The Other Shore. Michael Jackson
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radios, he penned one of the last entries in his log:
It is the end of my
game the truth
has been revealed
A few minutes later, he climbed the companion ladder to the deck, then stepped off the Teignmouth Electron into the sea.
As Pauline and I stepped from the aircraft, the hot soup–sweet African night enveloped us. My body felt swollen. My shirt stuck to my skin. Inside the airport terminal, African bodies pressed around us, pungent and cloying. It took two hours to get our passports stamped, to reclaim our baggage, and to clear Customs. We moved in a state of torpor, saying nothing, as if we were strangers to each other.
It was after midnight by the time we got away from the airport. Lightning flashed along the Bullom shore, and the humid air was heavy with the stench of decomposing vegetation and the sea.
In the taxi, the breeze through the open windows revived me. But I was beginning to rue the promise I’d made to my friend Alex Guyan in London. Alex had insisted that when we arrived in Freetown we stay at the City Hotel. Graham Greene had killed a lot of time there during the war, and Alex was an avid fan of Greene’s. It amused him to think of me sitting on the same balcony where Wilson sat at the beginning of The Heart of the Matter, “his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork... his face turned to the sea.”
I asked the taxi driver if he knew the City Hotel. Sure, he knew it. He could take us there for only thirty leones. It sounded like a lot of money, but I didn’t know the exchange rate and, besides, it was a bit late now to negotiate our fare.
Too tired to take anything in, we crossed the Sierra Leone River on a throbbing ferry and were driven through labyrinthine streets, lit by braziers and flickering oil lamps. By the time our taxi set us down outside the City Hotel, our minds were in a fug and we had lost track of time.
In the darkness, the wind thrashed at the palms in the hotel forecourt. Thunder rolled and caromed in the peninsular hills.
We found the main entrance to the hotel barred by a metal grille, and the shuttered windows showed no signs of life. Already we were wishing we had taken the airport bus with the other whites and gone to the Paramount Hotel, even though the cost of a room there would have been prohibitive, and even though we had vowed to steer clear of tourists, to plunge straight into Africa and keep our promise to Alex.
I shouted up at the dark and decaying concrete facade. “Anybody there?”
A first-story window was wrenched open, and a woman called down to us in Krio. At the same moment the rain came bucketing out of the sky.
Pauline and I must have looked ridiculous, soaked to the skin, with our shoes awash in the floodwater sluicing down the street.
The woman at the window was joined by others. They laughed and shouted down at us.
“We don’t speak Krio,” Pauline shouted back.
“Wait,” the first woman said, “I dae kam.”
They all traipsed down, dressed in miniskirts, shrieking with laughter. They held beach umbrellas above their heads to protect their jet-black wigs from the downpour.
They wanted a dash.
I dug in my pockets and came up with some English coins. The women took them gleefully and ran around to the front of the hotel, beckoning us to follow.
The lobby was feebly lit. Off to the left was a deserted saloon bar. Ahead was a flight of wooden stairs. The prostitutes clattered up the stairs in their high heels and fishnet stockings, gales of laughter going into the darkness, the smell of cheap perfume lingering in the clammy air.
When the hotel porter emerged from the shadows, bleary-eyed from his interrupted sleep, I explained that we had come in on the London flight and wanted a room.
“Kam we go,” he ordered. Dragging a bunch of ancient keys from his pocket, he started to climb the stairs, using the banister to pull himself up. Pauline and I lugged our suitcases after him.
Our room was at the end of a dingy corridor on the first floor. It was furnished with a double bed under a torn mosquito net, two chairs, and a chest of drawers. The room stank of mildew and excrement.
I went into the bathroom. The toilet hadn’t been flushed, nor would it flush. When I pulled the chain, there was a noisy gurgling in the pipes and a mess of paper pulp and shit disgorged into the stained bowl.
We were too tired to care. I bolted the door and we stripped off our wet clothes, toweled ourselves dry, and crawled under the mosquito net onto the bed where we lay jarred and spent from our journey. I thought: We have done what Alex wanted us to do. I can write him tomorrow and say we have experienced Greenland in all its seediness. Then we can find somewhere else to live.
We woke at first light to the jangle and blare of hi-life music. I went to the louvered window and looked down into the street. Several Toyota and Datsun taxis were parked at an angle to the curb, and the drivers were washing their cars with buckets of sudsy water. I was reminded of the way young men in the Congo used to wash their bodies, soaping themselves until they were all but invisible for lather.
Beyond the intersection, over laterite stonework and rusty roofs, I glimpsed the sea. Far out, a sunken freighter showed only its funnel and mastheads above the surface of the ocean. It must have gone down during the war, when Atlantic convoys used to assemble in the harbor. I made a mental note to mention this in my letter to Alex.
“What are you looking at?” Pauline asked.
I told her about the taxi drivers and the sunken freighter on the sand bar. Then I asked if she felt like getting up and going downstairs, to try to find something to eat.
“Don’t even talk about food,” Pauline said. She was suffering from morning sickness. She felt as if she were going to throw up.
“We’ll move out of here,” I said.
“At least let’s get a room with a toilet that flushes. I’m going to try to get some more sleep,” Pauline said. “If you go out, try not to make too much noise when you come back.”
I lifted the mosquito net and kissed her on the mouth.
I went out of the room thinking we should not have come to Africa. I felt sick in the stomach at the thought of Pauline pregnant and having our baby in such a place. I should have called it off, this year in Sierra Leone doing fieldwork for my Ph.D. I should have come alone or not at all.
In the downstairs dining room, some retired Krio clerks were eating breakfast. No one looked up as I walked in.
When the waiter asked if I wanted an English breakfast, I made the mistake of saying yes, and was served braised spam, glutinous eggs, and chips fried in rancid oil. The cook had been with the hotel since colonial times. Like the ex-clerks in their English serge and bowlers, his menu parodied the world that Sierra Leoneans had once been encouraged to emulate.
I had no appetite for the food in front of me and was beginning to think that my dream of returning to Africa, which had sustained me for five years, had been as absurd and anachronistic as the idea of Empire. When I tried to imagine myself in a remote village, speaking an African language, asking people to tell me about their lives, a terrible sense of despair came over me, such as Malcolm Lowry described in his story ‘Through the Panama’: “the inenarrable inconceivably desolate sense of having no right to be where you are.”2
In the days that followed, I filled my notebooks with such misgivings, panicking whenever I thought of the journey I had embarked upon. And each night I was tormented by the same dream, in which I wandered disoriented in an immense building, looking for a room where I was supposed to enroll.
Pauline grew impatient with me, and recollected the series of events that had brought us to Freetown together—the month we had spent in Copenhagen where she did an intensive course in Danish, the modern language most akin to Old Icelandic, the weeks in Paris waiting for a sailing from Le Havre to West Africa, and finally the