In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut

relationship with Christian, what bond has kept you going all the way from West Africa. Once the most basic facts have been exchanged there seems nothing more to say.
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    Later in the day a wind comes up and the surface of the lake turns choppy. Then the ship starts to pitch and roll, drawing a thin line of queasiness under everything. When the sun goes down it turns suddenly very cold. He is on the other side of the raised middle section of the deck to them, lying head to head with Jerome, and as he settles himself for the night he rolls his eyes up and finds Jerome in exactly the same position, looking back, and for a long arrested moment they hold each other’s gaze before they both look away and try to sleep.
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    In fact he doesn’t sleep much, the boat is lurching and the deck is hard and uncomfortable. Dangling above them is a huge metal hook on a crane and all his latent uneasiness becomes focused on this hook, what if it comes loose, what if it falls, he keeps waking from jagged dreams to see that dark shape punched out on the sky. The night is starry and huge, despite this one concentration of dread at the very centre of it, above him.
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    In the morning all the bodies stagger up stiffly from the deck, yawning and rubbing their necks. It takes a long time for conversation to start up, but even when everybody around him is talking he doesn’t much feel like words today. He is tired and sore and looking forward to being on land again. They dock at Nkhata Bay soon afterwards. By now the heat is already building and he doesn’t envy them the long voyage to the north, they will only arrive tomorrow. He says goodbye on the deck and this time he knows he won’t see them again. He gets off in a dense press of bodies, the ship’s horn bellows mournfully.
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    He shoulders his pack and sets out in the hot sun, heading to a guest-house ten kilometres out of town. By the time he finds the place a few hours have gone by. The setting is lovely, a series of communal bamboo houses on stilts along the edge of the beach. He lays out his sleeping bag at one end of a row of others and changes into shorts and goes out for a swim. He leaves his towel on the beach and swims far out into the lake. The waves are strong and rough here, by the time he comes back to shore he feels replenished and renewed.
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    Jerome, Alice and Christian are standing next to his towel, grinning. Hello, they say. It’s us again.

 
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    T hey changed their minds at the last moment and decided to get off the boat. They thought they would rest here for a day or two and then continue overland. They are staying in a bungalow at the far end of the beach, half-hidden among trees.
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    He spends that day with them on the beach. All their towels are laid out in a row, they drift in and out of the water or sprawl in the sun. He gives himself completely to the pagan pleasures of idleness and heat, what wasn’t possible for him with the other travellers down south is perfectly possible here, but underneath his tan he feels troubled. The way in which this mysterious threesome has threaded through his journey bothers him, there is almost the shape of a design to it, in which none of them has a say. Like this little reunion, for instance, it’s purely by chance that they’ve also come to stay at this place, if they’d taken a room in town they would probably not have seen each other again. Or perhaps he wants to see it like this, it’s only human, after all, to look for a hint of destiny where love or longing is concerned.
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    He is never alone with Jerome. Once or twice, when Christian has gone off to swim and Alice gets up to join him, it seems he and Jerome will be the only ones left there on the sand. But it doesn’t happen. Christian appears at the last moment, coming up dripping and panting from the lake, throwing himself down on his towel. But if he’s laying claim to the younger man he