Ways to Come Home Read online

  I open a green book. I fill the inside with booklets and itineraries, my leaving date, my flight time, a note to myself to buy sunscreen, and still there are pages white and unmarked. I trace the map and the route I would take.

  Starting in Kenya, the overland tour truck would traverse the northern tip of Uganda. A week later, we’d dip our toes into Rwanda, with only a little time to scurry back almost the same way before plunging south to Tanzania. A detour north-east off the cape of Dar es Salaam to the spice island of Zanzibar before continuing south, where we’d drop below the equator through Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

  Heading due west, we’d enter Botswana and pause for a few days in her delta before navigating Namibia’s barren Skeleton Coast, a resting place of ships and seal bones. From there, we would make our final descent into South Africa, finishing on the south coast where the two mighty oceans, the South Atlantic and Indian, run into each other at Cape Agulhas.

  I look at the map for hours, tracing the lines of rivers, the fall of valleys, the places where my feet would stand on the edge of cliffs.

  My backpack is stuffed with clothes and lies at the end of my bed, a rolled mat and the smallest sleeping bag I can find strapped loftily to the bottom. I have to be careful slinging the twelve kilograms onto my back – if I begin off balance, the slightest waver could make me lose my step.

  The night before I leave, I am too alert to sleep. But too tired to read. I try a few sentences of Keats and the words blur and become a map of Africa, black and waiting. I kick off the blankets and curl up in a small side chair, under the window. I decide to wait all night for the sun to rise. I open the window and the winter air tumbles in like a wave, breaking against my walls. I blink; I breathe. The sky itself, is a stretch of black, I can’t tell shape or form, it could begin just at the tip of my nose – or somewhere far away, far above.

  Silence falls like a shroud. I wonder if I’ve suddenly become deaf. I tap my finger on my window sill to know – tap, tap, tap – I can still hear. Everything else is rinsed away, swallowed in sky; it is an abyss. Then a creeping shadow. A huge dome. A crushed velvet throw rug. My back starts to ache. My toes are numb and icy. I’m about to give up, try and get some sleep, when she emerges: the sun. Spine first, arched and heaving, pulling herself over the ridge of night. Light spreads in strands at first. Then lashes my walls with buttery gold.

  I take a hot shower. Somewhere a kookaburra laughs. I pull on my new Gore-Tex shirt and it feels like someone has knitted together air – it’s as light against my skin as if I were wearing a gown of dandelions. Someone next door asks for more milk in their coffee. The night is small and cold behind me, almost forgotten. When the clock chimes six, I pick up my backpack, and slide back into the world.

  AFRICA

  NAIROBI’S STICKY season. The summer sun blankets the earth like hot honey. Within seconds, sweat pools under my arms and in the cups of my bra. It runs down my back and I swat at it like a pesky fly.

  Everything sticks to me: a local lady’s sweat as she leans across to grab her bag from the squeaking conveyer belt; leaking water from the rusted air conditioning; a man’s raspy uncovered cough. In five minutes, I am covered by the viscous sap of this land.

  Outside the airport, it’s a riot of noise. Constant plane traffic. Jet engines. Car horns peel like vuvuzelas at a rowdy soccer match. The beep of motorbikes roaring past. Somewhere near the airport a building site, the clang of metal upon metal, men shouting and then the gnarling pound of a drill that seems to tear through road and rock. The whole place appears to shake. My entire body weak and weary, my mind floating and slow after being above the cloud line for thirty hours.

  A line of old white taxis sit in the heat; paint peeling, bald tyres and rusted roofs. Drivers stand in a group under the only, gnarled tree, cigarettes in one hand, flicking away flies with the other. The wind lifts their smell towards me; sour sweat and cheap tobacco.

  One of them approaches with a smile, flicks his butt into the sand and holds out his hand. Tyam. His palm is warm and dry, and mine sweats into his.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say, wiping my hands on my t-shirt.

  He heaves my pack into his rusted boot. The seats in the back are missing springs and sag in the middle like old skin. The passenger seat has a rip through the leather as if someone with a knife has slit from the headrest to the floor. I straddle it awkwardly.

