Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places

by Adam Fletcher

  “Sit down, you wanker,” said Jack with a sneer. The group jeered and booed him until he sat down. Eight hours of suffering to go. It was a good thing Old Master Traveller wasn’t here to see this. I knocked my head repeatedly against the window, hoping I might pass out.

  Suddenly, the bus stopped. We were going to be thrown off. I’d been waiting for it ever since we got on. Through the window I could just make out the dark shape of a recently ploughed field. There wasn’t a building in sight. This would be a bad place to be stranded. The door halfway down the bus opened. The four farmers rose from their seats, collected up their things, and headed for the door. I was happy they could escape. As they passed I made eye contact with the first of them. He smiled and said something to our row in Romanian. “The man wishes you a good life,” the devil incarnate said. The row in front of us got, “May your harvest be bountiful.”

  The absurdity of the scene was too much. I was in hysterics, both captivated and appalled and waiting to feel some effect from the Valium. The farmers stepped down onto the empty road. They were angels too good and pure for this world.

  “Lovely boys,” said Jack. “I had a lot of time for them.”

  “AND THE FIRES OF HELL BURN HOT TONIGHT,” said the devil incarnate, rising once more from his seat. It was a scene that I would probably have enjoyed, if I were reading about it in a book and not stuck in the middle of it, sweat dripping down my back, concentrating on not getting motion sick. I thought back to Old Master Traveller. Was that my future? More importantly, why was this bus my present? My life was already full of great people, back in Berlin. Berlin, where I had a girlfriend who loved me and was waiting, sometimes even patiently, for me while I continued on some kind of quest, to, well, I wasn’t sure any more. I think, mostly, as she’d suggested at the ashram, to try to outrun my fate. To not admit that I was getting older, that my friends were buying houses, starting families, having careers, moving on with their lives while I was on Valium, on a night bus with THE DEVIL INCARNATE to Bucharest, where I wanted to learn about yet another dictator (Ceauşescu). I’d been in a rut, and rediscovering a passion for travelling had, albeit temporarily, helped me escape it. But then without noticing it, the pendulum had swung too far the other way. The solution had morphed into a new problem.

  I wasn’t normal. I had been given everything I wanted—security, love, recognition, money, time—and yet didn’t appreciate any of it. I was the weirdo.

  I put my head against the window into a patch of condensation. Something needed to change. Suddenly, I knew the next trip I needed to make. The last trip for a while. One I’d been putting off for a decade.

  14

  Thetford, England: “What are you doing here?”

  Legal highs, funerals, homecomings

  The drizzle of rain against the train window perfectly matched my brooding, sombre mood. I was more apprehensive about this trip than all those that had come before it. Here, it was not the unknown that concerned me; it was the known but not liked. I was heading to my home town: Thetford.

  Thetford is part of East Anglia, a large, possibly tumorous lump sticking out on England’s hip. Thetford is cloaked tightly in forest, as if someone is trying to hide it. Having lived there for the first eighteen years of my life, I don’t rule the possibility out. The only reputation it had in the local area was for being “a bit rough,” which is like describing a kangaroo as “a bit jumpy.”

  To my knowledge, Thetford has only ever made the national news on three occasions. The first was when The Sun, England’s most popular daily waste of tree, outed the town on its front page as the country’s “dogging” capital. Dogging is the practice of meeting strangers in car parks for anonymous sex. The second time Thetford made the news was when the book Crap Towns shortlisted it as one of the worst places in England. Now that was a party to remember. It was almost better than learning we were the nation’s dogging capital, although perhaps less good for the town’s car park revenues. The final time we had a brush with stardom was in 2004, when England played Portugal in the European football championship and lost on penalties. A riot took place in the town centre, as English hooligans attacked one of the Portuguese-owned pubs. By this point the Schengen Area had encouraged ten thousand mostly Portuguese and Polish immigrants to come work in the town’s factories, increasing the town’s population by 50 percent and its xenophobia by 1000 percent.

