Ways to Come Home

by Kate Mathieson

  The metal in old awnings creaks as they heat. Shop doors stay open waiting for gusts of wind to cool them down. Power is unstable, lights flicker and the whir of back-up electricity generators hum loudly. The streets are dusty, the pavements are worn and uneven. People queue in their lunch breaks, spilling outside a peeling white building that says BANK, the line snakes out the door, around the corner and farther down the street beyond. Men in suits joke with one another, women retrieve large wheat-coloured fans from their bag and keep a constant beat aimed at their faces. No-one seems the least put out.

  Farther down the street is a church, a block of sparse gravel and grass with some haphazardly placed bricks and old sheet metal, and a hand-painted sign that reads, GYM. We stroll down a long, sloping laneway.

  A smiling man in a bright red shirt, has set up a travelling shop; a large blue tarpaulin hammered into the ground is stacked with the most peculiar shoes. An array of sandals and thongs, dark black and spongey. All of them seem so much larger than normal – at least twice the size. Their tips came to a point like elf shoes, rounded into the sky like crescent ebony moons.

  ‘Tyres,’ the man says as he introduces himself as Mbita. Holding up a curved shoe proudly he says, ‘We collect them by the road.’

  We’re quite stunned by this invention. There are so many questions. ‘How do you make them?’

  With knives and a little fire to seal the edges.

  ‘Are there different sizes?’

  ‘Yes. Large and small,’ answers Mbita with a wonderful laugh. He seems so interesting, we forget about exploring and want to stay talking instead.

  ‘Do you wear them?’

  Sometimes.

  ‘Does your family?’

  For the first time he doesn’t smile. He tells us quietly his wife died recently. He had to pack up his son and two baby girls and move further away, outside the town. Down a long, dusty road. I focus very hard on listening, on looking at the shoes, and try not to think of his children at home in varying stages of motherlessness.

  Suddenly Mbita is smiling again. ‘Really, they are lovely for your feet,’ he says, gesturing to the tyre-shoes.

  Did I want to buy a pair, he is asking. I can feel the silence between what I want to say – no thank you – for what use do I have for tyre-shoes?

  And the other answer, the one we are all expecting, ‘Yes please, I’ll take three pairs.’ I keep seeing in my mind the wild eyes of his children wanting something for dinner.

  ‘They’re all quite big.’ I say slowly. ‘And I have enough shoes.’

  Mbita nods. ‘It’s okay,’ he says still smiling. ‘It’s okay.’

  I offer instead to pay for a photo of Mbita and his extra-terrestrial sized tyre-shoes. He shrieks with delight, then poses, two thumbs up.

  At the bottom of the street, small eateries are busy selling Coke in glass bottles floating in tubs of half-melted ice. Home-cooked ugali, the staple food, a dish of maize flour cooked with water until it forms a porridge or dough-like consistency is the lunchtime special. This is rolled into a lump or ball and is garnished with vegetable stews or, for those with more money, meat stews, where the ugali is dipped into the sauces and acts like a scoop soaking up the flavours around it.

  We buy a plate to share and two Cokes. They’re warm and the fizz seems to have disappeared a while ago. The cafe owner, a small lady in her fifties, offers a choice of three sides with the ugali – cooked cabbage, wilted spinach, or meat stew. The first two. Not the meat.

  We sit at a small plastic table near the front of the cafe where we can watch the people come and go along the street. The door is open and the hot breeze slips quickly through, like a current. Flies buzz happily in search of food and use my neck as some sort of airport landing.

  The ugali arrives. No forks. No spoons. I don’t feel I should be eating with my hands. God, where had they been? In pit latrines and against walls covered in dust and dirt. We ask politely for two forks and are given one between us, which we share without thinking – one night in a tent has caused all inhibitions to disappear.

  My first bite of ugali is rubbery. Tasteless. I try spooling wilted spinach around it like a ribbon, but then it just tastes wet and rubbery.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Ant asks offering me back the fork after nibbling a tiny mouthful.

  The lady behind the counter stares and I wonder if she can hear.

  I swallow heavily. ‘Not for every meal.’

  We can’t decide whether to keep eating or forget it. Ant takes the fork and dips it into the cooked cabbage, its strands translucent, a strange yellow green. We try not to notice the pigeons who have taken up residence on the table next to us eyeing our plate.

