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I am crying all the time this week and in order to get anything done, I have to keep working while I cry. Screens are a blur, phones get wet. I cried in the taxi all the way to East Legon and cried in the Uber home. We passed through some heavy intersections where people from the North whose mothers feared vaccines are living out their groundfloor days on handmade skateboards and, if very lucky, in a wheelchair. A sweet-faced lady in a chair was trolleyed past my window. She recognised white and put out her cupped hand. Mami, how are you today? I am fine, I told her, leaking water like a can of honey tapped full of holes. Thank you, I told the beautiful man shriveled from the waist down whose crossed feet were flippers on the eroded wood, he was selling keychains and lighters and I wanted to open my purse but all I could do was say, I’m sorry I cannot help you today. I’m so sorry. I had gone over there for a massage, my first since packing up Berlin in a tower of boxes, an overdue luxury that must have cost his three month rent. On the table I lay face down crying through the hole. The masseuse passed me kitchen towels at intervals. Her name was Beauty, no, Gifty. That used to be my name, too. Today all I had was the remnants of myself a lover leaves us with and self pity lit like a beacon flaring and travelling across several hills. I had the cheap Chinese canteen in which a man in his seventies asked How are you, and I said, cheerfully, very hungry, how are you, and he said, not the best, and I sat down and he began to speak.

We had a conversation which consisted of his facts delivered with no gift wrapping. He didn’t even need me to say really? wow, that’s incredible. He told me about Australia, it is very large, a country but also a continent. Yes, I said. I’ve noticed. He told me we grow wine in Australia. Some few minutes in I told him this is not a real conversation, you have not asked me one question apart from the obvious gambit of where are you from, and now you’re handing me information I already have as though you’re teaching me something, men treat women like this all the time and I have had a bellyful, I’m tired. He looked at me as though I had spat across him. Then he said, I have two daughters. I waited for, they tell me this, and I realise now I have never listened to them. Instead he began to hand me information of a more personal kind, one lives in LA and one on the peninsula where he grew up, they have good husbands but they’re neither of them happy. This was an accusation I recognised. Why had I left the man who says he loves me and who won’t stop calling even now. Why break my own heart. Why can’t we be happy. I said, interrupting again, maybe that’s because they are living in a world where men treat women the way you are treating me right now, it is tiring, you don’t let us be fully human, you don’t find out who we are. He looked startled. Then he said, I grew up on a peninsula in Italy, it is just as hot there as here but we don’t have the humidity. Humidity is worse than heat. No, I said. No! I put up my hand, put up my whole arm. My food arrived and I gathered it in with the crook of my free arm. “I’ve given you two chances and that’s all you get. Why not treat women more graciously. Why not learn from us for a change.” It is not, of course, really him I am speaking to, it is all of them, each one a replacement for the traumas of the last, I was crying as I paid my bill and crying as I waited in the thin shade for my taxi and my belly aches like wood left underwater.

I met six (6) beautiful British-Ghanaian men, who were sitting at the next table to mine. They had all just landed the night before, that is, last night: apart from ‘one idiot’ who inexplicably somehow booked a ticket for tonight and whom they were just about to haul down from Kotoka. “Do you smoke weed?” ‘Thanks, but I’ve done my time.’ By the end of the night it was, “I love you, Cathoel. No I really mean it, I just really really do.” He had to stand up to say it, putting his hands either side of my face but somewhat far away, not like lover distance, more like new friends. The ringleader whose name was on their band t shirts saying, “Wait, no! put the camera on me. I need to say. I love Cathoel. I just love her! She, is,” and we roared in sympathy as another round of whatever was brought and whatever and I essayed my theory, which is: Ghanaians say to each other, Chairman, Big Man, Bossu, Original, and they particularly say so whenever they need to ask for some service. Can you clean this asphalt under my feet. Can you bring me another cold beer. We ordered skewers and said, soft one, though, Boss — soft one eh. My theory is from how enslaved men once they had escaped into jazz called each other man, yeah man, right, man, that’s a good idea, man. And that this was (so I heard) because they on the plantations were always and forever called Boy. So I think it’s related. The conversation changed. We were talking about the music we’re going to make. That music will be partly Australian, part Ghana, part how did we get here. It is only half past ten I feel stony warm sober and I am in a different world.

