Part 1 (2/2)

Every few seconds his wife would shriek as the back of a lorry loomed up and filled the windscreen, and he would attend to the road for perhaps two and a half seconds before returning his attention to my comfort. She constantly berated him for his driving but he acted as if this were some engaging quirk of hers, and kept throwing me mugging, conspiratorial, deeply Gallic looks, as if her squeaky b.i.t.c.hing were a private joke between the two of us.

I have seldom been more certain that I was about to die. The man drove as if we were in an arcade game. The highway was a three-lane affair something else I had never seen before with one lane going east, one lane going west and a shared middle lane for overtaking from either direction. My new friend did not appear to grasp the system. He would zip into the middle lane and seem genuinely astonished to find a forty-ton truck bearing down on us like something out of a Road Runner cartoon. He would veer out of the way at the last possible instant and then hang out of the window shouting abuse at the pa.s.sing driver, before being shrieked back to the next crisis by me and his wife. I later learned that Luxembourg has the highest highway fatality rate in Europe, which does not surprise me in the smallest degree.

It took half an hour to reach Arlon, a dreary industrial town. Everything about it looked grey and dusty, even the people. The man insisted that I come to their flat for dinner. Both the wife and I protested I politely, she with undisguised loathing but he dismissed our demurrals as yet more engaging quirks of ours and before I knew it I was being bundled up a dark staircase and shown into the tiniest and barest of flats. They had just two rooms a cupboard-sized kitchen and an everything-else-room containing a table, two chairs, a bed and a portable record player with just two alb.u.ms, one by Gene Pitney and the other by an English colliery bra.s.s band. He asked me which I would like to hear. I told him to choose.

He put on Gene Pitney, vanished into the kitchen, where his wife pelted him with whispers, and reappeared looking sheepish and bearing two tumblers and two large brown bottles of beer. 'Now this will be very nice,' he promised and poured me a gla.s.s of what turned out to be very warm lager. 'Oom,' I said, trying to sound appreciative. I wiped some froth from my lip and wondered if I could survive a dive out of an upstairs window. We sat drinking our beer and smiling at each other. I tried to think what the beer put me in mind of and finally decided it was a very large urine sample, possibly from a circus animal. 'Good, yes?' asked the Belgian.

'Oom,' I said again, but didn't lift it to my lips.

I had never been away from home before. I was on a strange continent where they didn't speak my language. I had just travelled 4,000 miles in a chest freezer with wings, I had not slept for thirty hours, or washed for twenty-nine, and here I was in a tiny, spartan apartment in an unknown town in Belgium about to eat dinner with two very strange people.

Madame Strange appeared with three plates, each bearing two fried eggs and nothing else, which she placed in front of us with a certain ringing vehemence. She and I sat at the table. Her husband perched on the edge of the bed. 'Beer and eggs,' I said. 'Interesting combination.'

Dinner lasted four seconds. 'Oom,' I said, wiping the yolk from my mouth and patting my stomach. 'That was really excellent. Thank you very much. Well, I must be going.' Madame Strange fixed me with a look that went well beyond hate, but Monsieur Strange leapt to his feet and held me affectionately by the shoulders. 'No, no, you must listen to the other side of the alb.u.m and have some more beer.' He adjusted the record and we listened in silence and with small sips of beer. Afterwards he took me in his car to the centre of town, to a small hotel that may once have been grand but was now full of bare light bulbs and run by a man in an unders.h.i.+rt. The man led me on a long trek up flights of stairs and down hallways before abandoning me at a large bare-floored room that contained within its shadowy vastness a chair with a thin towel on its back, a chipped sink, an absurdly grand armoire and an enormous oak bed that had the warp and whiff of 150 years of urgent s.e.x ground into it.

I dropped my pack and tumbled onto the bed, still in my shoes, then realized that the light switch to the twenty-watt bulb hovering somewhere in the murk overhead was on the other side of the room, but I was too weary to get up and turn it off, too weary to do anything but wonder briefly whether my religious-zealot acquaintance was still roomless in Luxembourg and now s.h.i.+vering miserably in a doorway or on a park bench, wearing an extra sweater and stuffing his jeans with pages from the Luxembourger Zeitung Luxembourger Zeitung to keep out the cold. to keep out the cold.

