Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  Jem looked put out. ‘Don’t make fun of my lenses.’

  ‘You know, we’ve already taken fifteen trains.’

  ‘Feels like more,’ said Jem, offering me a piece of melon draped with sweet, stringy Parma ham.

  ‘I’m pretty sure we’ve spent most of our seven-month budget on bookings and fees,’ I said, watching the owner flap his cloth across a table, and kiss a couple of regulars on both cheeks. Italian agents in Rome had refused to change tickets that I’d booked two days earlier in Monaco through French agents, who had refused to amend a booking made two days before that in Valencia by Spanish agents. Each insisted the other company was responsible for voiding the tickets that were no longer needed, and declared that any refunds had to be requested by post – for a fee. I’d been directed towards a queue, which turned out to be a queue for tickets for a second queue that was for refunding pre-bought tickets, at which point I gave up – which was probably what each company hoped passengers would do. Binning the whole load, I decided it was time to leave Europe before I lost the will to live.

  ‘Don’t forget we need to pick up our laundry,’ Jem reminded me as we finished lunch and walked back towards the hotel.

  The bell of the laundromat gave a happy tinkle as we arrived to collect our clothes. The strong smell of laundered sheets hit me as we closed the door, and I immediately began sweating from the heat of the dryers. The iron hissing beneath her weight, Vittoria waved and put her glasses onto her nose, looking down her clipboard, before lugging a plastic-wrapped pile onto the counter. Vittoria didn’t speak a word of English, and we didn’t speak any Italian, yet with the combination of sign language and good faith, we’d managed to explain that we wanted everything chucked into one machine, and by the looks of things, she’d done a perfect job. Running my finger down the edge of our clothes, I waited for her to tap the total into a calculator. Hovering with his hands in his pockets, Jem handed me a twenty-euro note, as Vittoria turned the calculator around and took off her glasses, which hung from her neck by a chain. The screen read €109. Every inch of my skin prickled with horror, the tips of my ears turning hot. Looking up at Vittoria without saying a word, I felt my mouth fall open. She looked down, then laughed, shaking her head. I sighed with relief and, turning to Jem with my eyes wide, mouthed she’d forgotten the decimal point.

  Only she hadn’t.

  Vittoria had forgotten to add an additional €9 for a pair of knickers, and the total came to €118.

  I turned to Jem in a panic. ‘She wants €118 for our laundry!’

  ‘That can’t be right.’

  ‘I’m not paying that for a bunch of clothes that were shoved in a bloody washing machine.’

  Vittoria laid out the sheet on which she’d listed our eight T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, three cotton dresses, four pairs of socks, a stack of underwear, and a cardigan that was now missing a button – I saw that she’d listed the prices on a sheet from a nearby five-star hotel. Wagging a finger in front of her, I shook my head. ‘No, not paying,’ I said.

  Pulling out her phone, she began speaking into her Google Translate app before showing me the screen, which now read: What would you like to do?

  ‘Tell her you want to burn down her shop, the thieving …’

  ‘Shush, hang on,’ I said to Jem.

  ‘No way, I’m not letting this woman fleece us. Tell her she can keep our crap. In fact, it would probably cost less than that to replace it all at H&M.’

  ‘It would cost less than that to fly home.’

  Jem seized her phone. ‘We are not paying this,’ he said into it.

  Vittoria pursed up her mouth and read the screen, turning on the sound. Laughing, she shrugged in the infuriating way that only Italians can do, and tapped a new figure into the calculator, knocking twenty euros off the total.

  ‘We are not paying that. You are cheating us.’

  Vittoria listened to the deadpan automated voice, and smirked, throwing both hands in the air before speaking into the app.

  ‘There is an ATM down the road,’ came the voice.

  It was like listening to C-3PO and Stephen Hawking having the most passive-aggressive argument I’d ever witnessed. Tapping at her watch, Vittoria was not about to budge, and her shop was about to close. Offering a further ten-euro discount, she moved our clothes out of reach, at which point I was ready to explode, knowing that Vittoria had exploited the vulnerability of two foreigners unable to speak her language. Sweating from the steam in the shop and the steam in my ears, I dragged Jem out onto the pavement and went in search of the ATM.

