Around We Go
Lost in Rome: the first in a series of travel fictions
Hello everyone! A quick note before we start. This is the first in a series I’m tentatively calling ‘travel fictions’ - they are short stories rather than diaries, but all feature someone in a different part of the world, somewhere unfamiliar to them. Those who know me may notice inspiration is taken from places I’ve been or things I’ve done, or, mostly, scrapes I’ve gotten myself into. This isn’t accidental - they’re not quite autobiographical stories, some parts are most definitely made up - but they are at least partly inspired by things that really happened. I’ll let Geoff Dyer sum it up the way he summed up his book Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It - “everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head.”
When we arrived in Rome we had no money and so, we didn’t stay in Rome. We popped into a hostel near Termini and on hearing their prices, decided it wasn’t for us. We decided this quite loudly and with much Italian remonstration with the poor woman on reception, who wasn’t even Italian. So loudly in fact that we attracted the attention of those in the adjoining bar, one of whom told us about a camping resort where a room for two could be had for pennies. “It’s a fair way out of town, though,” they said, but we were already putting on our bags.
“A fair way out of town” was one way of describing the camping resort’s location, though I would have instead described it as not actually in Rome at all. To get there from Termini we would have to ride the metro an interminably long way out to some long-forgotten suburb and then ride a bus an interminably long way out to some long-forgotten outskirt that was so outskirt-y it was almost its own non-place somewhere between Rome and the sea. “Or,” said the man in the bar, “I could drive you there, since I’m staying there myself.” This was an enormous stroke of luck but did mean we were completely unprepared for what would happen in a couple of days' time.
Jamie, my travel companion, was already sick of Rome by the time we arrived, and we hadn’t even seen the place. Though that’s because he was sick of Italy, sick of trains, sick of being on the move. He was particularly sick of being with me. I was also sick of being with him and so the camping village, despite being in the arse end of nowhere, was actually ideal. For me, it provided other travellers who were on a budget, who were English speakers, and who, thank God, were not Jamie.
One such person was Mark who claimed, like me, to be a big fan of Ernest Hemingway. Since we had been in Venice I had talked, if not exclusively, then very often about Hemingway and although Jamie didn’t see the attraction, Mark did. Or at least that’s what I thought until I asked the somewhat basic question of which of Hemingway’s novels he thought was best. Mark hemmed and hawed and then said he wasn’t really sure he had a favourite, though it was plainly obvious that he wanted me to say what mine was first so that he could agree, since he didn’t seem to be able to recall the names of any of them. When I said The Sun Also Rises was my favourite he said, of course, it has to be that. But Mark was still not Jamie and was happy to let me go on and on without stopping about a writer he clearly hadn’t read and so we got along fine.
Jamie had no interest in talking to Mark because Mark was a man. Jamie had by this point on our interrail jaunt begun describing himself as “in need of companionship.” When I pointed out that I had been accompanying him for the last three weeks he looked at me with a scowl and said “that isn’t quite what I mean.” When Jamie saw the pool and the women who were swimming in it, lounging around it, drinking pornstar martinis in the vicinity of it, he looked like he was about to fall down and weep. He was enraptured in the way that I had been at the Uffizi in Florence. There Jamie had only grunted when confronted with the beauty of art. The swimming pool in Rome was his gallery.
The swimming pool was where we spent the next day. Sure, we’d just arrived in one of the greatest, most iconic cities in the world, but Jamie made it clear that if he had to make the journey to the centre that morning he would be doing so only under extreme duress. Since by this point travelling with Jamie even while he wasn’t under duress was bordering on the unbearable, and my new friend Mark had made it clear that a visit to the Keats-Shelley Museum was, despite his apparent literary interests, not his idea of a good time, I agreed to a day by the pool.
But after a day of watching Jamie unsuccessfully trying to get an Australian girl who went by the name Sunshine to join him on his sun lounger, I insisted on going into the city the next morning.
“I’m not sure I fancy it,” said Jamie.
“It’s Rome,” I pointed out, “this is one of the best places in the world. We have to go and see it.”
