In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,27

comes free, a baby cries, then she says, please could you, the Irish woman leans over to rearrange her breast, sucking starts again. The women talk softly to the white travellers and among themselves, and sometimes they sing hymns.

By the next morning his head is fractured with fatigue and swirling with bizarre images. Under the cold red sky of dawn Lusaka is another surreal sight, shanty towns sprouting between the buildings, tin and plastic and cardboard hemmed in by brick and glass. They climb out among crowds onto the platform. The three women say goodbye and go off with their freight of babies to discuss their liberation. While he waits for the little group to gather he looks off to one side and sees, further down the train, at the second class compartments, another little group of white travellers disembarking. Three of them, a woman and two men. He watches but the crowds close around him.

They walk to the bus-station through streets filled with early light and litter blowing aimlessly. Somebody has a map and knows which way to go. Even at this hour, five or six in the morning, the place is full of people standing idly and staring. They are the focus of much ribald curiosity, he’s glad he’s not alone. On one corner an enormous bearded man steps forward and, with the perfunctory disinterest with which one might weigh fruit, squeezes the Irish woman’s left breast in his hand. She hits his fingers away. You not in America now, the man shouts after them, I fuck you all up.

The bus-station is a mad chaos of engines and people under a metal roof, but they eventually find their bus. When they get on the first people he sees are the three white travellers from the train, sitting in a row, very quietly looking ahead of them, and as he passes they don’t look up. The woman and the one man are young, in their early twenties, and the other man is older, perhaps his own age. He passes them and takes a seat at the very back of the bus. The rest of his group is scattered around. He hasn’t interacted or spoken with them much, and at the moment he’s more interested in the other three travellers a few rows ahead, he can see the backs of their heads. Who are they, what are they doing here, how do they fit together.

It takes eight hours to get to the border. They disembark into the main square of a little town, where taxi drivers clamour to take them to the actual border post. While they’re negotiating a price he sees from the corner of his eye the three travellers get into a separate car and leave. They’re not at the border post when he gets there, they must have gone through. There is a press of people, a long wait, by the time their passports have been stamped and the taxi has driven them on through the ten kilometres or so of no-man’s land it is getting dark.

When he enters the Malawian border post, a white building under trees, some kind of dispute is in progress. A uniformed official is shouting at the three travellers, who look confused, you must have a visa, you must have a visa. The older man, the one his own age, is trying to explain. His English is good, but hesitant and heavily accented. The embassy told us, he says. The embassy told you the wrong thing, the uniformed official shouts, you must have a visa. What must we do. Go back to Lusaka. They look at him and then confer among themselves. The official has lost interest, he turns to the new arrivals, give me your passports. South Africans don’t need visas, he is stamped through. He pauses for a second, then goes up to the three. Where are you from.

I am French. It’s the older man speaking. They are from Switzerland. He points to the other two, whose faces are now as neutral as masks, not understanding or not wanting to talk.

Do you want me to speak to him for you.

No. It’s okay. Thank you. He has thick curly hair and round glasses and a serious expression which is impassive, or perhaps merely resigned. The younger man has from up close a beauty that is almost shocking, red lips and high cheek-bones and a long fringe of hair. His brown eyes won’t meet my gaze.

What will you do now.

I don’t know.