Memoir: Safe Hitchhikers?

The summer of 2000 my mum and I wanted to be a little bit more adventurous than normal when choosing our holiday destination. We decided to go to London. Three days before we took off, a bee stung me while my then current boyfriend and I were smooching behind a tree. My left check grew to double the size and it looked like I had my mouth stuffed with marshmallows. In all our photos from our trip you can see that I’m clearly uncomfortable, but my mum had to keep shooting. After all it was our maiden voyage and it had to be well documented.

My mum, Marianne, has always been a master at making me feel embarrassed. The day I was stung she was the one who took me to the doctor, and the one who had to sit in the waiting room together with my boyfriend and do small talk. Somehow, out of all the questions she could have asked him about school, interests etc, while the doctor was examining me, she chose “Does your mum accompany you when you go to the doctor?” My boyfriend at that time was 18 and I was 14, so for me her choice was mortifying. I wanted to be the cool girl.

He was my mum and dad’s first challenge when it came to my choice of men. I’ve always had a thing for older guys, something that my parents have learned to accept. Though not always agreeing from the beginning they’ve been very supportive and loving parents with whatever I’ve done so far in life. A good example is when I came home from philosophy studies in Mexico, the winter of 2005. I was heartbroken, missing my Mexican boyfriend. My dad was not happy when I told him that I was seeing a Mexican Surfer by the name Coco, 29 (I was 19.) His response was “Over my dead body.” A month later, on New Year’s Day, my dad and I fetched Coco at the airport; he was invited for New Years dinner.

Our trip to London was my first trip abroad. It was my mum’s first time crossing the Norwegian borders as well, except for a short trip to Sweden together with my dad who always preferred Nordic, mountainous landscape to unknown cities in Europe. When I was growing up I would often impersonate my dad’s voice saying, “I love mountains. I love fjords.” My mum would laugh, but after a couple of giggles she would stop because it made her feel bad.

The way I see it, London was and always will be my mum’s first adventure outside her motherland. Crossing the border between Norway and Sweden doesn’t really count as many people think that Norway is a city in Sweden. There is also a reason why Norwegians call the Swedes ‘Sweet Brother.’ 115 years after our independence we still feel like meeting one of our own when we encounter a lost Swede in an exotic country.

While in London, we didn’t meet any lost Swedes, but rather got lost ourselves. We were two naive farmer girls far away from home. A home characterized by every one knowing every one, sleeping with unlocked doors and safe hitchhiking.

10 years later, my memories of our trip to London are snippets without dialogue. It’s like a silent movie playing in my head. I picture my mum pointing out buildings and street names so we could find our way back to the hotel. I see my mum on the top of a double-decker bus, she’s wearing her goofy-looking sunglasses and the wind is playing with her hair. I can’t see exactly how she looks like, but her hair is dancing. I see Pringle boxes in different colours at Sainsbury’s. We bought one of each because we wanted to try all the different flavours. I remember the cramped feeling of walking down Oxford Street. We were just two out of many people walking down that street. We were insignificant, but significant to each other. I reminisce about the Italian restaurant close to the hotel. The waiter thought that my mum and I were sisters and he tried to hit on my mum, but she was totally oblivious to it. I see tub rides, shacking wagons and moving walls and long queues at Madame Tussauds’ and somewhere, between all the snippets, the silence stops. I can hear my mum laughing whole-heartedly. It’s a sound that is easy to recognise because I hear it often. One evening she got tipsy on one glass of white wine and she couldn’t stop laughing. It’s funny how some moments are so vivid, while others fail to be remembered. We also have moments that we don’t want to remember, and ironically they end up as the most vivid ones. They even have dialogue.

Exterior – Outside the police station. Night.

‘Hi. Are you guys lost?’ says the Indian man in the white van. By the way he also has an Indian accent. ‘Do you know where you’re going?’ Before I continue with the dialogue, let me rewind so you know why we were outside the police station in the first place.

Interior – Packed tube to Camden, the black line. Day.

15 minutes before my phone got stolen I made a joke about it. My mum didn’t think it was funny, but I did. When the phone eventually ended up as stolen, my mum didn’t believe me at first. She searched through the whole bag before she realised that I wasn’t lying. She appeared like one of those inspectors at the airport, but ten times more thorough. We didn’t know how to deal with a theft, because it was the first time something had ever been stolen from us. (We're Norwegians you know.) We kept calm, though it was uncomfortable to know that the pickpocket was one of the people standing next to us. The tube was so packed that it was impossible for anyone to move. We were sardines in a can. The can was the tube.

