Chapter 9

The first pounding on the door came exactly an hour later. He was angry. Furious. And he demanded to know why I wasn’t coming to work.

“I have a head ache,” I screamed back at him through the door. This seemed to buy me another hour or so, but soon he was back with more banging and more demanding.

The louder he demanded and banged though, the less and less inclined I felt to face the day- or him. I pulled the duvet over my head once again and continued to sleep. I must have desperately needed it too-I’d not had a good nights sleep since I was sixteen years old and had discovered the joys of night clubs- because when I finally emerged, it was dark.

A whole day had gone past, much to my relief. It suddenly dawned on me that I could probably sleep this whole horrific experience away. And when I got back to London-to civilization, coffee that didn’t taste like mud, Egyptian cotton pillows, 24 hour a day electricity- this whole thing would just feel like a distant dream. As if it had never happened.

“BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG”

The knocking on the tin door sounded like someone was detonating nuclear weapons. It wasn’t only the bang that was loud and disconcerting, it was also the after shock that followed. The tin door hummed and rattled violently in the wake of the violent bang. And as soon as it had finished, another loud nuclear detonation was upon me.

I didn’t need to be psychic or posses x-ray vision to know who was standing on the other side beating his fist against my door. If that was the final question on a game show, “Guess who’s standing on the other side of that door?” I would be a winner. But unfortunately this wasn’t a game. This was real life. My life, and it was starting to feel like a nightmare.

“Are you trying to burst my ear drums” I called out loudly over what must have been the fifth set of knocking.

“Open this door Zara,”

“Ooooh,” I said in a mocking voice, “I’m so scared.”

There was a short silence before I heard the rattle of keys, the tin-y sound of them entering the lock and then the scrape as the door ripped at the concrete floor.

“That was particularly mature Zara,” He said as he barged in and took up an authoritative stance in the middle of the floor.

“Well, that was particularly creepy, bursting in like that with your own set of keys. Aren’t there laws against it, privacy laws? I bet I could sue you for breaking and entering if I liked,” This came easy to me. I knew how to fight with someone, and in a strange way, it felt much more comfortable.

He cocked his head to the side in the most mocking expression I’d seen, “I have a set of keys to all the rooms.”

“Oh well it still doesn’t make it right. What if I was in the bath, or getting dressed and naked?”

He ignored my naked statement and continued, “You weren’t at work today!’

“I told you, I am not going to be working.”

“If you stay here you have to pull your weight, that’s how it works.”

“I’ll just wait for my aunt to come back and talk to her about it.”

Riaan looked frustrated with me, “I have already told you. She’s the one who told me to put you to work,”

But even though he’d said it out loud a few times already, I still couldn’t quite believe it. My aunt was one of my favorite people. She was kind and adored me. I just couldn’t imagine her imposing this torturous regimen on me. My dad was another story, but her… I couldn’t quite believe it.

Unless my whole family was in on it together? United in a conspiracy against me, a plot to make my very existence on this planet a living hell.

Riaan sighed loudly in defeat, which I was pleased about, “There’s no excuse tomorrow, you will work like the rest of us,”

And with that he was gone again, slamming the door so hard that its vibrations would have registered on the Richter scale.

Message to Clay:

I hate him! I hate him! I hate him! He won’t leave me alone, he even has keys to my room so he can barge in whenever he wants to. What a perv! Oh, did I mention I hate him.

I didn’t sleep well that night- I’d probably had too much sleep during the day. I tossed and turned incessantly and was constantly woken up by the horror movie sound track that was playing on repeat…

The hoot of an owl, the low tone growl of something evil sounding, the scraping of a tree branch, the rustle of a bush, the far away cries of what sounded like a lamb being slaughtered.

All I could think about was a poor barefoot girl wearing a white night gown running through the woods being chased by a man wearing his mothers clothes, a creepy wig made of rats spines and wielding a bloody chain saw.

I was still awake when the sun started to rise- and that’s also when the banging started again.

“Zara, Zara,” His voice felt like sandpaper being scratched across the back of my eyeball.

“If you don’t come out for work I’m coming in.”

Pause.

Bang, bang.

“Zara, I am giving you to the count of five.”

Pause.

Bang, bang.

God, who did he think he was, my father? Only mothers and fathers did things as stupid as count to five. What was he going to say next, Zara Elizabeth Bennett I’m warning you.

“Fine. You leave me no choice. I’m coming in!”

I heard the keys again and looked around the room frantically, there was nowhere to hide other than inside the cupboard under the kitchen sink. I thought about standing my ground and refusing point blank, but I really didn’t have the energy for a full-blown confrontation right now.