The littlest member of drawing group was handed over in a hurry and he settled down, put his sticky little hands up on my neck and his face on my chest and decided seemed he liked it. When he woke up I put him down and since then every time we meet and draw when he is hauling himself around under the table he looks up and even if I’m frowning with concentration he just gazes at me with these big juicy one-tooth grins. He likes to put my discarded shoes in his wet mouth because that is how babies converse with this world. I was pregnant once after longing forever for a child and that child’s father who is two metres tall got angry and jostled me in a doorway and roared and shouted and I refused to cower but stood up to him saying I dare you, too proud to remind him I am with child and then he knocked me to the ground in our tiny house and walloped me over the head with a book so hard he broke its spine and I miscarried and that child will now never be born and I miss the joy and the tedious frustration and the chance to love and care for her or for him, every day, and I will be sad not all the time but every week about the death of this life I carried inside me here until the afternoon of the day I die. 

The long trotro ride from Accra Mall to the middle of nowhere. The long wait under an awning while a second trotro very slowly filled. The long trotro ride to a small town with a big market. The share taxi to a smaller town with a driver so tender he slowed almost to a stop to get us all over the deep potholes seamlessly. The cute okada rider who followed us until it was time to disembark. The swift and zipping moto ride thorough narrow winding woven-palm-wall and rammed-earth village laneways, past a stream of local men each of whom greeted us gravely as it grew dark, “You are welcome.” The two intelligent teenagers who helped us carry our stuff over the sandy lanes and along under the trees (Lydia is backpacking for a month and I had three different books to read), the trudge over a small rickety bridge with beautiful handpainted fishing prows moored under the palm trees. The lumps in our burning throats when all we had to give them was money but they asked, sensibly, for ‘a book’ to assist with their education. The resolve to carry even more books from now on. The fences built from compilations of old and faded hand painted boat legends, such as GOD IS IN CONTROL/CONSUMING FIRE. The first night sleeping in a sweetly made plump low bed as soft as straw ticking, under a grass roof, on a soft sand floor, within four palmleaf walls, which a gentle man named Mawuli later showed me how to weave… the sea on one side and the freshwater estuary on the other .The fishing boats passing at dusk and at dawn. The annoying rasta who wanted us to pay him too much attention, who took the huff when I politely told him you talk plenty and listen little and you have tired us, please we don’t want your company today. The little black and white doggoe who fell in love and came to coil around my feet everywhere I sat down. The overpriced food und undercleaned toilets. The stripey palms, one of whom had capsized into the river. The water soft and idle and fresh and fast moving on our skins. The sensation of sleeping 13 hours at a time like a sunken ship. The whistling breezes. The bonfire. The night. The night! The night!

Looping conversation with a lady sitting on a park bench. She had met her husband at the age of sixteen when she stuck her hand up through the sand of some faraway place and took his. Maybe on the other side of the world. Maybe Australia. This was painful, she explained, “because I’m just 5’4″ and the earth is 40,000km deep.” So, ah: that’s how you met? Well, no, we actually got married earlier, when I was five. She sat between three bulging sports bags rimed with grease. She’d been homeless for 93 days. A very long summer. The conversation had first started up with her objection to the idea that, Well, it was cold, but it’s autumn. “I prefer ‘late summer,’” she said. I passed her my tray of chips and she sat with it on her lap, half laughing, before passing it back, unable to share. “Ordinarily, I would love to. But I’m too drunk.” She was intelligent and kind. She had polished off a bottle of apple schnapps and was working up the energy to go buy another. A friend of hers, a fifty-year-old punk with a seamed face and combat jacket, stopped behind the fence and they talked about collecting bottles. At the centre of the green, fenced square a brindle dog leaped at one passing furry friend after another, demanding play. After her punker friend had gone I brought the conversation back round to her husband but still can’t work out how it all was supposed to have happened. We kept looping away from the questions I most wanted to ask. When you met, how did you work out it was him? How did he work out it was you? Did, like, both of you remember this strange experience, feeling someone take your hand from the far side of the world? Why didn’t it work out between you? Or did it? As he is still “my husband.” So then is he homeless too? Where is he now?

