My Camel Spits in the Sand

Koforidua, 1957

My dress, handmade, melts in the heat of a cocktail party. My legs run with turquoise, my hands and arms turn green. The batik dye is made with wax; I’m flammable, warned away from the gentlemen smoking Pall Malls, pretending not to notice my slow dissolve.

Cairo honeymoon

The hotel bedspread is rolled into waves, a frangipani posy tucked into each one. After dark we take a tour, find in a NAAFI tent a pair of belly dancers shivering between bobble-hatted British cyclists. A heel is off my shoe. My camel spits in the sand.

Christmas on the banks of the Volta

The turkey, given a cup of gin, dies happy. Our host’s cook serves mayonnaise. We’re told the secret of his technique: a mouthful of olive oil drizzled into the egg yolks between the gap in his front teeth. The houseboy’s seen in a pair of my M&S knickers, nude.

Mysore, 1958

Tea on the veranda of the Metropole Hotel, served on a steel tray. Tea-pot, sugar-bowl and jug, all steel, stainless and very shiny. It brings down the sky — a great black sheet of crows beating wings and beaks, their claws clattering, chattering cups and saucers.

Lagos, 1959

Market day. Aubergines and buckets of palm oil. Chickens everywhere. The floor slippery with a litter of offal, the horns and hooves of goats. Fish from the sea arrive on bergs of ice. Bicycles bring in cows’ heads, their hearts bloody and black, throbbing with flies.

Bapatla bungalow

A tattered dohti drying on a line. Zinnias in the burning sand. Two girls in flowered skirts dance, the arches dropped from their feet, leprosy paling their skin. A man without arms brings water from a well.   A boy knits, using as needles bent bicycle spokes, scraps of coloured wool.

The Cat-Walk is a Landing Strip

The cat-walk is a landing strip, lit like the white heart of a refrigerator. It’s a high-dive board above a sea where turtles snap and alligators razor the water with their teeth.

To the yap of shutters and the burst of bulbs, Tatiana walks her goose-flesh precisely down the plank. She’s a timed-exposure, an X-ray, her bones worn on the surface like tribal jewelery. Dressed in chocolate and cream, a dash of raspberry, splash of lime. Should she fly when she reaches the end of the cat-walk, take off and soar above the cameras and crowd? She’s light enough; if she shrugged off the ballast of clothes, she’d float.

The sound of applause chases her backstage to be pulled and prodded, stripped and slapped into the next outfit, her skin puckering with cold, the clothes catching on her corners. A smattering of powder on her cheeks, her tongue dashing to catch a flake, then a brisk fist in her back and she’s walking the plank again, chilled by the fog of ice at her feet.

This time she does it. Reaches the end and launches into the crowd, her arms stretched out to the empty mirrors in designer shades, in diamonds and silver and a thousand startled eyes.

Tatiana lands in the open jaws of a large bag, studded and strapped: the Latest Thing. The leather tastes good. She sucks on it savagely.

It’s the Siege of Leningrad all over again, starvation held at bay by boot-tongues. They take her picture as she lies there, feeding on fashion, the shutters barking about her like guns.