All Of Monday’s Reasons - 31
31. The Train To Amsterdam
Map
More passengers arrived and the train came. We found a compartment on the Austrian railway and were joined by three English seventeen year olds who had a year to go at school. They had been to Auschwitz and had been moved to tears by the experience, they said.
They showed us a British newspaper from the day before. The international section was missing when they bought it, so I read about UK news home affairs in a land which seemed even more distant than home.
All the passengers on the train were between the ages of nineteen and twenty seven. They were trying to promote the image of reckless youth and were headed for its capital city, Amsterdam. Everyone was either drinking or smoking or listening to some seventies psychedelia on a stereo. Some were
doing all three. In one smoke-filled compartment, three hairy guys with flared jeans and tie-die t-shirts were strumming out a Dylan tune on their beat up guitars, harking back to an era in which most of them were only seven years old.
We talked and drank the beer between the six of us. When that was finished, we had a litre of Greek rose and when we drained that, we had half a pint of ouzo. The others crashed out while Caroline and I finished the rest of my food. She thanked me for having shared it with them. I said it was no problem.
“I feel a bit guilty, though. It was your food. We’ll pay you back.”
I knew they were low on money so I said I would accept very little, since she insisted.
There was a pause before she said, “Do you smoke? You know- dope?”
I said I did, but I never went out looking for it.
“You don’t have to,” came the reply, “that’s how we’ll pay you back. If you stay in the same campsite as us, you can have your share of what we smoke.”
I was even more glad I had met up with these two, first from saving me from a fate of certain Claus, now with free drugs to tackle that lingering, nauseaus, Clausy feeling.
I was the first to wake up the next morning. I woke reasonably early because I had slept so heavily, and I didn’t feel hung over but my mouth was dried out. I went to the buffet car and bought half a litre of beer which I drank slowly as I looked out the window. God, in some ways, to be seventeen again.
This was my first time in Holland. The countryside was beautiful and unlike any other I had seen so far on the trip. It was flat and green. The smooth landscape of green meadows flowed smoothly past the window. I didn’t believe that there really were working windmills, either, but we passed several on the way. I half expected to see a boy with clogs on with his finger plugging a leak in a dyke.
The beer woke me up and I began to look around me to see the debris of what must have been a wild party. The corridor was strewn with beer cans and sleeping hippies. Those who were awake were wearing dark glasses and were probably hung over.
Walking back to my compartment I passed a guy drinking a can of beer on a pull down corridor seat. He looked like he had just woken up. To his right side were five cans in a six-pack neckring and to his left were a dozen empty cans, crushed and piling up next to him. I slithered around him and shuffled through the beer cans.
I looked into the next carriage where five nuns conversed and a vicar were sitting upright in their seats, politely laughing as they conversed. It was Sunday and one of them was reading a Bible.
I walked a little further and found a place between bodies where I could stand and watch Holland unfold before me. After five minutes I felt a tugging at the left leg of my jeans. One of the party animals had woken up. I looked down.
He pointed to my bottle and a sluggish voice with a Dutch accent asked, “Hey man, where’d you get the beer?”
I pointed up the car and wondered how many days I would stay in Amsterdam.
My companions woke up and we pulled into Amsterdam a measly half an hour late. I laughed when I heard people complaining that the train was behind schedule.
———