	Lonely As A Cloud



When Albert Hiribango was told that there was an American tourist in his town who 
was looking for a lift to the capital, he initially had mixed feelings. On the one hand, 
he felt it was his Christian duty to give a helping hand to anyone in need, and he knew 
there were many out there who would be less ethical than him in extending this hand. 
On the other hand, he feared that his general loathing for America and all it 
represented would prevent him being the ideal host. His worries were further 
heightened when he met Hannah, in her skimpy tee-shirt and her large baggy khaki 
shorts. She was dressed so immodestly, with the whole of her waist revealed, her arms 
bared to the shoulder, and even some kind of jewellery pierced into her navel.

But he was not a man to go back on his word, even if the woman was clearly 
one of loose morals. However, this was typical of Westerners. They'd come to Africa 
bringing their preachers and their faith - which was, of course, the greatest benefit 
brought by the white man - enforcing their morals, and then, when it suited them, they 
changed the rules: now dressing with the immodesty that they had initially condemned 
in the African. However, Hannah was not a young woman. She must have been in her 
early thirties, but typically for a Westerner, she dressed and behaved like someone 
much younger. Albert couldn't help admiring Hannah's trim figure and her self-
confidence. Her hair was cut expensively, two horns of dark brown hair against her 
cheeks and an immaculate fringe. Albert carefully placed her large heavy cases in the 
back of his jeep, covered them with a tarpaulin sheet and invited Hannah to sit next to 
him.

"So, you come from America?" he asked, as he shifted the jeep up into third 
gear. 

"Yup. California. Small town not more than two hours ride from LA," she 
agreed, throwing a strip of chewing gum into her mouth. 

"How many miles is that?" Albert couldn't help wondering. He's heard that 
roads in the United States were rather better than here, and he reckoned that two hours 
drive was probably more than the forty or fifty miles he could normally do in that 
time.

"A hundred or so, I guess. Though when you get to LA, the traffic's so bad, 
you just don't know your luck."

Albert smiled grimly. So, Americans had bad traffic as well, but he doubted 
whether that meant dodging the insane drivers and straggly cattle he was accustomed 
to. "And so, what is it you do for a living?" He asked. Then qualifying quickly, 
because it might be that Hannah was a married woman, though he could see no 
evidence of a ring on her third finger. "That's if you do work, of course."

"I'm a sex poet," Hannah replied with a smile.

Albert couldn't help himself. "You're a what?" he asked abruptly, hoping he'd 
misheard her.

"A sex poet," Hannah repeated. "It's the big growth area in poetry. You don't 
write about landscapes, flowers or whatever these days. Some poets write about urban 
squalor and drugs and stuff. Like rappers only without the twelve inch discs. Some of 
us write about sex."

"Sex?" Albert wondered, carefully steering his jeep to avoid the carcass of a 
dog sprawled out across the road. "How can you find anything to write about that?"

"Well, it's not as easy as you'd think," Hannah remarked. This, of course, was 
contrary to Albert's own opinions. Surely sex was something very private. Not 
something that one ever wrote poetry about. "After a while you run out of fresh words 
to rhyme with 'fuck'. You know, there are the obvious words like 'suck' and 'muck', 
but not long you start resorting to words like 'duck'. And you know, I may be broad-
minded but I'm not as broad-minded as that. You know what I mean?"

"Not really," admitted Albert. "But 'sex poetry'. What exactly is it?"

"Poems about sex. The before. The after. The during. The wanting. The 
missing. The having. You know."

"What about love and affection? What about the virtues of chastity and 
fidelity? Do these have a part to play in 'sex poetry'?"

"Of course they do. You don't just write about fucking. Although, fucking's 
mostly what it's about. And BJs, DP, BDSM, homosexuality. Everything."

"Homosexuality?" wondered Albert, who reasoned that this was surely 
something the Good Lord would never countenance. But, he reminded himself, 
California was the new Sodom and there was no limit to these Americans' depravity.

"Well, yeah. But naturally I'm not too hot on the men-men stuff. After all, I've 
been close, fucking close, close enough to touch and feel the heat, but it's not 
something I can really understand. Not really truly. Though I have written a couple of 
poems about it. You know, from a woman's point of view. But girl-girl. Well, that's 
another matter. I used to get so much inspiration from my girlfriends, I could just 
hammer the old keyboard all night long."