  Finally, after passing the fork between us another few times, we leave a tip and take our warm Cokes with us.

  WE DRIVE for hours along a black tar road pitted with potholes. Everything looks the same. Dirty blonde soil, spindly trees barely thicker than my fingers.

  Despite the chill of the early mornings, Kenya heats quickly. Climbing from the truck just before noon, the day smacks my face with heat. The top of Matilda has started to sizzle. Feeling dehydrated, I fill my water bottle from the guts of the truck. The water storage tank can hold litres, and is treated with tablets so the water is drinkable. I take a long sip then immediately spit it onto the dust. It tastes like warm bleach; I’d rather go thirsty.

  We set up little fold-out stools in a semicircle, and wooden fold-out tables stored deep within the belly of Matilda are set up for lunch.

  Sarah lays out ten loaves of bread, bulk jars of mayonnaise that could fit a human head, a two-litre bottle of tomato sauce, an old jar of mustard and a container of butter – melted and runny like egg yolk. Those on kitchen duty cut up cucumber and carrot with blunt knives, then lay out cold-cuts of meat, pink with large white gristle bits, which is hardly cold at all. Mountains of cheese are grated from solid kilogram blocks. The cheese, a strange bright orange, like layers of waxy carrot.

  We line up at the buffet-like trestle tables making sandwiches on brown plastic plates. There are tiny pieces of onion for those who get to it first. No-one is sure if they should touch the cheese. It has already melted into itself forming a bubbling lava trail.

  I make a plate of wilted lettuce, cucumber and mustard and pour ketchup over it. When I was younger I’d have sauce on everything. On crackers. On slices of apple. Banana. (Yes, it’s true.) And even ice cream. In my mind, there’s nothing that can’t be made better with tomato sauce. Except, it seems, wilted lettuce.

  No-one talks; it’s too hot. We push flies away from our face but they keep returning. Some campers go back for seconds but everything is warm, almost hot, and I’ve seen too many flies resting on the cucumber to do that.

  After lunch we pack the tables away, wash the plates that dry in seconds, and take our seats back on the truck.

  The earth rolls along. Cities and towns, give way to open land – barren and broken and beautifully spacious. How much would it cost to buy a slice? Could you build a house here? I’ve always wanted a vegetable garden, a herb potager, but if you try and plant tiny seedlings into this parched ground, the earth could easily push them back up.

  When we stop near a vegetable market, I buy a handful of bananas; short and stumpy – each one no longer than my fingers. Just picked, the man tells me. My first mouthful, falls apart like spun sugar in my mouth; tastes of sunshine and sky. It forces my eyes closed. I finish one and eat another.

  I think of the bananas I bought in Sydney. Cold like fish, resting on ice. God knows how long they were stored in the supermarket’s industrial fridges. I think we all know, but have forgotten, or want to forget that our fresh produce is not so fresh. Apparently, apples store well and can spend up to eighteen months in cool closure, before they’re wheeled onto the shop floor, sprayed with water to look fresh, picked and plucked into our trolleys. Broccoli comes out wearing ice chips in their hair. Carrots are chilled. Is it any wonder, tomatoes don
’t taste like tomatoes anymore? Isn’t anyone else worried?

  When I leave, I buy another bunch. I think about saving half for dessert, but when Matilda starts moving, I find myself peeling and eating them all, one by one. Down below, a lone zebra trots along the roadside, whisking away invisible flies. The driver of a passing truck, leans out the window, waving at us and tooting his horn. I grin and wave back. After that, we don’t see anyone else.

  Just ninety hours ago I was buying a tube of travel toothpaste from Priceline in Sydney. I was buying pre-packaged pasta in plastic wrap to cook for dinner. I was cutting a refrigerated apple for breakfast, cool and crunchy, tasting of air, of nothing. I was listening to the marine roar of the traffic hum near my house.

  Am I here in Africa? Sometimes, it feels like a dream.

  WE STOP briefly for the night, at a campsite somewhere in Uganda, arriving after the sun has set.

