Drifting across Europe in pursuit of my lost, wild twin

The world’s worst hitchhiker is sleeping under a tree in the woods on the Luxembourg border. He never had any intention of going to Luxembourg and doesn’t even know where it is but hey, that’s all part of the experience. This is what happens when you’ve read too many Jack Kerouac books and your attempts to emulate him are mainly based on his clothes. The hitchhiker is freezing cold, his Kerouac jeans and Kerouac lumberjack shirt are soaking wet, and his Kerouac climbing boots are leaking.

This idiot – let’s call him Jeff – is in this mess because he’s guided by mistakes, and stupidity, and recklessness instead of wisdom, and planning, and sound advice. A tendency to go down the dark back alley everyone has told you not to go down will get you into all kinds of scrapes. It will also get you into all kinds of adventures and one day, who knows, you might write about them in a book. Call it Wild Twin.

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I always had a notion that I had a wild twin, a version of myself that lived just beyond the edge of convention, of common sense and safety. If I went hitchhiking to Paris – or elsewhere, there’s always an elsewhere – I might meet him or become him, and my life would be transformed.

Drifting around Europe wasn’t anything to do with finding myself. It was more about losing myself, getting lost, disappearing. In my first trip abroad, hitching to Paris – via Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Brussels again, Luxembourg, and Reims – the more I tried to get to Paris the further away I seemed to be. Hungry, broke, frightened, sick and completely out of my depth, I’ve never understood why I didn’t just turn around and come home to Liverpool, to warmth and safety. To come home. Something – some stubborn will and determination – kept me moving on, possessed with a romantic vision of a city I had fallen in love with, glimpsed in films and books and paintings.

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When I finally got to Paris, and it dawned on me that I knew no one and no one knew me. I felt like I was close to becoming my wild twin. I was so invisible that I had disappeared. Holed up in a cheap hotel just down the road from the Beat Hotel I felt close to mental breakdown. Living on bread and oranges and a daily sandwich from a Tunisian cafe I walked for hours, all day, every day until I was so exhausted and lonely that I would return to the bedbug ridden hotel and fall into a dead sleep, often in tears.

But I was in Paris! I had nothing to compare it to. Liverpool seemed ugly and broken in comparison. Paris was alive and felt like the centre of the universe. Everything I loved was here: the river and its bridges, art galleries, bookshops, cinemas, architecture. As I walked the streets, constantly astonished, I realised I was in love.

Over the coming years as I drifted around Europe, sleeping rough in the woods, or a train station, on the banks of a river, or the docks of Piraeus there always came a point where I either felt like I’d slipped out of my own skin and could keep travelling forever or I felt I’d gone too far. When I woke up on a metro ventilator grill close to the Place de la Republique, sick with hypothermia, in a rare moment of common sense my girlfriend – somehow, I’d managed to acquire one – and I decided to head to Amsterdam where I could reassemble myself into something resembling a human being. Intending to stay for a week or two we ended up staying two years.

If Paris is my dream city Amsterdam is my home. Outside of Liverpool it’s the city I know as much as I know my own skin. Immersing myself in the squatter community became, I’m convinced, the reason I became a writer, even though I hardly wrote a word in the two years I lived there. This endlessly mutating community of punks, hippies, queers, anarchists, drunks and drug addicts was a carnival of mad and beautiful souls where everyone had a story, or a secret, or a fantasy to live in.

Living on our wits, hand to mouth, thieving, working the nightshift in hotels and bars, scavenging for food in the markets and dirt boats, sitting in candlelight in the abandoned electrical shop I lived in, listening to the stories of Bill the Wolf who’d survived a Nazi concentration camp – this was where I became my own wild twin.

Everyone in this community was their own wild twin too. When you slip through the cracks – in my case, wilfully, recklessly, on purpose – you become unrecognisable from the person you were in the ‘real world’ in a wild embrace of the unruly and strange, a descent into a subterranean community of lost souls. This is where I lived when I was a lost soul too. That life became this book.

Jeff Young’s Wild Twin is out now (Little Toller, £20). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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