Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
give me more space, throwing shoeboxes at the back windowsill, which I would have preferred him not to do
because more often than not they clonked me on the head, and at the same time he was driving with one
hand at seventy miles an hour in heavy traffic.
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 bitching 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 passing 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 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
