Up on the terrace, the touts were working the crowd—slowly, carefully, with a lower-key approach than they tended to use down in Stone Town. In Stone Town the same guys would shadow you on the same streets day after day.
“Jambo,” they’d say.
“Jambo,” you’d reply, because it would be rude not to.
“You want to go to Prison Island? You want to go to the East Coast today? Maybe you want go to Nungwi? You want taxi?”
You ran the gauntlet going up Kenyatta Street and never had a moment’s peace when you were around Jamyatti Gardens, from where the boats left for Prison Island, its coral reefs and giant tortoises. He’d read the books all right.
“Jambo.” The voice was close to him. Craig sneaked a look around as he necked his beer. A young Zanzibari had moved in on a blonde English girl who had been sitting alone. The girl smiled a little shyly and the youth sat down next to her. “The sun is setting,” he said and the girl looked out over the ocean. The sun had started to dip behind the bank of cloud. “You want to go to Prison Island tomorrow?” he asked, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
The girl shook her head. “No. Thanks.” She was still smiling but Craig could see she was a little nervous. Doing battle with her shyness was the adventurous spirit that had brought her this far from whichever northern market town she’d left behind. She was flattered by the youth’s attentions but could never quite forget the many warnings her worried parents would have given her in the weeks before she left.
The tout went through the list and still she politely declined. In the end he changed tack and offered to buy her a drink. Craig heard her say she’d have a beer. The youth caught the waiter’s eye and spoke to him fast in Swahili. Next time the waiter came by he had a can of Stella for the girl and a Coke for the tout. Craig watched as the girl popped open the Stella and almost imperceptibly shifted on her seat so that her upper body was angled slightly further away from the boy in favour of the ocean. Maybe she shouldn’t have accepted the beer, thought Craig. Or maybe it was old-fashioned to think like that. Perhaps these days girls had the right to accept the beer and turn the other way. He just wasn’t sure the African youth would see it like that. Whether he was a practising Muslim—the abnegation of alcohol told him that—or not.
A high-pitched whine in Craig’s ear. A pin-prick in the forearm. He smacked his hand down hard, lifted it slowly to peer underneath.
Craig started, then shuddered; never able to stand the sight of blood, whether his own or anybody else’s, he had once run out of the cinema during an afternoon screening of The Shining. He had fainted at the scene of a road accident, having caught sight of a pedestrian victim’s leg, her stocking sodden with her own blood. She survived unscathed; Craig’s temple bore a scar to this day where he had hit his head on the pavement.
The mosquito had drunk well, and not just of Craig either. His stomach turning over, he quickly inspected the creature’s dinner which was smeared across his arm, a red blotch in the shape of Madagascar, almost an inch long. Craig wondered whose blood it was, given that the mozzie had barely had enough time to sink its needle beneath his skin. Some other drinker’s? Craig looked about. Not that of the Italian in the tight briefs, he hoped. Nor ideally had it come from either of the two South African rugby players sitting splayed-legged at the front by the railing.
He spat on to a paper tissue and wiped his arm vigorously without giving it another look until he was sure it had to be clear. The energy from the slap had been used up bursting the balloon of blood; the mosquito’s empty body, split but relatively intact, was stuck to Craig’s arm like an empty popsicle wrapper.
This bothered him less than the minutest trace of blood still inside the dead insect’s glassy skin.
When he looked up, the blonde girl had joined a group of Europeans—Scandinavians or Germans by the look of them—and was eagerly working her way into their telling of travellers’ tales, while the young tout glared angrily at the bank of clouds obscuring the sun, his left leg vibrating like a wire. Craig hoped he wasn’t angry enough to get nasty. Doubted it—after all, chances were this sort of thing happened a lot up here. The kid couldn’t expect a hundred percent strike rate.
Craig gave it five minutes, then went over and sat next to the kid. Kid turned around and Craig started talking.
Ten minutes later, Craig and the kid both left, though not together. Craig was heading for Mazson’s Hotel and bed; the kid, his timetable for the following day sorted, having spoken to Craig, was heading home as well—home for him being his family’s crumbling apartment in the heart of the Stone Town, among the rats and the rubbish and the running sewage. To be fair, the authorities were tackling the sewage, but they hadn’t yet got as far as the kid’s block.
The group that Alison, the blonde girl, had joined was approached by another tout, an older, taller fellow. More confident than the kid, not so much driven by other motivations, less distracted—he had a job to do. With her new companions, Alison was not so nervous about getting into the trips business. She wanted to go to Prison Island, they all did; they looked around to include her as the tout waited for an answer, and she nodded, smiling with relief. Turned out they were German, two of them, the two girls, but naturally they spoke perfect English; the third girl and the boy, who appeared to be an item, were Danish, but you wouldn’t know it—their English, spoken with American accents, was pretty good too.
“We were just in Goa,” said Kristin, one of the German girls. “It is so good. Have you been?”
“No,” Alison shook her head. “But I’d like to go. I’ve heard about it.” She’d heard about it all right. About the raves and the beach parties, the drugs and the boys—Australians, Americans, Europeans. It had been hard enough to get permission to come to Zanzibar, especially alone, but her parents had accepted her right to make a bid for independence.
“Ach!” shouted Anna, the second German girl, flailing her bare arms as she failed to make contact with a mozzie. “Scheisse!”
“Where are you staying, Alison?” asked the Danish boy, Lief, his arm around his girlfriend’s shoulder.
Alison named a cheap hotel on the edge of Stone Town.
“You should move into Emerson’s House,” Lief’s girlfriend, Karin, advised. “That’s where we’re all staying. It’s really cool. Great chocolate cake…” She looked at Lief and for some reason they sniggered. Kristin and Anna joined in and soon they were all laughing, Alison included. Their combined laughter was so loud they couldn’t hear anything else.
People started to look, but, leaning in towards each other, they could only hear their own laughter.
Popo—the kid—picked up Craig outside Mazson’s at nine the next morning in a battered but just about roadworthy Suzuki Jeep.
“Jambo,” he said as Craig climbed in beside him. “Jozani Forest.”
“Jambo. Jozani Forest,” Craig confirmed their destination.
They rumbled out of town, which became gradually more ramshackle as they approached the outskirts. Popo used the horn every few seconds to clear the road of cyclists, who were out in the hundreds. No one resented being ordered to make way, Craig noticed, as they would back home. Popo’s deft handling took the Jeep around potholes and, where they were too big to be avoided, slowly through them. Most of the men in the streets wore long flowing white garments and skull caps; as they got further out of town, the Arabic influence became less pronounced. The women here wore brightly coloured kikois and carried unfeasibly large bags and packages on their heads. Orderly crowds of schoolgirls in white headgear and navy tunics streamed into schools that appeared to be no more than collections of outbuildings.