"I see," remarked Albert, who didn't understand at all. He glanced at Hannah, 
hoping to see an expression that told him that she was merely kidding, but her face 
was set and there was a look of frankness in her face. Without a comment, he silently 
concentrated on the badly scarred road, past the parched fields and the odd scattered 
tree. Occasionally, an antelope would gallop by or a brightly coloured bird would 
swoop from the sky, but generally there was as little evidence that this was the land of 
big game, as it would be obvious to a visitor to America that he or she was in the land 
of the buffalo. 

"Sex poetry is still poetry, of course," Hannah continued. "You have to 
struggle to get the right words. To capture those moments that make it worthwhile. 
And that was something I was so good at. I would do poetry readings all through the 
State. And I got a bursary from several colleges for my stuff. And my first volume of 
poems, They Fuck You, Your Mom and Pop, did very well. For poetry anyway. I got 
interviewed on National Television. I even appeared on Breakfast TV. And my second 
volume, Innocence Regained, didn't do too badly either. That had a theme of 
examining all the different variations there are. You know, transsexualism, incest, 
hermaphrodism, group sex, all that sort of stuff."

Albert coughed. Hannah would be arrested for peddling that sort of filth in this 
country. "Where do you get your inspiration from?"

"Personal experience, mostly," Hannah boasted. "I don't believe I can really 
capture the essence of any situation unless I've been in it myself. Some sex poets, they 
rely on watching sex videos or reading porn. It's all second-hand for them. I don't 
believe in that masturbatory shit. I've got to actually do it myself. Or be pretty darned 
close to it. I mean, I'm no transsexual, for instance. But I've had so many lovers. My 
best girlfriend and her husband and I, we've explored well nigh everything together 
and with everyone who's game. The only things I draw a line on are non-
consensuality, bestiality, and, of course, child sex. Those sick fucks just deserve to 
die."

"Indeed," agreed Albert, though aware that when he got married to his wife so 
many years ago, she was what would be considered a minor in most Western 
countries. At least this American was showing some ethical considerations, he mused.

He set his eyes back onto the road as it wound around the ancient African 
landscape. Above were a few hovering vultures which told Albert just how far they 
were out from the nearest town. He leaned forward, and turned on the radio. He tuned 
it through all the different radio stations, most of them broadcast in different native 
languages, until he found an English language one playing Western music. Out trilled 
some Country music, of which Albert was rather fond. He enjoyed those mournful 
tunes with their lyrics of lost love and quiet despair. This was an America he could 
understand. Not one that revelled in excesses of godlessness. 

Hannah was clearly not enjoying the Country songs as much as Albert. But she 
was too polite to complain, and fixed her gaze through the dusty window at the plains 
beyond, steadily chewing her gum.

"So, why have you come to Africa? And by yourself?" he asked after long last.

"Writer's Block!" She replied. "That was the reason."

"'Writer's Block'?" wondered Albert, unsure whether this was some illness 
peculiar to California.

"Yes. About a year and a half ago. Somehow, the flow just stopped. I just 
could no longer write poetry. I would spend hours on the computer, and inspiration 
just did not come. My muse had deserted me. And to date, it still hasn't returned."

"But why come to Africa then?" wondered Albert. "I don't see the connection. 
Although this continent is famous for many things, poetry is, unfortunately, not one of 
them." Nor, he almost added, was 'sex poetry'.

"Well, I struggled for weeks, months. I had poetry commissions that I couldn't 
deliver. My work of sonnets, Lonely as a Cloud, was just getting nowhere. The words 
just weren't coming. I would imagine a sex scene or an erotic incident, but I wasn't 
able to capture its essence. What I did write was banal and basically not very good. 
There was no rhythm to my verse. The poems had no structure and I couldn't find 
words that didn't sound clichéd or leaden. Sex had somehow become reduced to 
nothing more than gynaecological observations. My portrayals of love were clunky 
and unconvincing. Something drastic had to be done. I had to do something to break 
this cycle of despair."

"And then you came to Africa?"