  ‘We have to pay it, she’s never going to give our clothes back otherwise.’

  ‘Fine, but I’m going to come back after dark and put a brick through her window.’

  *

  After the laundry episode, we had blown our budget for Europe, and had no option but to leave under a dark cloud, winding our way up through Switzerland and Germany, crossing through Lithuania and Latvia, from where we were due to board the train to Moscow from Riga. On the train from Milan to Zurich, I found myself sitting at a table opposite an imposing figure dressed head to toe in black and drinking wine. It was the middle of June and he was wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of drop-crotch black trousers. With his grey beard and dark eyes, he looked like a film noir in human form. Glancing up a couple of times, I could see he was obviously listening with undisguised interest to our musings over Russia. Mark was from Stoke Newington, and was on his way to shoot a story for the Sunday Times Style magazine.

  ‘Are you going to Moscow, then?’ The tone of his voice didn’t inspire me with hope.

  ‘Yes, we’ve never been before. Have you?’

  ‘Ha!’ Mark threw back his head and laughed, folding his arms across his chest. ‘I haven’t been since 1987 when I went on a joint trip from school with my film studies classmates.’ He visibly shuddered. ‘The history studies group came too and the two groups hated one another. It was an awful trip. I ended up being pursued by Russian urchins after they were arrested in our room.’

  ‘Wait, what? Why were they in your room?’

  ‘These two lads appeared from the shadows and asked if we wanted anything: flags, champagne, fur hats, all black-market stuff.’ Mark poured out the rest of his wine, shaking the last drops into the glass. ‘So, me and my mate Andre arranged a party in our room, basically an impromptu bazaar of the army uniforms and accessories they had touted to us, and said we’d take a cut of the sales. The rest of our film studies group bought tons. Anyway, the police turned up and they had to do a runner, so we held on to all their stuff in a few suitcases.’

  ‘That’s a bit harsh.’

  ‘We did get it back to them after they stalked us around Moscow for three days, trying to catch hold of us in the street, and loitering around the hotel.’

  ‘We don’t have that much time in Moscow,’ said Jem, ‘just a couple of days, as we’re taking the Trans-Mongolian to Beijing and it only departs on certain days of the week.’

  ‘Probably not a bad thing,’ said Mark, narrowing his eyes. ‘Russians don’t tend to be particularly warm towards, how should I say it, people of your …’

  ‘Colour?’ I prompted.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Mark, looking relieved.

  ‘You’re not the first person to tell us that,’ Jem replied.

  Jem’s mother is Malaysian and his father half Scottish, half Lithuanian. However, the Malaysian side of the family won the gene war, and he is as black-haired and brown-eyed as I am.

  ‘Who knows though, things change,’ said Mark. ‘We did the train from Moscow to Leningrad. I remember it was boiling,’ he said. ‘I was so depressed, lying in my bunk, hearing a party next door, where I knew the boy I adored was. I was in a constant bad mood all week and spent a long time weeping as I was madly in love with him, and he slept with a girl. I remember lying there in my ridiculous cashmere John Flett coat, full of unrequited love. Oh, my god that train!’ Mark buried his face in his hand
s as my enthusiasm for Russia slowly dissolved into nothing. ‘I remember our pathetic little plastic bags of boiled eggs and weird stuff that we bought at the train station. We thought we were going to die of malnutrition, and lived off a family assortment of biscuits that my friend Ceri brought. I think I blocked it all out, but now that I recall, she also had a single orange, and we were granted one segment each.’

  ‘Was the food that bad on board the train?’ I asked.

  ‘Black bread, and eggs swimming in oil. Make sure you buy your own food. I remember Ceri slapping my hand away from the Peek Freans, and screaming “Stop! We need to ration them!” ’ Mark sat back and looked out of the window. ‘I also remember sending a message home to my dad asking him to meet me at the airport with Perrier and freshly squeezed orange juice, neither of which I could find in Russia. I still can’t drink mango juice because it’s all they had and it reminds me of that long, long, long week. I did come back with a luxuriant rabbit fur hat though.’

