Whoever Fears the Sea, Justin Fox [i love reading .TXT] 📗

a taxi back to the hotel. He decided he deserved some pampering by feminine hands, even if he had to pay for it. Joyce was his masseuse, a buxom Kikuyu matron who’d hoped to knock off early — but along came a down-in-the-mouth, bag-of-bones mzungu just before closing time. It was not the feel-good, New Age experience he knew from his regular in Joburg. There was no incense, no candles, no tinkling music; just a brightly lit room and a metal bed. It looked more like a surgery. They stood facing each other under the neon glow.

‘Take off clothes,’ she commanded, more gruffly than he thought necessary. An assistant joined her, and both stood watching him with their arms folded. Paul pulled off his T-shirt as nonchalantly as possible, but struggled to slip out of his jeans. He climbed on to the bed in his jocks. The women made no move to get to work on him.

‘Is this okay?’ he asked.

‘Yes, you lie still,’ said the matron.

The assistant left and slammed the door. Paul cleared his throat authoritatively.

Joyce was rough, pummelling him as though his flesh were recalcitrant clay. He cringed and winced, but her fingers read none of his resistance. When he directed her to his sensitive bits, like the middle of his back, she saw this as an opportunity to try to split his skin with her thumbs, then with her elbow. ‘Is it better?’ she asked.

‘Yes, much!’ he gasped. ‘That bit’s really fine now.’

She had poured a tub of oil over him, which attracted the dusk mosquitoes. They attended to every part of his body not being flayed by Joyce. When would it end? There was a knock at the door and Paul had a moment of respite, which he used to kill a mosquito slaking itself on his calf. There was a hissed exchange: it was after five, why was she still here? A muscle-bound man peered round the curtain and eyed Paul suspiciously. Joyce returned to renew her onslaught, more urgently, more painfully.

Paul crawled out of the spa forty-five minutes later, wondering how long it would take for his muscles to recover. So much for the milk of feminine kindness he’d been craving. Passing through reception, he bumped into Joshua, the hotel’s entertainment manager. On the off chance that the man might be able to help, Paul imparted his dhow woes.

‘Hakuna matata, my friend, we’ll find you a boat,’ said Joshua, picking up the phone to call one of his contacts. Paul asked him to try Kilifi harbour first, then Malindi.

Half an hour later, Joshua came to find him at the bar. Kilifi wasn’t an option. It had only yachts and live-aboard dive boats, not the experience Paul was looking for. However, Joshua had secured a possibility of sorts: big thumbs-up and a wide grin. A certain Mr Yusuf in Malindi would be able to organise something.

‘It’ll be expensive, because any dhow that takes you up to Lamu will have to tack back down the coast into the wind after it’s dropped you,’ he warned. ‘Day after tomorrow good for you?’ Paul had no other plans and nothing to lose; in forty-eight hours he’d make sure he was in Malindi.

Dinner was another big, bland buffet. He sat alone at a table on the terrace with a romantic candle for one and palms swaying their skirts alluringly. Lady-boy palms with hairy coconut testicles, he wrote in his notebook. Everywhere he looked were honeymooners, each one transfixed by the candles in their partner’s eyes. Elton John gnawed away at the edge of his hearing like the bloated mosquito that he was. If only he, too, could be swatted. The omelette man now carved fat slices of desiccated lamb. The éclairs were as floppy, and as tasty, as his lopsided chef’s hat.

Paul remembered Bangkok with Hannah — an evening like this, of sticky air and swaying palms. It was early in their relationship, a virtual honeymoon after months apart. There was an expensive dinner at the water’s edge, following by nightclubbing and then love-making. Good times. Before the indeterminate times. Long before the bad times.

Paul helped himself to another éclair. Then he walked through the palms down to the beach, only to find the moon almost full and casting an ethereal path across the sea. It looked too romantic for a stroll, so he headed for the safety of the bar.

A television set flickered above the counter. KBC showed footage of Ground Zero, where teams picked through the rubble. The newsreader was saying all eyes were on Afghanistan and the retribution to come. A studio guest talked about preventing a clash between East and West, Islam and Christianity, and how Kenya was home to both communities, able to see both sides of the story.

Relief arrived in the shape of the girls from an Abidjan dance group who began contorting their bodies, dislocating shoulders, tumbling about and snaking across the floor between the guests. At least they were a distraction, and kind of sexy. And the beer was nice.

A couple from London, who’d been having a spat about wallpaper colours over dinner, were making up over G&Ts at the end of the bar. There was a light sucking of lower lips, a darting of chameleon tongues, a fogging of eyes. Their electricity coursed down the bar to where Paul sat. Enough, he decided, taking himself and his heavy head off to bed.

 

CHAPTER 6

 

The matatu minibus taxi pulled away in a cloud of black fumes and triumphant hooting. It zigzagged through a maze of parked tuk-tuks and stalls selling fruit, sofas and bed frames, paused at a ramshackle Shell garage to put more air in the tyres, then pulled over at a bus stop on the edge of town. By Paul’s reckoning, the taxi was full. It would be a three-hour drive to Malindi and, with twelve passengers and