I remember skinny-dipping at midnight with some of the guests, including Frank from Football and the bar lady with the black fingernails and great tits. I steal watery touches of the pretty brunette I met on the dance floor and kiss her wet skin. I pin her up against the side of the pool with her legs around my waist and we make out like teenagers while I furtively stroke her clit. I can tell she wants me to fuck her, so I switch off the pool light for the five minutes it takes. I cover her mouth with one hand and pull her towards me with the other. I am so pent up from the encounter with Eve that I have an explosive orgasm. The girl giggles and purrs and I get out of the water.
Cut to Sifiso slapping me on the back again, smiling like a charcoal Cheshire cat and smoking a cigar. Cut to seeing the twins at the chocolate fountain and suggesting we take it into the bedroom. Cut to watching Francina dance to Abba. Cut to when the last stragglers and I are at the bar, watching the sunrise and drinking screwdrivers with freshly-squeezed orange juice. A waiter brings in egg and bacon rolls with HP sauce and hot chips drenched in vinegar. I meet a guy from Texas who speaks like a cowboy and a tall fish-eyed woman, dressed head-to-toe in black, who chain-smokes like Bette Davis. We talk about things that seem important at 5am: plastic surgery, designer sneakers, upcycling, the petrol price, Malema, Gadaffi, chicken roasted on a beer can, and no one wonders why the others are standing in a stranger’s garden, drinking drinks they no longer need speaking to people they will never see again. No one wonders why this seems like a better idea than going home or what that says about the people doing it.
Cut to me realising the party is over, giving the faux butler the responsibility of ushering the last hangers-on out the door, and going to my bedroom where I hope to find the chocolate twins but actually find a cold, empty bed.
Quote: Kafka
“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
8
DIVINE DICTATION
There is a pleasure and pain in writing that is, ironically, difficult to put into words. When you are struggling to tap into the force it can feel like you will never get there again, that the muse has abandoned you, for bad behaviour, or just for kicks (muses have distorted senses of humour) and, if this happens enough, you can end up throwing your laptop out of the window and swearing off writing for life. And then one day – when far away from pen and paper, on the M1 highway or at a dinner party – something will come to you which you know is good, you know is original and fresh and important. You end up in the emergency lane, hazard lights flashing, ransacking the cubby-hole for something, anything, to write with, or the guest bathroom, scratching down sentences on double ply with borrowed eyeliner while other guests knock down the door. Divine dictation. The feeling that comes with it, intimate and sexy, pen on paper like lips on skin, a heat that starts in your pelvis and travels upwards, outwards, not so much a bolt as a current. You are turned on: physically, psychologically, spiritually. Nothing beats this feeling. Well, very few things beat this feeling.
I haven’t had it in a while. I keep hoping that my muse will rescue me, lift me out of this pit of desperation. I try to have faith but when you show up to the page every day for over a year and get nothing, you start to feel a little bereft. I’ve tried to fake it, tried to force it, but that never gets me past a couple of hundred bad words. I gaze at copies of my published work and wonder where the hell all those sentences came from. And what a schmuck I was, taking it all for granted. The Catastrophe of Success, as Tennessee puts it, embalmed by fame… and then, nothing. The cold abyss.
This blankness, this snowstorm, this nothingness makes me reckless. I start thinking I should do more, travel more, taste more, try more, fuck more. I am cast adrift in pages and pages of white paper and I realise that I will do whatever it takes to get me writing again.
9
TENTACLES OF DEPRESSION AROUND MY HEART
I won’t bore the page with details of my hangover. All I’ll say is that on a scale of one to ten it’s a robust nine. The only other time I have ever had a bigger headache is when I had undiagnosed, untreated malaria in Lagos and spent a few delirious days sweating in my seedy hotel room, until a maid started screaming that I was dead and they arranged for me to be taken to a hospital. I was touched that she took it so much to heart but later found out that she was a deeply superstitious person and thought that I had a juju on me (Nigerian curses are contagious) and so was yelling for her own life, not mine. The worst parts of malaria were the crazy nighttimes, when I never really knew where I was and my dreams just became more and more surreal. At first I thought the symptoms were the side-effects of the malaria meds; then I suspected food poisoning; then that I had been abducted and locked in this pokey room with its resident cockroaches. Now there are cockroaches and then there are Lagos Cockroaches: the size of your thumb and built like army tanks. Pesticideresistant-waterresistant-fireresistant-heelofyourshoeresistant. In the beginning it freaked me out, turning on the hotel light and seeing these ungodly things scatter for shelter, so quickly, wondering if they are imagined. Lying on the stained bed in the darkness, the bugs became less bashful and eventually came out to play. I remember – whether imagined or not – how they felt on my exposed skin, how their hard thoraxes shone in the moonlight, how their needle-like feelers felt in my ears, my nostrils. And the noise they made: scratchycrickety. At times when I thought I was coming out of the stupor I wondered if I had conjured them up but they swiftly asserted their existence: in the minibar fridge, crawling out of the porcelain basin plughole to surprise me while I was brushing my teeth and, once, a crushed corpse in my underwear. I almost jumped out of the window.
Lagos is a noisy city – especially at night. It comes alive with a raw, pulsing energy, like Rio’s ugly sister with colourful litter and ringing gunshots and humidity that smacks you in the face. An old English professor of mine who has a reputation for his persistent puns and poignant turns of phrase refers to Nigeria as the Armpit of Africa. I’ve never known an entire country to be described so aptly in only three words.
So while my head feels like Hiroshima and my lacerated feet are stinging, I know that in theory it could be far, far worse. That’s something I have going for me: a bank of really bad experiences – which sounds awful but in reality is great, because I can always compare my current state of affairs with some of my worst and come out feeling like Lucky Jim. Maybe that’s why God made childbirth so painful, so that when your life is wrecked by children you know it could be worse. I keep the idea of my mother at bay. It could always be worse. I throw back two Disprins and a bottle of water. I’m sure they’ll dissolve in my stomach.
I’m sorry I didn’t get to enjoy the twins. Every time I think about them I get a pleasant twinge in my pants. I’ve tried a lot of things with girls (and the occasional guy) and have had more than my fair share of ménage à trois, my first going back as far as high school (which turned out to be a disaster, as you can imagine, no matter how much I closed my eyes and thought of the theory of Pythagoras). I still remember the girl, her face pinched with the shock of what had just happened. I guess the twin fantasy will remain just that, for now.