his face, I’m on holiday, what do you want from me.
He and Anna have a good friendship, she is like a sister to him, somebody he loves and who makes him laugh. Somebody he wants to protect. It’s in that capacity that he’s escorting her now, as her guardian. In that last telephone conversation before she left Cape Town, the same one in which she promised never to drink, she had asked him, almost as a challenge, are you up to it, do you think you can handle me. He’d answered breezily, not thinking about it much, yes of course. It didn’t feel like a heavy undertaking at the time, because he’s always had a cooling, calming influence on her, she’s always listened to him. But already, just a few days into the trip, he understands that they’re playing by a new set of rules. She and he have always been on the same side, but it’s as if she’s changed allegiances somehow, to who or what he doesn’t know, though he comes gradually to understand that the danger to Anna, the force from which she must be protected, is inside her.
He gets an inkling of how strong that force is when, out of curiosity, he takes half of one of her tranquillizers. The effect is devastating. He’s wiped out, flat on his back, for twelve hours, and for the whole of the next day he’s groggy and weak. After that he looks at her with a new awareness. She’s swallowing these pills three times a day and they don’t appear even to slow her down any more. What is this thing that’s taken up station inside her, driving along with so much fury and power.
Her illness, which he comes to think of as a person separate to Anna, makes her behave in bizarre and unsettling ways. The drinking is one sign, but there are others. She has an obsession with packing and unpacking her rucksack, at any time of the day or night this compulsion overcomes her, then there is the manic flurrying of zips, the clothing piled up on the bed. He watches with troubled fascination as she separates different items into different compartments, shirts here, panties there, dresses somewhere else again, and each set of garments is packed into a plastic bag with a label on it. When he points out to her how crazy this is she laughs and agrees with him, but it doesn’t stop her from repeating the exercise just a couple of hours later. And she’s awake every morning at first light. She has been given sleeping pills, which she’s supposed to take every night, but often she doesn’t bother, then he is awoken by the noise of her blundering and fumbling as she goes out onto the balcony for her first cigarette, sorry did I disturb you, I was trying to be quiet. Nor do the other pills appear to be working. Her moods continue to veer wildly between elation and despair, she can be laughing at breakfast and sobbing by mid-morning, he doesn’t know how to cope with these extremes.
Nevertheless, they manage to have a good time together. The beach is just down the road and they spend hours there each day. They walk and swim and Anna takes hundreds of photographs, clicking the shutter voraciously, sucking the world into her camera in rectangular pieces, the fishing boats on the sea, the sun rising and setting, drops of water on dark skin, the faces of people passing by. When I look at these images now, years later, they call back a sense of idyll and innocence which perhaps was never true, not even then. Though I know from other visits how fine a place it is, and if the air is disturbed every now and then by the death-screams of a pig, well, there is slaughter even in paradise.
It’s on one of the first evenings, as they sit on their balcony together, that she says, it would be so nice if we could make love. He looks at her in astonishment. She quickly adds, I know it’s impossible, but I was just thinking.
A long silence follows. Their room is on the first floor, on a level with the tops of the palm trees in the yard, and in the last light the fronds take on a soft, reflected glow. Anna, he says. We can’t.
I know, I know, forget it.
Your girlfriend is my best friend. And I don’t think about you in