In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,40

stairs. That night I go with them to the front desk of an expensive hotel nearby to phone. Alice and Jerome want to call their mother at home, it’s been months since they spoke to her. It takes a long time to make the connection, they have to wait and wait in that vast echoey foyer. While he listens to this half of a conversation around the world, ah Maman, il est si bon d’entendre ta voix, the syllables of a language he doesn’t understand convey an intimacy and affection that he does, and he can half-imagine this other life they come from, far to the north, which he’s been invited to join. Should I go. Can I. His own life has narrowed to a fork, at which he dithers in an indecisive rapture.

He doesn’t have to decide now, there is always tomorrow, tomorrow. But in the morning nothing has changed. He goes with them to the embassy to ask advice. We will lend you money, the people at the embassy say, go up to Kenya where you’ll be able to use your card. There is a brief discussion but in fact there is no choice, without money there’s nothing more they can do. They will go to Kenya the next morning. He knows already that they will ask him, they know already what he will say. Yes, I will come to Kenya with you.

I don’t remember what they do the rest of that day. The next memory he has is of waking up in the middle of the night with the beam of a light-house flaring intermittently across the ceiling and the sound of Roderigo furtively masturbating under the sheets.

The next day is the election, but from the dusty windows of the bus the city looks the same as it did yesterday. It takes more than an hour to drive through the intricate alleys and little streets near the bus-station. The complicated shop fronts with their myriad steps and tiny windows put him in mind of the innards of some enormous animal, through which they’re creeping like a germ.

But once they’re free of the city and on the open road the bus accelerates to alarming speed. They are being driven by a psychopathic Indian apparently bent on killing them all, overtaking on blind rises, racing some other bus to settle an old score, hurtling into corners without slowing down. A sort of dull terror comes down over him, he grips the seat and watches the outside world spill past like a dream. The road runs up in sight of the coast, across a broad green plain the flat water continually reappears, palm trees lagoons mangroves all the detritus of the tropics, little villages and settlements flash past, quick glimpses of other lives that glance off his in a tiny collision of images.

When they get to the border post he becomes anxious, what if they notice he has no visa. But he is out almost faster than the others, an exit stamp planted like a bruise next to the entry stamp he bought a few days ago. As they drive into Kenya it’s dark already and a steady drizzle starts to fall. Nearing Mombasa, there are more and more people at the side of the road. The final approach is by ferry, on which they move across open water to the city, he stands outside at the rail and watches the yellow lights through the rain. The hotel they find is the most depressing one yet, two flights of stairs climb to their floor, the whole place seems made of untreated concrete, in the middle of each room a ceiling fan shudders and turns. The building doubles as a bordello, the floors underneath them are occupied by prostitutes who hang around in the foyer and on the pavement in front, hello my darling are you looking for me kssk kssk. They are in two rooms again, he and Roderigo apart from the rest, but a narrow balcony outside connects them. From this balcony there is a view across the street to a similar building facing them, in the different rooms of which they can see various sex acts in progress, each in its little lit cube.

This time the invitation doesn’t come from Jerome, but from Alice. At lunch the next day there is a little moment of seriousness at the table, would you like to come with us, we have found a cheap flight to Athens, my mother has a