We'd Like a Different Room, Please

The culture shock hits home. Well, our hotel room, anyway.

We are in our new room. My mother didn't like the old one because there were no carpets on the floor - only polished dark-wood floorboards. This room has carpets, well, a huge woven rug over the floorboards. But there is no ice in this ice-bucket, and the one from our old room didn't follow us. 

"David, go get some ice from the machine outside, " my father says.

"Okay." I'm wearing jogger shorts and flip-flops - a big change from the corduroys and parka I arrived in two days ago.

The door closes behind me, and I am alone with the Gilbey's Gin ice-bucket. The hotel landing is quiet except for the vaguely reassuring hum of a wall-mounted air-conditioner below the window to my right, and the occasional faint rattle of ice-blocks falling inside the ice machine further down the corridor. Bright African sunlight streams through the window, and as I walk through the resultant rectangle of light projected onto the carpet I can feel its warmth on my legs. There is a smell; a smell I will remember for the rest of my life and still encounter. It is a smell of polished mahogany, of plush dark-green carpets, of starched sheets and old air-conditioners; a smell of hotels. 

The ice machine is at the far end of the landing near the stair-case that leads down to the ground floor, and as I slide back its heavy steel lid and start to take out some ice with the bucket's little scoop, ice-blocks falls onto my hand as the machine's innards disgorge once more their newly-frozen contents. I fill the bucket, replace the scoop, and then head back to our room where my father opens the door to my knock.

"I filled it," I offer, walking past him into the room and lifting the little bucket up above my head to show that's what I'm talking about.

"Thanks, put it on the table"

There's a small round table here, and I put the ice down on it, next to his glass. Across the room  I hear a noise from my mother, as if she has been punched in the stomach. As I turn she drops onto the double bed with her head in her hands and starts to utter a series of soft short wails. 

"Dad! What's wrong with her?" I ask running over to the bed.

"Look out the window," he says, plopping ice into his brandy and Coke, and ignoring my mother completely as if he's been here before and knows there's nothing to be done.

I'm kneeling next to my mother, asking her if she's okay; trying to get some response from her heaving form. She seems to be okay - just upset. I stand up and move across to the window on the other side of the bed. There's an air-conditioner below the window here, too. It's plastic vents are cold and wet as I press my palms on it, but resting my forehead on the window I can feel the glass is warm from the heat outside; the air-conditioners are left running during the day against its relentless January onslaught.

Down below us, on the other side of the road, there is an other-wordly sight, the likes of which I have never seen: a crush of African humanity. Hundreds and hundreds of black folk, and this close to the window I can hear the drone and din of all their voices. And there is music - the glass vibrates to the beat. Every now and then I can hear laughter and occasional high-pitched cries as wares are advertised or services offered. There are chickens in cane-cages; small fires with meat and sausages cooking on metal grids over them, each one effusing smoke that creates a haze over the whole fiasco; goats of all sizes tethered with lengths of twine to makeshift stalls, and unknown herbs and roots hanging from their corrugated tin roofs. Toyota mini-buses are parked haphazardly in among the whole scene.

I turn round to face my old man who's looking at me helplessly, opening his mouth to say something, but I get the words out first:

"It's the Market Square."