  The thought of five days on board a train eating nothing but black bread, oily eggs and biscuits, drinking nothing but mango juice, was enough to make me nauseous, and I made a mental note to stock up on food before boarding the Trans-Mongolian.

  ‘My lasting memory of the trip was how fucking depressing Moscow is. The city, I understand, is still a shithole. I’ve not been able to bring myself to go back since. One of the history studies group wrote a feature about it, and it ran as a full page in the Daily Mail. I have it somewhere.’

  A few nights later, Jem and I were lying like dead fish, rocking in the darkness as the train from Riga sped towards Moscow. My blanket drawn up to my chin, I stared at the berth above my head where a skinhead in a vest was asleep, his wrist hanging over the side. It was almost the girth of my thigh. Staring at the wrist as it swung with the motion of the train, I began to dread the next few days, praying that Mark was wrong about Moscow. He hadn’t been there for almost thirty years and it had to have changed since then.

  Neither of us slept, knowing that we would soon be arriving at the border for customs and passport checks, but we were too scared to talk in case we woke our companion. Slowing for what felt like an eternity, the train finally creaked and juddered to a halt. Muffled voices and footsteps approached immediately, and a torch flashed through the window. A woman screamed as a German shepherd straining on a leash came panting up the aisle, throttling itself, lurching up at Jem, then snuffling around my berth. Jem froze against the wall, his blankets on the floor. A torch shone into my eyes, and a voice said something I couldn’t understand. Handing over our passports, we sat still as the dog tugged at the leash, and another pair of footsteps clumped up the aisle. A guard stopped at our berths, crossed both forearms in the air and gestured for us to get up. Throwing all our bedding to the ground, he lifted up the berths, checked inside to where our bags were stored and rummaged around before signalling for us to move back. Returning our passports, the first guard gave us both one last look, then tugged at the dog and moved on to the next carriage.

  ‘We were the only people they checked,’ whispered Jem.

  ‘We’re the only brown people on board,’ I whispered back.

  Jem’s hands were like ice. He hated dogs, and although I adored them, even I had felt my bowels loosen at the heat and smell of the sniffer dog’s saliva in my face. As the train squealed and began to move on into Russia, the snores from above deepened, and I eventually turned on my side and allowed myself to fall asleep. We’d wanted adventure, and I could tell it was about to begin.

  2

  A Small World

  Bombing trains is rife in Moscow. Commuter services and metro carriages are prime targets, particularly new stock that has just been rolled into use. It takes nerve, skill and speed to bomb trains: there’s a high risk of being arrested, but the adrenaline rush and respect from other crews fuels the addiction. Planning takes precision. Crews check police schedules, study train timetables, and scout out hiding places, plotting escape routes in case things go wrong. One grey afternoon, we got bombed on the way back from Kubinka to Moscow. Groaning to a halt in between stations, the train was seized by masked men who scaled the sides with SAS stealth, bolting from one end of the carriage to the other. Amid the faint rattle and hiss of spray cans, I could smell the fumes of fresh paint. Before we realised what was happening, the train’s guards jumped down and chased them away, but not before the group had tagged the carriage with chunky neon letters spiked with black.

  Russian graffiti writers are part of a growing community of street artists, many of whom use their work to express their dissidence. Government authorities are quick to conceal the art, which makes train-bombing more attractive to writers who use the carriages as mobile galleries, watching with pride as their work tours the city. The ubiquity of graffiti by train lines never failed to darken my mood as we crossed the country. From time to time I would spy a wittily placed tag, but overall it rarely extended beyond misogyny or vandalism – the adult equivalent of using a compass to scratch a cock and balls into a school desk. As we waited for the train to proceed, I noticed – alongside a bulging, angry ‘SLUT’ – the same UTOP tag that had appeared a number of times along the route. Wondering if it was a political movement or the Russian slang for whore, I looked it up and found a two-minute music video of the UTOP crew, in which the writers used power tools and metal cutters to remove a grille and drop into a metro tunnel. Overnight they painted an entire carriage orange, writing their name in neat, bold lettering, with a pair of eyes peering cheekily through a slit. Not only did they document themselves at work, they made sure that one of their crew was on the platform the next morning to film the train arriving in all its glory. Considering the potential repercussions at the hands of the Russian government, it was an impressive stunt.

