Mr Davis and I arrived here a few days ago, shortly before dusk. We had traveled in silence, for it turned out he spoke no English beyond his introduction. When he stopped in front of the Seaview Hotel, he said, ‘This is a good hotel for you.’ I paid him three hundred dollars and he drove away.
My room is on the fourth floor, on the corner. A small balcony overlooks the market square, and when I stand at the very edge I can just see the bay. When the heat abates in late afternoon, people appear with baskets as if answering a secret summons. Sounds drift up, the bright trill of bicycle bells, schoolboys running — the slapping of their cheap plastic shoes. The air vibrates with the short, sharp whistling of swifts as they turn and wheel against the dimming sky.
The market closes at dusk, the square empties again and is dark within the hour. Under the one working streetlight, taxis wait. The drivers get out and sit together on the hood of one of the cars, smoking and laughing, listening to football on the radio. I have only once seen a customer. They all drive white Toyota Corollas, though this provides no uniformity: each vehicle is in a different state of decay.
Later still, when even the taxis have gone home, beggars gather under the light. Some of them carry plastic bags containing leftovers from the restaurants around the market — rice and ugali, I think, perhaps pieces of fruit — and this they share amongst themselves. I recognize a few of the beggars from the market: the man with elephantiasis afflicting one leg, the man with no fingers or nose, the blind boy. The man with elephantiasis drives a hand-pedaled bike. When they have finished eating, the blind boy climbs onto the back of the bike, and they pedal off.
I sit and watch the dark, empty market. I’m not sure what’s going to happen. Maybe nothing will. It could be that I have nowhere to go, so I am here. Anywhere and nowhere are the same place. But I keep thinking about the boy, about Davis. ‘This way, this way.’
Arnau, March 21
After Strebel left, after midnight, I could not sleep. My heart looped between the warm feeling of him and the black dog he’d implanted in my mind. I still felt him against me and inside me, his long arms scooping my body to him: a formal lover, wholly aware that we must keep passion at bay. To relish would have been unseemly. We’d made love with great care.
I’d had few lovers in my life other than Tom, and only before Tom; boys my own age, fellow students, callow and unpracticed. I’d never been in love. And then, in October, in my second year at Brown, a man stopped me.
‘I’m looking for the Joukowsky Forum.’
‘You’re nearly there.’ I was hurrying to the other end of the campus, not wanting to be late for Dutch and Flemish Masters. ‘Just up the block. On the right.’
‘But I’m terrible with directions.’ He had turned toward me and I noticed as if by instinct the soft, dark wool of his coat, the glossy silk of his tie. ‘I think perhaps you’d better take me there.’
He’d smiled, the hint of mischief, or complicity — of the accomplices he wanted us to be. I turned — and the ease of that turning, the lightness of movement, belied the weight of the consequence. In that moment my singular life ended: my ambitions to be an art historian, my upcoming year in Florence. It wasn’t a sacrifice. I was nineteen, I had faith in opportunity and time, in things working out. All I knew was that I was going to miss my class, and I didn’t care.
We walked together and arrived at Joukowsky. There was a poster advertising a lecture about human rights in African prisons by someone called Thomas Lankester. ‘It looks heavy-going,’ I said.
‘Very,’ he said. ‘But edifying.’
‘Do I need edification?’
‘I hope so.’
And we had laughed together, we had shared the little joke.
After the lecture, Tom took me to his hotel room. He was slow, careful, drawing out each sensation. In that heightened state I could see the threads in the white sheets, taste the aftershave on his neck. He stood over me, looking down. ‘Beauty like yours,’ he said. ‘We should bottle it.’
Tom’s life wasn’t altered by our meeting. Or our marriage. I went with him, not in concession but because I was nineteen and he had chosen me. And he loved me. Surely — surely he had. Yet that love had ended, and I hadn’t noticed.
The way I hadn’t noticed a black dog.
The black dog had been crucial to the accident. If not the cause, then a deciding factor. It had caused me to swerve. Without the black dog, the children would not be dead. Without me, they would not be dead. The dog and I moving along our timelines. But the dog, like Tom, trotted on, away from the scene of carnage, regardless and unchanged.
I think that’s why I went to the window, as if I might see the dog. It might be straying up the dark road in flagrant violation of Swiss leash laws, cocking its leg on the lamp post. But of course there was no dog in the road. No cars. Only the still sigh of 2 a.m. The night was clear. I glanced upward at the blinking stars, hemming the mountains.
Then, shifting my gaze, I saw him on the other side of the road.
He had a soft-edged shape, a middle-aged, balding man. I felt I should know him, that I did know him. From the village? Did he work at the hotel? Had I seen him in the supermarket? Was he a neighbor? Had he thrown a curse at me?
But I felt more than familiarity — rather, an intimacy. A connection that in the next second I had to dismiss because I did not know him, had never met him. There was only the feeling, and the way he turned from me and hurried off, as if he’d forgotten a pot on the stove.
I knew. He had got the key from Mrs Gassner. He had sat in my kitchen and drunk a cup of coffee. Waiting, watching, scenting. He had wanted some sense of me.
He had it now. He’d been standing there in the dark road for hours. He had seen Strebel leave. I had slept with the policeman overseeing his child’s death. And while that small, ruined body was disintegrating, I had been kissed, I had been comforted, I had been pleasured.
Tanga, May 22
She is American. I know before she opens her mouth. She wears knee-length khaki shorts with pleats. They make me think of Melinda. But this woman has big, soft hips, and the pleats that were sharp and neat on Melinda’s speed-walked frame are stretched to wheezing point. If Tom had been here I could almost have heard his eyebrows rise in disapproval. He did not like overweight people.
‘Gloria Maynard,’ she says, extending her hand. ‘I’m here reinventing myself by saving the world.’
Gloria tells me she has already asked at reception. She knows I haven’t given a check-out date, which has kind of piqued her curiosity. ‘I’ve seen you walking around the past couple of days,’ she says. ‘Thought I’d say hi.’
I want to shout ‘Go away!’ but instead I extend my hand and say, ‘Hello. Pilgrim Jones.’ There’s an odd moment when I don’t know what to do next so I say, ‘Come in.’
‘Better idea.’ Gloria waggles her car keys. ‘Let’s go to the club and get some gin and tonics.’
She sees me wavering — sees my empty room, my lack of immediate, certifiable excuse.
‘I won’t take no for an answer.’
She certainly won’t.
She drives a white Toyota Corolla with one hand, smoking and gesticulating with the other. She flicks the gold fringe on the dashboard. ‘Bought it from a taxi driver. Actually, he owed me money and in the end he had to give me his car. He had a little habit. Would you believe it, there’s a big drug problem in this town. Walk along the front at night and you can buy anything you want. Crank, crack, smack, weed, meth. Because it’s a port. Some of the stuff’s on its way in, some on its way out. I reckon, this being Tanzania, the same stuff is coming in as is going out.’