Neither Here Nor There (17 page)

And so the morning passed.

I fell into one of those drooly, head-lolling dozes that seem to be more and more a feature of the advancing years. When I woke, I discovered that my companions were also snoozing. The schoolmaster was snoring raspingly, his mouth hugely agape. I noticed that my swaying foot had rubbed against him, leaving a dusty mark on his navy trousers. I further discovered, with cautious movements of my foot, that it was possible to extend the mark from just above his knee almost to his ankle, leaving an interesting streak on the trouser leg. In this means I amused myself for some minutes until I turned my head a fraction and discovered that the old lady was watching me. Immediately, I pretended to be asleep, knowing that if she uttered a sound I would have to smother her with my jacket. But she said nothing.

And so the afternoon passed.

I hadn’t eaten since my snackette supper of the night before and I was so hungry that I would have eaten almost anything, even a plate of my grandmother’s famous creamed ham and diced carrots, the only dish in history to have been inspired by vomit. Late in the afternoon, a porter came along with a creaking trolley carrying a coffee urn and snackstuffs, and everyone stirred to a kind of frisky wakefulness and examined the fare keenly. I had twenty-four kroner of Swedish money, which I thought a handsome sum, but it proved sufficient to buy just one hopelessly modest open-faced sandwich, like the bottom half of a hamburger bun with a menopausal piece of lettuce and eight marble-sized meatballs on top of it. Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heart-breaks.

I bought the sandwich and carefully peeled away the cellophane, but just as I lifted it to my mouth the train lurched violently over some points, making the bottles clatter in the drinks trolley and causing all the meatballs to jump off the bun, like sailors abandoning a burning ship. I watched with dismay as they hit the floor and bounced to eight dusty oblivions.

I’d have scarcely thought it possible, but the lady in black found a look of even deeper contempt for me. The schoolmaster skittishly slid his feet out of the way, lest a meatball come to rest against his glossy brogues. Only the young Swede and the trolley attendant took a sympathetic interest and pointed helpfully as I gathered up the meatballs and deposited them in the ashtray. This done, I nibbled bleakly on my piece of lettuce and dry bun and dreamed of being almost anywhere else in the universe. Only another two and a half hours to go, I told myself, and fixed the old lady with a hard stare that I hoped somehow conveyed to her what pleasure, what deep and lasting pleasure, it would give me to haul her off her seat and push her out of the window.

We reached Gothenburg just after six. Rain was belting down, drumming on the pavements and coursing in torrents through the gutters. I sprinted across the open square outside the station, jacket over head, dodging tramcars with split-second if largely inadvertent precision, skirted a large puddle, feinted between two parked cars, head-faked a lamppost and two startled elderly shoppers (once I start running, I can’t stop myself from pretending I’m returning a kick-off for the Chicago Bears. It’s a compulsion – a sort of Tourette’s syndrome of the feet), and darted breathless and sodden into the first hotel I came to.

I stood in the lobby, a vertical puddle, wiped the steam from my glasses with a corner of shirt tail and realized with a touch of horror, as I hooked my glasses back around my ears, that this was much too grand a place for me. It had potted palms and everything. For a moment I considered bolting, but I noticed that a reptilian young reception clerk was watching me narrowly, as if he thought I might roll up a carpet and try to carry it out under my arm, and I became instantly obstreperous. I was damned if some nineteen-year-old pipsqueak with zits and a clip-on tie was going to make me feel loathsome. I marched to the front desk and enquired the price of a single room for one night. He quoted me the sort of sum that would necessitate a trip to the bank with a wheelbarrow if paid in cash.

‘I see,’ I said, trying to sound casual. ‘I assume it has a private bath and colour TV?’

‘Of course.’

‘Free shower cap?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Assortment of complimentary bath gels and unguents in a little wicker basket by the sink?’

‘Certainly, sir.’

‘Sewing kit? Trouser press?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Hair dryer?’

‘Yes, sir.’

