Never Drive A Hatchback To Austria (And Other Valuable Life Lessons)

By R.A. Dalkey

If being a grown-up were as simple as holding down a job, buying a reliable car, finding your dream home and living happily ever after, there'd be no need for this true story. But our mid-thirties author's unorthodox approach and complete failure to accept the world as defined by adults was never going to make it quite so straightforward - especially when Brexit threw a spanner in the works.

 

Set against the backdrop of his ever-swelling grumpiness and the growing realization that he might never actually become a millionaire, this book follows him and his trusty hatchback as they travel from England to Vienna, seizing the chance to live in Europe before it got closed to Brits forever. It's a journey that takes him to Cyprus and Venice, Slovenia and Surrey, Belgium and Bonn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: First District
• Release date: May 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386951155

R.A. Dalkey

R.A. Dalkey was born in Cape Town. After selling hand-written newspapers to classmates in primary school, then winning awards for lucid essays whilst studying journalism at Rhodes University, it was inevitable that he would make a living out of words. Under his real name (Richard Asher) he's been published by GQ, Reader’s Digest, The Sunday Times, Australian International Traveller, Reuters, Autosport and Sports Illustrated, to name just a few. As a sport and travel journalist, he's always favoured an immersive approach. He's driven outback trucks in Australia and crashed racing cars in Europe. He once conducted a two-year experiment trying to be a professional golfer. Having visited 75+ countries, he's slept rough in Jo'burg, been arrested in Mongolia and mugged in Barcelona. Apart from growing up in the euphoria of post-Apartheid South Africa, he lived in the USA, Australia and the UK before settling in Vienna in 2016. He relished learning German and now speaks four languages. Dalkey also narrates his own audiobooks. He's on Twitter @mygreenjacket and Instagram @worldsleeper.

Book preview

3

LIVING WITH SATAN’S SISTER

Two or three weeks later, we did start playing cricket matches that didn’t get called off without my knowledge. And since I had a car, I drove to them.

Sure, with hindsight, I hadn’t needed to jump into my car purchase as quickly as I had done. But since it was a mostly made-up sense of urgency that had gotten the job done, it didn’t matter all that much that the supposed cricket match turned out to be kind of made-up as well. I’d gotten the whole business out of the way. And that was a good thing.

The Peugeot was treating me well, too. That weird noise was still happening over the bumps (and there were a surprising number of potholes in David Cameron’s Witney at that time, let me tell you), which was gradually convincing me that the thing had no suspension whatsoever. But, importantly as far as I was concerned, this didn’t seem to affect the thing’s ability to get me to cricket. The engine always started and ran strong. The wheels always went where I pointed them, although I have to admit I was stalked by images of them all detaching at once, leaving the car’s body skidding belly-first along a tranquil country lane in decidedly non-tranquil fashion.

Sure, I was nervous, mainly because I didn’t know how much attention the car had had before, and because I did know that all I’d done from a maintenance perspective was dust down the back seats. I didn’t think about deadly scenarios for extended periods, however. It boiled down to me being a bit cavalier about these things. Or, if you want to put it another way, I preferred to take my chances with a gory accident than go to some mechanic and try to fathom whether he’s ripping me off or not. My concession to safety was merely to drive much less expressively than both Steven and Simon. If you make sure you’re always going slow enough, then wheels can fly off as much as they like, can’t they? So I became the sort of driver the police might fine for being too far under the speed limit.

(Going too slowly in my Peugeot did eventually lead to me getting in trouble with officialdom. But we’ll get to that later.)

Pootling around Oxfordshire’s roads on my way to Shipton, or various away matches in places with fantastically English names like Great Tew and Stokenchurch, seemed like the perfect way to spend the summer. Clearly, my car was the most awesome decision anybody had ever made. And that was before it saved me from my appalling new house-mate at 49 Mandrill Lane.

As if to balance out the glory of buying myself a car and making my life easy, my life at home was becoming difficult and burdensome. Fate had dealt me a terrible hand on the house-mate front: it was fast becoming clear that Karola was quite impossible to live with.

I hope that wherever she is now, there’s a measure of solitary confinement involved. Because no human being should have to share even a medium-sized and abundant tropical island with such levels of OCD. She’d always be coming over to re-arrange your coconuts in a neat pile and chastise your adopted monkeys for some made-up crime against order. In time, swimming to the horizon without a hope of survival would emerge as the only viable option.

The only time this woman should share a small space with anybody is if that person has committed a terrible crime and been sent to a particularly cruel corrective facility, in which she would be assigned as your roommate. But I must stress that it would have to have been a truly heinous sin.

I’d had my suspicions about Karola the moment I’d gone around there to view the room she’d advertised on Gumtree.co.uk. As we’d sat in the gleaming open-plan lounge/kitchen area, I’d noted that there was no evidence of any cooking (or eating) having been done. Ever. No plates in the sink, no loaf of bread on the side, not even a half-cooked onion slice stuck to the stove plates. I’d even commented on it.

"It’s very...neat here, I remembered saying bluntly. I don’t think I would live quite like this. I don’t wash every plate immediately after I finish eating."

