By Alex Roberts
Saturday
I woke up- unsure if it was night or day; the sun was caught in suspension at six degrees above the horizon. But where had the river gone? How had I gotten home? In a cab at dawn with preachers? Were agreements made for me to forsake sin and join a church choir in Masaka? Did someone at the docks down by the Nile tell me they had watched a boat full of revelers flip over into the river in those cold stagnant moments just before dawn? Had they survived? Even uglier, did anyone really give a flying damn enough to rescue them?
My God, the hotel room looked like something out of an outdated music video- it was trashed, and I didn’t know how, I’d barely been there, this was supposed to be a respite of last resort.
My heels, now caked in mud, yellowing scabs and half dead bandages, had bled clean through during the night and soaked well into the sheets, as they had worsened over whatever hours I’d spent quivering like an ill-fated dullard amongst the sheets.
There was broken glass from an unnamed source and the tap had overflowed into the bathroom, leaving a puddle of malignant looking muddy water covering the tiles.
Continuation on principal. That’s what a true journalist would do in these circumstances- leave alone that memory of one of the few members of the ‘Serious Press’ at the festival I’d walked past weeping ferociously next to a trash encrusted bush some fourteen hours prior.
I grabbed a wad of cash, found a random Chinese built boda boda with a terrible suspension outside the hotel and went back in towards the grounds for more.
The grounds by this point were absolute chaos. One Norwegian aid worker described it in rather gauche terms to a friend of mine as ‘worse conditions than some of the region’s refugee camps’. All the trash bins had long since overflowed, and everyone seemed to be deep into day three of a full-scale emotional crisis. I saw a condom hanging from the branch of a pine tree like some sort of twisted Christmas ornament. People wandered about, sipping straight from bottles of Waragi Premium and smoking hastily rolled joints in front of the none-so-watchful eyes of nearby cops, who were also still knocking back shots of Waragi.
My attempts at coverage had long since fallen by the wayside, whenever I ran into my lovely business partner, she only gave me eyes of steadily growing concern, especially when she ran into me at 4 AM that Saturday and traded me my liquor bottle for juice, but I was too far gone to notice or care.
I’d carried quite a bit of cash (an amount that I drastically played down to the girl I was dating at the time) and reached in for another note. One of my original companions, a software wiz with a penchant for spectacular tailored festival garb, walked past me, coated in glitter and dust-dulled rhinestones. We solemnly nodded at each other on the footpath as I fumbled for bills.
Inside my little bum bag, instead of a decently organized wad of bright scarlet 20,000 Ugandan shilling notes was a singular crumpled one. If the funds had been quietly snatched by quick fingers, or lost to my own carelessness, I couldn’t decipher any more. I was beyond any rational caring.
Journalistically, this had been my greatest failure. Nothing was covered, no artists got their promised interviews, my long-suffering partner’s camera-selfie-stick wasn’t even held aloft for a better shot of the intense ‘Underground Stage’ acts banging out jams under a scaffolding constructed stage. The tired eyed medical workers from the tents recognized me due to the infected heels and looked at me forlornly every time I passed them on the illuminated part of the bog-like footpath.
