13

You Only Live Twice

In Live and Let Die – the book, not the movie – James Bond flies from Florida to Jamaica. Somewhere over the Caribbean, just past Cuba, the plane encounters a tropical storm and we learn that James Bond is afraid of flying.

This isn’t as surprising as it would be in the films – Live and Let Die is only the second book in the series, but we’ve already seen in Casino Royale that Bond is a cautious gambler who never wagers large sums, and we’ve been treated to the sight in New York City of Bond and Felix Leiter taking the cross-town bus to Harlem. The bus! That wouldn’t happen in the movies, but then the Bond books are fantasies for middle-aged men; the movies are for kids.

When the storm hits, Bond white-knuckles the armrest and spends a page and a half fretting about what happens to metal when it’s placed under duress in mid-air. He calms himself by repeating, like a mantra, “Trust in your stars.” His stars have brought him this far; all he can do now is trust they’ll take him through.

I’m not a nervous flyer and long-haul flight isn’t the Bondish adventure it was in 1953, but I sat in the aisle seat on Turkish Airways flight TK 1661 to Istanbul and remembered Bond and his stars.

I also used to blindly believe that everything would be all right. Faith in your destiny is a useful delusion. It lets you do things that will surely fail, which is often the only way to succeed. It’s childish but it worked. Maybe “middle-aged” is another way of saying you’ve lost faith in your stars.

My partner was asleep beside me. Sleeping on flights is a secretagent trick a damn sight more useful than fax machines in watches or cars that go underwater. I dozed briefly but woke from a dream of drowning. I stared at the ceiling for ten hours, thinking about the water and the grey misty hills on the far side, and everything that had brought me here. I wondered what the hell I thought I was doing.

We hired a car in Istanbul. When I first conceived the swim I imagined myself alone out there in green waves with just a grumpy old Turk in a rowboat beside me, some local who knew the waters and would occasionally bark incomprehensible instructions and throw me apricots to keep my strength up. When the adventurer Richard Halliburton (who would later swim the length of the Panama Canal, paying thirty-six cents in toll fees) came to swim the Bosphorus in 1926 he stayed in Byron’s old house at Abydos for a week while he seduced local boys and gathered his nerve, then rose one windless morning and ate a tin of sardines and plunged in. The world isn’t like that any more.

These days the Dardanelles churns with shipping, and the only time to swim it is 31 August each year when it’s closed for the Byron Memorial Swim (or Turkish Memorial Day Swim, as the Turks call it. Byron died at Messolonghi fighting to free Greece from Turkish rule, so he’s no hero in Turkey). The effect of it all is that 31 August is another great big sports day, a tide of rubber swimming caps and numbers written in koki pen on upper arms and someone speaking through a loudspeaker.

That discovery was depressing enough, but the English company that runs the occasion encourages foreign swimmers to sign up for a kind of jolly package-tour experience, involving being bussed down with ruddy-faced fellow swimmers, no doubt swapping cheerful anecdotes and training regimes and comparing nose-plugs all the way. You’re all put up in hostels and small hotels at the site, and share an orientation dip the day before the swim and a celebratory meal when you’re all finished. I can imagine nothing less Byronic.

I signed up and paid the registration fee, because there’s no other way into the water, but by god, no one’s getting me on a bus. Who do they think I am? James Bond circa 1953?

We had a couple of days before the swim so we decided to go walking in the mountains. Well, I decided we should go walking. My partner enjoys a spin around the Promenade, but she had never been hiking before, not a long hike, out in nature where there are ravines and up-hills and wild boar. She was hesitant.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’ll keep you safe.”

I said that because of a strange trick of the mind. I was so worried about the swim that I’d started assuming I was an expert on everything other than the swim.

At the car-rental place a tall, thin man with a luxurious moustache that made him resemble a broom had me initial seventeen byzantine, or possibly Ottoman, pages of contract, detailing precisely the procedure for surrendering my oldest son to the Janissary guard should I return the car with scratches. He and his assistant suspiciously checked each page, faxed them to an undisclosed second location for safekeeping, then gave me a car and pointed to the highway.

The only way onto the highway was down a one-way off-ramp, which I drove in reverse, merging backwards with a steel river of Turkish traffic. Cars hooted and yelled and converged like Kurds around an ISIS fighter. I was still raising my hand and saying “Sorry!” after an hour when the ring road swept us out of the dusty industrial suburbs and down to run along the Sea of Marmara.

“Plastic bottle-tops?” my partner was saying, a few hours later.

“Plastic screw-tops, like on a Coke bottle. On all the softdrinks.”

