Neither Here Nor There Read Free

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 albums, one by Gene Pitney and the other by an English colliery brass 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 glass 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 album 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 undershirt. 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 sex 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 shivering miserably in a doorway or on a park bench, wearing an extra sweater and stuffing his jeans with pages from the Luxembourger Zeitung 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