I'm currently in Europe, Paris to be precise. I was here four years ago, a short trip spent wallowing in all that the likes of Amsterdam, Paris and parts of the UK have to offer. I spent a lot of that time writing, as I have been this trip, and recently came across what I'd penned then, a series of oddball missives to myself, to friends back home, to nothing and no one in particular.
Before I begin to post what I've written this time around, a trip down memory lane seems to be in order.
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Pre-dawn in Central France… Notes from the other side of the world…
A perpetual state of transit is where I seem to find myself, a perpetual
state of motion, or perhaps non-motion would describe it more accurately –
another train station, another airport, another smoker’s lounge, another bar.
Standing and sitting, waiting for the next leg to begin, counting the hours
since I left but never really being sure if it’s right, if I am where I think I
am, wondering if I’ve calculated wrong and have missed a connection and am
doomed to wait forever in a foreign airport, a train station, a smoker’s
lounge, a bar.
It’s hot in Singapore, muggy
and thick but you only really feel it that split second you alight from the
plane, the gap in the connecting tunnel just big enough to allow you a whiff of
stifling air before you’re caught once more in the air-conditioning, the
recycled air which is all you breath on any
distance trip really. It’s been
seven hours since we left, people wander somewhat aimlessly, but we seem to be
OK, steady walk, taking control of a situation which really demands a
horizontal position and a cold beer. We find our transit motel, a small,
nondescript room, three beds, a shower, tea and coffee, nothing out of the
ordinary anywhere.
I wander downstairs by myself,
the need to smoke outweighing the need to lie down for now – Singapore airport
is bright and modern, an architect’s dream, an artist’s nightmare. There aren’t many people wandering around and
so the garish shops hawking their techno-wares, their fashion and their
product, the ones pushed in the face of weary travellers, are pushing to what
is a barely populated space… it’s calm, and is easy to wander around slowly, no
hustle, no bustle, a languid 8pm stroll around no man’s land, as we are indeed
behind customs, that odd space which doesn’t really belong to a country, a
place which technically has no borders or laws, just an urge to make money and
to sell, except to those of us who are already content and want nothing more
than alcohol and nicotine.
The terribly titled Smoker’s
Lounge is a glass cube, a room off the side of the Singapore Straights Bar,
where you can get two New Zealand Harry’s beers for five euro, a room with no
air except the air that’s been regurgitated from someone’s lungs, thick smoke
fills the entire space, there are plants but they must be plastic and they do
little to cheer this extraordinarily depressing scene. The room is full when I find it, opening the
glass door at the front, the deluge of smoke unable to escape because of the
curtain of cold air protecting the smoke-less citizens outside its
boundaries. No one speaks, it’s totally
quite, people suck on cigarettes and look at the floor, they think about
god-knows what and they smoke in total silence almost, it seems, afraid to be
there, to be seen there, to even connect themselves with what is, basically, a
smoker’s detention centre.
It’s obvious in places like
this they’re trying to phase smoking out – even a heavy smoker would think
twice before going in there. I myself do
a number of times, each time not finishing more than half a cigarette, but as
any smoker will tell you, after a seven and a half hour flight, you’ll pretty
much go anywhere – I catch the eye of a few people I see in there from time to
time, and we become kindred smoking spirits, united behind the lines by
something that will eventually, perhaps, kill us all.
Seven hours we spend in
Singapore airport. I try and get a bit
of work done, I drink a couple of beers with Pip – it’d be easy to get drunk
here, quite cheaply, and I’m tempted to, given our next flight, which leaves at
11:45, is supposed to last for around 13 hours, a prospect which holds no
excitement for me. But we just stick to
a couple, returning to the room to read and while away the hours, leaving again
to eat at a Thai restaurant overlooking the main concourse, which is beginning
to fill up as more and more planes arrive from overseas destinations, expelling
passengers of all shapes and sizes, of all races and denominations, of all
types from scruffy backpackers to elite, harried looking businessmen. We finish eating and head back to the room, I
detour for another smoke and find it harder to reach the cube as people spill
every which way in an effort to find what they’re looking for – I smoke and
return once more to the room.
