The Man in the Airport Café

By Student Contributor Joanne Marie Dwyer

I am in a dusty, sun-baked Kisumu on Kenya’s Lake Victoria, trying to get to Uganda. I was meant to be there yesterday for a short stay at the end of my trip, but was late leaving my old home in Kenya’s tea covered highlands. I had gone to visit a few familiar faces and the schools my charity had partnered with.

There was a problem locating the taxi driver and I had not made it to Kisumu in time to get the bus back to Kampala. This had not mattered much at the time – it is wise in Africa to go with the flow – and I had spent a night in Kisumu instead, wiling away an evening with some wine and a rooftop dinner. But now I have a plane to catch out of Kampala to London and the bus I had booked for this morning to take me across the border, which is only a couple of hours away, is nowhere in sight.

“The bus is delayed,” the man in the wooden shack with ‘Ticket Office’ painted on the front informs me.

Nearby is The Pentagon, The White House, a coffin maker and God’s Car Wash. I am not sure what the first two sell. Barack Obama’s paternal family still live in these parts and Luos, the main tribe here (Kenya has 43 of them), have embraced their American ties with pride.

“Where is it at the moment?” I enquire.

“I am not sure,” the man says.

“Could you ring the driver and find out?”

The man shakes his head.

“My phone is dead,” he says.

“Oh, that’s okay. We can use my phone,” I say.

The man shakes his head again.

“I don’t know the number,” he replies. “It is on my phone.”

The man disappears in search of a phone charger and when he returns, he has some news.

“The bus is still in Nairobi,” he announces. “There is some small traffic.”

And then:

“It will be here at 4pm.”

I know that it will not be here at 4pm. It takes around nine hours to reach Kisumu by bus from Nairobi, assuming there are no further delays, which one can never assume (I was once on a bus that got stuck in a mudslide), and it is already late morning.

All the other buses are full. I try to call Kenya Airways but can’t get through on the phone so I head to their office in town.

“We can put you on the 3pm flight to Nairobi,” the travel agent says.

“It is the last available seat on the plane. It is in business class.”

I have never flown business class before.

The travel agent taps away at his keyboard, squints at the screen and looks back up at me.

“You can pick up the 6pm flight to Entebbe from there,” he says, “It is a one-hour flight so you will have plenty of time.”

I think about work and what they would say if I called on Monday and said I was still here. Perhaps I could practice the art of remote working. I also think about my bank balance. But mostly I think, maybe there’s something in this.

My insistence on taking long, ostensibly romantic journeys via various, not always comfortable, modes of transport, in the vague hope of seeking out a handsome stranger had seemed, as my friend Sally put it, “an endearing quirk”. And now here I am about to fly half-way across Kenya in order to fly straight back again, over Kisumu, this time, and onto Uganda.

I make my way into Kisumu’s tiny airport and set my bag down on a chair in the cafe, sensing someone’s eyes on me. I look up and straight into the watchful gaze of a man seated on the far side of the cafe, talking into his mobile phone in an accent that is hard to make out. He doesn’t smile. Neither do I. Our eyes are locked on one another and I don’t want to be the first to look away. He is dressed in black suit trousers and a white, long-sleeved shirt that he has rolled back at the elbows.

The waiter interrupts. I order a mango juice, send a text to my Dad, and check the departure board. The clock next to it is 30 minutes slow and I wonder if this has confused any passengers yet.

The man stands up to light a cigarette and I watch as, silhouetted against the white light and simmering heat pouring in through the open door, he lifts a little boy into his arms to show him the planes coming into land. Schoolchildren like to huddle against the wire fence to wave and cheer them on. It isn’t his child but something about the way he picks the boy up, or maybe the fact that he does this at all, makes me think that he probably has one.

The boarding call rings through the Tannoy and something inside me shifts as he strides towards me on his way out. Still on the phone, he catches my eye and smiles.

In the largely empty departure lounge, I take a seat by the window. In a moment, he is there in my peripheral vision, scanning the room, and in the next he is beside me.

His phone rings again.

“I’m fine,” he says dryly into the receiver, “apart from the fact that my phone is about to die.”

I am needlessly deleting text messages and pretending to be fixated on something that isn’t happening outside when he speaks.

“Married? Kids?”

I turn to face him, wondering when I became old enough for either.

“No,” I reply. “And you?”

We only had five minutes. He had two little girls. He was South African, older than me. He had a job here in Kisumu. He had once lived in England and knew the town where I had grown-up. I told him I was coming back in three months’ time and again the month after that. He handed me his card so that we could meet up.

I couldn’t hand him mine because it was buried in my bag which was carrying my underwear. There was no way of retrieving it without pulling out my intimate wardrobe.

As we walked towards the plane, he with his sunglasses on, me squinting into the sunlight, he joked and said, “So how can a charity director be sitting in business class while the MD of a private company is slumming it in economy?”

