Neither Here Nor There (3 page)

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
shit?’, a hyperactive stranger who talked about boners 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 Tromsø, 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
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 space 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 passengers, 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 Skellefteå, 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 button, 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 cashier 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
the buttons 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 cashier 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 cashier’s heartless gaze I replaced the cakes and Pepsi and took instead a free glass 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 passed.

We were woken early for another rest stop, this one in Where The Fuck, Finland. Actually it was called Muonio and it was the most desolate place I had ever seen: a filling station and lean-to café in the middle of a tundra plain. The good news was that the café 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 astonishing 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 passengers and I milled around in the shop part of the complex, looking at fan belts and snow shovels, and stood in the perishing 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 passed 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 Kvaløya, 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 Tromsø. 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 glass.

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.

I took a room in the Håja 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-God-for-not-making-me-live-here sort of way. The hotel was in a dark neighbourhood of shipping 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 passed, 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 assortment of businesses – a bakery, a bookstore, a cinema (closed), a café called Kokken’s – and on the harbour side by the town hall, a few more shops and the dark hulking mass 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 whooshing 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 astonishingly 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
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 passed by without even looking at me. A hundred yards further on I passed two more people, a man and his wife tramping stolidly into town, and they too passed as if I were invisible. Strange people, I thought.

The headland proved unrewarding, just a jumble of warehouses and small ship-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 Meridianstøtten 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 Meridianstøtten with prudence.