“And that’s the closure industry?”

“That’s the closure industry. You wouldn’t have thought they’d need a steam train, but they must make a lot of bottle-tops.”

We crested the rise of a green field. There were bright yellow flowers across the meadow and a spreading tree speckled with white, and below the rise was the deep-blue Dardanelles.

I pulled over and we stood watching it roll down to the Gallipoli peninsula and then to the sea. It was a hot, windless day but there were flecks of white where the different streams of current collided. It was wider than in my imagination, bigger. It was muscular. It didn’t flow like a river, it marched like an army.

“There it is,” I said, and she put her hand on my arm.

We drove down and straight onto the ferry at Eceabat. I stood at the railing as we crossed to Çanakkale, trying to estimate our speed and how long it was taking. Gulls wheeled above the high wooded shores. I saw an old castle through the trees. A branch came down in the current, moving fast, much faster than I can swim.

On the ferry was a busload of schoolkids on a field trip to the Troad. Schoolkids are all the same. They just want to flirt with each other and get this over with. It doesn’t matter whether you’re on a trip to the ruins of Troy or to the Durban Mini-Town and Snake Park in 1981; if you’re a kid, the world’s right there and you don’t care.

My plan was to walk the Lycian Way and use the time to get my head right for the swim. I’d been too busy in the last month before leaving: It had all come too soon and I hadn’t thought enough. You can’t go in the water if your head’s not ready.

The Lycian Way is 540 kilometres down the Lycian peninsula but it was summer and our time was short so we were only doing a couple of days of a mostly shady section. Four or five hours a day would harden me up after too much time at my desk. I’d have time to get my nerve up.

“You should think about other stuff too,” said my partner as we drove.

“Huh?”

“While you think about the swim. You should also think about other stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Like Clarence and his wedding. And about what you’re going to do about work.”

“I’m not doing anything about work. What do you mean?”

“You’re unhappy doing what you’re doing.”

“I’m not that unhappy. It makes money.”

“Well, that’s true,” she said. “Being only slightly unhappy is a good life-goal. And the thing with money is once it’s gone you can never get more.”

I’ve never told her this, but I genuinely find her sarcasm attractive.

“Just think about it,” she said. “That’s all.”

“What will you be doing while I do all this thinking?”

“I’ll be thinking as well. Or maybe I’ll just look at the scenery. I’ll see when the time comes.”

We were to walk each day to a different inn or small hotel where our bags would be waiting, and at the end of it someone would bring us back to our car. When he was sixteen, Ernest Hemingway went alone from his home in Oak Park through the woods and backwaters of Illinois and Wisconsin to camp at Rapid River and Horton Bay, a week’s walk away. This would be like that, only with inns and each other and fewer rifles. The trail started from an old ski-lodge high in the white-capped Ovacik mountains.

“This is nice, isn’t it?” I said as we pulled up to the lodge. It looked out at the valley, with hawks turning in a blue sky over green forests and gorges running away in long knuckles and crooked elbows to the distant, silver Mediterranean.

“Why isn’t anyone else here?” she asked.

She had a point. The lodge was old and made of yellow pine and it might be busy in the winter when the snow reaches down the mountainside, but in frostless summer it felt like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. There was no one to greet us. Rabbits nibbled at weeds growing through the tennis court. There was an empty indoor swimming pool. I wandered through the dusty slatted shade of the lobby and found a bar neatly stocked with empty bottles. The corridors were endless, carpeted and dark, and all the doors to the rooms were unlocked. It reminded me of a bad dream I couldn’t quite remember.

There was one manager who didn’t speak English and a cook who also didn’t speak English and the manager’s wife who didn’t speak English either. We were the only guests. It turned out that the cook wasn’t actually a cook, he was someone’s nephew. That night we sat in the kitchen while the manager cooked shish kebab over a coal fire and the nephew poured us warm Efes lager.

“I’m sorry,” I said to my partner.

“I love this place,” she said.

After dark a couple of shepherds came in, smelling not unpleasantly of sweat and hillside and sheep, and sat on the floor and watched the news on a small television mounted on the wall. The news was in Turkish so I wasn’t following it, but when the shepherds started laughing and cheering I looked up and saw the story was about some new financial crisis in Greece.

The shepherds stayed up drinking raki while we went to bed. The manager gave us candles because the electricity goes off at ten. Late that night I woke to the sounds of drunken shepherds roaming the corridors, looking for an available room to doss down.

“I’m really sorry,” I said to my partner, and she started laughing.

The next morning she looked nervously at the mountains all around.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t maybe get a lift to the next place, and start from there?” she said.