I hate it when people insist on washing every plate immediately after eating, whose number includes my parents. It’s not like I make a point of not doing it, given the choice, but I just don’t get why it’s so critical if you wait a while. Being thoughtful for the next person means not leaving sticky rice in the pot they might need to use later in the evening, or vast quantities of goo in the sink. But unless you live in a house that shares a single plate, simpler items like that can wait for a day or two if you’re busy. And nobody will catch cholera.

Oh, it’s not always so tidy, she’d said with a dismissive wave and a reassuring smile. I should have noted the manner in which she then glanced away. And perhaps that the smile was a fake one.

Oh yes, I really should have noticed.

Why did the last person move out? I probed cautiously.

Oh, she was really a bit crazy, replied Karola, still avoiding eye contact. She spoke with a convincingly world-weary air. She couldn’t share...

When I came back for a second viewing — for I had become quite careful about house-mates and rooms generally, and learned not to decide purely on first impressions — I noticed a few lightly soiled plates stacked up next to the sink. It was the first and last time I saw such a thing. I later realised that this was a cynical attempt to prove that she could be as casual about such matters as the next person. But like the busy, happy classrooms they show you in Pyongyang, it was an illusion. And I should have known better.

Obviously in dire and urgent need of some help with the rent, she addressed my various concerns with what appeared to be easy-going reasonableness. She let me pay the lion’s share of the rent and kick her out of the giant main bedroom, while agreeing to leave all of the essential furniture in it. She allowed me to move my tasteless chest of drawers into the lounge. She didn’t even ask for a deposit, saying she trusted me. And all of this made the little voice of warning in my head pipe down.

A few days later, the month of April had begun, I’d paid my share of rent and picked up a key. I’d also provided the good folk of Witney with the amusing spectacle of a man wheeling his clothes-rack-on-wheels across the main shopping drag in what must rank as one of history’s shortest and simplest house moves.

While I certainly enjoyed not having to phone up any removals men or badger friends with cars, this particular home switch would also go down as one of my life’s greatest mistakes. Time to find a room had been running out, though, and there seemed to be precious few of any description on offer.

Yes, my flat-renting strategy was just about as frantic and flawed as my car-buying strategy. But I think the former is easier to explain away. With rentals, you’ve got the added complication of lining up your move-out and move-in dates, unless you’re particularly fond of paying double-rent for a month. They force your hand a little more than a car purchase does — you don’t even need a made-up cricket deadline to rush into signing a lease.

And finding a room for rent in Witney was even more do-or-die than it would be in other places. Sharing was the only financially viable option, but Witney wasn’t the sort of town where much house-sharing went on at all. It was full of families and people who had mortgages. It was also too far from Oxford for any students to want to live there. So when I saw a room on offer, the need to claim this rare beast swiftly pressed hard.

The room was very nice, it had to be said. I might have been sharing a flat, but this was the biggest room I’d ever had. I had myself a double bed, ample closet space and a sizeable desk at which one could write. If I wasn’t sensible enough to keep my cricket gear in the car, I could quite easily have stored it in my bedroom too.

This part was good. As for how things might play out in the common areas, I watched and waited. Karola worked from lunchtime until late at night, so we didn’t actually see much of each other. But even ships passing in the night leave a wake — and I was hoping she would too. I wanted her to make some tiny hint of a mess. It would ease my suspicions that I was trapped in a flat with a neat-freak.

But after just a handful of days, I hadn’t noticed so much as a dirty knife in the kitchen or a misplaced remote control in the lounge. I began to get unnerved.

I could do what I wanted in my own room, but all this pristine order made me uneasy about disturbing the perfection of the bathroom or kitchen. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a lot of choice: I did need to wash and cook. In other words, actually use the place for living.

I had a nasty feeling in my gut that Karola saw this arrangement not as two people sharing the rent — and thus the common areas in friendly spirit — but rather as me renting my room off her, the grand Lordess of the apartment. While she never said such a thing out loud, it was obvious that any plans I might have to prepare food or observe daily washing rituals were only going to be put up with grudgingly. The idea of a flatmate who left traces of his existence was clearly at odds with the apparent priority of ensuring the apartment was always ready to receive a crew of photographers from Modern British Interiors magazine.

Let me confess here that I actually have a little bit of OCD myself. I’m not one for living in a pigsty, believe it or not. I am a great fan of reasonable cleanliness and do not particularly adore cobwebs. I also see value in being tidy enough to be able to find my things when I’m looking for them in a hurry (which is whenever I look for something. Because we only look for things we need now, don’t we?). But moderation in all things, as they say. A stray jumper on the sofa or a coffee mug by the sink is what makes a place a home rather than a freshly made-up hotel room, not so?

During that first week or so, I began to take on board a number of things my two exploratory visits hadn’t quite revealed. There was the fact that the electricity for every device — kettle, toaster, microwave — was always switched off at the wall plug. (Easy for her, really, since a glance at the fridge confirmed my suspicion that she never actually cooked or ate anything at all.) I noticed that the front door would always end up double-locked, even when I’d not left it so. And, most astoundingly, that there was not one single bottle of gel, soap, shampoo or any other bathroom confectionary around the combined bath and shower