Living for Disco

“Marius, can you get me some food while you’re out please? A pie? And some water? Thanks”

Two hours pass.

Marius walks in through the door.

“Your water is in the car”, he says, running past me into his office.

“What about my pie?”, I ask hopefully.

“No pies left. But I got some raw fish.”

“?”

Convinced that he is joking I go out to the car. On the seat, next to my bottle of water, is a plastic tub of roll-mops.

I spotted the taxi driver as he came around the corner. He was still out of sight of the gaggle of school kids that last week were responsible for my 40 minute wait in the boiling heat with a supermarket carrier bag full of dairy produce. They were, by all accounts, also responsible for beating up one of my colleagues and stealing her cellphone and all of her money, but that’s not why I was lurking out of sight.

It’s impossible to get a taxi from Maerua Mall at lunchtime at the moment. Exam time means that the kids are always there. No matter how many of them leap into taxis, there seems to be a never ending supply of blue clad, notebook wielding teenagers. It’s as if, when one disappears, an identical one is created out of thin air in a bizarre realisation of a Doctor Who episode.

Being British, I am a firm believer in the value of queuing. It’s just right. I have an in-built hatred of queue jumpers that leads me to do that arms-folded-foot-tapping-tongue-tutting-stare-balefully-at-the culprit-in-the-hope-that-they-will-feel-absolutely-ashamed-of-themselves-and-piss-off-to-the-back-of-the-queue thing that you always see British people doing in check-in counters at airports.

So last week, my queuing gene compelled me to wait until the kids had all gone before trying to get a taxi. After 20 minutes I realised that this was futile, so I started extending my arm at passing cabs to indicate that I was looking for one, in case just standing there in the scrum looking desperate and hot wasn’t obvious enough.

It made no difference. I actually did manage to get into a cab at one point, about 26 minutes in, but had to get out again when four kids hijacked me by jumping into the back, and instructing him to go to Katutura.

So, today, unwilling to go through this rigmarole, I put into practice my new belief that queuing is for losers and sissies, and came out of the back exit to nab the cabs before they made it round to the front. Clever, no? It worked. Hallelujah.

I was less impressed when my taxi driver deliberately cut up an ambulance, despite the presence of flashy lights and sirens, and then drove slowly in front of it for a few agonising minutes while the driver gesticulated wildly at him to get out of the way. My driver trundled along in second gear, looking in his rear view mirror, chewing a bit of twig like a man deprived of gorm, while some poor bastard no doubt bled to death in one of Namibia’s regular horrific road accidents. And it was my fault.

Queues are there for a reason. I understand that now.

It’s time to go through the CVs for our receptionist post. There are millions of them. They slide in drifts off the desks, and pile up on the floor. We need snow shoes to navigate the office. An entire rainforest has expired in order to supply the paper we are now sifting through.

I’ve been involved in selecting candidates for interview before, and so was quite prepared for a mammoth endeavour, reading each CV in detail and marking them according to the job description. Ability and experience is everything – age and sex irrelevant.

Not here. Oh no.

On the chuck pile go:

*Anyone over 25 (We’re a young organisation)
*Women with children (Kids are always sick or have problems at school)
*Married women (ditto)
*People who live more than 50k outside Windhoek (Will have to stay with relatives, which won’t work out, so they will go home)

I paled. It just seems so wrong. But then, when we have over 500 CVs, and our shortlist must not exceed five candidates, it does seem like a good way, if unfair, to get rid of the ones who won’t get anywhere anyway. I must confess to having come round to this way of thinking after dutifully reading over 30 CVs.

So, in the spirit of efficiency, I have added the following to the chuck pile criteria:

*People who staple their CVs in a way that causes me to injure myself when I open the envelope
*People who write their motivation letters on scrappy bits of stained paper with badly torn edges
*People who can’t spell ‘receptionist’, ‘typist’ or the name of the organisation
*People who fill in application forms for other positions and use that as their CV
*People who enclose every single certification they have ever earned, even if it’s in swimming.