“You can, if you like,” I said. “I’ll walk and meet you there.”

“I can’t let you walk on your own,” she said.

“Of course you can. Look. I brought a compass.”

“Do you know how to work a compass?”

“Anyone can work a compass.”

*

The first day’s walk was short: four hours down an easy path with occasional climbs to an old Roman bridge over the Kemer River and a nearby inn. I decided we should leave most of our gear in our suitcases. I had a map and compass and there were red-and-white way markers painted on tree trunks and pale boulders. We couldn’t possibly get lost.

Around the third hour I realised we were lost.

I hadn’t seen a boulder or a tree trunk with a way marker for twenty minutes. I backtracked with an air of doing all this on purpose, and picked up the trail again, but it started climbing and became harder.

We entered a forest.

“Is this the right way?” she said.

“Sure,” I said. “Definitely.”

I have never been one of those guys who refuses to ask directions when he’s lost. I would happily have asked directions from anyone. But there wasn’t anyone.

I had a cellphone with me and a number for the company that had provided the route maps and the transport for our bags. What I didn’t have in the mountains was any cellphone reception. I carried the phone in my hand as we walked, surreptitiously checking it from time to time for a sweet spot.

We stopped to rest in the shade of a pair of large, smooth boulders. The air was sweet with pine resin. I had an orange in my backpack and we ate it thoughtfully while I casually studied the map. I don’t know if you have ever looked at a map of the countryside, where there aren’t any streets or landmarks. It’s basically a blank piece of paper.

It was hot and we were thirsty, but I thought maybe we should start conserving our water. But water wasn’t on her mind.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” she said. “If you don’t feel like doing the swim, I don’t think you should.”

“What?!”

“I’m serious.”

“What makes you think I don’t want to do the swim? I’ve been training. It’s why we’re here.”

“Well,” she said, “does it really matter why we’re here? Being here’s enough, isn’t it? Anyway, if you don’t think you’re ready, what do you have to prove?”

“It’s a quest. We decided it together, remember?”

“Of course I remember, and the point of a quest is to do something while you work something out. You’ve done something. I don’t know if you’ve worked it out yet, but if you haven’t, swimming across a river isn’t going to do it for you.”

“It’s not a river. It’s the sea.”

“It doesn’t matter if you get to the end. If you want to swim, then swim, but if you don’t, then don’t. Here’s what I think you should do – I think we should finish our walk, then we should have a couple of days drinking beer by the sea. Then we should go home and you should resign from your job and you should take the time to make things right with Clarence and tell him you want to be his best man, and then you should spend the next five years or ten years trying to write those things you want to write.”

“What if I can’t write them?”

“Then you can’t. Then you can find something else to do. Meanwhile, I’ll help you pay the rent, and if I go broke or we break up or you’re starving to death, then you can start manufacturing crystal meth or something and make some money. It’ll be an adventure.”

I sat staring at her with my mouth open. I don’t believe I’ve ever met a person like this before.

“Well,” she said, getting to her feet, “we can talk about it later. Which way do we go from here?”

I stood too. My fingers were sticky from the orange and I was having difficulty folding the map. I squinted at the sun, and looked around. I took out my compass.

“Are we lost?” she asked.

“No, definitely not,” I said. “That way’s north.”

“Should we be going north?”

“Not necessarily.”

“How does knowing which way’s north help us?”

“I don’t know.”

“But we’re not lost?”

“Certainly not.”

A little way further there was a ledgey outcrop and on the edge of it I found one bar of signal.

There was no answer.

“Are you calling the company?” she asked.

“Yup. Just letting them know we’re running a bit late.”

I called again and someone answered. I told her in a low voice that I didn’t know where I was.

“Are you going toward the sea?”

“I don’t know. Sort of.”

“You should keep going toward the sea.”

“I can see the sea in two different directions.”

“Hmmm.”

I explained that I went over a ridge and then another one, and now I seem to be going down.

“There are lots of canyons around there,” said the woman.

“Yes.”

“Just so long as it’s not Göynük Canyon,” she said. “Don’t go into Göynük Canyon.”

“How do I know if it’s Göynük Canyon?” I demanded. “What’s Göynük Canyon?!”

And that’s when the reception cut out.

I looked at my partner, and she smiled at me.

“We’re not lost,” I said.

“Okay, Bove,” she said.

An hour later, I couldn’t see the sea any more. Somewhere on the way she had stumbled and twisted her ankle slightly, and she was limping and leaning on a tree branch we’d broken down to use as a walking stick. The sun was touching the peaks of the mountains.