'Hope so,' I said, and snuggled down for an eleven-hour sleep.

I spent a few days tramping through the wooded hills of the Ardennes. The backpack took some getting used to. Each morning when I donned it I would stagger around for a minute in the manner of someone who has been hit on the head with a mallet, but it made me feel incredibly fit. It was like taking a wardrobe on holiday. I don't know that I have ever felt so content or alive as in those three or four days in the south of Belgium. I was twenty years old and at large in a perfect world. The weather was kind and the countryside green and fetching and dotted with small farms where geese and chickens loitered along roadsides that seldom saw a pa.s.sing car.

Every hour or two I would wander into some drowsing village where two old men in berets would be sitting outside a cafe with gla.s.ses of Bols and would silently watch me approach and pa.s.s, responding to my cheery 'Bonjour!' with the tiniest of nods, and in the evenings when I had found a room in a small hotel and went to the local cafe to read a book and drink beer I would get those same tiny nods again from a dozen people, which I in my enthusiasm took as a sign of respect and acceptance. I believe I may even have failed to notice them edging away when, emboldened by seven or eight gla.s.ses of Jupiler pils or the memorably named Donkle Beer, I would lean towards one of them and say in a quiet but friendly voice, 'Je m'appelle Guillaume. J'habite Des Moines.'

And so the summer went. I wandered for four months across the continent, through Britain and Ireland, through Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Italy, lost in a private astonishment. It was as happy a summer as I have ever spent. I enjoyed it so much that I came home, tipped the contents of my rucksack into an incinerator, and returned the next summer with a high-school acquaintance named Stephen Katz, which I quickly realized was a serious mistake.

Katz was the sort of person who would lie in a darkened hotel room while you were trying to sleep and talk for hours in graphic, sometimes luridly perverted, detail about what he would like to do to various high-school nymphettes, given his druthers and some of theirs, or announce his farts by saying, 'Here comes a good one. You ready?' and then grade them for volume, duration and odorosity, as he called it. The best thing that could be said about travelling abroad with Katz was that it spared the rest of America from having to spend the summer with him.

He soon became background noise, a person across the table who greeted each new plate of food with 'What is this this s.h.i.+t?', a hyperactive stranger who talked about b.o.n.e.rs all the time and unaccountably accompanied me wherever I went, and after a while I more or less tuned him out and spent a summer that was almost as enjoyable, and in a sense as solitary, as the one before. s.h.i.+t?', a hyperactive stranger who talked about b.o.n.e.rs all the time and unaccountably accompanied me wherever I went, and after a while I more or less tuned him out and spent a summer that was almost as enjoyable, and in a sense as solitary, as the one before.

Since that time, I had spent almost the whole of my adulthood, fifteen of the last seventeen years, living in England, on the fringe of this glorious continent, and seen almost none of it. A four-day visit to Copenhagen, three trips to Brussels, a brief swing through the Netherlands this was all I had to show for my fifteen years as a European. It was time to put things right.

I decided at the outset to start at the North Cape, the northernmost point of the European mainland, and to make my way south to Istanbul, taking in along the way as many of the places Katz and I had visited as I could manage. My intention had been to begin the trip in the spring, but just before Christmas I made a phone call to the University of Troms, the northernmost university in the world and hotbed of Northern Lights research, to find out when the best time would be to see this celestial light show. The phone line was so bad that I could barely hear the kindly professor I spoke to he appeared to be talking to me from the midst of a roaring blizzard; I imagined a door banging open and swirling snow blowing into his frail and lonely hut somewhere out in the wilds but I did catch enough to gather that the only reliable time to come was now, in the depths of winter, before the sun rose again in late January. This was a very good year for Northern Lights, as it happened something to do with intense solar activity but you needed a clear sky to see them, and in northern Norway this could never be guaranteed.

'You should plan to come for at least a month,' he shouted at me.

'A month?' I said with genuine alarm.

'At least.'

