narratorAUSTRALIA Volume Three

On a hot summer day, people you do not know may call you a prostitute for a wearing a mini skirt or a pair of shorts, but on a rainy night, you will spot them almost naked on the streets, in shoes so high they limp like wounded creatures.

  They will be trying to stop pot-bellied people’s cars.

  On a weekday, government workers will be ‘out for lunch’ somewhere between ten o’clock in the morning and three o’clock in the afternoon. They will come back at four o’clock to pack up and leave for the day. You will be asked to ‘try tomorrow’. On that next day, you may be asked for ‘tea’, if you want to be attended to faster.

  Grown men will be running behind a politician’s car like hardworking tsetse flies trying to serve you a grand attack of sleeping sickness. You will need to remind yourself that the politician is a human being, and not some god.

  A pregnant woman will die at a hospital entrance trying to have a baby, because she will not have admission fees. The baby will also die. And if the woman’s relatives are not keen, the baby’s body will disappear in mysterious circumstances. Things will always happen in mysterious circumstances in this particular world. You do know that morgue attendants have been caught selling human body parts to sorcerers and witches, don’t you? Does juju ring a bell? See how you go with taking the matter to court. If you are a ‘nobody’, don’t expect any justice. Over here, justice is bought, and files disappear in mysterious circumstances.

  Cases are closed on that ‘mysterious’ basis.

  I am told midwives will yell at you or your wife for having labour pains; they will tell you nobody told you to ‘sleep around’. But there is hope for you. Day-care will not cost you top dollar; a female relative will be there for you to play nanny, because it is one big family. Because it takes a whole village to raise a child.

  Thankfully, people will not tell you every single thing about them. You know, things you really do not want to know ... who they slept with last (and where) or what underwear their spouses wore, but you will somehow sense their other problems, and those problems will somehow be yours, because that is just the way it is.

  Chances are, you will not solve them, but you do need to show you care. It matters.