Besides, I’ve also learnt over the years that if you ignore something for long enough, it tends to go away- like speeding fines for example. I made a mad dash for the cupboard and squeezed in carefully.

The space was tight and smelt like damp, moldy, dusty wood - under normal circumstances I would never lurk in a cupboard, but these weren’t normal circumstances. I closed the doors behind me, just as he came barreling in. I’ll hand it to him; he was a persistent thing. He would have made a good hallway monitor at school. Those teachers’ pets that roamed the corridors dying to catch someone out so they could run off and report them to the teacher and get a gold star. I peered through the tiny keyhole and if I put my eye close enough, I could make him out. He was wearing the exact same outfit as he’d had on yesterday; clearly khaki was the uniform of choice around here. But he was still as good looking as I’d remembered him though, even more so now.

He gazed around perplexed, before bending down to look under the bed and then in the bathroom. He sighed, cursed a few times in Zulu and then exited. I creped out the cupboard slowly and peered out the window. He was marching away like a Nazi soldier on a mission. Good riddance. There was no way he was going to force me to do work- I didn’t work. I’d never worked a day in my life and I certainly wasn’t going to start that filthy habit now and sully my perfect non-employment record.

My stomach rumbled and it dawned on me that I hadn’t eaten in over 24 hours. Not that I ate much- eating was not fashionable any more. The less food you ate, the more envied and adored you were. And you were practically worshipped if you were one of those people who fasted. These days it was all about juicing, in fact juicing had become quite a status symbol of late. It was almost compulsory to Instagram a pic of the food you were about to put in the blender before you did it. And the more Kale, celery and beetroot you were able to stomach, the more you were admired, especially when you hashtaged things like #yumyum underneath your photo. Competition was tough; Poppy Penelope Peaches (real name, daughter of some washed out rock star from the sixties who wore leather pants like a uniform) posted a picture of a turnip in her morning juice ritual. Clay and I then decided to see how far people would take it when we placed a clove of garlic and a large onion on our bed of Kale, celery and asparagus. Of course we never drank the God awful concoction, we just wanted to see if we could start a trend, and more importantly have people like Poppy Peaches forcing Onion-y Garlic-y juice down their throats in the morning.

I wondered what was for breakfast here, in the ‘mes hall’- or whatever it was called. It didn’t sound particularly appealing and I also couldn’t risk public exposure right now, for fear that Riaan would find me, arrest me and drag me off to work in a slave labor camp. I remembered that I had a protein bar in my bag, that would be more than sufficient for the day- it was probably more than I had eaten in a while. It was already hot outside and I was trying to decide what to do with this day. It was winter in London and looking down at my legs, my ‘Caribbean Sunset” spray tan needed a top up. A day spent at the pool tanning was exactly what I needed.

But when the receptionist informed me that there was no communal pool, only the private plunge pools on the villa decks- I saw my spray tan dream go up in a puff of smoke. My heart sank. My day was ruined. What was I meant to do, go back to my room and rot? But when the receptionist took a phone call in the back and left the room keys unattended, I decided to make my move. I’d just sneak in for the day, no harm done. I would be in and out and no one would even notice.

I grabbed the key and walked off casually, so as not to arouse any suspicion, but as soon as I was out of sight, I made a quick move for it. I slunk down the walkway like a Lynx, slipped through the door like a professional cat burglar and drew the curtains behind me.

As soon as I was inside I made myself at home, tossing my things on the bed and slipping my gown off. I was wearing my gold bikini, my favorite one, Clay had once joked that it was so shinny that it might be used to start bush fires by reflecting the suns rays off it. The wooden deck outside was calling my name. It was drenched in a radiant early morning light that was slightly dappled as it shone through the trees. I found a towel in the bathroom, spread it out and sprawled across it melting into the warm sunny morning air.  It felt peaceful here. Meditative. Like I was on a Yoga retreat and a swami was going to come and cleanse and realigned my Chakras’ or something cool and spiritual like that.

I closed my eyes but was met rather rudely, not with images of peace, tranquility and monks in saffron robes burning incense, but rather of Riaan. His angry looking face was being projected onto the inside of my skull. This was not right. How dare he?

How dare he break and enter into my peaceful place. How dare he act like a caring kindly Saint and then make me feel so comfortable with him that I start talking about personal things. And finally, how dare he be so damn gorgeous and kissable?

Why was I thinking about him?

This what not what I had envisioned for my day. I needed a drink. The bar fridge was fully stocked, not just with alcohol and soft drinks, but also with every snack imaginable. I grabbed a bag of peanuts and raisons and ate them in an agitated manner. Crunching through the nuts with my teeth made me feel a bit better. I decided against the alcohol, since it was only 11:00 AM- and God forbid someone thought I had a drinking problem and I got shipped off to a Betty ford style clinic with real alcoholics. I settled on a very unsatisfying fruit juice and headed back to the dappled sunlight.