A month. A month in the coldest, darkest, bleakest, remotest place in Europe. Everyone I told this to thought it was most amusing. And now here I was heading north on a bouncing bus, inescapably committed.

Not long after leaving Oslo I became aware with a sense of unease that no one on the bus was smoking. I couldn't see any NO SMOKING NO SMOKING signs, but I wasn't going to be the first person to light up and then have everyone clucking at me in Norwegian. I was pretty certain that the man in the seat across the aisle was a smoker he looked suitably out of sorts and even more sure that the young man ahead of me must be. I have yet to meet a grown-up reader of comic books who does not also have an affection for tobacco and tattoos. I consulted the Express 2000 leaflet that came with each seat and read with horror the words 'tilsammen 2,000 km non-stop i 30 timer'. signs, but I wasn't going to be the first person to light up and then have everyone clucking at me in Norwegian. I was pretty certain that the man in the seat across the aisle was a smoker he looked suitably out of sorts and even more sure that the young man ahead of me must be. I have yet to meet a grown-up reader of comic books who does not also have an affection for tobacco and tattoos. I consulted the Express 2000 leaflet that came with each seat and read with horror the words 'tilsammen 2,000 km non-stop i 30 timer'.

Now I don't know Norwegian from alphabet soup, but even I could translate that. Two thousand kilometres! Non-stop! Thirty hours without a cigarette! Suddenly all the discomfort came flooding back. My neck ached, my left leg sizzled like bacon in a skillet, the young man ahead of me had his head closer to my crotch than any man had ever had before, I had less s.p.a.ce to call my own than if I had climbed into my suitcase and mailed myself to Hammerfest, and now I was going to go thirty hours without an infusion of nicotine. This was just too much.

Fortunately it wasn't quite as desperate as that. At the Swedish border, some two hours after leaving Oslo, the bus stopped at a customs post in the woods, and while the driver went into the hut to sort out the paperwork most of the pa.s.sengers, including me and the two I'd forecast, clattered down the steps and stood stamping our feet in the cold snow and smoking cigarettes by the fistful. Who could tell when we would get this chance again? Actually, after I returned to the bus and earned the undying enmity of the lady beside me by stepping on her foot for the second time in five minutes, I discovered from further careful study of the Express 2000 leaflet that three rest stops appeared to be built into the itinerary.

The first of these came in the evening at a roadside cafeteria in Skellefte, Sweden. It was a strange place. On the wall at the start of the food line was an outsized menu and beside each item was a red b.u.t.ton, which when pushed alerted the people in the kitchen to start preparing that dish. Having done this, you slid your empty tray along to the check-out, pausing to select a drink, and then waited with the cas.h.i.+er for twenty minutes until your food was brought out. Rather defeats the purpose of a cafeteria, don't you think? As I was the last in the line and the line was going nowhere, I went outside and smoked many cigarettes in the bitter cold and then returned. The line was only fractionally depleted, but I took a tray and regarded the menu. I had no idea what any of the foods were and as I have a dread of ever inadvertently ordering liver, which I so much detest that I am going to have to leave you here for a minute and go throw up in the wastebasket from just thinking about it, I elected to choose nothing (though I thought hard about pressing all all the b.u.t.tons just to see what would happen). the b.u.t.tons just to see what would happen).

Instead I selected a bottle of Pepsi and some little pastries, but when I arrived at the check-out the cas.h.i.+er told me that my Norwegian money was no good, that I needed Swedish money. This surprised me. I had always thought the Nordic peoples were all pals and freely exchanged their money, as they do between Belgium and Luxembourg. Under the cas.h.i.+er's heartless gaze I replaced the cakes and Pepsi and took instead a free gla.s.s of iced water and went to a table. Fumbling in my jacket pocket, I discovered a Dan-Air biscuit left over from the flight from England and dined on that.

When we returned to the bus, sated on our lamb cutlets and vegetables and/or biscuit and iced water, the driver extinguished the interior lights and we had no choice but to try to sleep. It was endlessly uncomfortable. I finally discovered, after trying every possibility, that the best position was to lie down on the seat more or less upside-down with my legs dangling above me. In this manner, I fell into a deep, and surprisingly restful, sleep. Ten minutes later, Norwegian coins began slipping one by one from my pocket and dropping onto the floor behind me, where (one supposes) they were furtively scooped up by the little old lady sitting there. And so the night pa.s.sed.