I played my trump card. ‘Magic-wipe disposable shoe sponge?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Shit. I had been counting on his saying no to at least one of these so that I could issue a hollow guffaw and depart shaking my head, but he did not and I had no choice but to slink away or sign in. I signed in.

The room was pleasant and business-like, but small, with a twenty-watt reading light – when will Europeans learn that this is just not good enough? – a small TV, a clock radio, a good bath with a shower. I tipped all the lotions from the bathroom into my rucksack, then tossed in the little wicker basket, too – well, why not? – and went through the room harvesting matchbooks, stationery and all the other items that were either complimentary or portable. This done, I ventured out into Gothenburg, still famished.

The rain was falling in sheets. I had thought I might stroll out towards the famous Liseberg Gardens, but I got no more than a couple of hundred yards before I was turned back by the pitiless downpour. I trudged back to the city centre and tried to have a look around the main shopping district, sprinting squelchily from doorway to doorway and from one dripping awning to another, but it was hopeless. I wanted a restaurant, one simple, wholesome restaurant, but there seemed to be none. I was soaked and shivering, and was about to return in a desultory spirit to my hotel to take whatever food was offered there at whatever price, when I noticed an indoor shopping centre and darted in, shaking myself out like a dog. The shops were mostly dreary Woolworth’s-type places and they were all shut, but there was a surprising number of people wandering around, as if this were some kind of marvellous place to take an evening stroll. There were a lot of young drunks staggering about too, most of them at that noisy and unattractive stage where they might want to be your pal or pick a fight or just throw up on you, so I gave them a wide berth.

One of the more striking features of Sweden and Norway is how much public drunkenness there is. I mean here you have two countries where you cannot buy a beer without taking out a bank loan, where successive governments have done everything in their power to make drinking not worth the cost and effort, and yet everywhere you go you see grossly intoxicated people – in stations, on park benches, in shopping centres. I don’t begin to understand it.

But then I don’t begin to understand a lot of things about Sweden and Norway. It’s as if they are determined to squeeze all the pleasure out of life. They have the highest income-tax rates, the highest VAT rates, the harshest drinking laws, the dreariest bars, the dullest restaurants, and television that’s like two weeks in Nebraska. Everything costs a fortune. Even the purchase of a bar of chocolate leaves you staring in dismay at your change, and anything larger than that brings tears of pain to your eyes. It’s bone-crackingly cold in the winter and it does nothing but rain the rest of the year. The most fun thing to do in these countries is walk around semi-darkened shopping centres after they have closed, looking in the windows of stores selling wheelbarrows and plastic garden furniture at prices no one can afford.

On top of that, they have shackled themselves with some of the most inane and restrictive laws imaginable, laws that leave you wondering what on earth they were thinking about. In Norway, for instance, it is illegal for a barman to serve you a fresh drink until you have finished the previous one. Does that sound to you like a matter that needs to be covered by legislation? It is also illegal in Norway for a bakery to bake bread on a Saturday or Sunday. Well, thank God for that, say I. Think of the consequences if some ruthless Norwegian baker tried to foist fresh bread on people at the weekend. But the most preposterous law of all, a law so pointless as to scamper along the outer margins of the surreal, is the Swedish one that requires motorists to drive with their headlights on during the daytime, even on the sunniest summer afternoon. I would love to meet the guy who thought up that one. He must be head of the Department of Dreariness. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if on my next visit to Sweden all the pedestrians are wearing miners’ lamps.

I ended up dining in a Pizza Hut in the basement of the shopping centre, the only customer in the place. I had forgotten to bring anything to read with me, so I passed the time waiting for my pizza by staring thoughtfully at the emptiness around me, sipping a glass of water and making up Scandinavian riddles –

– and chuckling quietly in the semi-demented manner of someone who finds himself sitting alone in damp clothes in an empty restaurant in a strange country waiting for a $25 pizza.