This is a story from a strange encounter back in Berlin, eight years ago today.

It’s nine years this July since I came to Berlin for a week and after 10 months away in Ghana it feels so very strange. This morning I got lectured for five minutes by a small child because I had committed some minor infringement. In Australia, in Ghana, this behaviour in a three year old would be a sign of some kind of psychosis. The lockdown has eased somewhat and I went out for a beer with a philosopher acquaintance and we sat in the late sunshine saying yes, it is really quite cold. Summer has gone. This place always seems to me balanced on a deep core of ice that defrosts only partially, for only a few brief weeks.

What was this morning’s minor infringement, you ask? I have set out, as is customary, about a hundred books in boxes on the pavement to give away. Berliners call it ‘zu Verschenken.’ I also propped up on top a feather pillow which has a water stain but is fluffy and clean and comforting. This little boy and his mother felt that the pillow was ‘dreckig’, a shaming word in German. It means filthy, repugnant somehow. I said, well, I thought as winter is coming perhaps one of these people in the homeless community might like this only I didn’t want to offer it to them personally, I thought if you needed such a thing it might be easier to just come and choose it for yourself under cover of the night.

I indicated a rowdy crowd of revellers who live around the church at the bottom of our road, one of them in a fragile house ingeniously made from a stack of opened umbrellas. Dreckig, the little boy said again. Das müssen Sie wegwerfen, you must throw it away.

I said, well, if after a couple of days no one has taken it, I will. But I think also the landfill… Dreckig, he said. Ohh, Germany. This was not the first time I had had the road rules, or communal expectations, explained to me by a three-year-old. Sitting with my friend in the penetrating wind I reflected bitterly how Berlin has allowed me to fool myself: it seems like a community of artists but is in fact a narcissist playground dominated by shallow extraverts. As I was thinking these dismal thoughts a blonde woman came bouncing up and stood in front of us. She was pretty like thistledown and behind her her friend sat sucking Aperol spritz through a stainless steel straw. My expression was unwelcoming and she seemed to falter, then spoke up bravely. Excuse me. I’m sorry to interrupt you. It’s just I had to tell you that I find you so extremely beautiful.

I walked past a group of boys and one of them said, opportunistically but with a sweet formality, ‘I would like to marry you.’ ‘Really?’ I stopped. I put my hands on my hips. ‘But I think I might be too young for you.’ He laughed and showed me the lovely gap between his teeth. He was eleven, maybe twelve. Well, alright then, young prince. I walked home down the narrow path that has its own trees and bought pineapple from a woman carrying pineapples on her head. I walked for hours until the night came down. As it grew dark the moon grew brighter. It is solstice everywhere but on the equator, where we are directly engaged with the sun.

In Accra I have four or five street friendships with little doggoes and pussycats who live around the way. Tonight I was walking home late past a famous club when three bouncers slumped over their phones sat up abruptly. A blonde dog with a triangle head shot out of the bushes and raced after me, barking.

Oi, they said, hey! The biggest one got up. It’s ok, I said, she’s my friend. Then (bashfully) Thank you.

Oh, she’s your friend? Ohk, and they relaxed into their screens once more. Triangle Dog propped up her feet against my skirt and let me scratch her round the gills. I made some slow, strokeful investigations behind the ears. Her half-grown puppy pressed up behind her, what am I missing? What’s going on. The mother dog closed her eyes with pleasure. Hello, little darling, I said, hello, sweetheart. How are you doing, everything nice, everything good? I told her, isn’t it a wonderful night. For indeed the tropical standing trees were bowing and bending in this sweet night breeze and all the whole time I was walking, I felt accompanied.

