He Said/She Said(79)

Civilisation seemed a long way away by the time we crested the hill to see the makeshift township. The festival site had better infrastructure than some of the villages we’d passed en route, with a little bush supermarket, a row of showers and African-style squat-down toilets that were cleaner than any you’d find in a British shopping centre. Cafés sold drugs as openly and cheaply as beer.

‘It feels right,’ I said to Kit. He simply tilted his face to the sky and grinned. There would be no checking the forecast for him here, no worrying about weather conditions. An African winter is predictable. That day, the sky was the kind of warm bright blue that makes you doubt the colour could ever be associated with coldness, and its clarity made us doubt the very existence of clouds. On a fully rigged stage, a reggae band chugged their way through a series of Bob Marley covers. We walked past a tent where a marbled graphic was being projected on to one wall. Kit picked up a little coconut mask of a screaming African face and held it over his own eyes. ‘This looks exactly like Mac did when he was sectioned.’ It was the first time he’d ever been able to joke about Mac’s recovery.

There was no dusk; one minute the sun turned the colour of orange squash and the next it sank without warning behind the horizon. We ran through the new night to pile on the layers and lie at the mouth of our tent, backs on the ground. At 4,000 feet above sea level, with minimal light pollution and only a pink moon glowing, the African sky was not so much speckled with stars as streaked with them; the effect was meteorological rather than celestial, the Milky Way a stormcloud that threatened to rain glitter. There was an atavistic satisfaction in gazing at the heavens.

‘We’re meant to look up,’ I said. He nodded into my shoulder, then rolled into me. The shallow convex of his belly tucked into the small of my back, matching the rise and fall of my diaphragm. Even our breathing was in synchronicity that night.



Perhaps it was the effort involved in getting here or my need for atonement but Zambia felt more pilgrimage than holiday. We eschewed the stages and bars for the shade of trees. That must be why it took her so long to see us.

When it was time for the eclipse, the organisers pulled the plug on the sound systems. ‘First contact,’ whispered Kit, as the moon took its first baby bite out of the sun, to soaring cheers. Here at last was the reverence I had so hoped for in Cornwall. Not a silence, there were too many of us for that, but every whoop and whisper was respectful of and somehow devoted to the phenomenon. The crowd tilted their faces towards the shrinking crescent sun in heliotrope unison. An hour followed in which it seemed to me I barely blinked.

‘Don’t you want to get a picture?’ I asked, gesturing to the camera dangling by his side. He waved it away.

‘Nah,’ he said, to my astonishment. ‘Not this time. Let me just live it for once.’

Then the winds came, that eerie nowhere breeze I’d experienced in Cornwall, only here it was warm and gritty with dust. As if at the wind’s signal, time, crawling for the last hour, sped up and dusk pushed in from the east.

‘This is what two thousand miles an hour looks like,’ said Kit, as the darkness charged us. The landscape changed as dramatically as the sky, our shadows suddenly shrinking as though we were melting into the ground. I started to shake, and reached for Kit’s hand. He lifted his arm and twirled me around, ballerina-style, so that I could see the twilight on every horizon.

A ring of white light surrounded the sun, one pure diamond flare teetering at the tip, and then the switch of totality was thrown. Oh my God, dio mio, mein Gott, wow, screamed the crowd. The moon was a black disc covering the sun and streamers of plasma flared out, like a gas ring being ignited. ‘Is it safe?’ I asked Kit. I meant can I take my glasses off but the question felt bigger, too. Is it safe to be alive, on this spinning rock? Is it safe to be this small? Are we going to be all right?

He removed my glasses in answer and I looked with naked eyes at the coal-black ball in the sky. I knew all the theory, I knew I was looking at vast promontories of hydrogen gas, but as I stood there I could think only in terms of gods and magic. The corona danced, a living golden flare twice as big as the sun itself. A star is not an angel but a monster. It was so huge that it made everything that had happened to us, everything we had done, seem tiny. Regret, guilt and fear melted away.

‘I’m healed,’ I said, and it didn’t feel trite in this context. You can say anything under the shadow. Kit’s cheek was wet on my shoulder and I matched him tear for tear. We weren’t the only ones crying; there was soft sobbing nearby, and in the distance, someone howled like a wolf. We stayed like that for four and a half minutes. As if programmed by some internal clock, Kit slid my goggles back down like a visor; seconds later, there was a blaze of yellow light and the shadows melted away to the east. It was over. The tears I wiped away now were happy.

‘When’s the next one?’ I said.



The following day, buses that had brought us here arrived to take us back, only now there were seven thousand people all trying to leave one destination at one time and chaos ensued; some were bound for Lusaka Airport, others going further south to Livingstone. Some poor sods from Japan faced two days on the bus to Johannesburg. Kit and I queued on one side of the road for the Livingstone bus, while the opposite queue for the Lusaka shuttle snaked for half a mile. After a two-hour wait it was finally our turn to lug our backpacks on to the roof-rack and take our places on the sticky plastic seats. I wiped the window down but the dust was on the outside.