Further Under the Duvet (9 page)

When we landed, our lovely driver took us on a tour of Samara. Until very recently it was a closed city. (They used to make bomber planes and other secret stuff.) It was a big banana to be allowed to visit and, in all fairness, it was beautiful and the Volga was frozen over and men were sitting fishing into little holes in the ice and it was all very atmospheric and charming, but I couldn’t care less. I wanted something to eat. Instead I had to do a press conference.

After which we were finally allowed to eat something. Our host led us along a slushy, potholed street, to a pancake place, where he ushered us to the cloakroom and said, ‘Here. Please to take your clothes off.’ And I was too narky to even raise a smile.

Food usually does the trick with me but even after I’d eaten about fifty-six pancakes with a variety of fillings, my mood remained sour. And still remained so when we arrived at the local university, where I was to adjudicate a debate. In honour of me being a recovering jar-head, the title of the debate was: Should drugs be legalized? It was the most
one-sided debate I’d ever come across; it was clear that all the students were horrified by drugs and it kind of annoyed me, what with Russia being rife with alcoholism. Why worry about keeping pot criminalized when alcohol was perfectly legal and in the process of killing and destroying more Russian lives than every other drug put together?

Anyway, I should have kept my mouth shut and smiled politely, but to my great shame I couldn’t. Brutally and rudely I laid down my views, and although they gave me a box of chocolates when I left, I could tell that they were thinking of keeping it for themselves. Not that I blame them. Oh the shame! The rudeness of me!

And so, finally, to our hotel, a flimsy unreassuring place which seemed to have been bought in its entirety from Ikea. (This is not a good thing, some of the unhappiest moments of my life have been spent in Ikea.)

I was feeling too ashamed to go out for dinner that night, but Valya made me. In the restaurant she was in a strangely restless mood, drinking vodka shots and on the prowl. She still loved her husband but she wouldn’t mind making the sex with someone else. Your man over there, in fact, she said, pointing to a bull-necked but otherwise quite attractive man, who had surprisingly nice shoes for a Russian. I was thrilled. I’d taken violently agin the deserting husband and I wanted her to hook up with someone new. Himself and myself wished her well, left her to it and went back to our flat-pack assembled hotel. Some unknown time that night we were woken by an almighty crash. It sounded like a ceiling had fallen in. We’d just drifted back to sleep when we heard another. Then one more, this time so bad that Himself’s
washbag fell off the bathroom shelf. It was Valya-related, I just
knew
it.

Great excitement next morning at breakfast, when through the haze of cigarette smoke, we saw, bobbing his head along to the techno, Valya’s fella from the night before. She shoots, she scores!

Unfortunately not; it transpired that he was just another guest in the hotel. Feck!

Then Valya appeared, telling the entire room, first in English, then in Russian, that she had been so drunk the night before that she had fallen into her wardrobe. (The first crash we’d heard.) Then she told everyone that she had missed her husband so badly that she had rolled around with a pillow so much that she had fallen out of bed. (The second crash.) Twice. (The third, washbag-dislocating one.)

Flight to St Petersburg. The plane was disappointingly normal. Seatbelts and the like. I much preferred the other one.

Now St Petersburg, with its wide European-style boulevards and impressively bombastic buildings, is the Russian city that everyone gets their knickers in a twist about. And yes, it’s undeniably impressive and beautiful, but actually I think I preferred the smaller, more ‘Russian’ towns, the ones that you mightn’t normally see.

My work consisted of holding two workshops, where I met students of English so staggeringly talented they put me to shame.

Then it was my last afternoon, when I stumbled across – and I’m not joking here – one of the most beautiful shoe
shops I’ve EVER been in. And let’s face it, I’ve seen the inside of a few.

God, I love Russia.

PS Soon afterwards Valya met another bloke. He is excellent at making the sex.

PPS A few months after my return I was driving back from County Mayo when I realized the next town I was about to drive through was called Tulsk. Tul
sk
. See my point? It ends in ‘sk’. So there’s no need for me to go to Murmansk, Tomsk, Omsk, Bryansk, Gdansk or Novosibirsk. But I might anyway.

Previously unpublished
.

