Ile de Goree, Senegal

My stomach felt odd upon our return. It had been so for a few days since Nouakchott, but tonight it felt more clangy, white noisy. It didn’t feel like the alcohol either, growing up a lightweight in a binge drinking society had taught me how to recognise the signs of alcohol poisoning. I tried to suppress the feelings, and I fell asleep on my tiny mattress, my legs grasping at empty air but settling for the stone floor. Brief waves of nausea tantalised my sleep, but it was ignorable. It was annoying though, this constant stuttering, the dreams insolent and hallucinatory. I had continuous dreams, long nightmarish narratives that wouldn’t reach their dénouement even if I awoke, the apparitions returning to taunt me like ugly catchy songs. Eventually I tired of the discomfort. My semi-inebriated brain thought it’d be best if I tried to throw up, clear my stomach from this blockage, this inconvenience. As soon as I stood up, the food swelled up like an orchestral crescendo. And it all came out. I made the toilet luckily, but the flimsy partition immediately woke up the others. They were sympathetic, and I, trying to be staunch, convinced them that I was ok and went back to sleep with the faint taste of vomit cradling my lips. They must have thought my lightweight drinking ability couldn’t keep up with the girls.

An hour later I woke up to the same rush. This continued throughout the night, but it eventually became a dry retch. There is nothing worse than a dry retch, I need the satisfying gurgle, the emptying of a full bucket. With dry retching, it’s a lot of pain for no discernible reason. Your stomach feels like it’s trying to escape. But the dry retching was the least of my concerns by the third visit to the toilet. It had all exploded into diarrhoea. It was odd evicting your bowels just metres from your mates, and with no roof or functioning door separating you from them. As humans we try so hard to pretend shitting doesn’t happen – locked cubicles, air fresheners, toilet brushes, impassive post-dumping expressions to show that time had frozen between entry and exit of the bathroom, that we often baulk when reminded of other people’s daily necessities. Here I had no recourse to such pretence. I had no room for pride. The smell was so rancorous it actually made me vomit, and since I was already exploding one way, I had no option but to throw up on the floor. I was pushing things out both ends, like cookie dough being hit by a hammer. I couldn’t see what was going on in the dark. When I tried to clean my vomit up with my toilet paper, I had to get down on the ground and grope like a speculator, and hope I was cleaning it.

Mitya and Ivan were understanding though, immensely so. They didn’t complain about being woken up, they hunted out drugs, they gave me the sympathetic, empathetic man-grimace, which is the best thing men can do to each other short of crying on their shoulders. And the smell was the worst thing I’d ever produced. I didn’t think was humanly possible for something so rancid to be made by own body.

I woke a couple more times in the night for more frenzied assaults on the toilet, and I used up a whole roll of my limited toilet paper clearing the vomited floor and my body. I was no longer drunk, but I knew that the alcohol wasn’t going to help my dehydration.

The next morning I felt better after getting some solid sleep after popping a cornucopia of pills. I stumbled to get some lemonade by myself in the morning, returning to the restaurant which had now turned itself into a store for the day. I walked without direction or vigour, compelled forward against my body’s best wishes. My body felt like somebody had picked me up and wrung me dry. My bones were trying to hitch a ride on the other side of town, my mind wanted to collapse into the lava, my clothes drenched in sweat, and god knows what other internal workings were conspiring against me. I threw up the lemonade straightaway and at irregular intervals for a few hours afterwards. I had loose motions again too, and this lasted for a considerable time. I couldn’t bear the thought of food in me, so my chastised stomach sat in resigned hunger. I tried forcing down a banana, but that came out the wrong hole too. This was the first time in the trip that I wanted to go home. Immediately. I wanted to get out of there, back to a comfortable toilet, back to a warm, comfortable bed, back to home comforts like TV or music. Stomach bugs are as unpleasant as you can get – but this felt worse than an ordinary stomach bug – and my sole comfort was two guys who heard me creak all night.

I suppose it was put into context by being on a slave island. But context doesn’t stop the shits.