  The air conditioning is broken. I wind the window down as far as it will go. As we leave the airport, something in the distance is burning and the smell of scorched rubber fills my lungs.

  We turn sharply onto a four-lane highway. Cars surge past us. Mercedes and BMWs with rusted paint, dirty exhaust coughs and no side mirrors. The drivers enthusiastically press their horns, leaning on them longer than necessary. The streets become a dissonant rumble.

  Along the highway small stores open their doors. People shop for fresh tomatoes, piles of melons, ripening bananas. Small cafes look busy. People sit in plastic white chairs at small, card-sized tables surrounded by crates of Coke and Fanta stacked high against faded blue walls. There’s a hardware store. A truck mechanic. Off to the left a large white building sprawls across several blocks. Tyam points to it, a shopping mall. Air conditioned. I think how delicious it would be to stand in a blast of cool air, if only for a few seconds.

  Tyam changes lanes with a jerk, stopping suddenly for a car without working tail lights, flinging us both forward. The brakes scream; there’s the grinding of metal. My stomach makes a sound like it’s being strangled. I gulp a mouthful of warm water from my backpack, and stick my face closer to the open window.

  As soon as I’d landed on Kenya’s tarmac I expected to feel a sense of promise and relief because I was moving again. Going somewhere. As if travelling itself is a tonic, a tincture, that can be poured into you the moment you step off a plane.

  But it isn’t.

  I feel strange, overtired. I’m about to be sick. It could be jet lag. Or the smell of rubbish burning. Blllopp. My stomach churns. Must get out, I think.

  I ask Tyam to stop for a minute, so I can walk a bit. He says no, it’s not safe, and locks the doors with a central switch.

  Ten minutes later we hit solid traffic. Bumper to bumper. The taxi wheezes and shudders as we shift into lowest gear.

  It becomes unbearably hot when we aren’t moving. My thighs stick together and to the leather seat. My sweaty hands continually slip off my legs and fall against the burning leather. The stick shift starts to melt under the sun’s full force.

  Up ahead, local men stand on the side of the road with armfuls of pink plastic sunglasses, paper fans, fake flowers, to sell to passing cars, like a moving bric-a-brac market. One man is holding out a black puppy to the traffic. He looks like Mufasa on Pride Rock lifting up Simba. Is he selling it?

  Most of them have ripped pants, old and stained. No shoes. Do they make enough to eat, I wonder. To have homes?

  We inch forward, then stop. The men spot me through the open window. A tourist. They make a beeline for our car. A man with plastic flowers arrives first. He sticks the fake flowers through my open window as though they’re real and he wants me to smell their aroma.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘A pair of plastic lime-green sunglasses?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘A tray for ice cubes?’

  I look away. I wasn’t sure what else to do to stop them coming.

  Tyam stares idly out his window, as though this window shopping is quite usual.

  More hands shove through the window. Scarves. Postcards. Carved statues of elephants small enough to fit in my pocket.

  But I don’t need more things to put in my pocket. They have been full for so long, with receipts and bills and business cards and appointment slips and lip gloss and hair clips and all the things I convinced myself were essential, but as it turns out, I didn’t need at all.

  Space. That’s what I need.

  A man with a terracotta pot, chipped and sp
illing dirt in a trail behind him, approaches slowly. He has a limp and appears to be dragging part of his foot across the hot tar.

  He pushes the pot through the window, presenting it as if the closer it is, the more chance I’ll buy it.

  The pot is red and broken. Inside, an old dry fern is giving up on life. She has grown a good few inches, perhaps gold and green once, before the sun raged against her. As if in hope, she had birthed two more fronds and then decided against it, and they had curled over, shedding themselves. Their burnt stems now lay shrivelled and hard, still attached, but past resurrection.

  I’ll take it! I think. I know I can give life back to this fern, simply by adding a bit of water. Talking to it. Putting it in the shade for a while. Wouldn’t it then spring back to life?

  But what use do I have for a pot out here? We’ve been told by the tour guides to pack little, and even then, halve it. The pot would take up half my backpack, and then what use are we to each other?