Recently, for reasons we needn’t get into right now, I was on a long bus journey in foreign parts. This would have been fine, interesting even, awash with local colour, which usually consists of people carrying chickens, except that every other one of the forty passengers was Irish. We were travelling as ‘a group’. And the thing about a large group of Irish people visiting a different country is that we feel the national obligation to be ‘great craic’ weighing heavily upon us. It’s our duty to be entertaining. It’s what we’re famed for and we can’t let those poor humourless foreigners down.

The vivacious journey began with everyone bellowing cheery insults from the front to the back of the bus. And whenever someone went into the bus’s toilet, if you didn’t make squirty, hissing noises, and give the poor weak-bladdered person a round of applause when they made their red-faced exit, you were regarded as a bit of a killjoy. (I say ‘you’ but I mean ‘I’. ‘I’ was regarded as a bit of a killjoy.)

You see, I, despite being Irish, was miserable. The problem was the noise. I’m not good on noise at the best of times. And it was midnight and we had an eight-hour journey ahead of us and I was hoping for a sleep.

But the shouting and the ‘good-humoured’ slagging was
as nothing
when I realized that, Christ, we were going to have a famed Irish sing-song! Someone produced a guitar. Someone always produces a guitar. And it’s usually the person sitting right behind me.

Never mind that it was the dead of night and we were passing through mile after mile of deserted, freezing countryside, the Irish people sang their patriotic hearts out for those poor craic-free foreigners. We had the sad songs about having to leave Ireland – emigration themes are always popular on journeys abroad, even if it’s just a day trip to Achill. And then we had the shouty, foot-stamping anthems. When the opening strains of ‘The Wild Rover’ started up I began eyeing the door of the speeding bus, longingly.

NO, NAY, NEVER.

One day this will all be over
, I thought.

RISE UP YOUR KILT!

A time will come when I’m somewhere peaceful and quiet. A library, maybe. Or perhaps a convent, one of the ones where they’ve taken a vow of silence

NO, NAY, NEVER, NO MOAAAAARE!

I’ll be old some day and hopefully profoundly, profoundly deaf. Mind you, they say that hearing is the last faculty to go. Just my fecking luck
…

AND I’LL PLAAAAAAAAAAY THE WILD ROVER, NO NEVER NO MOAAAAARE.

Actually, never mind hoping that things will improve in this life, because I can’t imagine it. One day, I’ll be dead and buried and unable to hear anything and none of this will matter.

It was literally like being tortured. I wanted to turn around and shove my hands at the guitar player and plead with him,
‘Go on, pull my fingernails out, I don’t mind, do anything you want, just stop FUCKING SINGING.’

After about an hour of this hell – which seemed to last a year – they stopped for a cigarette break and, despite the freezing temperatures outside, everyone trooped off the bus and Himself went with them. (I won’t say where the country was because the other passengers might recognize themselves and track me down and sing at me. Let’s just say it’s a part of the world where the winters are harsh and the misfortunate natives aren’t much craic.)

Even Himself, despite being the most easy-going, tolerant person I’ve ever met, was finding this tough. He had stopped smoking about five years earlier and I was terrified that he was going to start again. I didn’t blame him. After being on the dry for ten years, I was contemplating going back on the sauce. Genuinely. It was the closest I’ve ever come to cracking in the entire decade.

Eventually everyone got back on the bus, but there was still no sign of Himself.
He’s definitely had a cigarette
, I thought,
and he’s too upset to face me
. But no, here he was, climbing back on at the last second. ‘I nearly didn’t get back on,’ he admitted. ‘I was thinking I’d run away into the forest and take my chances with the wolves.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said, grabbing his hand and lunging for the door, but it was too late, the bus had set off again and so had the singing.

When we’d exhausted all the Irish songs, we had a Beatles medley; then the Rock Around The Clock type ones; then something about a red rooster, where everyone had to flap their arms and make ‘bokabokabok’ roostery-type noises; for
reasons that escaped me, ‘Take Me Home, Country Road’ reappeared on a loop, every ten songs; then finally we had a Rolling Stones tribute where one of the ‘most hilarious’ of all the (extremely hilarious) passengers took it upon himself to strut up and down the aisle, with his arse stuck out in an approximation of Mick Jagger’s, while everyone else yelled, ‘Go on, you good thing!’

