In a Strange Room: Three Journeys Page 0,43

he insists that, yes, he will be going to Malawi. He just wants to wait a day or two, he says, till this election thing is over in Tanzania, you can never be sure, you know, this is Africa after all. In these conversations he always has to ask my name at some point, before immediately forgetting it again.

Meanwhile he prepares for his return, he goes to the consulate and gets a proper visa for Tanzania. Then he goes to the health office down at the harbour to get the vaccinations he needs. The Indian doctor he speaks to tells him smilingly how much they will cost, then leans forward confidentially and says, do you actually want these vaccinations.

I don’t understand.

You can pay and have the vaccinations, or you can pay and not have the vaccinations, I don’t mind, it’s up to you.

He pays and doesn’t have the vaccinations, he is learning the way things work. As long as the stamp on the paper is correct, what the stamp is supposed to signify doesn’t matter to anyone.

The third time he goes back, Charles is more animated than usual. We can leave the day after tomorrow, he says, how does that suit you. The results of the Tanzanian election have come out, but the whole process has been denounced as highly irregular, it has to be started again from the beginning. It doesn’t look like there’s going to be trouble, Charles says, they’re behaving themselves. There is only one thing, I stay out of town, come and spend the day there tomorrow.

He is there in the morning and they drive out soon after in Charles’s battered van. They go back on the ferry and along the road to the coast. He spends his last day in Kenya at a resort on the beach near to where Charles lives with his family.

This is also the day on which the others are leaving Kenya, he knows the time of their flight. So at two that afternoon, while he stands on a deserted beach of glimmering white sand, gazing out into an ocean that stretches in gradations of deepening colour towards a line of surf that marks the reef far out, he looks at his watch and feels their departure almost as a physical change in himself. His heart missing a beat, say. You are going down the runway, you are lifting into the air, you are banking slowly to the north and moving away, away.

It’s about now that he realizes he has made a mistake. He should have gone with them, of course he should. Why is he going home. It’s only a couple of days later, but already his decision is senseless. He sees clearly what he’s going back to in South Africa, the same state of nothing, the drifting from place to place. Never has this condition so obviously been what it is, an absence of love. He feels sick with the meaning of what he’s done.

But it isn’t too late. What rises in him now is an urge to make the largest and most dramatic gesture of all, he will chase them not for a few hundred kilometres but halfway across the world. He spends the afternoon walking up and down the beach, crossing and recrossing his own tracks between the palm trees, while he works out what to do. It’s entirely possible. He must get back down to South Africa as quickly as he can, he must scrape some money together, he must fly to Greece in a few days. On the piece of paper from the Tanzanian border he has Jerome’s home number, where his mother is. He must phone her and find out where they are, how to get to this holiday house. He will make his way there from Athens, he will arrive one night out of the dark, out of the recent past, with his hands open, smiling. It’s me again, I came here to find you.

He’s still knotted up when he and Charles set off the next morning. Charles is wearing shorts and sandals and a big straw hat on his head. He is a good-looking man in a loose, big-boned sort of way, but if you study him closely you begin to see the signs of decay. His nails are dirty, he has nicotine stains on his teeth, around his eyes the lines are as deep and dark as old bruises. There is something in his spirit that resembles an overripe fruit, soft