It’s making a huge difference.

I had a mercifully brief conversation about my sexual availability with my taxi driver this morning that took me right back to the time I spent in Egypt, and the constant question “Do you have a boyfriend?”

When I worked as a tour leader, I led a number of different trips. For some reason, if you were ending one trip at a particular hotel in Luxor, the likelihood was that you should relocate to another hotel in town to begin the next trip. Cue extended lie in, followed by hasty packing of huge rucksack, dragging belongings downstairs trailing scarves and toiletries, flinging it all in a taxi and haring off to check in across town.

I used to have the following conversation about 20 times a day:

“Where you from?”
“England”
“You have a boyfriend?”
“Yep, most certainly do, thanks for asking.”
“Egyptian boyfriend, or English boyfriend?”
“English.” (No choice but to answer this – if I said Egyptian, I’d be expected to provide name, addresse, shoes size and dental records)
“Aha. Then you need an Egyptian boyfriend too.”

Normally at this point, I’d laugh, and he’d laugh, and we’d all have a jolly old giggle, I’d pay him, and he’d bugger off to annoy his next client.

One guy took it a bit further.

“You like sex?”
“Excuse me?”
“You like sex?”
“I wouldn’t know”, I said. “I’m a virgin. And anyway, in my culture it’s considered extremely rude to ask a woman that question.”
“But all western women, they like sex. All the time.”
I told him that if he didn’t shut up, I’d get out of the cab and find someone else to take me to my hotel. He kept quiet for a blissful five seconds.

“I have a bed.”
“Gosh. How nice for you.” I sensed this was going to be an interesting discussion.
“Is in my flat. My bed. Is in my flat. Is nearby.”
“Lovely.” Getmeoutofhere.
“You come with me now, we have sex, I bring you to your hotel. Fifteen minutes.”

How could a girl refuse such an appealing offer? A hurried humping session with a toothless, unwashed cabbie on a scummy mattress in the sweltering heat of Luxor was just what the doctor ordered. Naturally I requested that he hightail it to his flat immediately to commence festivities. In fact, why not just pull into the nearest alleyway and go at it on the sticky plastic seats in the back?

At least that’s what I meant to say. What actually came out of my mouth was “No. You’re extremely rude and I don’t want to talk to you any more. Shut up, and take me to the Pharoah hotel, which is what I’m paying you for or I’ll report you to the police.”

A golden opportunity missed.

As I dragged my stuff out of the boot, the hotel porters rushed to give me a hand. I turned to pay the driver, and found him proffering a grubby piece of paper.

“My phone number. You change your mind, you want sex, I come, I pick you up. Fifteen minutes.”

Mute with amazement, I took it. I probably still have it somewhere. You never know when I might need it.

This is what I did with my weekend.

I wish I could show a picture of the sunset I saw on Saturday night. We were ensconced in a lovely, shady camp spot, boerwors and lamb chops at the ready under the tree, braai ready to fire up. We put everything we needed into my backpack, and then we climbed for a while until the Landrover became a speck far below, and the whole world was laid out before me. The sky is so vast here, the horizons so far away. Mountains gave way to mountains that gave way to a limitless expanse of blue. The half moon burned brighter as the earth turned, and slowly hid the sun from view. A kestrel flung itself out into the thermals and drifted, keening, until we could no longer see it.

In the shade of a small cave, we sat and poured the wine, and then we sat and watched as the sky became a canvas that you wouldn’t think could be real. Soft greens and impossible blues merged into pink and purple, like a fantastically complex cocktail before it’s shaken. The plains stretched away, seemingly empty, but alive with countless invisible lives. In my mind I populated the landscape with ostriches running and zebras grazing.

When it was over we climbed down, before the light went, and finished the wine by the fire.

No photo could do it justice, and my writing certainly can’t. I just hope I never forget how it looked.