"Well, I was making love to Angela, who's one of my regular lovers and she 
said I just had to leave California. Go somewhere. Travel anywhere. Just go to new 
places, meet new people, pick up things abroad. And, you know, except for a few 
short visits to Canada and England, I'd never really left the States. Sure, I'd been 
around so many of the states: mostly on lecture tours. I've been to Oregon, Minnesota, 
Louisiana, Maryland, even Hawaii. But not for very long elsewhere. So, I put a 
blindfold on, opened an atlas randomly at any page, and stuck in a pin on whichever 
page was open. And it was here in Southern Africa. So that's why I'm here and why 
I've been travelling around here for the last six months. It's all because of writer's 
block and the Readers Digest Atlas."

"So you must have got to know Africa quite well."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? But I dunno. It's always other Westerners I 
meet mostly. Other people travelling. Or people staying at the hotels. It's not as if 
there are that many Westerners here, but I seem to meet them. I've seen a lot of the 
continent, but I don't really know the people."

Perhaps, thought Albert, her profession might be part of the reason. That and 
her immodesty and strange views. He continued driving along the broken roads, the 
sun glancing through the open window onto his arms and onto the sharp crease of his 
smart brown cotton shirt. Even with his dark glasses on, the glare of the sun 
sometimes made it difficult to see too well. 

Hannah had put on her own sunglasses, which, unlike his, were small and 
metal-framed. She smiled at him, and then without warning she started coughing. And 
coughing. Big wheezing coughs that quite frankly worried Albert. He wasn't sure 
whether he should stop the jeep. But after a minute or so Hannah stopped and wiped a 
trail of yellowish mucus off her lips.

"Are you alright?" Albert asked.

"I don't know. I've not been feeling too good recently. A bit of the trots, this 
funny cough that just comes and goes, and sometimes a bit feverish. But I guess you 
expect that in Africa."

"Do you?"

"Well, you've got so many germs here, haven't you? Cholera. Typhoid. 
Malaria. Hepatitis. Everything. And, of course, AIDS."

"Well, yes," admitted Albert. "Most of that's due to poor sanitation, unreliable 
water supplies and the climate. But AIDS of course came from America with the batty 
boys."

Hannah frowned. "'Batty boys'? I've never heard of them before. But I heard 
AIDS originally came from Africa. You know, from baboons or something."

"Baboons!" snorted Albert. "There was no AIDS in Africa before you 
Americans left the way of the Lord and brought Sodom and Gomorrah back into the 
world."

Hannah frowned. She studied Albert with his slightly greying hair, the sharp 
creased shirt and cotton trousers, as the realisation took hold on her that there were 
people in the world whose view of things was quite different to that which she took 
for granted in the Golden State. She was to spend several more hours in Albert's 
company, and she didn't want to spend them arguing on the rights and wrongs of 
things. Fuck! He might even approve of smoking, or be unsympathetic to 
vegetarianism, or deny the virtues of tantric sex. All the things she held dear. It even 
occurred to her that Albert might not approve of sex poetry. But then this was another 
land, and it was best that she respect people's rights to believe and practise what they 
believed. As long as they didn't smoke in front of her or force her to eat meat. Or 
force her to indulge in any unnatural practices.

Albert turned up the radio and the rest of the journey was spent listening to a 
mixture of Country music interspersed with a curious mix of contemporary (and not 
so contemporary) pop music. The conversation they had veered away from anything 
about which either passenger could claim to have a strong opinion, and Hannah 
gradually began to warm towards her African driver. He was going to the capital on 
business that seemed to relate to the bank and finance house for which Albert was 
district manager. But he accepted Hannah's invitation to come back to her hotel for a 
drink.

The area in which the hotel was situated was markedly smarter than almost 
everywhere else Hannah had been in this country. The tree-lined roads were marked 
by consulates, embassies and the national headquarters of many multinational 
companies. Albert parked the car in the hotel's vast but nearly empty car park, and the 
two of them sat in the hotel bar. A man in a black suit and tuxedo was playing a 
selection of inoffensive standards on a huge white piano, while the large leather seats 
were occupied by a mixture of black and white guests speaking to each other in a 
multitude of languages, of which, naturally, English was the most prevalent. 