I sat cross-legged on the deck and looked out at the view. There is something very distinctive about the African landscape, nothing else looks quite like it. Tall dry grasses stretched out below me, they were constantly in motion, swaying from side to side as the breeze moved through them, and when they moved they rubbed together, creating a soft rustling sound that filled the air. The soothing sound plays constantly like a song on a loop. Trees were scattered intermittently across the savanna- some were large, their branches reaching up to create a large umbrella like shape, whilst others were small and sparse, and looked like leafless skeletons. Nothing about Africa is neat or predicable. The landscape is rugged, wild, untamed and it changes unpredictably. When I was younger I loved it here. I thought it was an enchanted place, full of mystery like Alice’s Wonderland. And I suppose it is- it has a certain magical quality that cannot be put into words.

I felt a leaf graze my naked shoulder, and then another one. I looked up and saw a small brown squirrel darting across the branches of the tree. It stopped and looked at me the second I looked up, as if it had somehow sensed me. It moved its head from side to side a few times before beginning an elaborate jump from branch to branch. It’s movements were almost animatronic, and rather amusing to watch. It ran around the trunk several times before disappearing into a hole. A few seconds later it repeated the process all over again.

I sat and watched ‘Henry’, that’s what I named him, for a while as he went about his daily routine. There was something soothing about watching him, and it gave me something to focus on other than Riaan. I wondered what his plans for the day were? Gather some nuts, play a game of catch in the treetops with his brothers and sisters? Suddenly I envied Henry. His life seemed so uncomplicated. Simple, happy, peaceful.

The sun was getting hotter by the minute and soon it became to necessary to slip into the coolth of the pool. I got in, bobbing up and down for a few minutes before I was overcome by a feeling of desperate loneliness. A sensation of sadness descended on me. I thought about Riaan again and the sadness morphed into guilt.

NO! This wouldn’t do, I needed company, Henry was not exactly a conversationalist.  I needed Clay. I tried to send the messages again that were stuck in my outbox, and this time they all went through.

Beep, beep.

Message from Clay:

Babe! I was starting to worry about you. I thought maybe you had been abducted by some African men and dragged into the forest…wait, that kind of sounds nice. Lets chat.

With that I dialed his number, but the reception wasn’t good enough for a conversation, “Wait, I’m going to call you from the hotel phone,” I screamed down the crackling and hissing phone line.

I poured myself out on the bed and dialed his number; within seconds I heard his voice.

“Babe! You sound like you’re in hell”, he screeched in his distinctly gay sounding voice- it was regularly hammed up for entertainment purposes.

“I am. This is worse than being stranded in Hackney. They actually expect me to get a job here. A job”

Clay burst out laughing so hard that he started choking on something, “I think my Cosmo has just shot out my nose I’m laughing so hard”

“You’re drinking a Cosmo without me. I’m heartbroken. I hope you haven’t found yourself a new girlfriend to hang out with too.”

“Never! Compared to you, everyone else is boring!”

“Wait,” I said making a move for the bar fridge and getting myself a dinky little bottle of white wine, “I’ll have a drink with you,” That way I wasn’t drinking alone.

We chatted and laughed and drank for hours. I’d also almost finished all the snacks, and was just about to order myself room service when I heard a noise at the door. To my horror the door handle opened and the bewildered looking receptionist walked in followed closely by two guests.

“Gotta go,” I whispered down the phone at Clay. Although I don’t know why I was whispering, I had been bust in broad daylight, sprawled on the bed in a gold bikini, surrounded by half eaten snacks and mini bottles of wine.  The husband’s eyes widened and I graced him with a little wave and smile, his wife gasped and glared at me with very angry eyes.

“You can’t be in here, “ The look on the receptionist face was one of utter shock and I couldn’t help it, but I laughed.

“You have to go!” Her voice sounded high pitched and panicky, as if she was going to be in trouble for letting this happen.

“You have to get out!’ She continued to squeak. But the more she talked, the more I laughed, until I was almost hysterical.

“Please! Please!” She looked like she was close to tears now, as she rushed around trying to pick up empty packets and bottles.

I leapt off the bed, grabbed my stuff and ran past them in a state of giggles. I turned around just in time to see the receptionist apologizing profusely to the very un-amused looking guests.

Some people just don’t have a sense of humor.

But at least I was starting to have some fun!

Little did I know that the fun was about to come crashing down and exploding around me.