The University/3

I wake up with a start. It is still very dark in the room as morning has not yet broken and I am finding it very hard to get my bearing. My head is throbbing with a pulsating ache and there’s somebody lying in the bed beside me…the person has just started to snore. I try to peer through the darkness to see if I can make out the form of the person and I notice-as I begin to edge closer-that the long tangling blond hair, which is slightly visible from beneath the duvet, belongs to a woman.

I move even closer to the warmth of the body and my groping hand connects with bare flesh; she is naked and I am suddenly aware of my own nakedness. Where am I and who on earth is lying here beside me? The effort to remember the events of the last few hours is making my head to ache even more intensely-but I must remember. This is not the first time in the last few days that I am waking up like this.

What happened last night?…I am beginning to remember now:

Our winter holidays started almost 2 weeks ago and I’ve been spending a lot of time at the University since Ugo travelled to Moscow to meet up with some of his old friends last week. He heard that one of his class mates from College is studying at the Patrice Lumumba University and he‘s gone to discuss business with the fellow. Eddy travelled to Kharkov to meet up with his brother with whom he is to later travel to Turkey to buy leather jackets.

I have been finding the rest of the guys in my hostel to be too boring; especially my room mate Ade, who thinks that I am now “a lost soul”. I have also been finding Barry a bit annoying because he’s always talking about racism and the black cause. I am beginning to think that the guy has some serious issues because he is damned too rigid in his thinking and sometimes comes across a bit belligerent when anybody disagrees with him.

Clements and Ken have also travelled for the holidays but I have been hanging out at the University with Philip-a 3rd year Law student from Uganda who loves his Vodka and his women. He likes to call the women "fighters" and is not concerned about the fact that most of them have done the rounds of most other guys in the hostel. But he seems to be particularly successful with them as he is always having a constant stream of them visit him; to the point where people actually come to him for help. And I am beginning to think that I know the reason for his popularity with the women; the other day I had accidentally caught a glimpse of his manhood and the size of it has left me feeling very very insecure about mine ever since.

I am in Philips room now and I am sure that he is in the bed across the room with one-or two-of his fighters. Yesterday evening I had come round to the University to meet up with him and as always he was drinking in their company. And as always I decided to get drunk in order to free myself from my reservations about fighting-a freedom, which now feels like an even worse enslavement because as always when I emerge out of my labyrinth of drunkenness and I am confronted with the reality of what I am gradually becoming, I am overcome by a certain sickness of spirit. I feel like one who is held captive in the grips of carnality and who is completely yielded to seducing spirits who now lead me deeper and deeper into a dark pit of depravity from which i will not be able to come out…I am a lost soul, Ade says-a person in need of salvation.

But where lies this salvation that Ade talks about? How can I, by just listening to the words he tells me, be cleansed of the darkness that torments my soul? How can my polluted spirit be purified? How can the memory of my childhood injustice and the pain from this guilt, which gnaws away at my soul, be washed away?

What will fill this emptiness that seems to be ever enlarging with the passing of each day; this dark and encroaching emptiness that is seeking to completely engulf me…and which seems to always linger with me until I can find something to distract me?

I am now reaching towards the softness of the body that is lying next to me; I am edging even closer and I am beginning to feel the hardness in my loins as my hands are now finding her warm moist softness. She is turning towards me and is now beginning to part her legs as she begins to moan-I need this distraction…