Afterwards, just to make an evening of it, I went to the station to purchase a ticket on the next morning’s express to Stockholm. You cannot just hop onto a train in Sweden, but must think about it carefully and purchase a ticket in advance. The ticket hall had one of those systems where you take a number from a machine by the door and wait for it to appear above one of the ticket windows. My number was 415, and the highest number seeing action was 391. I waited for twenty minutes and the numbers advanced only to 393, so I wandered off to the station newsagent to look at girlie magazines. The newsagent, alas, was closed, so I looked at a couple of travel posters, and then wandered back. Not entirely to my surprise, I discovered that there had been a frenzy of activity in my absence, and number 415 had come and gone. So I took another number – 432 this time – and a seat and waited for half an hour. When at last my number came I presented myself at the window and asked the man for a ticket on the 10.05 to Stockholm the next morning.

He regarded me sadly. ‘I’m sorry, I do not speak English,’ he said.

I was taken aback. ‘Everybody in Sweden speaks English,’ I protested feebly.

His sadness grew. ‘I don’t. Please you must to go to window sree.’ He indicated a window further down the line. ‘She speaks vair good English.’

I went to window three and asked for a ticket to Stockholm the next morning. The woman, seeing the number 432 crumpled in my fist, pointed to the number above her window. ‘You have the wrong number. This window is for number 436.’ Even as she spoke a ferocious-looking lady with grey hair and a dicky hip was hoisting herself out of her chair and charging towards me. I tried to explain my problem with the monoglot at window five, but the ticket lady just shook her head and said, ‘You must take another ticket. Then maybe I will call you. Now I must deal with this lady.’

‘You are at zer wrong window!’ the old lady announced in the bellow of someone whose hearing is going. ‘This is
my
window,’ she added, and tossed a haughty look to the rest of the room as if to say, Are foreigners stupid as shit, or what?

Forlornly I shuffled over to the machine and took another number. In fact, I took three – I figured this would give me some insurance – then retired to a new seat to watch the board. What a lot of fun I was having! Eventually my number came around again. It directed me to return to window number five – home of the only man in Sweden who speaks no English. I crumpled this ticket and waited for the next to be called. But he called the next one, too. I scampered to his window and begged him not to call my remaining number, but he did.

I couldn’t bear to start the whole thing all over again. ‘Please,’ I said, speaking carefully, ‘I just want a one-way ticket to Stockholm for tomorrow morning at 10.05.’

‘Certainly,’ he said, as if he had never seen me before, took my money and gave me a ticket. It’s no wonder so many Swedes kill themselves.

In the morning it was still raining, and I gave up hope of exploring Gothenburg before catching my train. Instead I went to the station and spent my children’s inheritance on two cups of coffee and a leaden iced bun. The train left promptly at 10.05 and after four hours and twenty minutes of riding through the endless pine forest that is Sweden, I was making my way through the throngs at Stockholm’s pleasantly gloomy central station.

I went to the station tourist office to have a room found for me. I had to fill out a form with about 700 questions on it, but it was worth it because the hotel, the Castle on Riddargatan, about a mile from the station, was a charming little find, friendly, clean, and reasonably priced – in so far as that statement can be made about anything in Sweden.

I headed first for Gamla Stan, the old town, on the far side of the Strömbron bridge. It had an oddly Central European feel to it: narrow, hilly streets lined by severe, heavy buildings the colour of faded terracotta, sometimes with chunks of plaster missing, as if they had been struck a glancing blow by tank fire, and often with pieces knocked off the corners where trucks had carelessly backed into them. It had a kind of knocked-about charm, but was surprisingly lacking in any air of prosperity. Most of the windows were dirty, the brass name plates and door knockers were generally unpolished, and almost every building was in serious need of a good coat of paint. It looked much as I would expect Cracow or Bratislava to look. Maybe it was just the rain, which was falling steadily again, bringing its inevitable grey gloom to the city. Did it never stop raining in Sweden?