Rostov-On-Don/3

We eventually left the restaurant and got back to our coach without any more untoward incidents. On our way back to our cabin, we passed the cabin that the Portuguese speaking girl shared with another female student and as we passed by I heard her laughing inside her. So I decided that I would stay outside a bit in the corridor, in the hope that she would come out briefly.

Half an hour later I was still waiting in the corridor and looking out into the darkness, outside of the windows, as our train spread towards the Caucasus mountains when she eventually came out alone into the corridor. She had paused and then smiled at me as she looked in my direction. In that instant, as I had tried to respond to her enchanting smile, my dry lips had suddenly frozen on my face and they started to feel all rubbery and funny! I had looked away quickly so that she wouldn't see the confusion that must have been emblazoned on my face at that moment. And I had quickly turned away and hastened back to my cabin in case she said something…
“This wan wey you run come back into the room wetin happen?” Ugo asked, wanting t6o know why I had run back into the cabin.
“Na dat girl!. She been commot for corridor and I no come know wetin to do; I no even fit smile sef.” I said telling him what had just happened.
“ Well, you for at least ask am hin name and then ask am other tings about hin self”. He advised saying that I should have started to ask her about her name and other things about her self.
“She left me feeling confused and I just had to get out of there!”
He laughed. “I bet you’re still a virgin. And make I tell you, my man, babes no dey like men wey slack. So if you go continue like this you no go see dat babe pants!” He said, saying that if I continued behaving in the way I was then I certainly wasn’t going to see her underwear.
“But no be hin pants I wan see”
“Na you sabi”. He said, meaning that what I wanted to do was my business. He then started to lecture me on “what women really want“; and talked about how they want a man who is in control and who is “confident enough to show it“. And that it is such real men who will always get their ways with woman.
“So Kasi, if you wan nyash dat babe, then you go need to begin behave like dat kind man. ”He said, ending his lecture with the admonition that if I wanted to sleep with her, then I needed to start behaving like a real man.
I had wanted to tell him that this was more than just about sleeping with her but realised that we he had just said would have still applied anyway.

Later that night as I lay on my bed in the cabin thinking about the events of the day, I was feeling restless. The sound of that word “abezy’an”, which had punctuated every sentence the fellow in the canteen had made kept on coming back to me, like the echo of a scream reverberating relentlessly in a dark tunnel, while the image of that lovely girl and her laughter struggled to push it to the fringes of my consciousness. And It was her face that was on my mind as I cuddled up under the duvet and succumbed gradually to the pull of sleep

That night my sleep was troubled. At one point I woke up from a nightmare in which I had been chased by a large black monkey along a lonely road flanked by some houses. Some eyes had peered at me from behind their curtains as I ran by. And I recognised that a pair of those eyes were those of the lovely Portuguese-speaking girl.