boys buy Ukrainian whores by the hour.

The Turks stare out of our Toyota's tinted windows like
foreigners moving through an unfamiliar landscape, most of them as detached from the new tourists as their parents were from the hippies. Then we swing inland, leaving behind immodesty and modernity. In only a few miles, unchanging upland villages rise out of dust. Children dig at patches of beans. Their back-bent mothers, in voluminous
ş
alvars
gathered at the ankles like baggy culottes, hoe yard-sized wheat fields. A farmer tips off his donkey, removes his knitted cap and unrolls his prayer mat. A man without a hand alights at a carpenter's shop.

‘There!' Penny shouts, standing up in her seat, pointing forward.

The flat steppe, which for hours has been bleak and mournful, crumbles away from the roadside. Our
dolmu
ş
hurtles down a steep, rippling precipice. I crane my neck upwards as the Toyota twists between extraordinary, mushroom-capped stone towers. The sun strobes between and through them, ushering us into one of the world's strangest landscapes.

Cappadocia was once an essential stop-off on the overland trail to India, now it's the most easterly point of the Turkish backpacking circuit. One-hundred-foot layers of volcanic ash, dust and ballast have been sculpted by the elements into a moonscape of honeycombed cliffs and Gaudiesque phalluses.

In Göreme, at the centre of a web of valleys, Penny doesn't stop to find a hotel. Instead, she hobbles out of the bus station, calling back to me over her shoulder, ‘This way. Hurry up.'

I pay the driver and grab our bags, chasing after her past the ‘fairy chimneys'. Cobbled streets wind between the salt-white pinnacles. Ochre spires sprout breakfast balconies. Over thousands of years, people hollowed living spaces out of the soft stone, which can be carved with a spoon when first exposed to the air. At the edge of town, we turn down a dry river bed into deserted ‘Love' Valley. Pigeons glide into fallow fields. Flocks of starlings rise up into yellow-flowered oleaster.

‘I remember that tower,' Penny assures me, pushing into the outlandish wilderness, thrilled by the prospect of rediscovery. Around us, the canyon walls are riddled with the dark portals of hermit cells and cave churches. ‘We stayed down here to the right.'

We fork right and walk into a stone wall. A hot breeze exhales from the dead end. Undeterred, Penny retraces our tracks, laughing away my concerns about her age and the searing heat.

‘I'll be dead for a very long time,' she shouts, doing little to ease my concern for her emotional state.

Until the 1950s, Cappadocia was unexplored and undocumented by the outside world, save for the accounts of a general secretary of the Royal Geographical Society and a Frenchman, Father Guillaume de Jerphanion. Then, British travel writers – including Freya Stark and Patrick Leigh Fermor – visited the region, and their evocative reports captured the imagination of the first sixties travellers. They pitched their tents and unrolled their sleeping bags in the sun-baked ravines, sitting up all night playing guitars and watching the sensuous colours of the rock surfaces change hue in the day's shifting light. I'd read everything I could on the full-moon parties, the Malibu surfer who became a cavedwelling troglodyte and the former B-52 airman, whose job had been to obliterate life on Vietnam's DMZ, planting a vegetable garden in the fertile Anatolian soil. I'd even heard of a Glaswegian who, driving his Messerschmidt bubble car to India, stopped here for a night and stayed for three years.

‘Come on!' Penny shouts.

There is no shade along the winding footpath. The midday sun glares off the ashen sand, dazzling my eyes and softening my brain.

‘It's got to be here somewhere.'

We press along an even narrower ravine, deserted and silent but for the cries of birds.

‘There,' she rushes, like a lame horse on the home stretch. ‘There it is.'

The cave –
her
cave – is perched thirty feet up a sheer face, overhung with a mushroom-cap awning. I see no ladder.