Every song that was ever written was sung on that bus that long, long night. It was a living hell and it made me wish I was Finnish. (They’re fairly taciturn, aren’t they?)

Other people’s noise just wears away at my nerves. I used to live in a flat where the upstairs neighbours used to decide at four in the morning that they didn’t like the way their furniture was placed, and with fabulous ‘let’s do the show right here’ spontaneity, decide to move it around there and then. And another flat where it sounded like twenty or thirty people had strapped woks to their feet in the flat above and were doing a tap-dancing marathon – the weirdest combination of clanging and thumping you’ve ever heard. I used to bring people home to my flat just to hear it – I could almost have sold tickets – and they always agreed that it sounded
exactly
like twenty or thirty people had strapped woks to their feet and were tap-dancing around the (wooden – oh but of course) floor.

Because I travel so much and stay in hotels (which I know sounds fabulously glam, and as a result my whingeing will elicit no sympathy), I’m constantly at the mercy of other people’s rackets: next-door’s telly, next-door’s alarm clock (going off at five-thirty with no one to turn it off because it was set by the previous occupant who is long gone), loud
conversations about vending machines held right outside my door, people upstairs having grunty, athletic sex or holding what sounds like gymnastic classes. There are times when I actually cry from the frustration of not being able to sleep. See, I don’t just stay in the hotels to enjoy myself, I’m there to work. And yes, I know I get lovely room-service breakfasts and nice, free shower gel and I don’t have to make my bed – which is all wonderful – but if I don’t get enough sleep my eyes swell up and go all slitty and sometimes I have to have my photo taken when I’m like that, and I’m unphotogenic at the best of times. Also, without sleep, my brain gets removed and replaced with a lump of suet, which makes things a bit tricky when a journalist asks me, ‘What exists in the thin line between pleasure and pain?’ And, just in case you were thinking this, I’m not allowed to answer, ‘How in the name of Jayzus would I know?’ Oh no! I have to come up with a coherent, witty, charming, original answer or else the journalist will mock me mightily and tell her fellow country-women not to bother buying my book.

As a result, I never leave home without earplugs. But my earplugs were no match for the busload of Irish people. The ‘great craic’ and late-night sing-songs continued throughout the week-long trip and Himself and myself returned home in flitters, physical and emotional wrecks. My back teeth were worn to stumps from the tense grinding I’d been doing and I had so much suppressed anger I was afraid I might run amok with a tennis racket in a public place (possibly McDonald’s).

Soon after we got back, we thought we’d go down to Clare, in the hope that a few days by the sea, listening to the soothing suck and rush of the waves, would glue our frayed
nerves back together. But we’d have been better off staying at home and lending a hand on the Booterstown roadworks for all the good it did us.

The house we were staying in was in the middle of a terrace of other houses and no sooner had we parked the car and dragged in our bags than we realized that the soundproofing was so bad we could almost hear the breathing of the people three doors down. But never mind breathing! They could do much better than that! For reasons best known to themselves the house on one side of us had people on permanent duty clattering at high speed up and down wooden stairs in stiletto heels. While the house on the other side had gone to the trouble of providing a rota of people on a twenty-four-hour door-slamming vigil. Worse still, there wasn’t even a regular pattern to it, so that at least after a few non-stop hours, we’d simply get used to it – like when you live next to the railway, after a while you don’t even hear the trains. But oh no. They’d go on a good fifteen-minute banging session – then abruptly stop. Gorgeous, throbbing silence would reign just long enough for me to think that maybe they’d gone out, and no sooner would I begin to exhale with relief than one supersonic crash would herald the start of the racket again.

Even late at night I was just drifting off to sleep when a mysterious door banged so violently the windows rattled, then from the other side, a burst of hammering heels as loud as machinegun fire had me bolt upright in the bed, my heart pounding.

‘What kind of mad bastards are they?’ I fumed, sleep having deserted me. ‘Can’t they get a proper hobby?’

After my sleep had been fractured for the third time I began to fantasize about killing them; the stairs-clatterers
with their own stilettos and the door-bangers by closing their heads in their own door and giving it a good slam.