Close to this spot in a compound filled with trees I lived with four fellow travellers and three doggies for three months, nine months ago at the beginning of my three week visit. My seventh visit to Ghana and the first time alone, no loved one to meet me and wait for me at Kotoka airport. I began to unravel what had been done to my financial life and my family’s generosity and have extended my return ticket and tourist visa over and over and moved house nine times. In that first place, leafy and whickering, lived a large Alsatian guard dog, an elderly relative scaly with scurf who unfortunately took a favour to me and I used to have to scour my hands clean every time after greeting her because she was so stinky and kinda scratchy — and then the third and smallest doggie, a white fluffy morsel named Bella. She had dark eyes and a crumpled little tail. Bella got farmed out to a father-to-be and reappeared with her belly bulging. It was evident she had found the process shocking and she seemed shyer and started turning up at my door every other morning, shimmying and cringing. If I stepped aside leaving the door ajar she would bolt inside and climb effortfully onto my bed to stretch out with a sigh, and if I lay down she came and pressed her fullness into my lap. They had a hanging cane chair in the garden and I sat there in the shade reading entire books end to end, there is only one bookshop in Ghana and I had plundered it. Bella came and foisted her pointy little feet into my lap whenever lap was in reach, until I lifted her into the groove she wanted to settle. My little farmer.

My date took me to the poolside with his mother. This was an accident. I had already set out from my house and he wrote saying, umm actually, Mum’s coming too. He took us to a fancy hotel where I’ve sat poolside several times writing; because even for writers, a ten dollar coffee isn’t that much more costly than a three dollar coffee. I’ve been using these slivers of luxury to ease myself through life for many years. There we sat, Mum and he and I, on cane loungers under a row of palm trees. I said, brightly, So you realise your son and I don’t know each other at all, we just fell into conversation yesterday at the physiotherapist’s? I am nursing a catastrophic injury from a blow from my landlord, long story. I go twice a week and they use pressure, massage, heat and manipulation — not unlike a bad relationship. I sat down and said, Good afternoon, and this large man with bright eyes said, Good afternoon, and I said, Are you fine, and he said, I’m fine, and you, and then we began to laugh because “If we were really fine, we wouldn’t be sitting at the physiotherapist’s.” I said, imagine you turn up at the desk and they say, Fine? Oh then I will cancel your appointment. 

At the hotel I had left my phone on charge at the front desk with a glorious young man who said, I like your hair. Thanks, I said, twitching a plait: I grew it myself. This, in Ghana, is more unusual than in Australia because an entire generation of black women have been persuaded their own natural hair is somehow missing something or wrong. When it rains they all dart away for shelter, clutching handkerchiefs over their heads. I told the waiter, you know I am envious of yours, right? It’s so curly and the colour is so good. We stood grinning. So when I rounded the pool in my sixties hostess gown and bare feet and went inside, masked, to retrieve the phone, I passed under a broad big-leafed tree which thrust its roots out into the broad-bladed lawn in runnels of neatly maintained root-ridged soil. It made a pattern like an outline on paper of a hand. I squatted down under the palm trees to gather the cerise palm nuts so ripe they were falling out of their neat pale creamy cases. I could hear a Ghanaian bird singing a long, descending trill. I could hear four men standing facing each other in the pool discussing marketing and strategy, two words I just can’t stand. I took my handful of red nuts back to our row of loungers and showed them to my date and his mother. In the background they were playing ‘Still the One’ by Shania Twain, which another man had sung to me a mere few weeks back at a drinking spot in Legon: the only one I dream of/still the one I want/for life. I let my legs lie flat so they overhung the too-short chair and put on sunglasses and closed my eyes. Then the waiter turned up with his round black tray and began to decant drinks from a frosted pitcher. It’s always summer here.