  That morning, we’d taken the commuter service to Kubinka to visit Patriot Park, Putin’s latest provocation. Dubbed a ‘military Disneyland’, the park had opened two days earlier and had been featured on news around the world, with footage of children clambering over tanks, missiles, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. It had looked like the ideal way to spend a couple of hours, so we had taken the metro to Belorussky station, an asylum-green kingdom of domes and spikes, and caught the train seconds before it left. At once I knew that we were making a mistake: the inside looked like an old school bus, with seats harder than concrete, and faces harder than the seats. Even the rust flaked with rust. We ought to have abandoned the trip, but the whole point of travel is to do things you would never normally do, so the fatalist in me sat tight as the train creaked and left the station. For the next hour we passed unbearable poverty, rolling by rough sleepers, hungry-looking children and makeshift homes covered in plastic. Unsure if these were Russians or Ukrainian refugees who’d fled the violence in Donetsk and Luhansk, I sank into my seat, the unease growing in direct proportion to our distance from Moscow.

  Life had not been kind to people here, their knuckles cut and calloused by labour, their slip-on shoes unfit for the rain. Pale eyes stared out of bloodless faces – not subtle glances, but fixed, purposeful staring. Folded arms revealed fading green tattoos; downturned mouths were marked with cold sores. Shrinking myself into a corner, I stared out of the window, avoiding eye contact, wishing we’d stayed in the capital. Over an hour and a half, the crowded carriage dwindled to two men and an old woman. Dressed in vests and tracksuit bottoms, the men turned around every few minutes, wrapping biceps around the back of the seats as they watched us.

  ‘Should we change carriages?’ Jem whispered.

  ‘Maybe. I’m praying they get off first.’

  ‘At least the old lady is still in here. They won’t do anything if she’s sitting behind us.’

  I glanced round to look at her. ‘She hasn’t moved for an hour and I think she’s soiled herself.’

  The train slowed and I saw with relief that the platform of Kubinka station was approaching. Wailing and banging her head back and forth on the se
at in front of her, the woman had woken up and begun hurling indiscriminate abuse, urine puddling around her feet. The men were the least of our problems, but as we crossed the footbridge they followed closely, spitting at my legs as they passed.

  ‘Why are we here? Let’s just get the train back to Moscow,’ I said, stepping over the glob.

  ‘We’ve come this far, let’s find the park, have a quick nose round, then head back. We can take an Uber back to Moscow if you like.’

  No one seemed to have heard of ‘Patriot Park’. Even though the Russian translated as ‘Park Patriot’ and we’d written down the Cyrillic, wilful ignorance – paired with open hostility – made our attempt to find a taxi impossible, until a driver in fatigues herded us into the back of his car and sped off towards the motorway.

  ‘Is this an actual taxi?’ Jem asked, scrabbling for the seatbelt. ‘There’s no meter.’

  ‘I’m too scared to ask.’

  The driver seemed to know where he was going and accelerated down the slip road and onto the motorway, weaving around cars, tearing past trucks and lorries, before turning around to ask questions in Russian. With nothing but a free app downloaded onto his iPhone, Jem attempted to hold it against the driver’s ear. Smacking away the phone with a paw-like hand, he pulled off onto a road that led to a huge car park.

  ‘Park Patriot,’ he said, slamming the brakes.

  There was nothing to see but a convention centre and a couple of tanks. Strains of communist music played through speakers.

  ‘This can’t be the place, there’s nothing here.’

  ‘Park Patriot,’ he repeated, thumping the steering wheel with each syllable. Throwing open the door, the driver lumbered off as though looking for information, then disappeared into a pink portaloo.

  ‘Shall we sack it off and go back to the station?’

  ‘Probably best.’

  Wiping his hands on his shirt, the driver got back in and tore away from the kerb, careering around the empty car park. Leaning forward with his app, Jem asked the driver to go back to the station.