We were woken early for another rest stop, this one in Where The f.u.c.k, Finland. Actually it was called Muonio and it was the most desolate place I had ever seen: a filling station and lean-to cafe in the middle of a tundra plain. The good news was that the cafe accepted Norwegian currency; the bad news was that it had nothing that anyone outside a famine zone would want to eat. The driver and his mate were given heaped and steaming platters of eggs, potatoes and ham, but there appeared to be nothing like that on offer for the rest of us. I took a bottle of mineral water and slice of crispbread with a piece of last year's cheese on it, for which I was charged an astonis.h.i.+ng twenty-five kroner, and retired to a corner booth. Afterwards, while the driver and his mate lingered over coffees and suppressed contented burps, the other pa.s.sengers and I milled around in the shop part of the complex, looking at fan belts and snow shovels, and stood in the peris.h.i.+ng cold out by the bus and smoked more fistfuls of cigarettes.

We hit the road again at seven-thirty. Only another whole day of this, I thought cheerfully. The landscape was inexpressibly bleak, just mile after tedious mile of snowy waste and scraggly birch forest. Reindeer grazed along the roadside and often on it itself, coming out to lick the salt scattered on the ice. We pa.s.sed through a couple of Lapp villages, looking frigid and lifeless. There were no Christmas lights in the windows here. In the distance, the sun just peeked over the low hills, lingered uncertainly, and then sank back. It was the last I would see of it for three weeks.

Just after five o'clock we crossed a long, lonely toll bridge on to the island of Kvalya, home of Hammerfest. We were now as far north as you can get in the world by public transport. Hammerfest is almost unimaginably remote 1,000 miles north of the Shetlands, 800 miles beyond the Faroes, 150 miles north even of my lonely professor friend at the northernmost university in the world at Troms. I was closer now to the North Pole than to London. The thought of it roused me and I pressed my nose to the cold gla.s.s.

We approached Hammerfest from above, on a winding coast road, and when at last it pivoted into view it looked simply wonderful a fairyland of golden lights stretching up into the hills and around an expansive bay. I had pictured it in my mind as a village a few houses around a small harbour, a church perhaps, a general store, a bar if I was lucky but this was a little city. A golden little city. Things were looking up.

2. Hammerfest

I took a room in the Hja Hotel near the quay. The room was small but comfortable, with a telephone, a small colour television and its own bathroom. I was highly pleased and full of those little pulses of excitement that come with finding yourself in a new place. I dumped my things, briefly investigated the amenities and went out to look at Hammerfest.

It seemed an agreeable enough town in a thank-you-G.o.d-for-not-making-me-live-here sort of way. The hotel was in a dark neighbourhood of s.h.i.+pping offices and warehouses. There were also a couple of banks, a very large police station, and a post office with a row of telephone kiosks in front. In each of these, I noticed as I pa.s.sed, the telephone books had been set alight by some desperate thrill seeker and now hung charred from their chains.

I walked up to the main street, Strandgatan, which ran for about 300 yards along the harbour, lined on the inland side by an a.s.sortment of businesses a bakery, a bookstore, a cinema (closed), a cafe called Kokken's and on the harbour side by the town hall, a few more shops and the dark hulking ma.s.s of a Birds Eye-Findus fish-processing plant. Christmas lights were strung at intervals across the street, but all the shops were shut and there wasn't a sign of life anywhere, apart from an occasional cab speeding past as if on an urgent mission.

It was cold out, but nothing like as cold as I had expected. This pleased me because I had very nearly bought a ridiculous Russian-style fur hat the kind with ear flaps for 400 kroner in Oslo. Much as I hate to stand out in a crowd, I have this terrible occasional compulsion to make myself an unwitting source of merriment for the world and I had come close to scaling new heights with a Russian hat. Now, clearly, that would be unnecessary.

