I got off the plane and waited for a bus. The rain was pouring. I got on the bus and pressed my face against the window. As we drove into the city, I saw concrete buildings pop up. Ten. Twenty. A hundred. A thousand. A million. Concrete apartment buildings, two flats wide, forty, fifty, sixty stories high. Unfinished buildings cocooned in bamboo scaffolding and green sheets. Office blocks in the sky. Covered in neon. Blinking.
I got off the bus and walked out into the heat. The rain was throwing. I put sandals on and waded through the streets. The rain was hurling, dropping, bouncing. I walked beneath flyovers, under underpasses. I walked through heat, heat like a wall you had to climb over, like a hill you had to climb up. I walked through smells stronger than anything I’ve ever smelt, like the whole city had gone off.
I didn’t know what time it was, what day it was, what month it was, what year. There was no way of telling. The sky was always grey. I couldn’t see the tops of the buildings. I couldn’t see anything. The rain was hitting, cracking, firing.
I found a park in the middle of the tower blocks. I found a concrete football pitch, painted green. It was flooded too. I didn’t know where I was, or when, or how I’d got there. So I walked to the middle of the football pitch, and stood on the centre circle, under my umbrellas, wondering what to do next.
Photograph by Gemma Thorpe.
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