Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

A teacherish voice called from the train loudspeaker, exhorting the passengers to wake up please, we would soon be arriving.

I grew conscious. My eyes felt toasted, my bottom tenderised, and my shoulder, having been rammed against the window bracket for hours, seemed to have relocated to my ribcage. It felt like my left leg was being jabbed with spikes and someone had stolen my feet.

I shared my bench with a pair of cobblers, father and son. Under the seat they had a sack with two chickens inside. The chicken heads protruded from holes and pecked at discarded sunflower seed shells. Now the son, beside me – in fact, much of his body was in contact with mine – yawned and grunted and stamped.

He had a foppish, asymmetrical haircut that would look cool in a London nightclub but was odd in combination with his peasant uniform of ‘Lining’ trainers – white with red flash – and a shapeless brown suit. I felt guilty for the anger thoughts I’d directed at him during the night, when he’d slid into my patch.

Outside, the low sun tinted the mist pink. Hills had been chopped into bite size fields, a cubist landscape. The fields were divided by mud ridges just wide enough to step along. A woman ladled urine from a bucket onto rows of veg and a man sprayed pesticide from a backpack. A white egret, skinny and with bent back, like a fashion model, posed by an irrigation stream. The mud walls of houses were the colour of the red soil, as if they had grown from it. Their tiled roofs curled at the ends. That seemed a characteristic Chinese flourish, you saw the same upward gesture at the end of a calligraphy stroke, in the flick of an opera singer’s wrist. A man was leading a water buffalo. What a head a water buffalo has, sports car sleek with go-faster horns.

On the facing bench, the seamstresses were waking. In daylight they’d played cards joylessly, taking it in turns to present their laps as a table. Beside them sat one of those mysterious Chinese businessmen, well dressed but carrying nothing but a mobile phone and a jam jar of tea. In between us on the floor the cabbie snored away. Last night he’d drunk a bottle of whisky then wrapped himself up in a plastic sheet and lain down. In the moonlight I’d fancied he resembled a mummy, and the fruit peel and wrappers around him were his grave goods. He didn’t look like that now, he looked like a bum, perhaps as much as I did.

Everyone seemed to have had a lovely sleep. I marvelled, as I had during the night, at that peasant ability to hunker down and switch off. They’d slept in positions I would not endure for more than a few minutes.

A guard wheeled a trolley up the aisle, selling breakfast and socks. I bought a couple of eggs boiled in tea and pointedly dropped the packaging on the floor rather than out of the window. A girl swept rubbish into a pan, barking at passengers to raise their feet. One of her epaulettes was loose and flapped like a broken wing. Now a patriotic song was playing. How I loathed that loudspeaker. In the more expensive classes you could turn it off.

Yesterday evening, when the journey had begun, I’d had a fine time. Cigarettes, fruit and beer had been pressed upon me, and I’d fielded questions concerning my origin, occupation and salary. I’d handed round my lucky five pound note and the queen had been much admired. Having scandalised my audience by revealing how much cigarettes cost in my country, I’d had to admit I had no idea of the price of a cow.

Then the lights had gone out and they’d all gone to sleep. I’d grown obsessed with finding the one position that would be comfortable and remain so. I would think I had it then ten minutes later have to shift again. Round about four a.m. I’d forgotten my pains in a delirious flush of ideas. I’d decided that someone ought to genetically engineer a goat that could eat plastic, to clean up all the rubbish along all the railway lines of Asia. Many brilliant observations had followed, none of which I could recall now.

Following that, I’d replayed Monty Python sketches in my head, until I’d realised I was giggling aloud. I think it was shortly after that that I’d passed out.

The cabbie unfurled himself and a chicken pecked at his foot. The seamstresses got their cards out and the cobblers brushed their teeth. The cleaning girl recovered my book, now covered in banana, from under the seat, and emptied her pan out of the window.

| Bradt Travel Guides/Independent on Sunday travel writing competition winner