  I sit for a few seconds in silence. Why am I so fixated on buying this plant? Surely I’m better off with the plastic sunglasses. Or the battery-operated face fan in the shape of strawberry.

  I’m just about to open my mouth and say no thanks when I look at the seller. He’s a hunched, old, wizened man. His mouth like a shrivelled plum sucked into space, a black hole behind where his teeth should be. His wrinkled hands shake as though he has advanced Parkinson’s, causing the dirt to spill across the road and my lap.

  I rummage around in my bag and pull out ten dollars from my wallet, handing it to him. He pushes the pot into my hands.

  No, no, I shake my head.

  ‘Thank you, thank you.’ He smiles toothlessly at me, nods and says, ‘Where you going?’

  I pause. I could say the name of the hotel but I don’t want him to know I am headed to a place with pools and lush gardens. I feel guilty I am going there at all. I could say Uganda. Or Rwanda. Or Nairobi’s centre.

  But he has kind, deep brown eyes that somehow look inside me, and I wonder if he knows I don’t know where I am going.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say quietly, thinking, how true.

  The traffic ahead starts to move. He steps back. We move forward at a snail’s crawl, braking regularly, before eventually speeding up.

  When I look back, I’m not sure why. To wave to the plum-mouthed man? To see him again? Perhaps to make sure he has found safety as the cars start to speed past. But, of course, he has. He has lived here for years, this place has made him. Shaped him.

  Arriving at the Hotel Sarova Pacifica, Tyam takes in my bags and I tip him generously. I tell the front desk clerk I’m here for the overland trip. She smiles and says to meet downstairs just after dawn.

  I fall gratefully into room 212’s tight, white bed sheets. My head pounds. The air conditioning is switched on high and the buzz fills the room like a swarm of flies. Outside the pool lights burst into the night, casting shadows from the palm trees that lumber into the sky.

  When I close my eyes I think about the plum-mouthed man and his fern. I think about the sound his bad foot had made, a coarse shuffle, as it was pulled across the road. And in that small space between consciousness and sleep, I’m thankful that everything is moving again, lest we become potted and flailing and giving up on life.

  WHEN I arrive downstairs at dawn, the hotel driveway is crammed with white people and backpacks. It looks like summer camp. I think, Oh God, I can’t do this.

  I escape inside and drink a watermelon juice from the breakfast bar. Outside, people shake hands and exchange names. They laugh and chat and greet each other like old friends. A stocky girl with a large smile, long black hair and beautiful island skin, a milky caramel, is telling people where to go, where to put packs, and sleeping bags and tents and bread.

  I order another watermelon juice and then need the toilet.

  When it’s almost time for the bus to leave, I decide I will go. I have to sprint before they close the door. My backpack, the last one, is stowed in the bulk hold.

  Inside Matilda, our cobalt blue truck, there is the smell of lemon antiseptic, bleach, damp carpet and anticipation. People say names and smile. Hello, hello. Another Aussie, they say and shake their heads, as if we are multiplying like rabbits. I slip into the first empty seat.

  The girl next to me says, ‘I’m Antonia,’ in a posh, clipped English accent, ‘but call me Ant.’ With young skin and perfect, wavy, blonde hair tumbling half way down her back, she has the finely boned face of a bird – beautiful and elegant. She would be better placed in a full-page Hilfiger ad than in a tent.

  Eager friends sitting across from us introduce themselves as Pip and Shamil from Melbourne. This trip marks their last holiday before they graduate as doctors. Ant says she has just graduated as an environmental scientist from Auckland University, and has spent the last several months exploring the Middle East.

  ‘What about you?’ they ask, and expectant eyes fall on me.

  They want to know what I do for work. Saying change manager makes my mouth feel as if it was stuffed with cotton wool. It makes people think of sweeping boardrooms and marble floors, high heels and matching suit jackets, and meetings about strategies and operational models. And that is a person even I don’t know.

  Here’s a word I want to say. Writer. But that word elicits the same questions. Every time.

  ‘Books?’ they say.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What kind? Fiction?’

  ‘No, actually, non-fiction.’

