Otherland: A Journey with My Daughter

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IT IS ON THE train from Russia to Ukraine that the moment I have been waiting for finally comes, and Billie refuses to use the toilet, point-blank. She will hold on, she says: she was not born a woman for nothing. The problem, I discover, is not the soggy brown rug thrown over a hole in the toilet’s floor, but something that inhabits a hole in the toilet’s wall – something my daughter, with the full force of her adolescent pessimism, has immediately classified as a used sanitary pad. And so she goes on strike, inconsolable in her revulsion.

‘You have not travelled,’ I tell Billie, ‘unless you have seriously considered just how far you are prepared to go to keep your bladder from bursting. This is the real journey every semidecent traveller must take.’ We are going from my favourite city in the world, St Petersburg, the ‘Venice of the North’, to my mother’s hometown, Kiev, or the ‘Jewel of the East’, as those shameless, pimping guidebooks would tell you.

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