A few drinks and a conversation about Albert's job was all that it took for 
Hannah to proffer Albert the invitation to join her for a coffee in her hotel room. 
Albert wasn't at all surprised by this, though most such conversations he'd had with 
women markedly younger than him which had resulted in such an invitation had 
usually had a price tag involved, something which Albert accepted as part of normal 
life and an almost expected feature of his visits to the capital.

He was not at all alarmed when Hannah, in the privacy of her large hotel room, 
dominated by a huge television screen where two European football teams were 
silently running around amongst the on-screen score-cards, took virtually no time at 
all, and with no sign of shame, in removing her top and shorts. He was actually more 
surprised to note the light rash that coloured her bare shoulders and the bottom of her 
neck. She pulled down her knickers and Albert saw that the lips of her vagina were 
pierced just as surely as her navel. He thought it strange that Westerners attacked the 
tradition of female circumcision, but had no apparent qualms in practising genital 
mutilation themselves. Typical hypocrisy, he thought.

Hannah took it on herself to unclothe Albert and gave a whoop of delight as 
his penis sprang up relieved of his boxer shorts. Albert knew that he wasn't the most 
well endowed man there was (his times showering with other men after playing a 
game of rugby had disabused him of that vanity), but he'd heard that Western men 
were quite pitiful in that department, and Hannah's joy as she took his prick in her 
hands was evidence that this view might be true.

She took his erect prick in her hands and touched the glans with her tongue. 
Albert quivered with tension as he felt the soft warm moistness of her tongue on its 
tender edge, causing it to stiffen to its maximum extent. And then she knelt down in 
front of him and guided his penis into her mouth: placing a finger firmly between his 
scrotum and his anus, and gulped it up and down her neck, her cheeks bulged out. 
This was something Albert's wife had never assented to. She had always objected to 
the smell and the association with urination. The only women to ever have agreed to 
that were the scrawny prostitutes who hung around the bars at the rather more modest 
hotels he usually stayed in. And although his penis was almost bursting with the need 
to release, Hannah had the expertise of these same prostitutes to ensure that he didn't 
reach his climax too soon.

She removed her mouth from his prick and ran her hands up and down his 
black torso and thighs, while her teeth worried at the strands of black short curled hair 
around the base. She took her mouth away briefly and coughed in a wheezy throaty 
way, while one hand kept a grip on the hard throbbing shaft of his dick. He looked 
down on her from above. Her hair flopped over her cheeks and he admired the 
whiteness of her skin. He'd never had sex with a white woman before and he found 
the contrast between the tanned flesh of her arms, legs and waist a frightening contrast 
with the anaemic whiteness of her crotch, arse and bosom. He supposed that in 
America, white people were probably as white as that all over. The strangeness of it 
almost excited him to ejaculate there and then.

But thankfully that was not to be. Hannah guided Albert back onto her large 
double bed, the thin sheets pushed back, and as he descended onto his back, she kept 
herself astride and on top of her. And then, the moment that defined sex, she 
positioned her crotch above his erect prick, and let it slide, easily and smoothly into 
her moist vagina. She sank her crotch bit by bit down to its very base, supporting her 
weight on her long thin tanned legs, her arms falling lengthwise on either side of him. 

"Ooh! It's been so long! Days! Maybe weeks!" she gasped as she pushed her 
crotch slowly and smoothly up and down, while Albert lay recumbent, his own arms 
stretched uselessly on either side of him.

"Is that so?" he asked, watching with almost academic interest as his penis was 
alternately swallowed and eased out by her labial lips.

"African men! They're all mouth and trousers!" She explained. "You don't 
know what a struggle it is to get a fuck round here. I'm just glad there are a few 
women here who don't mind."

"Don't mind what?" asked Albert, not really expecting an answer, but 
guessing her meaning. The perversion of the suggestion actually aroused him the 
more, and he took Hannah's waist in his broad hands, the watch sliding slightly down 
his wrist, and drew her body close to his. Her breasts, so pert and white, pressed 
against the short curly hair of his chest, tingling his nipples and urgently commanding 
his buttocks to thrust harder and faster into her. 