“That way’s west,” I said helpfully.

The good thing was that I had a torch and warm clothing and something you could huddle under for shelter in the dark Turkish night. The bad thing was that I had left it all back in the suitcase.

I started to feel afraid.

“I think,” I said, “there’s the possibility that …” I folded my arms to keep my voice steady, “… we might be lost.”

She smiled bravely. “It’s all right,” she said. “You’ll get us out.”

You’ ll get us out.

I thought about that.

I thought about what I’d done.

I’ve brought her out here on my damn fool quest. I’ve been obsessing about myself and my own life non-stop for six months. I’ve let friendships lapse and good sense suffer and I’ve sucked up all the oxygen from my relationship for myself. I’ve made her walk when she didn’t want to walk and I’ve lost us with no food and dwindling water in the Taurus Mountains and even here, even now, even after all this, she hasn’t uttered a word of anger or recrimination or expressed the slightest desire to be anywhere else.

I feel unbearable shame. I can’t meet her eye.

“I promised I’d look after you,” I said.

“And you will,” she replied.

“We may have to sleep out here.”

“As long as we’re together,” she said, “it’ll be all right.”

I stood and stared at her, lost in the darkling woods with the sweat beginning to cool on our skin, and I realised what I’d found.

Not everyone gets lost, at least not with the frequency that I do, but everyone will have the moment in life when the sun is dropping on a cold, dark mountain and you don’t know the way home, and it’s only then you’ll discover the real character of the person walking beside you. I had discovered it, and it shone like the sun on the distant sea and took away my fear.

And I realised I didn’t want to call her my partner any more. And I didn’t want to call her my girlfriend. She has a name, and it’s Keren.

I didn’t have a ring but I wound a stalk of grass around her finger and went on one knee and I promised Keren I would always look after her, only a bit better in future, and I asked her if she would carry on looking after me since I seemed to need it more than she did, although I’d try to need it less, and I asked Keren if she would marry me.

There was a silence while I considered the down-on-one-knee manoeuvre, and wondered if it looked dumb and sexist. There are definitely people on Twitter who would tell me it’s sexist.

She looked down at me and wiped the sweat from her eyes, and I thought, Oo-er, have I misread this? This will make for a very awkward journey home.

But then she said yes and we carried on walking, and about twenty minutes later she discovered she’d lost her ring, but it was okay, because there’s plenty more grass growing in the world.

*

We carried on walking, Keren and I, down the pebbly slope into the valley of the shadow of Göynük Canyon. You can’t turn back and there’s no point standing still. All you can do is keep going.

The sun had dropped behind a ridge and it was becoming dark. You can’t keep walking down hillsides in the dark. But if we stopped, that would be the moment we’d have to accept we were sleeping there, out on the mountainside with no shelter.

Then I saw a flash of light, a torch beam, on the slope below.

“Hello!” I yelled. And then: “Help!”

“Is that Darrel?” came a voice.

Twice in one hour. Obviously I’m becoming better at asking for help.

*

There is a limit to the number of times a man can be rescued in his adult life. After that he must start rescuing himself.

It’s the day of the swim now, and this is where we came in. I’m standing here in my Speedo, and the water is cold on my feet. It isn’t as cold as the snow-melt waters of April and May, but it’s still cold, and my legs are still skinny and naked.

Keren knows I’m afraid. She knows it better than I do. At breakfast this morning she tried again. You’ve learnt all you’re going to learn from this, she said. Why do you need to do it?

Because I said I’d do it. That’s what a man does.

And she replied: Is that a man speaking now or a boy?

And it’s true. It’s a boy’s idea of manhood. To a boy, a man goes to the bitter end because he always has something to prove. I don’t know if I’ve learnt anything through all this; I don’t know that anyone over the age of eighteen ever learns anything that they don’t on some level or other already know. But maybe remembering is as good as learning.

I don’t want to swim. I haven’t trained enough and I’m afraid of it. I can summon the will to overcome the fear but I don’t want to any more; it no longer feels as important and I don’t feel incomplete. I’ve already made my crossing and I’ll be needing my will and my strength for bigger things. There’s nothing for me out there but water.

“But I can’t just not swim. What about the book?”

“A book’s not a good enough reason.”

“If you went to see a movie about a guy trying to do something, and then at the end he doesn’t even try, you’d be pretty pissed off.”

“That’s true,” she said. “But there’s a difference between a movie and a book.”

“If I don’t swim it now, I’ll never swim it.”

“So what?” she said. “Anyway, don’t be so dramatic. There’s next year, or the year after. There’s ten years’ time. You have more time than you think.”