“You said the same thing about Florence.”
“And wasn’t I right?”
“Well, I didn’t really care for it,” Jamie said, shrugging his shoulders.
“If you come to the centre you’ll also be able to go to Vatican City,” I pointed out, “another country to tick off your list.” Jamie liked travelling because he could tick places off, say he had “done” loads of countries. He could say he had been to this place and that place and even those distant places over there. The fact that he didn’t actually enjoy his time in the many countries he ticked off wasn’t something that seemed to bother him.
“Vatican City is its own country?” he asked.
“Uh huh,” I replied. Jamie paused and pondered what to do.
“We’ll go to the centre,” he said finally, “but not before eleven.”
The trip to the centre was as awful and long as we expected it would be, but we didn’t get lost or kidnapped or murdered so we considered it a success. Though, not getting lost or kidnapped or murdered was largely down to us bringing Mark along with us. He had been staying in the camping village for two weeks already and was, he said, ready to bed down for the winter. Though it was still only September he said that he could think of no better place to spend his time and so was in protracted negotiations with the people who ran the village to secure a discounted, long-term rate. His two weeks of experience staying in the village meant he had made the journey to the centre a number of times and so we just followed him and didn’t really pay attention to where we were going.
This didn’t seem like a big deal but after a day’s exploring, during which we visited the Colosseum, the Pantheon and Vatican City (“that’s another country down,” said Jamie), we went to a bar in Trastevere and proceeded to get drunk. I had three, maybe four Aperols and Jamie was guzzling beer. In hindsight our heavy drinking was clearly related to the fact that Mark had, against all odds, despite his personality and looks, managed to charm an Italian woman named Cecelia. She was gorgeous and funny and, as far as we were concerned, lovely in every way. When she was in the bathroom we asked Mark how he had managed to get her to not just talk to him but to clearly like doing so.
“I have absolutely no idea,” he said, “but I think you’ll be finding your way back to the resort on your own.”
“We’ll never make it!” I protested. We had done so of course just two days beforehand but now after a few spritzes this seemed an impossible undertaking.
“Not my problem,” Mark said, finishing his beer and ordering another as Cecelia re-joined us.
But it was our problem and so we drank some more to both quell our jealousy at Mark’s good fortune and to put off making the long journey home. This was a very bad idea because it meant we were both woefully underprepared in terms of knowledge of Rome’s geography and - and this was the kicker - hopelessly drunk. With some gentle prodding we managed to extract the metro line and which station we needed to get off at from Mark, but with the bus stop’s location he was vague.
“It’s definitely upstairs from the metro,” he said in between snogs with Cecelia.
“Well, I think I would have been able to figure that out myself,” I replied.
“Sounds like you’re getting on fine then,” Mark said, before plunging into a kiss from which he looked like he might never return.
It was only after a few minutes of searching, upstairs from the metro, before we came to the conclusion that we were not getting on fine. There were multiple bus stops on each side of the road and we didn’t even know which side we were supposed to be on. One direction pointed east or southeast, that much Jamie could be sure of. How he could be sure of this wasn’t clear, he seemed to have worked this out by looking at the stars. That meant, logically, that the other direction pointed west or northwest. But since we didn’t know in which direction the camping village lay from this particular metro stop, this knowledge of the compass didn’t really help us.
“If only we knew that,” Jamie said, “but then,” he added, “I suppose the road might not always point east or southeast. It might change direction.”
“I’d say that’s probably likely.”
“I think we might be fucked.”
“Yes, I think so.”
We had phones of course but Jamie’s was dead. It was perennially dead, it spent more time dead than alive. Mine was alive, just about, but since I was cheap and on a very bad plan using data abroad cost a small fortune. Normally I would cadge Wi-Fi from bars and cafes but I hadn’t been smart (or sober) enough to do this and to check which bus we needed to get home before we left Mark and his new Italian girlfriend. I was silently cursing my stupidity for not having done this when a bus pulled up. It was the 523.
“The 523!” Jamie shouted. “It’s the 523!”
“I can see that.”
“No, we need to get the 523, I’m sure.”
