Eartha

4| Eartha

When Eartha had migrated all her loads to the wide lobby of Block A and had them inspected by one of the women sitting in the marine-blue plastic chairs in the open space, she headed upstairs towards where Room 16 would be. Her mattress was balanced under one arm and the Ghana Must Go hung heavily on the other hand.

The corridors and stairway buzzed with arriving students.

On reaching Floor 2, she realized that it had exactly the same floor plan as the one she just ascended from. Directly facing the stair landing was a lone door. It was widely spaced out from the two other doors that peeked out from both sides of it. This made all the space directly in front of it and around the staircase open and free. It also divided the whole floor into two wings. Eartha didn't think that door opened to a hostel.

Maybe a kitchen?

But she shrugged and looked around, not knowing if Room 16 was towards the left or towards the right. When a girl arrived from the staircase behind her, slightly pushing Eartha out of her way with the other end of the mattress she was carrying, she knew she had to move on and find her room by herself.

Taking a guess, she turned towards the right wing, away from open space, into a slightly wide corridor.

There were two doors each on both sides of the long corridor and girls buzzed in and out of these door into the corridor. Turning back, Eartha saw that the left wing of the open space also had the same length of corridor and number of doors. The first door she reached read 'Room 14' on a long, white piece of material stuck over the lintel. The next door beside Room 14 read 15 and when she turned to her right side of the corridor, she discovered that her own assigned room directly faced Room 15.

She moved towards the door, heaving a sigh of relief. The Ghana Must Go bag was not lightweight and was beginning to wear her arm down. Also, the matress hoisted under her other arm didn't help matters, her whole limb burned with muscle ache.

Through a pewter-grey door she hadn't noticed at first, a girl came out, slamming it behind her. The door stood beside the wall at the end of the corridor and was longer and thinner than the dormitory doors. There was also another similar door facing it on the other side of the corridor.

Those have to be the bathrooms, she thought and tore her gaze away, stepping into Room 16.

The first thing that struck Eartha about the room was its vastness. The bunks all hugged the walls of the room, leaving a wide open space the size of a standard living room in the middle. She could put her mattress on the floor in the middle and still have two other mattresses each line up on both of its sides.

There were six bunks arranged around the rectangular room. One bunk each lined both sides of the door horizontally, pushed off towards the end of the room. Two bunks also faced directly from the door, aligning with the ones beside the door on the other side of the room. This bunks had two wide, louvered windows behind them that probably looked out into that wide space between the Block A and Block B. Two other bunks hugged the shorter end of the walls on either side of the room in a vertical line, so that the six bunks formed a rectangle with the shape of the room as well.

An older girl sitting on a bunk facing the door was unbuckling her shoes. She looked up when she noticed the gawping girl that stood rooted in front of the door.

'Room 16?' she asked.

'Yes,' Eartha replied, returning back to herself. 'Bedspace 2.' She looked around.

The girl pointed a skinny left arm forward, towards a bunk on the other side of the door at the far end. 'That's Bunk 2, it's written on the wall beside the bunk.'