Copyright © 2020 Maddy Hamey-Thomas There are hundreds of kilometres of time to get to know each other. Not just, Where did you grow up? What motivates you? Did you ever feel sexually attracted to women? But, learning a new rhetorical expression; realising she’s most interested when she’s saying nothing; she wants my thoughts, not my approval; we use hands as welcome distractions. I feel like I’m on fire, like everything that I’ve got is kindling and I’m burning it for them. For two ladies – they provoke an unnerving swell of esteem and kinship in me – who I’ve just met. A fragile sort of admiration since, I knew even then that, with the trip and the world ahead of us, we were different. These girls are real earners, ambitious types. They know how the fuck to play the game. I am struck by an awe only muted by incomprehension.
Stella is the most elegant thing. She can’t abide the sunlight. She’s got that enviable North American smile and pearly skin to match. (Somewhere in South Korea there must be a fashion magazine with her face on it.) She’s petite and she’s sexy. She’s a 21st century Barbara Stanwyck. Elena is softly spoken. Her words get caught up in her mass of black curls. She talks about spiritual enlightenment and I cock my head. There is something different about her and yet she reminds me of the butter spread you apply to your toast. I find I necessarily return to her.
After pitching our camp, I sometimes notice Elena wander off to talk to Okeyo. Her outline glows in the half-light of dusk by the card-playing table on the truck, whilst he sits opposite, bent into his laptop screen. She is staring fixedly; he doesn’t stop talking, though he never lifts his gaze. When he speaks to me, he talks of seeing lions mating. It seems a laughably thin guise and I laugh my way right into his arms. Lingering in hot embraces in the supermarket vegetable aisle, hands still clutching a limb-like appendage of carrots. Heart in my stomach, stomach in my heart: regurgitating old, sad food.
When he dances he grinds his hips asymmetrically, knees bent, face set in faux-concentration. Pretending like he’s pretending to be alone. The crowd are caught, the dumb fish. Clapping along, they almost choke with glee. His thin limbs signpost the eye. Soft fabric, long bones. A male peer looks on, nods rhythmically and approvingly. Okeyo drags his feet in the sand, cutting rivets that form a whirling pattern around him. He’s pairing a coquettish smile with a downturned glance, a combination that’s too easily triumphant. The humming in my muscles increases and I’m thankful when Elena, Stella and I leave off and drink a bottle of wine. Lounge like goddesses nearby. I hope his pride is cut by our choreographed departure but we can still hear a faint shrieking, which means he’s determined to see the performance through.
The sand is gleaming gold-silver this evening and there are endless stretches before you reach the waves. Feeling desolate, I flatten myself out on my front like a sleeping cat; just a tussock in the dark. I’m still so far from the water, totally stranded. Frogs make the sound of a wooden xylophone to accompany the mad blast of stars. I’ll never, not in the number of years as there are those stars, feel this way again.
He takes too long to close the divide between us, meandering in S-formations across the width of whole sand banks. But we’re quick to touch when he arrives. I try to soothe his fears: I don’t want anything bad to happen to you, I would not tell. He grimaces then tells me he would be ready for oblivion, if it came to that. I don’t think this is true. He tries very hard to fuck me by moonlight.
I hold his hands away from my body, look away from his face disfigured by sexual desire, pull my dress down over my buttocks. I’m going to hold his attention before the daytime erasure begins. That gap in my vision where Okeyo should be. The absence wriggling through the cab’s window to talk in Swahili with the driver. Lending money for the border crossing. High-fiving friendly strangers at petrol stations. Pulling his knitted hat down over his dreadlocked hair, leaning on windows wet with condensation. I think of those dark ribbons falling over his shoulders, decorating his back and chest.
It’s another day and we’ve misdirected the rest of the group. He eats rice with his Coca-Cola; I let my pasta pomodoro grow cold. Our knees touch and I remember bathing in yesterday’s ocean with Elena. She swims between my legs, emerges victorious with her heels kicking off from my hips and out of reach. When she leaves the water unobserved, I form a bedraggled, one-woman search party that ends with my head nestled awkwardly against her doorframe, waiting. A worn sentinel in reserve. I love you more than him (but I choose him over you). When she finally opens the door, she folds her arms tightly in front of her body, keeping herself pencil-straight. It is an abiding memory.
That, and the sprinting races across red dirt during pit stops. A tandem activity that brought us together and apart in riotous, accordion play. That, and how she seemed quickly to disappear. A merciless beach party blows across my sight and she turns her artfully darkened, quizzical eyes to new revellers. Stella had long since withdrawn to a hotel suite after the sudden arrival of an illustrious boyfriend. For me, the world had contracted itself to the bar, the beach, the bed. Soon, I would not be able to remember the bee-eaters or the sound of zebras running through grass; I knew that the water in the Okavango Delta had held some sort of sanctuary in the past. Time was running out in fact. What was left was just waiting for it to be over, as Okeyo fretted and Elena asserted her distance from him.
No doubt he often thought of getting home to Nairobi, after months of sleepless service to a grab bag of grasping tourists, but he never said and I never knew.
Later, back where I am from, I write enthusiastic texts that end in questions. They are sent internationally, with the resignation of a sigh in the nighttime.