Beyond the high street, the road curved around the bay, leading out to a narrow headland, and after a half a mile or so it presented a fetching view back to the town, sheltering in a cleft of black mountains, as if in the palm of a giant hand. The bay itself was black and impenetrable; only the whoos.h.i.+ng sound of water hinted at what was out there. But the town itself was wonderfully bright and snug-looking, a haven of warmth and light in the endless Arctic night.

Satisfied with this initial reconnaissance, I trudged back to the hotel, where I had a light but astonis.h.i.+ngly expensive dinner and climbed gratefully into bed.

In the night I was woken by a storm. I crept to the window and peered out. Snow was blowing wildly, and the wind howled. Lightning lit the sky. I had never seen lightning in a snowstorm. Murmuring, 'Oh, sweet Jesus, where am I?', I climbed back into bed and buried myself deep in the covers. I don't know what time I woke, but I dozed and tossed for perhaps an hour in the dark until it occurred to me that it never was going to get light. I got up and looked out of the window. The storm was still raging. In the police-station car park below, two squad cars marked POLITI POLITI were buried in drifts almost to their roofs. were buried in drifts almost to their roofs.

After breakfast, I ventured out into the gale. The streets were still deserted, snow piled in the doorways. The wind was playing havoc with the town. Street lights flickered and swayed, throwing spastic shadows across the snow. The Christmas decorations rattled. A cardboard box sailed across the road ahead of me and was wafted high out over the harbour. It was intensely cold. On the exposed road out to the headland I began to wish again that I had bought the Russian hat. The wind was unrelenting: it drove before it tiny particles of ice that seared my cheeks and made me gasp. I had a scarf with me, which I tied around my face bandit-style and trudged on, leaning heavily into the wind.

Ahead of me out of the swirling snow appeared a figure. He was wearing a Russian hat, I was interested to note. As he drew nearer, I pulled my scarf down to make some cheering greeting 'Bit fresh out, what?' or something but he pa.s.sed by without even looking at me. A hundred yards further on I pa.s.sed two more people, a man and his wife tramping stolidly into town, and they too pa.s.sed as if I were invisible. Strange people, I thought.

The headland proved unrewarding, just a jumble of warehouses and small s.h.i.+p-repair yards, loomed over by groaning cranes. I was about to turn back when I noticed a sign pointing the way to something called the Meridiansttten and decided to investigate. This took me down a lane on the seaward side of the headland. Here, wholly exposed to the pounding sea, the wind was even more ferocious. Twice it all but picked me up and carried me forward several yards. Only the toetips of my boots maintained contact with the ground. I discovered that by holding out my arms I could sail along on the flats of my feet, propelled entirely by the wind. It was the most wonderful fun. Irish windsurfing, I dubbed it. I had a great time until an unexpected burst whipped my feet from under me. I cracked my head on the ice so hard that I suddenly recalled where I put the coal-shed key the summer before. The pain of it, and the thought that another gust might heft me into the sea like the cardboard box I had seen earlier, made me abandon the sport, and I proceeded to the Meridiansttten with prudence.

The Meridiansttten was an obelisk on a small elevation in the middle of a graveyard of warehouses. I later learned that it was a memorial erected to celebrate the completion in 1840, on this very spot, of the first scientific measurement of the earth's circ.u.mference. (Hammerfest's other historical distinction is that it was the first town in Europe to have electric street lights.) I clambered up to the obelisk with difficulty, but the snow was blowing so thickly that I couldn't read the inscription, and I returned to town thinking I would come back again another day. I never did.

In the evening I dined in the hotel's restaurant and bar, and afterwards sat nursing Mack beers at fifty re a sip, thinking that surely things would liven up in a minute. It was New Year's Eve, after all. But the bar was like a funeral parlour with a beverage service. A pair of mild-looking men in reindeer sweaters sat with beers, staring silently into s.p.a.ce. After a time I realized there was another customer, alone in a dark corner. Only the glow of his cigarette revealed him in the gloom. When the waiter came to take my plate away, I asked him what there was to do for fun in Hammerfest. He thought for a moment and said, 'Have you tried setting fire to the telephone directories by the post office?'

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