I met Combo at dawn. I was standing on the Malawian shore of the lake watching the sun rise over the mountains in Mozambique and she came and stood wordlessly beside me and we watched together. After a while I offered her a swig from the bottle I was holding. ‘No,’ she said, without taking her eyes away from the sun. ‘I am too drunk.’
It was the first sunrise of a four-day music festival. I’d been dancing all night on the beach. A line of four middle-class English girls were kneeling in a row at the water’s edge performing the Astanga yoga Salute to the Sun. You could feel the heat of the sun as soon as it had freed itself from the mountain tops. I was utterly at peace with myself for the first time in as long as I can remember.
After another while I said, ‘I’m going back to the room to sleep.’ She took this as the invitation that it was and we turned around and walked very slowly and silently together across the white sand towards the rooms under the palm trees.
There was a baboon on the stairs. This particular one had a reputation for indiscriminate violence, but like everyone else that morning he was in an irenic frame of mind and let us pass without incident.
I was sharing the room with the financial director of the festival, but had yet to meet him. Under the mosquito net was a sleeping form. I lifted the net and extended the hand of friendship. Once he’d realised where he was, and who I was, and what the situation was, he returned the handshake, gallantly said hello to Combo, and went back to sleep.
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