Nairobi Dreaming - Complete!

Chapter 23: Old friends

The first time I met Caterina we were on a beach on Isla Mujeres in Mexico. It was a blindingly sunny day. The sand was bone-white, the sky so blue it looked painted. Caterina was standing with her back to me, framed on either side by a topless muscular man, one perfectly manicured hand wrapped around some kind of orange drink with a cherry red umbrella in it. She projected absolute confidence and frivolity all at once. Her white bikini was less a suit than a bunch of strategically placed string, her dyed honey-blonde hair was pulled back in a picture perfect pony tail and she was talking about The Bachelor like it was a piece of serious art.

Ugh I thought, What a ditz.

For the rest of the afternoon I more or less avoided her as best I could but the group of twelve people I was with was small enough to make that tricky. She had a way of pulling everyone into her orbit and her mastery of both English and Spanish meant she could switch between the two effortlessly and avoid leaving anyone out. Instead of being impressed by her accentless fluency I found myself concentrating on how much she sounded like a valley girl when she spoke in English and how she liked to end as many words as possible in Spanish in the diminutive. Instead of "cafe" she said "cafecito" and instead of "ahora" she liked to say "ahorita."

It wasn't until she made some quip about the fact that bananas were first considered too phallic for American women to be seen eating them that I started to wonder if I had misread her. It was a fun little fact, a little sexual - the kind that could be thrown into a conversation and then giggled over - but it was also incredibly esoteric. How had she known that? I asked and she told me that she had read it in a biography about Minor Cooper Keith, the American entrepreneur credited with bringing bananas to America. "And look, he was an asshole," She said in the same gossipy but serious tone that she had applied to her discussion about reality television. "I think people are into the whole 'he built a railway and these banana plantations and now we have this, like fragile fruit, that should be really hard to transport from that far away as part of our breakfast' but the things he did to make it so... honestly disgusting."

I blinked at her and then just decided to go for it. I knew a few things about the bloody history of bananas in Central America too. Not as much as her but enough to start a real conversation that lasted a little over an hour about it.

That evening, over dinner she said to me, very pointedly, her words a little slurred by wine, "I know you thought I was dumb, but that's just prejudiced."

We'd been friends ever since.

*****

I arrived at Caterina's house in Notting Hill to find her silhouetted in the doorway, backlit by warm orange light. I knew that in the daylight her home was the kind of obnoxiously photogenic house that Instagram influencers liked to pose for photos in front of. It was three stories high, had pristine white walls covered in flowering red vines and a lacquered black door. It was high contrast pretty but in the darkness everything was softened, the edges rubbed with charcoal shadow and the night air had a slight, refreshing bite to it.

Caterina ran toward me, barefoot, and wrapped her arms around me. When she pulled back she saw the tears in my eyes, cooed at me with concern and gave me another quick hug. She took my luggage from me, wrestling it away with the expert strength of someone who exercised six days a week and quickly escorted me into a home that was at once cozy and minimalist. There was a lot of black and white, clean, empty spaces and also fluffy throws and pillows.

She warmed up a plate of paella, filled two glasses with rioja, started her fireplace and then curled up next to me on one of her gigantic white couches, her demeanour that of a very affectionate, very attentive cat. She took a sip of her wine through a straw, a habit she had started years ago to prevent her very white teeth from darkening, and said, "I'm the happiest to see you but obviously, you didn't fly here just to pay me a surprise visit. Tell me everything."