  When I turned sixteen, I got a job in the town’s Turkish delight factory, where I was remunerated at a generous 2.80 pounds per hour. A pittance anywhere else, but quite ample in Thetford—chip butties cost only eighty pence, after all. It was a job that consisted, largely, of putting paper lids on boxes of sweets for nine hours a day. The training for it took less than a minute. A former pimp worked there and recognised in me an impressionable young virgin whom he could, and did, corrupt with his depraved stories. He had a particular fetish for lying under glass coffee tables and looking up… Actually, I’ll stop there. Sadly, my factory-production-line career ended late one night at the end of an arsonist’s lit match. The factory was burnt down. It wasn’t just dogging we excelled at—we could more than hold our own at arson. A few years before, someone had even managed to burn down the town’s swimming pool. No, I never got my head around that one either. Not everything in Thetford is explainable, but absolutely everything is flammable.

  Walking home from school was like running a public shame and bullying gauntlet. I spent my childhood looking, with pangs of envy, at adults and thinking how I couldn’t wait to be them. They could just get in a car, or on a train, and never have to be in Thetford again. It looked magical.

  At nineteen, I got my wish. I left for university. Since that day, all I’ve done is try to forget about Thetford. I’ve boxed up all my memories of it and shoved them into the racks at the far back of my mind. The boxes are marked “Childhood Trauma—Do Not Open!!!”

  Which, of course, raises the question as to why a decade after my last proper visit to the town, I was stepping off a train into it. I wasn’t there in search of a neat, feel-good ending but because of a nagging feeling that if that ending did exist somewhere out in the future, the route would almost certainly pass through Thetford. After all, most of my coping strategies—not showing emotion, hiding behind jokes, running away when things got tough, treating my past like bones to be buried—had been learned there. Thetford was ground zero for my personality flaws, for patterns of behaviour that had seen me churn through friendships, jobs, and responsibilities.

  The small station looked identical to my memories of it. As did The Railway, the pub next to it, as did the newsagents down the road that I’d been to many times as a kid, just past the same red postboxes, at the same pedestrian crossing. If this was all the same, surely everything here would be? The rain increased in severity. So did my apprehension. I tried to hide my head in my shoulders. Heavy-footed, I trudged towards the town’s pedestrianised centre, and my hotel. I was shocked to be reacquainted with Star OK Kebab, a Thetford institution. Every night out of my youth, as a jangly, spotty fifteen-year-old in brightly coloured Ben Sherman shirts, had ended at Star OK, an eating establishment whose name made as much sense as our decision to go there, i.e., no sense at all. It was a place I’d forgotten existed, but as soon as I saw it again, the lids from boxes of long-neglected memories flipped off and out jumped dozens of long-suppressed experiences: throwing up in front of it, watching the regular fights there, sitting with school friends against the church wall opposite while a man threw chips at my head. It seemed to have exactly the same sign, layout, interior decor, menu—as if frozen in time.

  My hotel room looked out onto a building site that the receptionist informed me, with barely suppressed pride, would become a new retail complex and “three-screen cinema.” Star OK might have been in stasis, but other things in Thetford were progressing. Another memory bubbled to the surface: the town had briefly had a cinema in the mid-nineties. A month after its opening (to much fanfare), I visited
it, with my friend Kevin, to watch the movie Beverly Hillbillies, which is now almost certainly a cult classic. Upon arrival, we found the doors and windows boarded up. How a business could lose enough money that it has to shutter just weeks after it opens is still a mystery to me. Perhaps someone had threatened to burn the cinema down, or the mayor feared that we’d lose our “crap town” status.

  After lunch I took a walk. Outside Poundland, two drunks embraced and swore affectionately at each other. Here we go, I thought. They’ll be fighting soon enough. Classic Thetford. But they didn’t; they just sat quietly together on a bench, a can of Special Brew in hand, whistling. I bristled as a group of teenagers passed me, forgetting that because of my age, all that petty tribalism and bullying I’d had to endure in my youth didn’t apply anymore. I was anonymous to them now, just another boring adult.