“You’re sure?”
“As soon as I saw it I remembered it was the 523 we got this morning,” Jamie said.
“How sure are you?”
“110% sure.”
“That’s pretty sure.”
“I’d say I’m certain.”
“Good enough for me.”
We jumped onto the bus, suddenly confident in our convictions. Then when it came to buying a ticket from the driver our convictions fell to bits.
“Camping village?” Jamie asked. The driver just looked back and shrugged.
“The camping village? You go there?” Jamie said in a half-Italian, half-Indian accent.
“Si,” said the driver, though without any real confidence. He looked like he just wanted us to go away.
“Fantastico,” said Jamie, and he bought two tickets.
At that moment, it felt like our whole trip was back on track. I remembered why I had brought Jamie along. He wasn’t a man of culture but he was a man of action. Faced with the crisis of finding a bus home Jamie acted and got on a bus. If I were in this situation alone, I would have stood at the bus stop all through the night and into the morning, watching each and every bus pull up and not getting on any of them because I wasn’t 100% sure they were the right bus. In my quest to make sure I travelled in the right direction I would have actually travelled in no direction at all, would have stayed exactly where I was.
Though in the end it turned out that staying exactly where I was, in that situation, not getting on the 523, would have been much better than what I did. Not getting on the 523 would have meant I was standing still but that I was not, as it turned out we were, travelling in the wrong direction, travelling into some deep dark corner of Rome that wasn’t where I wanted to go.
“Jamie,” I said, “did you notice how on the way in on the bus this morning, the city got more and more Rome. Like you could tell we were getting closer and closer to the centre?”
“Yeah?” he replied.
“Well, don’t you think that’s happening now?”
“What do you mean?”
“I guess I was expecting things to get less and less Rome as we got closer to the camping village. Like things would get more rural and flyblown and out in the sticks like they were this morning when we set off.”
At this point Jamie started scanning the streets outside the window. It wasn’t clear where we were but it was clear that we were definitely very much still in Rome.
“It does look quite busy,” Jamie conceded.
“Quite city-centre-ish, wouldn’t you say?”
“A bit city-centre-ish, I suppose.”
“We’re on the wrong bus.”
“It certainly looks that way,” Jamie agreed.
Once we’d worked this out there was a brief period of relative calm, as if by working out the magnitude of our fuck up we had somehow made it a little less of a fuck up. We knew we were going the wrong way and so at least we knew that. We had figured something out and that was an achievement in itself. It was just a slightly lesser achievement than getting on the right bus to begin with would have been. After a few minutes the frustration of not getting on the right bus was the prevailing emotion.
“We’re morons,” I said, “absolute morons. How could we be so stupid?”
“I don’t think it was that stupid,” said Jamie, “the bus was definitely something like the 523.”
“But,” I replied, “it clearly wasn’t the 523, it was something else.”
“Well, you didn’t remember any bus numbers at all,” Jamie pointed out.
“No, though if you hadn’t either we’d still be standing at the bus stop, at least.” I said.
“We should get off.”
“Get off and do what?”
“I dunno,” Jamie said, “look for another bus stop?”
“We wouldn’t even know the right bus number if we saw it.”
“Hmm,” Jamie replied. In the end we just stayed on the bus as it wound its way through a bit of central Rome. Or a bit of Rome at least. We couldn’t tell if it was central Rome, we couldn’t tell where it was at all given there were no obvious landmarks to spot. We seemed to have boarded the only bus in Rome that wasn’t going anywhere near anything worthy of note.
We couldn’t decide what to do and then we were interrupted. A large man with an open blue shirt tumbled up the bus towards us - we had sat at the back, naturally - and said with a thick German accent, “you are going to the camping village, yes?” Jamie and I looked at each other for a second, and then at the large German man. His shirt was open to just above his stomach and spilling out over and through it was a mass of grey chest hair that looked like it was trying to grow out towards us and envelop us. That was his main feature. I can’t remember what his face looked like because I barely looked at it. I mainly stared at his chest and eventually remembered he had asked us a question.
“Uh, yeah?” I replied.
