Wild life
Tea breaks
Aidan Hartley
WMalindi e're at my mother's beach house on Kenya's Indian Ocean. I've been driven to a state of sexual desperation during the course of my wife Claire's recovery from having our baby son Rider a month ago. For days I have eyed her lasciviously, with no result. Since this is a typical AngloKenyan family holiday, I may as well forget about it. I was having a siesta this afternoon in my kikoi, a sarong-like wrap which is one's normal attire here on the Swahili coast, when my 21-month-old daughter, Eve, attempted to ram a ripe banana between my closed teeth. This woke me but, despite having mushy sludge over my face, I pretended I was still asleep in the hope she would go away. I then noticed an odd sensation and realised Eve had squeezed said banana into the crack at the top of my buttocks.
Feeling like a sundae, I got up and crossly went to look for Sylvester and get some chai. Sylvester is my mother's butler and I've got to keep my eye on him. Perhaps I've belly-ached about him in a neocolonial way in the past after he put kerosene instead of vinegar in the salad dressing or poured chocolate sauce on the roast instead of gravy. But today he's wearing a T-shirt that says 'Official Member of the Piss and Moan About Everything Club'. Sylvester is all smiles and I suspect he's being ironic.
I thought I could seduce Claire after a night out dancing in town. The only bar we found open yesterday was packed with tired whores and white male tourists who
all looked like the bald gangster played by Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast. The night life isn't as I remember it when I was a teenager in the defunct Stardust. A much-loved family friend who used to stay on our beach was the late Quentin Crewe. He was confined to a wheelchair but he used to get out on the floor at the Stardust for hours and zigzag between the dancing tarts. Quentin's no longer with us and Aids has cast a cloud over life here. A neighbour came by yesterday to ask where she could get a pick-up to transport the body of a friend of hers who had just died at home.
Half the male 'tourists', by the way, are servicemen for the German military patrolling Somalia to the north of us in case al-Qa'eda should attempt to regroup there. German? I know, it's odd. They fight day and night and one knows something's amiss when the Luftwaffe buzzes over the veranda. They don't even need to go to Somalia to find Osama's disciples. Right here, my barber's a red-eyed Islamic fanatic but he gives me a jolly nice cut and blowdry. All this German activity hints at another military plan to be executed over our horizon by Pentagon generals who are, as I write, scratching their heads and saying, 'Iraq! Iran! Why the hell can't the ARabs standardise their spelling!' In a few months the monsoon will be carrying radioactive dust into Mum's bougainvillea and the nice fanatics may not be so friendly to us.
To hell with the world situation — I'm on holiday, for pity's sake. At bedtime things should be very romantic. The night scents of jasmine and frangipani from the garden. The moonlight on the ocean. Great, except that now we have two children we are paranoid about malaria. When I was a kid my parents never bothered about the medicine. Malaria wasn't half as dangerous as it is nowadays, and if we got it we were taken to Dr Zoltan Rossinger. He had fled Hitler's gas chambers for Kenya and he used to charge Africans nothing and everybody else the normal price, except Germans, who paid double. Rossinger is also dead and malaria is now deadly.
There's no way you can persuade small kids to swallow the horrible preventative medicine, so one has to make sure they don't get bitten. They have to be soaked in insect repellent and stuck under the net by sundown, with so many anti-mosquito joss sticks burning in the room that it's like a Hindu temple. The operation takes hours. If we try to make them go to sleep by themselves they start caterwauling, so we all have to sleep together in a heap with the fan on. I am banished to the very edge of the bed and get no shut-eye. I'm still awake and bleary at dawn when I get up to watch the Swahili fishermen skimming over the surf in their outrigger canoes. And then Sylvester, in his Piss and Moan About Everything T-shirt, appears with a pot of chai.
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