  To my surprise, evidence of creeping gentrification was everywhere. The bus station had been knocked down, moved a few hundred metres, and renamed the grander-sounding Bus Interchange. The high school had also been rebranded, earning the more prestigious nomenclature of “Academy.” An important TV show called Dad’s Army had been filmed there, and the show now had its own small museum. Thomas Paine was born here, and had his own statue. I walked the banks of the river Little Ouse, which flowed lazily behind my hotel. Following it out of town, I expected to find toxic sludge, rusting shopping trolleys, mutant fish, and heroin addicts. Instead, I discovered ducks, swans, thick curtains of weeping willows, thatched roofs, unspoilt woodlands, and traditional English pubs.

  It was, dare I say it, pretty. I guess it always had been. That just hadn’t fit the narrative of my being better than it, of it being this ugly thing I’d endured, escaped, rubbed myself clean of, like Andy Dufraine emerging from the gutter before heading to live my prosperous, middle-class, exotic, international life. That was a nice story, but it was a story. I’d always prided myself on being someone willing to change his opinion when presented with compelling evidence to the contrary. Here was that evidence. Thetford was not crap. It was my imagination that had distorted it into something ugly. Therefore, I’d been unnecessarily slandering and avoiding it for years.

  During that walk, just like in meditation, whenever I felt my thoughts wandering to the future I would take them gently by the collar and pull them back into the past. I walked to the newsagent that had employed me as a paperboy. I’d spent four years getting up at 6:30am, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-four days a year to earn thirty-two pounds a month. With the benefit of hindsight: clearly child exploitation. The shop was an Indian restaurant now. Karma. Korma.

  I was staring at this shop, thinking about the pungent, cheap aftershave of Malcolm, its terrible and erratic manager, when I heard a car horn and turned around to see that its owner was my auntie, on her way back from work. Although my parents and siblings have long since left the town, I do still have some family in Thetford—family I didn’t see often for that very reason. “I thought that was you,” she said, through the open passenger door. “I had no idea why it would have been. What are you doing here?”

  I didn’t have a very good answer.

  We drove to her house, just a few streets away, and she told me, in rapid-fire, stories about the more distant branches of our shared family tree—of births, marriages, and deaths. Families are like icebergs: there’s always way more going on under the surface. I learned that my Uncle Graham, whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years, was now a member of the right-wing UK Independence Party. “He’s got some horrible views. I switch off whenever he starts talking.” My auntie is a benefits adviser at the local council and had endured a rough day at work taking calls from the general public. “If only you knew what was going on out there, Ad. The system is kind to all the wrong people.”

  My Uncle Paul was dozing on the sofa. He’s been practically housebound for the past seventeen years as a result of fibromyalgia, chronic muscle pain. He passes his time with history books and the simulated warfare of computer games. “You have to keep your mind active. That’s the hard part,” he said, when I asked how he managed to stay so upbeat about his house arrest. “The loneliness, well, you get used to it.” He was similarly positive about Thetford’s progress. “The Premier Inn is expanding again. Your old high school, well, you wouldn’t recognise it. Thetford’s really looking up.” He said this with the sort of satisfaction you’d expect from someone playing a more active role in it—a manager, perhaps, or consultant. Or a management consultant. “You’ve heard about the new cinema, right?”

  Everyone was excited about the new cinema, which meant it would almost certainly be a massive disappointment.

  My grandma lived one estate over, and my auntie visited her every day. On the walk I learned that it was the eve of my grandma’s ninety-fifth birthday. We found her in the living room of her small bungalow reading Gone Girl under a thick green woollen blanket. Not expecting to see me, she made an exaggerated oooh sound to mask the fact she was struggling to locate my name. It’s never a nice feeling when your grandma sees you so rarely she’s uncertain if you’re an Adam or an Anthony. “What are you doing here?” she asked. Like most elderly people, my grandma has no problem spending time with her past. She immediately began regaling me with stories of people I’d never met, and who were possibly fictional, dead, or both. The stories ran into each other and collapsed dizzy in conclusion-less heaps. “Did Granddad tell you how he had his heart restarted on the operating table?”

  I groaned. “Yes, Grandma. Only every time I saw him.” He also told it to the man who brought the free paper, and sometimes even passing pedestrians. With the aid of her Zimmer frame, my grandma got to her feet and headed for her bedroom in a sprightly manner for someone her age. I could now say this, as I now knew her age. I found her rummaging through the drawers by her bed. “Last time I saw you, you asked me for Granddad’s funeral thingy.”

