agree we’re fine

My date took me to the poolside with his mother. This was an accident. I had already set out from my house and he wrote saying, umm actually, Mum’s coming too. He took us to a fancy hotel where I’ve sat poolside several times writing; because even for writers, a ten dollar coffee isn’t that much more costly than a three dollar coffee. I’ve been using these slivers of luxury to ease myself through life for many years. There we sat, Mum and he and I, on cane loungers under a row of palm trees. I said, brightly, So you realise your son and I don’t know each other at all, we just fell into conversation yesterday at the physiotherapist’s? I am nursing a catastrophic injury from a blow from my landlord, long story. I go twice a week and they use pressure, massage, heat and manipulation — not unlike a bad relationship. I sat down and said, Good afternoon, and this large man with bright eyes said, Good afternoon, and I said, Are you fine, and he said, I’m fine, and you, and then we began to laugh because “If we were really fine, we wouldn’t be sitting at the physiotherapist’s.” I said, imagine you turn up at the desk and they say, Fine? Oh then I will cancel your appointment. 

At the hotel I had left my phone on charge at the front desk with a glorious young man who said, I like your hair. Thanks, I said, twitching a plait: I grew it myself. This, in Ghana, is more unusual than in Australia because an entire generation of black women have been persuaded their own natural hair is somehow missing something or wrong. When it rains they all dart away for shelter, clutching handkerchiefs over their heads. I told the waiter, you know I am envious of yours, right? It’s so curly and the colour is so good. We stood grinning. So when I rounded the pool in my sixties hostess gown and bare feet and went inside, masked, to retrieve the phone, I passed under a broad big-leafed tree which thrust its roots out into the broad-bladed lawn in runnels of neatly maintained root-ridged soil. It made a pattern like an outline on paper of a hand. I squatted down under the palm trees to gather the cerise palm nuts so ripe they were falling out of their neat pale creamy cases. I could hear a Ghanaian bird singing a long, descending trill. I could hear four men standing facing each other in the pool discussing marketing and strategy, two words I just can’t stand. I took my handful of red nuts back to our row of loungers and showed them to my date and his mother. In the background they were playing ‘Still the One’ by Shania Twain, which another man had sung to me a mere few weeks back at a drinking spot in Legon: the only one I dream of/still the one I want/for life. I let my legs lie flat so they overhung the too-short chair and put on sunglasses and closed my eyes. Then the waiter turned up with his round black tray and began to decant drinks from a frosted pitcher. It’s always summer here.