  ‘Oh, what about?’

  ‘Life.’

  They laugh a bit here before they realise I’m serious.

  ‘So have you had anything published?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Always that response. Oh. There is the weight of the world in disappointment in that Oh.

  I suppose I could tell them about the novella I’d written, the book of poetry too, but I self-published them, and people look a bit twitchy when I mention self-publishing. Isn’t that what writers who can’t get a publishing deal do?

  They’re looking at me, so I say quickly, ‘I’m just here to see some lions.’

  They laugh. As they do, Ant sits back and I catch sight of my reflection in the truck windows. A slumped face that hasn’t slept a full night in years.

  I suddenly feel old. Sagging and tired. What am I doing on a tour with all these young people? I can taste the acid again in my throat. I start to fret. I’m not sure I can do this, I think, watching our guide Sarah slam the rusty truck doors and slide the safety chain from the outside, locking us together.

  Matilda’s engine turns on, roaring so loudly we can’t talk anymore. I feel relieved. The truck moves heavily and slowly down the driveway like an elephant risen from slumber. Slowly we lurch forward to join the Nairobi traffic. High in the trees vultures circle and nest. Wrinkled pink skin heads. Sharp eyes, seeing things we can’t.

  Rubbish spills across the road. There are bottles and packets and plastic bags aplenty. The vultures have put much of this to good use – blue bottle tops, lolly wrappers and silver foil glint from the nests overhead. What remains of old rubbish – leftover meat and rotten vegetables – begins to heat under the sun. The flies buzz as they happily find new places to lay their maggot eggs.

  For hours, when we move it can be measured in inches. Roll. Stop. Roll. Stop. It’s hot inside the truck. Someone suggests we open the top windows. The warm breeze streams in, bringing gifts of sand. In minutes, everything is coated as though we’ve been sitting in a closed room for decades and need a good dusting. When the winds pick up, the sand hits our faces like a million pins, stinging our cheeks, so we close them again.

  On the edge of the city we peel off and leave the gridlock. Matilda wheezes to a gallant eighty kilometres an hour, which in a truck that size feels as if we are about to take off.

  Outside the city, everything is stained brown. Russet roadside cliffs. Broad boulders. Dark umber dirt. Scrawny trees, bark s
hredded from their limbs waving in the breeze. Dead branches fallen on each other, rolling about like lusty lovers in the dusty flats. The day is brilliant; blue skies and the fierceness of the sun. Warm and comfortable, I nod gently into a dozing sleep.

  ‘Zebra!’ someone shouts. I’m suddenly awake. All conversation stops. People jostle to find bags, switch cameras on and shove them out the smudged windows. Flocks of zebras stand along the highway swatting flies with their tails. People lift their cameras at every opportunity, trying to capture monochromatic rumps with zoomed lenses.

  Someone jerks open the sliding window to get a better view. The breath of Kenya roars in; tossing our hair, stinging our eyes and silently slipping between our lips.

  THE GREAT Rift Valley is located between the mountains, Kenya and Kilimanjaro, and knows the damage a fierce love affair can do. It is the longest rift on earth, and the eldest. Formed between two and seven million years ago, it stretches along the earth’s crust from Syria to Mozambique, running through Ethiopia, Tanzania, Congo, Malawi, Jordan and the Middle East, some 6000 kilometres in length.

  Wind and water are not the only elements culpable in creating this massive rift, for the playing of middle earth is also to blame.

  Millions of years ago, two tectonic plates could not decide, quite like lovers, whether they wished to be passionate or parted. They came together. They separated. They reconciled again. And while they bickered underneath ancient hominid feet, this toing and froing created bulges above.

  Fight after fight, they caused the earth’s crust to weaken, to swell, and to build. Until one day they erupted – a lovers’ fight – and the earth’s crust could not hold on any longer. One side dropped, faulted. It gave way, tearing a line for a million miles, ripping across the earth’s crust like a giant’s zipper split open.

  When the rift arrived in Kenya it couldn’t decide which way to go, and quite like the dual minds of lovers it diverged, offering us the possibility of going west or east. To choose our own path.