  “I did?” I had no memory of that. How did she? Or was she making it up?

  “It’s in here, I think, if I haven’t lost it. Ah, here it is.” She handed me a leather-bound book. It was the programme for my granddad’s funeral. We looked through it together, on the couch.

  “Not bad for eighty-nine, was he?” she said, staring down at the grainy black-and-white photo on its first page.

  “No, Grandma, he was very handsome.”

  I didn’t go to his funeral, because, predictably, I was travelling at the time. Another thing I now regretted. Another chance for sentimentality I’d forsaken in my pursuit of the new and exotic. The service had featured a lot of Christian hymns. “Was Granddad a Christian?” I asked.

  She inhaled. “Yes. I think he was.”

  Out of my grandma’s eyeline, my auntie shook her head vigorously.

  “I’ve never heard a Christian swear like your granddad,” my auntie said, on the walk back to her house. “Your grandma’s one, so she wants to think he was. She’s rewriting history now. Granddad was the same towards the end.” She paused as an excited dog bounded past us and across the field. “Actually, he was always like that.”

  This sounded eerily familiar. I realised how much of it I did, too. I guess we all do—recast ourselves in the stories of our lives, giving ourselves starring roles in our successes and minimising the role we play in our failures, working back from our actions to justifications, not the other way round. In my imaginative, directorial hands, my coming-of-age-in-Thetford tale had slipped genre and become a slasher movie with me running from a zombie army of the proletariat.

  I’d agreed to meet my old best friend, Dan, the next day. It was his wedding some three years earlier I’d elected not to attend, to Annett’s chagrin. Not only that, I’d also defriended him at the same time, letting him know I felt our relationship had run its course. I could think of eight or nine people I’d defriended via email when they’d become a little bit too much work, or I felt our relationship had peaked. There’d been no reason to. I had time for them. I was mostly just sitting around the
house googling myself and eating chocolate. I just didn’t want the effort and commitment of them. Or the guilty feeling they gave me when they complained how little I called, wrote, or visited them.

  I hadn’t realised then that the only way you know that something has value is if you find yourself willing to make sacrifices for it. That’s what elevates it, helps you separate life’s noise from its signal. Just as monogamy gives a relationship one sacred act you agree to do with each other and no one else. This should have been obvious from the time I spent with the protesters in Istanbul, the Orthodox Jews in Israel, and the Hare Krishnas in Argentina. An obligation-less life is a selfish life.

  Somehow I’d missed the lesson.

  I’d had no contact with Dan since he’d been defriended. We’d agreed to meet in the pub that had been attacked after England lost to Portugal. Dan strolled in ten minutes late. We recognised each other instantly, even though he’d bulked up since I last saw him, when he visited me in Leipzig, some eight years earlier. He had made the effort. I hadn’t. And I was the one who’d moved country. A stiff handshake didn’t feel enough, and morphed into a stilted hug. “It’s good to see you, Fletch,” he said, sitting on his high barstool. “But why now?”

  I didn’t have a very good answer.

  I told him about my recent trips and that I was taking a stroll down memory lane. I could see he remained unconvinced, and so I paddled us to the calmer waters of his job. For the past twelve years he’d worked as a prison guard. The last three had been particularly harrowing, he said, because of a loophole in the law regarding legal highs. While throwing illegal highs over the prison fence was a very quick way of ending up incarcerated yourself, throwing legal highs was like, well, throwing chips over the fence. A legal high was a psychoactive substance that was, ostensibly, just an illegal high (drug) with a molecule or two changed and thus would be sold until the law caught up with criminalising it. It had been raining legal highs in the prison yard, Dan said. The prisoners didn’t know what they were taking, and many got indebted to those dealing the drugs. Some reacted okay to the substances, others got violent or simply overdosed and died. Dan tilted his head to show the sides of his nose, recently reset after an inmate punched him, breaking it in three places. A brave inmate. “He was off his head on something.”