  The intensity of the heat has halved. A chilly wind pushes through. Shadows emerge and the night feels like the breath of winter. The evening grows icy and a rough wind fells our cheeks. Someone makes pasta with steamed carrots. I eat without tasting. Voices and chattering around the fire seem dull, as though I am listening through layers of foam.

  Lead has gathered among my eyelashes and it takes a huge effort to force them open. The back of my throat has a scratch I hadn’t noticed just hours before. My feet feel disjointed as if they are someone else’s warming by the fire. Am I feverish? My cheeks are hot. Am I just unwinding? Or is this the first nudge of sickness?

  Rain is coming. We must set up the tents, and quick. There are deep violet and green storm clouds gathering and it won’t be long until they find us. We run around like ants. Tent bags are thrown from the truck, and we catch them heavily (oof, in the stomach). There is the constant sound of movement, the click-clack of tent poles locking into place. Ant and I are again the last ones, we roll the sleeping bags out in the tent just before the first cloud opens. Quick. Inside.

  The first few drops sound heavy on the tent wall – they hit straight and explode quickly, like bullets. In minutes the entire tent is saturated.

  We sit inside, head torches flicked off, in the darkness. It feels like our own cave, a place to safely wait.

  After an hour, then two, it appears we’ll be here for the night. The rain doesn’t let up. I peel off clothes and change into pyjamas and hope to get warm. Even tucked underneath layers of clothes and a winter sleeping bag, my body feels frozen.

  Ant unzips the front of the tent to peer out. The night air rises inside at once, like a choir standing. A few nibs of chill push into the tent, feeling like early morning frost on our skin. She zips it back up quickly. It’s summer, yet chilly. The ground could freeze but, with such a foggy mind, I can’t find ways to make sense of this.

  My head sweats even though it’s the only part of me not wrapped in wool. I wonder if I have Nurofen somewhere, but can’t muster the energy to find it. It would be easier at home. It’s the first time I’ve had that thought. It would be easier to get more Nurofen. Go to the doctor. Curl up in my bed for days, surrounded by tissues and water, and not have to move. Instead I have scrunched up a cold jumper as a pillow.

  Ant, unable to sleep, has sat up, a shawl wrapped around her neck and arms, and is scribbling in her diary. Is the light too much? She tries to dim her head torch slightly, but it keeps a steady stream of orange tunneling through the pitch-black night.

  When she turns it off, everything goes dark. Outside the clouds gather and the rain lashes our tent sideways. I fall backwards, as one does from a ledge, head first, into the large hands of a strange dream.

  WE RISE before the sun on little sleep. Everything is saturated. Large concave circles bend each side of our tent like two hands holding puddles of water, big as bowls. One unlucky pair who didn’t peg deep enough were propelled towards the graduated hill; which leads, eventually, to the Nile. Their tent tobogganed, stopping only when they were snagged by an overhanging tree branch.

  We wring out clothes and water-swollen towels. Nothing has escaped the downpour. We must wear wet shoes, damp socks and sopping jumpers. There are faces of cringe as we squelch our way to the morning fire. It smokes more than usual, and takes a while to catch as wet wood tries to burn.

  No-one is amused. At the fire we turn our backs to it, then fronts, rotating like pigs on a spit trying to dry out as much as possible. Anything still wet is stuffed into backpacks with the risk of arriving at the next place smelling like mildew. We eat fire-smoked toast with lashings of butter and it warms us from the inside. Thankfully a dash of hot water, a clump of sugar and the deep, bitter paste of instant coffee soothes immediately.

  The morning sun slips her head above the earth, and a thin line of red splits the earth from night. Matilda’s chug-chug engine switches over. It shudders like a belly laugh, roaring at us as we drip our way across the soil and climb onboard. Collapsing against seats and each other, we barely mutter more than a hello, and take hours to wake fully.

  The landscape changes as we gain metres above sea level, ochre sand turns brown sugar, caramel, the scabby trees with split bark grow coats of moss. Vines layer the hills, adorning them like decorative jewellery, floating in the breeze, crisscrossing each other. Muddy roads.