“Your bracelets,” he said, seeing I was both confused and alarmed that a hairy German stranger seemed to know where I was going. He was referring to another sign of the camping village’s lowly status. As well as being miles away and incredibly hard to get to, it also asked that all guests wear paper wristbands for the duration of their stay so that we were, in their words, “easily identifiable.” The idea that any non-guests would have either the inclination or the wherewithal to make it out to the camping village was ridiculous but, a stickler for any rule large or small, I had worn mine in the pool and at restaurants and, as now, on the bus.
“We are going there, too,” he said.
“Oh,” I brightened, “you know the way?”
“No,” he said, “we followed you onto the bus, we were hoping you did.”
“Oh, dear,” Jamie said, “we think we’re on the wrong bus.”
The hairy German looked crestfallen.
“Oh dear,” he repeated.
“Who’s ‘we’?” I asked. At this two women appeared from behind the hairy German. They were almost identical and about two feet shorter than him. Perhaps it wasn’t two feet, perhaps they were just a bit shorter than the German, but the German was so big (and hairy) that he made anyone around him look puny. We looked small next to him and the women were shorter than us. They waved hello but didn’t say anything. They never did say anything, to us at least. Whenever we looked at the two women they always just shrugged and laughed at our shared predicament. They spoke only in whispers and only ever to each other. They were clearly with the German but how and in what relationship to him was tantalisingly unclear.
We looked at the two women a lot over the coming hours, because it was hours in the end. This is because although we were paralysed with indecision on the backseats, the German was the kind of man who made decisions.
“So, what are we going to do?” he asked, “do you know where this bus is going?”
“No.”
“Do you know where we are now?”
“No.”
“Right,” he said, “well there seems to be only one course of action.”
“What’s that?” Jamie asked.
“Well, the bus will go around again. We’ll sit on it until we get back to the stop we all got on at.”
“We will?”
“Yes,” he said. With this he sat down across from the two women a couple of rows in front of us.
“Are we really going to sit here that long?” Jamie hissed at me.
“Have you got a better idea?”
“We could get off?”
“We don’t know where we are, or how to get to where we’re going. Come to think of it, we don’t even know where we're going either, really. The camping village could be in Florence for all we know.”
This situation could have been easily solved with money. Most situations can be, I suppose, but this one in particular. If we had money we would simply have got off the bus and flagged down a cab and gone straight to the camping village. Or actually, if we had money we would have got a taxi in the first place, wouldn't have bothered with the metro or the bus. Money, as they say, can’t buy you happiness, but it can allow you to go from one place to another in a hired car with minimal fuss, without having to deal with too many unpleasant people or hairy Germans, and in my book that comes pretty close.
And so we sat and waited. Every so often the German would turn and ask a question, what did we do? Where were we from? Students from London brought a chuckle which he explained by saying that he was a professor. A professor of what, was the obvious next question, which he answered with, “oh, this and that.”
This and that. Through further questioning he revealed he was in Rome sort of on holiday, sort of on business. This and that, sort of. Nothing was definite or clear about the German apart from his chest hair. Most unclear was his relationship to the two identical women who didn’t seem to be German. In fact, we couldn’t figure out where they were from. Jamie asked them if they were enjoying Rome and received a simple shrug and laugh in response. The German smiled in response to this question but didn’t say anything.
The German, as we referred to him in the days after this and now whenever we see each other, was called Heinz.
“Like the ketchup,” he said with a smile, as if pre-empting our joke.
“Or the beans,” Jamie said.
So, the evening went on. After fifteen minutes of unclear back and forth with Heinz the excitement and novelty of the bus ride drained away slightly. A high point was the bus’s arrival at some sort of depot where it changed drivers. The original driver, the driver who had betrayed us by not telling us that he was not in fact driving in the direction of the camping village, got off, looking over at us in the back as he did so. He looked mildly perturbed but not completely surprised, like it was unusual but certainly not unheard of for him to carry unsuspecting tourists back to his depot. The new driver didn’t even look at us, just got in and started driving back towards the city.
