Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

After two days I had caught up my diary and finished my Simenon and was considering going to the Vientiane museum when I met Fiona, a backpacker. She was thirty, traveling alone, and like a lot of solitary travelers, resourceful, also shrewd, direct, opinionated, and full of misinformation. She didn't read much, she said; she got her facts from other travelers like herself, on buses, in hostels, waiting under trees in the rain. She had just arrived in Laos.

"I'm a traveler. That's all I want to do. But I ran out of money," she said. "I have to go back to England, but I'm only going so that I can make some money. I want to come back here, or somewhere. I just want to travel. I don't want to do anything else."

We were in a noodle shop. I offered to buy her a beer, but she said tea was fine.

"Thing is, when you're trying to save money, you need a flatmate. My last flatmate, Roger, was gay. When I say gay, I mean not just gay but, um, know much about S and M?"

"A little bit," I said. "Was that Roger's thing?"

"Roger's thing was parties. There are these S-and-M parties all over London. I went to some. The people were quite nice! Barristers. Company directors. Jobs in the City, stock market blokes. Roger was a clerk in chambers. But they have this one thing in common?"

"Pain," I said.

"Not just pain. Spanking. Whipping."

"Does nothing for me," I said.

She wasn't listening. "Roger had these two friends. One was really tall with a metal spike through his nose and tattoos and piercings. A bloke. The other was a very small frizzy-haired girl with Deirdre Barlow glasses. She was the weirdest of the lot."

"In what way?"

"They all went to bed together. I called them the Circus People. 'Circus people coming this weekend, Roger?' When they showed up, the flat stank. They didn't wash."

"But weird in what way?"

"They got Roger into cutting and scarification. They took these sharp knives and cut him all around one leg. Roger said, 'When they put the salt water on it, I was in heaven.'"

I said, "I'm losing my appetite."

Fiona said, "But it got me thinking. What about the people who are really in pain? Poor people. People in prison. That's a kind of insult to them in their suffering."

"Good point." I hadn't thought of that. I said, to change the subject, "So you want to go on traveling?"

She said, "Yes. My hero is Michael Palin. The BBC guy? He goes all over the world."

I said, "With a camera crew and someone to do his makeup and buy his tickets. He's got people who tell him where to stand!"

"He's a real world traveler. And he's funny, too."

"I'll give you that. He makes jokes."

"He's clever too!" She leaned over. "I'd never heard of Lhasa until he went there."

"Fiona, it's the capital of Tibet. I was there once."

She didn't care. She said, "I'll bet Michael Palin has been here in Laos."

"Or maybe not."

"That's what I want to do."

"Be Michael Palin? That's your ambition?"

"Wouldn't you want to be Michael Palin?" she asked.

The next day, as I was having lunch at an outdoor café in Vientiane, an old American woman entered with two young men. They sat near me, and from their conversation I gathered that one was her son and the other his Indian lover. The woman sat queening it for a while, and the young men talked intimately. And then a waiter approached her.

"Ask them. They make all the decisions," she said. "I'm just along for the ride."

Strange little dramas occurred, the glimpses I got as a traveler, not a short story but a fleeting look of something else. I always knew that there was much more, and so these people appeared like characters waiting for me, as some Americans had in India, to assign them parts in a bigger story.

I was satisfied that the depraved Vientiane of whores and stoners I had known was gone, replaced by a Vientiane of budget travelers and backpackers. Meanwhile the Laotians themselves did their best to escape across the river to Thailand, where there were opportunities for work and real money.

A pedicab, locally known as a tuk-tuk, passed me as I was walking down a street. The man said, "Where?"

I thought that I might go to the museum or see some more temples. But I said, "How much to the bridge?"

He named a price, and not long after that I was back at Nong Khai Station, waiting for the Bangkok train, thinking about the little dramas. A woman smiled at me.

"Anyone sitting here?"

"Be my guest."

She was American, tubby and short, duck-butted, about fifty or so, in black capri pants, her hair drawn back but most of it fluttering around her sweaty face. She was pale, unnaturally so in this bright sunshine. She carried a misshapen duffle bag, which she unzipped, taking out a ten-inch baguette sandwich wrapped in paper. Pulling off the paper, holding the sandwich in two hands, like a tool, she tilted her head and began eating, working on it from its narrower end.

"Real good," she said, chewing.

"What's in it?"