Each time I returned to England, I was torn in two a little bit more. I could have stood still in the middle of Oxford Street as crowds of people jostled and pushed their way past, immune to them all. Everything reminded me of the physical reality of my separation from Africa. The first time I stepped foot on Kenyan soil I knew in my bones that I would not want to leave.

Epic is a word that belongs to Africa. It is a place of paradoxes, contradictions, surprises and extremes. Alive with vibrancy and colour, its majestic beauty contrasts with how it can be maddening at times to live in, nudging you closer towards insanity before locking you in a tight embrace and making you fall in-love with it all over again. There are those who do not recover. And other lost souls who try, wherever else they go, to recreate Africa, searching for something they have already left behind.

It was “R”, my man in the airport cafe, who, in the end, was my trigger.

“You’re moving, aren’t you?” interrupted Mum when I called with another anecdote from Kenya.

I breathed in.

“Yes,” I said.

“When?” asked Mum.

She knew this would happen. She wasn’t surprised, either, by my whirlwind relationship with R. For me to mention somebody was noteworthy and I had mentioned R from the beginning.

Our first date took place in the usually tranquil surroundings of Lake Naivasha, on the floor of the Great Rift Valley, with 15 British teenagers. This was the fourth time I had taken a group of students and teachers to Kenya to spend time in their partner school, which was the main focus of the charity I had set-up. I was running an orientation session for them in Naivasha.

Naivasha was my first real taste of Africa. It felt like an antidote to Nairobi’s hectic welcome. I was 20 years old and had just stepped off an overnight plane from London with a bunch of other volunteers. The sun was beating down from a cloudless sky and streaming through the half-open windows, flecks of red dust made its way into the bus and settled onto my clothes and my hair, cars were honking at each other, overtaking from the inside and colliding at roundabouts, throngs of smartly dressed commuters were walking swiftly to work, while everything from the vegetable stalls at the side of the road to the women standing behind them seemed bathed in bright, multi-coloured light.

In Naivasha, I walked amongst zebra, antelope and giraffes as they roamed free under yellow fever trees. Acacias dotted the landscape around the lake and vervet monkeys darted about on the look-out for food while purple jacarandas blossomed and bloomed, as tiny, turquoise-breasted birds - the aptly named Superb Starlings - hopped and sang.

It was Africa distilled and framed into a single shot, imprinted forever in my mind’s eye.

I wanted to share it with my school groups, and with R. It was the first time we had seen each other since the airport and the only time I had.

I had tried to come up with a reason to email him and found one in The Daily Nation which carried a report on a small fire at his company’s Nairobi office.

Hi,

We met at the airport last week and today, Nation Media online tells me that your Nairobi offices had a small problem over the weekend.

Hope all is ok there and in Kisumu, too.

The Duke of Breeze, as the name might suggest and as you probably already know, is cooler.

Jo

R told me when we met that the humidity was too much, so I thought I would point him in the direction of Kisumu’s rooftop bar, The Duke of Breeze, instead. And so began a three-month online correspondence before R came to see me in Naivasha.

He joined my group for dinner on the upstairs veranda of a restaurant in a private game sanctuary, talking, laughing and sharing stories. The students chatted amongst themselves, now and then complaining about the food - steak, steamed vegetables and roasted potatoes was no match for a McDonald’s - as darkness fell all around. R and I knew almost everything about each other and our rapport was instant and easy.

The lake had flooded a few days before, encroaching on the sanctuary’s land and bringing out the hippos as they grunted in the dark at the water’s edge. You couldn’t see them, but you knew they were there. A tourist had been killed by a hippo not far from here. Julie, the restaurant owner, had come up with a plan to ferry everyone to the bus and onto the safety of a nearby campsite, since camping here wasn’t an option. This involved Julie driving a few at a time a mere 100 hundred meters from the foot of the veranda directly to the bus, in the back of her Land Rover Discovery.

TIA, as the saying goes: This is Africa.

I had a week off between trips and spent it with R in Kisumu. By the time I flew home, I was in talks with a newspaper editor in Nairobi and I had six weeks to plan my move: five months, one week and one day after R and I first met. The nearness of my impending departure, with a veiled sense of permanence hanging over it, hit my mum a little more. But she was also happy - and relieved - that I had met R.

I told her about R early on over lunch at an Italian in Bloomsbury. Mum immediately pictured herself with a future son-in-law and even grandchildren, which had been in demand for some time. The fact that all of this would probably unfold on a different continent was, at this stage, a mere inconvenience.

“Mum.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve met someone.”

Mum smiled.

“In Kenya.”

Mum smiled more.

“He’s South African.”

Mum nodded, still smiling.

“He lives in Kenya…”

“Ok,” smiled Mum.

“He’s older than me…”

“Uh-huh.”

Mum kept smiling, unperturbed.

“He has two daughters…”

Mum beamed.