My friends got me out. Realising I was missing from the weekends in Harare they came to see me. I remember Eddy, who wanted to be a policeman one day, sat on the floor in the hall while I faced the priest in his kitchen. He heard me tell the priest that I would report him, and he heard the priest reply no one would believe me, which turned out to be right. But my friends got me out and we went to a Bhundu Boys concert in a stadium outside the city that was too small for the crush, that shut the gates leaving us on the wrong side of a riot. Four stupid White kids in a place they shouldn’t have been, heading for a beating; my watch was ripped from my wrist as I clung to Eddy, huge beside me, ripping his jumper rather than risk letting go. Willy climbed on the roof of a taxi to shout for us, Eddy picked me up and carried me over the crowd. Willy and I headed back to Dhirihori where our headmaster met us at our rooms. He said he’d had enough, we were fired. We packed what we could carry and walked the twelve kilometres to the tarmac road and hitchhiked from there, I don’t remember where. My boyfriend from England (who I’d got with, in a hurricane) came out. Photographs show us travelling; we are waiting for lifts, a book in his hands, the road stretching sandy and sunny. We are damp in the back of a flatbed truck, heading for the border at Beitbridge. I am smiling on a beach in Durban. There are snapshots of a speedboat in the Okavango Delta, friends grinning from a ledge above Victoria Falls. We swam in Mana Pools unaware of the crocodiles. I went canoeing down the Zambezi, hippos snorting and spent the night with a South African guide. (I don’t remember where my boyfriend was.) Years later I would return to the Zambezi, to an island in that river where a party held me captive for ten days, unable to leave for the drugs and a man who had cracked, but that was to come and at nineteen, canoeing and hitchhiking and smiling on a beach, I was at the beginning. We found our way to Malawi, to a hut on Monkey Bay, to a bar that never closed. I got a job. We smoked a lot of pot. We paraglided in rainbow-striped life jackets. I have an image of us side by side in the shade of a bamboo roof, he is reading, I am writing my diary. We are sun-kissed, beautiful, our days idyllic. I loved him.
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