My six months of madness

I once went mad in Africa and it was no fun at all. I was snorkelling off the coast of Zanzibar and I dived a little too deep, and something in the middle of my head went click. And then I came up and fell on to a boat that took me back to the paradise sands, and when I got there I couldn’t walk straight and everything started to fall apart.

In fairness, that might not have been madness. That might have just been a problem with my inner ear. At the time, though, it was all bundled together. I’d been sub-Saharan for about nine months by this point, living cheap in the Cape and writing a novel. Three weeks earlier, we had packed up our belongings and caught a flight to Dar es Salaam, with a plan to drift back south over the next few months on buses filled with chickens. First, though, I’d popped into a chemist and bought us half a year’s supply of antimalarials over the counter.

Things got weird pretty quickly. First came the dreams. In my teens, I used to sometimes have dreams which made me feel psychic. I’d dream a thing and the next day I’d see it. Like déjà vu, pretty much, although far more explicit. Never really been able to explain it. They went away, anyway, after puberty, but once I started taking these pills they came storming back. There were sex dreams, too, but not good ones. Dark, tempestuous nightmares, where my body would convulse to the beat of the ceiling fan, and then my sheet sleeping bag would go in the wash.