Bella’s belly

In Accra I have four or five street friendships with little doggoes and pussycats who live around the way. Tonight I was walking home late past a famous club when three bouncers slumped over their phones sat up abruptly. A blonde dog with a triangle head shot out of the bushes and raced after me, barking.

Oi, they said, hey! The biggest one got up. It’s ok, I said, she’s my friend. Then (bashfully) Thank you.

Oh, she’s your friend? Ohk, and they relaxed into their screens once more. Triangle Dog propped up her feet against my skirt and let me scratch her round the gills. I made some slow, strokeful investigations behind the ears. Her half-grown puppy pressed up behind her, what am I missing? What’s going on. The mother dog closed her eyes with pleasure. Hello, little darling, I said, hello, sweetheart. How are you doing, everything nice, everything good? I told her, isn’t it a wonderful night. For indeed the tropical standing trees were bowing and bending in this sweet night breeze and all the whole time I was walking, I felt accompanied.

Close to this spot in a compound filled with trees I lived with four fellow travellers and three doggies for three months, nine months ago at the beginning of my three week visit. My seventh visit to Ghana and the first time alone, no loved one to meet me and wait for me at Kotoka airport. I began to unravel what had been done to my financial life and my family’s generosity and have extended my return ticket and tourist visa over and over and moved house nine times. In that first place, leafy and whickering, lived a large Alsatian guard dog, an elderly relative scaly with scurf who unfortunately took a favour to me and I used to have to scour my hands clean every time after greeting her because she was so stinky and kinda scratchy — and then the third and smallest doggie, a white fluffy morsel named Bella. She had dark eyes and a crumpled little tail. Bella got farmed out to a father-to-be and reappeared with her belly bulging. It was evident she had found the process shocking and she seemed shyer and started turning up at my door every other morning, shimmying and cringing. If I stepped aside leaving the door ajar she would bolt inside and climb effortfully onto my bed to stretch out with a sigh, and if I lay down she came and pressed her fullness into my lap. They had a hanging cane chair in the garden and I sat there in the shade reading entire books end to end, there is only one bookshop in Ghana and I had plundered it. Bella came and foisted her pointy little feet into my lap whenever lap was in reach, until I lifted her into the groove she wanted to settle. My little farmer.