Free A Single Swallow by Horatio Clare Page B

eventually and checked me in, unlocking the bar, pulling out a book, filling in a line, giving me a key to a hut. The floor cooled my feet; there was a double white bed, a huge mosquito net and a television showing ghosts replaying football in a storm. (African Cup of Nations – the final is tonight!) She was in her early twenties, perhaps, and bemused. I feared she did everything. I was loathe to unpack, to dirty the loo or derange anything, but I did, a little, starting with the aerial cable to the TV. The ghosts disappeared but not the storm. I went looking for food.
    The supermarket was playing host to a small party of exotic foreigners. Nobody else seemed to pay them much attention. I tried to work out where they were from, which meant eavesdropping. They were better-looking than they are supposed to be and younger than I had been led to believe was now the norm. Their truck looked good.
    It used to be said that the overlanders partied their way around, sleeping it off as Africa rolled and bumped tiresomely past. Now, it was said, the demographic had changed, and the trucks were full of retired Adventurous Travellers, beadily sharing knowledge about humans, humanities, earth sciences and is that or is it not a Bearded Vulture?
    These looked businesslike, buying supplies, and sexy, in their cottons, straps and tans, wearing that quasi-pained, pointedly-not-pushy expression you might see in Sainsbury’s on a Saturday. They were of a type, and I and many others in Rundu’s supermarket stared surreptitiously at white women.
    It was a strange meal; self-catering courtesy of the ladies behind the meat counter at the supermarket: a warmed chicken leg, some sort of bread and something to drink, taken on the veranda. Every time I dropped a crumb a line of ants switched direction and picked it up. I went for a walk by the river later: not very far, because it was hot, and cautiously, just because. Later still I went for another drive, vaguely wondering where the sewage farm might be. Angling the car away from the river, gracefully switching sides to avoid schoolchildren (many schools do two or more shifts, so there are three big changeovers, morning, noon and night) I came upon the millipede.
    Blacker, shinier and meaner than an escaped bicycle tyre, it was trundling in a dead straight line three-quarters of the way across the road, on our side. Three impulses hit me at the same time: public service (take the monster out), self-preservation (offer it a drink?) and something else, which escaped me in a whistle of amazement and made the Mousebird veer wildly.
    I am not sure if it was the millipede, the final of the African Cup of Nations, the threat implied by the vast and beautiful double mosquito net or the amazing near-silence, but I left that camp and drove through the gloom to another lodge, a bit further down.
    Around the television the atmosphere was unhappy. Cameroon, the Indomitable Foulers, were playing Egypt, the Indefatigable Pounders, for the championship. Regardless of the fact that Cameroon wanted it so badly that all of West Africa, southern Africa, and indeed BlackAfrica wanted it too, the barman, being Namibian, was disgusted with the whole thing, because South Africa had underperformed so thoroughly that they had contrived to be knocked out in an early round – which rather killed the atmosphere in the otherwise empty bar.
    Mine was a hot wooden room, beyond the wall of which was another solitary man in an identical room. I ate warm rice, noted that some sort of local government conference was taking place and tried not to laugh, the next morning, as the black staff took their wonderfully lethargic yet painstaking time misimplementing the harried orders of their white manager. His anxiety should have been catching. Without anxious hard work, you could see him agonising, the conference attendees would not get the five-star service to which they were entitled, regardless of creed, colour, price or