The two kept this up for several moments, uncomfortable as it sometimes was 
to fuck someone from underneath, even though Hannah seemed to be thrusting with 
an equal amount of urgency as him. And then they turned round, Albert on top of her: 
the position he most often enjoyed with his wife and which had resulted in three 
healthy sons, one healthy girl and a second girl who'd unfortunately died from a bout 
of dysentery when she was still a very young child. His penis thrust back and forth, 
feeling redder and rawer against her rough vaginal lips while sweat poured down his 
chest, lubricated the hairs, and slid against Hannah's own shiny perspiring skin. These 
white women seemed to sweat so easily, the pearls of perspiration glistening on the 
pits of her tanned shoulders, and gathering in a pool by his prick. He pushed in and 
out, while every now and then he felt Hannah's finger press against the skin between 
his testicles and the hairs of his anus: a trick he'd been told by one prostitute whose 
body he'd enjoyed would keep his penis erect for that much longer. In. Out. In. Out. 
Slap. Slap. 

And then, Hannah again broke off to cough. This time for longer and more 
violently. She pushed herself away from under him, and with a weak smile ran into 
the bathroom, where Albert could hear her cough for several minutes. Long enough 
for his twitching penis to gradually shrink to half its erect size. He studied the football 
teams on the silent screen, punctuated every few minutes by a startling spin of the 
image as a replayed shot or tackle was rebroadcast.

She came out from the bathroom, rubbing her lips with the back of her hand, 
and the two of them recommenced in their lovemaking as if there had been no break. 
Although Hannah had to first of all coax his penis back up to its full size. And their 
lovemaking went on and on, for longer than Albert could recall ever having made love 
before, whether with a prostitute or with his wife (even in the early days of his 
greatest sexual enthusiasm and especially now where it was usually perfunctory and 
not very frequent). She knew how to vary the diet to keep up their mutual interest, and 
even after he had released a mass of semen all over her breasts and waist (as she 
bizarrely insisted), he somehow regained the energy to begin again. Outside the sun 
went down and they put on the bedside lamps to allow some, but not too much 
illumination on their fucking.

At one stage, she positioned herself head down, arse in the air, and got him to 
fuck her from behind. This was something he'd never done before, and was not too 
sure he really enjoyed. The sight of a bare back (especially one with that strange rash) 
was not as appealing to his eyes as a woman's face and breasts, but the strange 
tightness of her vaginal opening from this angle gave him fresh desire, and he pushed 
in and out of her with vigour, supporting himself by arms stretched out alongside her 
own. But then she took his penis in her hand, while still beneath him and motioned it 
towards her anus. Before Albert was sure what he was doing, his penis was thrusting 
into a smaller tighter hole, one whose type he'd never been in before. 

At first he was enjoying it. The tight squeeze it gave his prick, the slight 
resistance it gave to his thrusts gave his lovemaking more passion and more thrust. 
And then his prejudices took hold. He was no batty boy. This type of sex was quite 
unnatural and almost certainly would require penance either before or during his after-
life. He pulled his penis free and reinserted it into her vagina, enjoying its now 
familiar warm liquid welcome as it sank into its more capacious depth.

Albert and she spent the night together, their arms around each other, 
occasionally chatting, but more often sleeping. In bed, Albert found her conversation 
about the lovers she'd known, the sexual escapades she'd enjoyed, the variations 
she'd experimented in, that much more acceptable and even quite erotic than when 
he'd driven her along the African roads.

Albert never saw her again. When morning came and they'd enjoyed breakfast 
together before his meeting at the bank headquarters, they'd made promises to keep in 
touch that both of them knew would never result in anything. A final kiss and a 
friendly squeeze of his sore testicles through his neat linen trousers was the last of 
Hannah.

At least until a few months later, when his wife drew his attention to the 
scandal of the death of a famous American Sex Poet who had died of double 
pneumonia, which it was suspected had been exacerbated by the disease that was 
decimating Africa. Much of the article concentrated on her fame and her controversial 
reputation, but also on the quality of her verse. But these parts of the article were the 
ones that concerned Albert the least. 

Hannah had unsuspectingly been carrying the retrovirus for many years, and it 
had matured into its full-blown manifestation while she was in the African continent. 
It would not have occurred to a worried Albert as he contacted his doctor, but her 
lonely agonised death in the top floor of the Garret hotel was not at all unlike the 
traditional death of a poet that Hannah might have aspired to in moments of foolish 
romanticism.








