Читать книгу On The Couch - Fleur Britten - Страница 14

‘Well, that was odd.’

Ollie and I were rumbling towards Asia on board the Trans-Siberian Express, and I was grappling with why Max could possibly choose to live in that chaos. We had thirty hours to work it out before it all began again in Yekaterinburg.

‘Max is having the time of his life,’ Ollie mused, as he stretched out on his sailor-sized bunk. ‘He’s meeting experienced travellers from all over the world, showing them his city, dodging his shitty job and working from his phone. He’s got it all worked out.’

Still, he must have possessed a spare brain lobe to accommodate the madness. Perhaps it was a reaction against Russia’s isolationist stance. Whatever, it would be hard to look at a Soviet block and still think ‘prison with windows’—we knew now that within their walls could be warm and colourful homes.

Ollie, meanwhile, was getting familiar with my dinner of Russian biscuits.

‘I couldn’t be my normal cheeky self,’ he said, his mouth full.

We were both caught up in manners: this was a shame—cheekiness had its role in social lubrication.

‘And you can’t be selfish as a couchsurfer,’ he added. ‘I was really having to push my leg because I felt rude telling Max to keep slowing down.’

He inspected the growth on his knee. It was bulging hard and taut. Ollie strapped a chilled bottle of water to the lump (he’d left his gel pack at Max’s) and added, ‘It would be really churlish to call a host boring—but Olga wasn’t so exciting.’

He was right. That was blasphemy.

As we pulled away from the relatively westernised Moscow, we pressed our noses against the window. Nothing to see but nothing: the Siberian birch, it seemed, had a monopoly over Russia’s hinterland. Staring out of the window began to feel like sticking one’s head into grey cloud: ready-made emptiness, waiting for our minds’ overspill.

But at least, I realised, one part of my mind was filled with peace: The Emperor Department. Usually so fraught with the minutiae of our last five arguments, now it was quiet. There was surely something out there for both of us that was more stable, that was better for us. We should be using this time to heal. I’d been sending trip updates to The Emperor, but now I sent this emotional update, and I felt it strongly. Maybe thousands of miles and all these weeks was the only way to save ourselves from ourselves.