I remember wondering who could’ve taken it, and I had my bets on the tall guy with the Mohawk (of course.) As soon as we got out, we called my dad who had to block the sim-card. Since we had already made the effort to go all the way to Camden we decided that the police station could wait for later. (We had to get a statement for our insurance company.)

Camden was an interesting place, very bohemian. Most of the people we saw there had facial appendages and luminous hairdos. Everything was new to us, even the vagrants. We spent most of the time there browsing the Camden market. We lost ourselves in shopping and the stolen phone was no longer on my mind. I finally got the buffalo shoes that I had been drooling over for as long as I could remember. They were super fashionable in Norway at the time, especially among boys and men suffering from the short man’s syndrome. My mum also bought me a white and a blue top with Chinese writing, which I didn’t know the meaning of. I also got a black mini-skirt with a matching top that was decorated with Chinese letters and an orange dragoon. (Yes, my memory is clothing-related and my dress sense back then was horrible. I was wearing legwarmers on sunny days and I remember that a vagrant pointed at them and laughed a toothless laugh because he found them extremely funny. He clearly hadn’t been exposed to the movie Flashdance.)

When we returned to the hotel it was already dark, and we still had to go to the police station. The manager of the hotel ordered us a taxi and explained to us how to find our way back to the hotel, but my mum and I weren’t paying him much attention. And what did we learn from it? To always pay attention when we don’t know what’s going on.

The police station was a quick fix, though my mum made it last a lot longer than necessary because she was confusing the officer by mixing Norwegian words with English ones before she totally switched over to Norwegian as if she was on autopilot. It must have been around 11 o’clock when we left. The street outside the station was pitch-black and ghostly. We couldn’t see any taxis. We looked at each other in a ‘what did the hotel manager say again’ way. As we were standing next to the road an Indian man pulled over in a White van.

‘Hi. Are you guys lost? Do you know where you’re going? He asked without giving us any space or time to answer before he continued: ‘I heard you talking to the policeman. I was also there reporting a theft.'

I don’t think my mum and I said anything in response. We just nodded to show him that we were listening. We must have looked so stupid.

‘I can help you out if you want me to. I’ll give you a ride.’

His van was packed with chubby Indian children who called him ‘dad,’ so our risk calculation concluded that it was ok. Without putting much more thought into it we jumped on. What else should we have done?

The car smelled of curry and mustard seeds, and I remember looking at the reflections from the street lights that were dancing over the chubby Indian boy’s face as he blew cinnamon chewing-gum bubbles. We were driving through streets that I didn’t know, but which I tried to recognise to make sure we weren’t taken elsewhere. Paranoia was building up inside of me, and it grew bigger as the man drove into a side alley that he described as a ‘short cut.’

‘My kids are tired so I’m going to drop them off at home before I take you to your hotel. Is that ok?’ He looked at us through his rear view mirror. He had bushy eye-brows.

I freaked out and I just knew that we needed to get out.

‘Stop the car. Pull over! Stop!” I shouted frenetically.

My mum had the same idea, but was a little bit puzzled when I took her by the wrist as I opened the sliding door and dragged her out of the car. I was the one playing the hero.

‘Thank you for the ride, but we’ll walk from here.’ I said.

The Indian stranger rolled down his window: ‘You girls shouldn’t be walking her. It’s not safe.’

He sounded worried, but I chose to ignore it, thinking that it was some sort of trick to get us back into the car. Psychopaths always know how to gain trust.

My mum and I started walking as quickly as we could in the direction that we came from. I could hear the stranger putting the car back in gear before he drove off. Easy Match. It was me, my mum and the alley now. We didn’t know where we were, and we didn’t say anything. We didn’t have to say anything. We both knew what was going on and we were on a mission to get back to the hotel (safely.)

When we got to the main road I saw a prostitute for the first time in my life. I was shocked of course. (I'm Norwegian.) We also passed a couple of drunken people, who made me feel very uncomfortable. Junkies and drunkards always made me feel uneasy because they just didn’t exist in my little hometown. The street laid out before us sure didn’t look like a good place to be. We needed to get out of there. So when I finally scouted a taxi on the other side of the road I risked my life crossing without looking. My mum followed.

Safe on the other side, we flung ourselves into the taxi as if we were fleeing from a crime scene. And safe and sound on the inside of the taxi our heartbeats settled. Traumatised, we didn’t say much, but looked at each other in a ‘how stupid are we’ way. A little bit embarrassed we promised to never tell anyone, and especially not my dad.

Sorry mum.