  One of the windows won’t close properly and as Matilda picks up speed, the wind howls like a woman in pain. My feet turn cold and blue and, no matter how many pairs of socks I put on, they don’t warm until I rub them furiously for twenty minutes. The altitude brings a sharp bite, and we start to layer clothes. Singlets. Thermals. Turtlenecks. Zipped vests. Beanies. Gloves. Extra socks. Ant and I rug up until we are only eyes peering out, which makes us laugh.

  What I wouldn’t do, she says, for some sun right now. She had just come from Peru, Jordan, Syria, Egypt – she rattles off the list of countries like a shopping list. Six weeks. Blazing heat.

  She points out a ring on her left finger. Moonstone and pearl. Carved into the shape of a beetle. A sacred beetle. But after weeks in the Middle East and now Africa it’s brown with dust and dirt.

  ‘It’s a long time to be away from home,’ she says looking out the window at the blue sky. ‘When you’re only twenty-one.’

  When I was twenty-one I left Sydney for the first time and moved to Taiwan. I packed the largest suitcase I could find with clothes that would never be worn in the tropical Taiwanese heat – jumpers and scarves and sneakers and jeans. I sweated through months living there, even in the winter. Humidity sat heavy, and everything around me seemed to ooze.

  Back then, I’d only just begun to understand the pull of elsewhere, and yet Ant had been doing this for years.

  ‘If I’m honest,’ she whispers in a low voice, ‘my heart really isn’t in this trip.’ She pauses. I wait for her to finish.

  ‘It’s at home with my—’ she stops for a second. ‘Well, I suppose you’d call him my lover.’

  Phil was older than she was, but the way she said older I imagined him to be in his fifties, wear tweed jackets and smoke a pipe, but at twenty-seven, he was younger than me. An environmental scientist, he was quiet, she said, selective, preferring woods and water to people.

  ‘We like coffee on Sundays,’ she said. ‘Dark black and bitter. And we curl up in bed, naked, and sip it and talk. About everything. He has this mind,’ she uses her hands to paint a world, a globe, bigger than our faces, ‘that thinks about things that other people don’t.’

  She leans forward, so close our covered noses could touch.

  ‘What about you? Do you have someone?’

  I think back to the man I lived with in that damp, ground floor flat. In the first few weeks he declared I was his muse – extraordinary and addictive. I liked the shape of his hands. Good, earthy hands, square palms and muscular fingers from years of living in the country; pulling out trees and working the land. He could fix almost anything around the house, and after dating so many men with soft office hands, pale and slender, I was bewitched.
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  In hindsight, liking him for his handyman abilities shouldn’t have been enough to move in with him. And the way he described me – like heroin – should have been equally unsettling. But, of course, we didn’t consider that.

  When the passion burnt out, and I lost my way, we turned on each other. How could he not fix me? He could fix everything else – the toaster, the vegie garden, the halogen lights. How damaged we must have been to stay. How broken we were, staring at each other over dinners with empty eyes. Continuing on with our days, living lives that should not have been ours.

  We know, don’t we, on some level when we are committing atrocities of the heart?

  So when I think of Phil and Ant snuggled up in the curves of each other, I think merely, that’s nice. I’m not jealous. Instead I think, what a relief I don’t have someone so close to me, so close they can see inside. And then I wonder how long it has been since I’ve had a real coffee, and what I wouldn’t do for a dark, chuggy espresso that tasted like soil from the earth.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Did you?’ she asks.

  ‘Not in a long time.’

  I see the breadcrumbs of her questions. She thinks I have left behind a lover. A wild passionate affair, scorned, that spun me to the other side of the world. If only it was that, it would be a much easier story to tell than the truth.

  And I’m not ready to tell anyone that.

  MATILDA NEEDS petrol. We stop in a small village with one gas pump, some scraggly trees and a cluster of brick houses. A man is crouched outside one of the houses bent over a camp stove. Two dishevelled dogs are curled on the dust. We stroll over to take a closer clock. A charred black pan perches above the naked flame of a campfire, small wood and coals giving off immense heat; inside are drops of batter: banana and oat pikelets. He’s selling them for thirty cents each. We buy them all. Piping hot, we shove them into our mouths. Too hot they burn, leaving a layer of skin that will flap and fall off in a day. But they taste as they smell buttery and golden and crisp delicious. They warm us from the inside out. We are all smiling again saying, ‘Did you see how much rain gathered on top of the tents?’