‘My friends, after today nothing will ever be the same again.’ And we all drank, not knowing how true his words would be for all of us.
I’d forgotten the girl, who was still sitting on the stool. We’d all shifted slightly to accommodate the arrival of first Saffia and then Julius, gradually forming a circle from which the girl was now excluded. She stood up and came over to stand next to me. I gave no response, the way I acted she might have been a stranger. I was aware of Saffia and Julius watching me. I wondered what on earth had possessed me to bring the girl? Perhaps if she’d stayed where she was I could have quietly dispatched her before the party. But now, in the wake of this act of presumption, I had no choice but to bow to the inevitable.
‘This is Adline, a friend.’ Adline was another girl I had once known, a girl of similar character; in the moment I seized her name out of the air.
Saffia nodded. Julius, his eyebrows fractionally raised, said, ‘Hello, Adline.’
‘My name is Yamba,’ the girl said loudly, as though broadcasting a public statement. She emphasised the two syllables of her name. Yamba. ‘And I am very pleased to make the acquaintance of you people.’ Pee-pool. I realised I had barely ever listened to her. She was not from the city as I had assumed, but from the provinces. Saffia and Julius stared at her politely, faintly nonplussed, as did Kekura, nobody quite knowing how to follow her statement. It was Saffia who broke the spell of the moment.
‘Well, very nice to meet you. Are you at the university?’
‘What university is that?’
I butted in. ‘Maybe we should think about going. The traffic is bad, you know.’
‘We’ve got plenty of time,’ said Julius.
‘Actually, I’m glad you reminded me. I should be going. Is there somebody at the house to let me in?’ Kekura, mercifully, helped bring the conversation round to another tack and in a few moments we had moved on to other things.
Julius, as I have told you before, attracted people and soon others in the bar migrated towards our group. A woman I recognised from the campus. I didn’t know anything about her, except that she was a black American. She was with a mulatto fellow, a writer who also ran a dance troupe, with some success or so I had been told. Saffia asked him whether he felt inspired by the night’s events.
All over the city people were gathering together in homes, in compounds, in bars to listen to news of Apollo 11’s progress on the radio. We were still at the Ocean Club when the announcement came that the lunar module would soon make the attempt to land. The proprietor ordered the music turned down, the room fell silent. Nothing except the hiss of static and the sound of the waves. I could see the water, faintly phosphorescent, advancing and retreating to the call of the very moon upon whose surface mankind would shortly arrive. The announcement came, followed by a short, black space and then the voice of the astronaut: ‘Houston. Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.’ Everyone in the room began to applaud and to congratulate each other. Even the proprietor, a miserly fellow by nature, was moved to order drinks on the house. The bartender sprang from stillness into life.
Julius punched the air and shouted, ‘The Eagle has landed!’
The girl Yamba, gazing at him from atop a barstool, asked, ‘What eagle?’
‘The name of the lunar module,’ I explained. When she looked at me as though I had spoken in Dutch, I added, ‘The spaceship.’
‘What spaceship are you talking about?’
I explained the mission to the moon, which had evidently completely passed her alone in the world by, she continued to regard me in disbelief. Some part of our conversation caught Julius’s attention and he turned to listen, as did others. At the end of my account, she pointed to the night sky.
‘This small moon here.’
‘Of course, that moon.’
She drew in her chin, put her hands to her hips and her head to one side, assessing me for the possibility I was making a fool of her. ‘Well, tell me one thing,’ she said.
‘Of course.’
‘What kind of person would want to do a thing like that?’
At that Julius shouted with laughter and slapped his thigh, slopping his drink around in his glass.
‘Excellent! I should let you talk to some of my pupils. First principles. Why?’
‘To humiliate the Soviets,’ said Kekura. ‘This is the new scramble for Africa. The scramble for space. A hundred years ago it was us they were fighting over. Our land, our wealth, our souls.’
‘Yes, indeed.’ It was Ade, who had joined us in the last ten minutes. ‘And to stop the newspapers talking always about Vietnam, Vietnam.’
‘It’s hard to disagree.’ The writer-dancer spoke next. ‘But if it were me I know why I would do it.’
‘Why?’ asked Saffia.
‘To fly.’
Saffia said, ‘I like that.’
‘To fly,’ repeated Julius. ‘To test the limits of our endeavour, of our courage.’ He was serious. ‘Otherwise what point is there in being alive?’
Did I mention to you how young we were then? How very young?
A piece of street theatre was going on outside. The dancer called for Julius to stop the car and we all descended. He went on to achieve some degree of fame as a choreographer, as I recall, until he fell foul of the authorities. I believe he died abroad. But that is by the by.
Outside a store two men dressed in improvised space suits moved about the interior of a makeshift module. Behind them was a television screen too small to be viewed by the crowd. So the performers were mimicking the astronauts, replicating for the audience what was taking place on Apollo 11. The dancer was enthralled and we stood and watched for a few minutes, until Saffia, made anxious by the possibility of guests arriving in our absence, said we must go and so we left him to catch us up later.
A few people had indeed already arrived. Julius went directly to the bar and began to serve drinks. Saffia disappeared into the kitchen. Kekura moved around the room holding up an aerial, while Ade monitored the quality of the picture. Kekura found a chair, placed the aerial on a shelf and stepped back to check his handiwork. Julius went to the record player, slipped a record from its sleeve and placed it on the turntable. The sound of a man’s voice accompanied by the rhythms of a guitar filled the room. Next to me the girl began to dance.
Nowadays every person you speak to who was alive at the time of the moon landing will tell you they can remember precisely where they were. My own recollections of that night are as shabby and ill-lit as the image that appeared on the screen Kekura and Ade had set up. A good part of that evening is lost to me now, lost to me moments after they occurred, lost in self-pity, frustration and alcohol. Here’s what I do remember:
At midnight people were still arriving. I wandered from the verandah to the main room and back again, for the most part avoiding becoming embroiled in conversation, drinking steadily. I picked up scraps of talk here and there as I moved by, like remote radio stations.
‘Keep a dog. Better than insurance.’
‘I hear Boston is as cold as hell. Yes, please. Campari.’
‘They are challenging the opposition MPs’ election one by one. Through the courts, so no one can complain. But it amounts to the same thing. Soon there will be none left.’ Kekura, who else?
‘And if something goes wrong with the spaceship?’
‘If they run out of oxygen, they will die.’ Ade Yansaneh, frowning under the lid of his hairline.
‘Eggplant. What is it you call them here? Garden eggs. I like that.’ The black American woman.
All the time I kept surreptitious watch on Saffia. Oh, she was an excellent hostess, as I think I have mentioned before; she attended to her guests in every matter, calling over the steward — whom I recognised from the university canteen — to refill a glass here, empty an ashtray there. There were dishes of spiced cashew nuts and Twiglets, as the evening wore on trays of olele wrapped in leaves. I ate nothing.