Eventually, we leave for the
departure lounge, and I wonder where all these people came from – two flights
are leaving from here at roughly the same time, a flight to Heathrow in London
and one to Charles de Gaul in France, and people teem everywhere, every seat is
taken, small children run and scream through the isles, dodging tired feet and
bags filled with duty-free booze and cigarettes, annoying anyone who is awake,
which is everyone – you can’t sleep in an environment like this. It’s around seven in the morning back in
Melbourne, I’ve not slept since waking up at 4:30 the previous morning – time
differences are getting confusing and Singapore is only two hours behind… we
wait and we wait and we finally get on the plane, taking our seats not long
before take-off, the wail of the new-born next to me setting me on edge for a
flight I was indifferent to, but which I’m now dreading and just want to be
over. My head feels like it’s full of
concrete, and luckily, as we begin our journey north and west, crossing over
the continental plate, over India and Pakistan, over the middle east, the
Caspian Sea, the bottom of Russia, the old Soviet States like Kurdistan,
Uzbekistan and the former Yugoslavia, over eastern Europe and finally western
Europe, I fall into a troubled sleep and so escape from what is happening
around me and what is likely to come.
We emerge from a pregnant grey sky, an offspring born of modern
technology and our planet’s ever-changing meteorological circumstance, the rain
meanders down with that French arrogance, and it’s almost nice to be in such a
state, so far removed from the norm it puts a fresh take on a sleepless
delirium and at least eases the pain of being part of this crowd of what were
once human beings. ‘Smoking in the plaza
outside Gare Du Lyon’, says a line in my notebook and I was there as the sun
came out and pigeons bustled around my feet and in my black suit I felt almost
real for a while, and yet transit is where I was and would be for a while.
Of course, we missed the
train, the inefficiency of Charles de Gaul airport, slightly north and east of
the French capital, the reason why – customs takes an eternity, although once
yr passport is stamped, it’s all over, you’d be pretty unlucky to get pulled
over by the blue-uniformed police and yr baggage searched – once you’ve gotten
yr baggage of course. We waited another
eternity for our bags to appear, finally picking them off the endless conveyor,
running downstairs, a taxi queue, yet another queue, but a welcome one for
smokers such as me. We head to town,
leaving the airport at around 8:35, local time, in the morning but we don’t
make our nine o’clock train, we don’t get to the stations until 9:30 and so I’m
standing out in the plaza outside Gare Du Lyon, the sun straining to break
through the cloud cover – looking around the vast square, there are apartments
in a huge building which curves around the northern edge, some balconies
displaying banners advocating against some cause or another, too hard to read
what they say though, the word ‘Non’ standing out the most,
anti-something. A bum wanders around the
area talking to himself, occasionally lighting a cigarette stub, occasionally
talking to people standing around eating or smoking or merely enjoying the
fresh air away from the stuffiness of the station, a building which on the
exterior, looks magnificent, but which inside could be any huge transit hub in
the world.
Young people, army recruits,
none of which look older than 22, stroll around in uniform, which would be
almost comical if they weren’t armed with thick, dead black German-made machine
guns, in a perpetual state of languid readiness, protecting us from I don’t
know what, they don’t make a sound and just walk around looking at everything
instilling a slight trace of fear amongst people, although the locals, to tell
the truth, don’t seem to notice. We wait
for another train, which, three and a half hours later, leaves from Platform 9
upstairs and we find seats and sink into them, so close to the end of the
journey and yet still on the journey and sleep is needed (only three or four
hours in the past 48) but I read and look out the window as the French
countryside rushes by like it has somewhere else to be and has no time to
waste.
We stop at Nevers and Vichy
and somewhere else and we eventually get off at Riom where the sun is shining
and it’s the perfect early autumn day, central France with its rolling hills
and tiny, narrow-streeted towns, basking in the sun as if it’ll never be back
again.
I wake up a little before 6am
in my tiny room in the middle of nowhere, it’s still dark and there’s no sound
anywhere, no people up and about, total silence. The moon is full and the silvery light
meanders around the edge of the window blind giving the room an eerie
glow. I read for a short time and then
set up my laptop on the tiny desk in the corner to record the events of the
past two days.
Eventually I open my window
and, turning off the light, climb out onto the wide ledge to smoke a
cigarette. The sky to my left is slowly
beginning to lighten, the moon to my right is gently setting, bathing the
entire scene in its ethereal glow – a cat walks across the carpark below me, a
shadow stealing eastwards, and a light goes on in a top floor room across from
me. The sound of a delivery van emanates
from the steep road out the front of the hotel and a dog barks, but aside from
that I could be alone in the world, just me in a town in the middle of the
French countryside, peaceful and well-rested, thinking about nothing in
particular and someone specifically, a quiet scene of reflection and calm. Today will be a long day, and there are
indeed many words to be written, and so around an hour later I decide to retire
again, for an hour or so, until someone wakes and the day begins and we see
what exactly is likely to happen next.
***
I'll post more of this work over the coming days, as well as whatever I manage to put together this time around.
SJF
