Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life: Brief encounter aboard the Mombasa to Nairobi ‘Lunatic Express’

issue 29 June 2013

Many years ago I met a woman in a train on the Mombasa to Nairobi ‘Lunatic Express’ line. She was seated opposite me in the compartment, next to her husband. The three of us had the compartment to ourselves. It was early in the morning. I’ve forgotten what the sleeping arrangements had been the night before. I think perhaps the husband and I had bedded down together and she’d rejoined him in the morning. Her husband had then left the compartment to go to the lavatory or dining car, and she and I had begun to talk.

She’d met and married the husband after a whirlwind romance a year before, she told me, and they’d opened and run a small restaurant together up the coast at Lamu. All very idyllic and romantic, perhaps, but the business had failed, then the marriage.

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