But other than this brief frisson boredom started to set in, and, in Jamie’s case, so did hunger.
“I’m peckish,” he said at least four times, “I’m hungry,” twice, and, towards the two hour mark, “I’m fucking starving. Will the restaurant be open in the village when we get back, do you think?” By this point it was past ten and pitch black.
“I’m not sure,” I replied, “it’s getting late.”
“Sodding restaurant, sodding bus, sodding Rome,” he said, “this is why I wanted to stay by the pool.”
“Come on,” I said, “you’d had a good day until this.”
“It was fine, alright, we saw some of Rome so I can say I’ve done that, but now all I’ll be able to think about when I think about today is this sodding bus.”
“What about the Colosseum? You liked the Colosseum?” I was trying to make light of the situation but Jamie was focused only on the dark.
“Sodding Colosseum. I hope the restaurant is open when we get back.”
I was lying when I told Jamie that I wasn’t sure whether it was still going to be open. I knew it was closed, that it closed at half past ten every evening because I had, incidentally, checked that very morning. I knew that what was awaiting us was an evening of no dinner, or at least no dinner at the restaurant. But this didn’t seem like the time to tell him. Better to at least be back at the village before he received even more bad news. This plan was spoiled by Heinz.
“Did I hear you talk about the restaurant?” he asked, turning around.
“Yeah,” Jamie replied, “it better be open when we get back. I’m starving.”
“Oh dear,” Heinz said, “it’s already closed.”
“It’s closed?”
“Yes, I’m afraid it closes at ten thirty, each evening.”
“Oh, well this just gets better,” said Jamie.
“I have some food,” said Heinz.
“You have food?”
“Yes.”
“Here, now?”
“Oh no,” said Heinz, “back in my room at the village. You can come and have some if you’d like.”
“Oh, that’d be lovely, thank you,” said Jamie. This surprised me. Heinz seemed harmless enough but not the sort of man we wanted to spend any more time with than was absolutely necessary. To me, that meant the duration of the bus journey. But the prospect of food had swayed Jamie.
“You’re not seriously going to go back to his room?” I whispered.
“He’s got food.”
“Yeah, but he’s a bit…”
“A bit…?”
“Well, he’s odd, isn’t he? Him and his two, well, ladies.”
“Him and his two ladies have got food so I’m going with them. You know there’s nothing else at the village.”
“Do you think it’s beans?”
“What?”
“Do you think Heinz has beans?”
“I’m too hungry for jokes like that,” said Jamie.
Heinz didn’t have any beans, in the end. Eventually the bus came back around to its original stop, the stop where we had made our catastrophic mistake, and we hopped off without a word to our second driver of the evening. Despite the late hour there were others with camping village wristbands milling around - for once we were glad of the wristbands - and, along with Heinz and his ladies, we boarded the right bus.
“Oh, it was the 325,” Jamie said.
“Not the 523.”
“Easy mistake to make.”
He had cheered up immensely knowing he was on the home stretch, the last bus of the evening. This boost was only temporary, however. When we arrived at the village we walked past the bar, still busy but serving only liquids, the pool and the showers and ambled down to Heinz’s room. He was on the left and the two identical women were in a room on the right. We weren’t sure quite why but this confused us about their relationship even more. We weren’t sure whether we had been expecting to find one room that was clearly tainted with the whiff of weird sex, or three different rooms, or what, but either way they didn’t stay in there long. They soon came out with crackers and little biscuits that tasted like stale bread.
“Mmm,” I said, pushing one down with gulps of water, “lovely.”
Jamie was chewing but his heart wasn’t in it.
“Just you wait,” said Heinz, “I have something really special for us.” The two women laughed together at this and Jamie looked at me expectantly.
“Beans,” he mouthed.
“Here we are!” Heinz exclaimed, holding a box aloft, “cornflakes!”
The next day, there was no sign of Mark. I ventured into the city alone to see the Keats-Shelley House. Jamie stayed by the pool.
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Tom! I laughed out loud so many times. This is a fantastic piece of travel fiction. Looking forward to more from the collection!
Fun read Tom thanks!