In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,31
to cry, such anger for such a little thing, but his anger is not just at her or even at the others in their party, the hottest part of it is for himself. He is as guilty as any of them, he too is passing through, he too has luck and money, all his self-righteousness will not absolve him. After she has gone scurrying off he sits in the twilight outside his room, while his anger cools into misery. Even before she comes back to tell him that she went to the old man and apologized, so everything is all right now, he knows that the spell is broken and he can’t be one of the lotus-eaters any more, he has to move on, move on.
He leaves the next morning early, as the sun is coming up. Everything is fixed and still in the glassy air, the mountains of Mozambique are visible across the turquoise water of the lake. Talking to the man at the front desk of the guest-house last night, he learned that a ferry will be leaving from Monkey Bay this morning, going up the whole length of the lake. This sounds good to him, he’ll travel north to some other town where nobody knows him. He waits up on the dirt road for the bus.
When he gets to Monkey Bay the ferry is already at the dock, a rusting agglomeration of metal listing badly to one side. He buys a ticket to Nkhata Bay, halfway up the lake. There is a small crowd of passengers, mostly local people with crates and boxes.
When the boat starts to move he goes and stands at the rail, in a little while he sees the islands of Cape Maclear floating by. It feels good to be alone in the cool early morning on the lake. After an hour or so the ferry moves in towards the shore again and docks at Salima, where passengers get off and on. He waits till they move out into the middle of the lake again before he starts to wander around. The boat is a whole little world on its own, with passages and stairs and limits and rules, and a slowly increasing population. He stops to watch a crowd pressing in on the hatch where food is served. There are limbs and feet and faces moving, all anonymous and tangled, but when he glances to one side they are standing there. The three travellers from the bus. Where have you been.
They have been back to Lusaka to get their visas. They have had a terrible time. They managed to get a lift with a local man, who was very keen to take them in his car. It turned out that somebody had been using this car to sleep in in the bush and had been murdered in it two nights before, so the back seat was covered in dried blood on which two of them had to perch for the whole long drive. They got to Lusaka on Friday afternoon to discover that the Malawian embassy was closed till Monday, so they sat around in a hotel room to wait. Now they have their visas and are not stopping to linger, they are trying to get up to Tanzania as soon as they can, from where they are hoping to find a boat or a cheap flight that will take them back to Europe. Two of them, the two men, have been travelling in Africa for a long time, nine months or more, and they are eager to get home.
All this he finds out in little bits and pieces through the day. Soon after he meets up with them, they come out to join him on the front deck. The boat is filling up at every stop and the only way to claim a place is to put your bag down somewhere. Sitting out there in the sun, chatting idly, he discovers that the Swiss travellers are twins. Their names are Alice and Jerome. The Frenchman, Christian, is the only one at all fluent in English. It’s through him that most conversation goes. He tells me that he and Jerome met each other in Mauritania and went on from there through Senegal, Guinea and Mali to the Ivory Coast, from where they flew to South Africa.
They have been there a couple of months, in which time Alice joined them, and now they’re on their way home.
Jerome listens attentively to this account, and now