Confrontations by Simone Atangana Bekono

Author:Simone Atangana Bekono
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

In my dream I’m not stuck in the Donut, but I am locked up. In my dream I’m looking out of the window of a building and through that window I see a tall, black man standing at the barriers and he’s looking over a field and everything glistens. In my dream he’s wearing a long down coat and old trainers. He points upwards, from the field to the sky, the heavy, dark, overcast sky. In between two rain clouds a woman appears. She has enormous black wings and red eyes, scratched open. She’s screeching. The sound echoes, comes from far. And then it gets louder, more shrill, more unbearable when she comes increasingly close. It makes the air tremble. I tremble.

‘Look,’ says the man in the down coat. When he turns his face towards me it’s the same face as the woman’s: bleeding eyes, brown, broken teeth, forked tongue, and that mouth, raw from all the screaming. The closer the woman gets to the earth the louder she screeches, furiously flapping her wings, and the man starts to join in. It thunders, their voices echo, they’re so extremely fucking angry.

Jeering and then a loud crash. I hear a low voice shouting something. Someone knocks on my door. Thumps.

I sit up in bed.

‘Who is it?’ I call. I hear the peep of the automatic door lock and someone kicking it open with a bang, then running away. The embers of my dream are still flickering and I’m sweating. I look at my legs. I move them and they’re working. Hands to my mouth and I don’t have a mouth that’s raw from screaming.

The light from the corridor hurts my eyes and just as I’m about to get up to close the door, Henny enters.

‘What are you doing?’ I ask angrily, squinting my eyes at her silhouette. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’

‘They stole a pass.’ Henny’s stance suggests she’s crushed.

‘What?’ I stare at her blue pyjama bottoms, her bare feet, the T-shirt hanging over her big breasts.

‘They stole a pass from the supervisors,’ she repeats. ‘They came into my room and ripped off my blankets. One of them took my TV.’

It takes a moment for me to grasp that she’s scared, Henny. I’ve no idea why she’s come to me, but I lie down under the blankets again, pull up my legs and pat my hand on the mattress. She closes the door behind her and sits down.

‘Are you okay?’ I ask and turn on my bedside lamp. ‘We’ll just wait here until it’s over.’

‘Was quite a shock.’ It’s only now that I hear how high Henny’s voice is. Her hands are small, her nails broken off. I hear a man’s voice and more running, banging. An alarm goes off.

‘If they come in here, I’ll hit them with the lamp,’ I say, pulling the lamp’s plug out of its socket. Henny nods.

‘Thanks.’

She looks at her hands. She’s trembling. I work my way closer to her from underneath the blankets and put my arm around her shoulder.

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