6.

The hotel was flashier than I expected. For starters, it had a pool. Also an armed guard on the door, with his gun slung super-casually over his shoulder. The big surprise though was that Xander had already arrived from Nigeria. To sweeten the offer of bringing me on the trip – mostly she just didn’t want to leave me at home to ride my bike, watch YouTube and stare at the ceiling, though after a long first year at boarding school that’s all I wanted to do – Mum had suggested back at Easter that I could bring a friend. She thought I’d pick Amelia, and of course I wanted her to come, but when I mentioned the trip to Xander at school he took it as an invitation too. Xander’s dad is Nigerian and they live there. I’d told him about the safari and he was really up for that. So keen, in fact, that he had got his dad to put him on a plane from Lagos a day early. He was on a lounger by the pool, baggy shirt undone, hat on backwards, drinking Coke with an umbrella in it, when we turned up.

I introduced Xander to Amelia. It’s always weird when two people you know in entirely different ways meet, with you in the middle, and Xander, who’s normally completely unrufflable at school (he slept through a fire alarm in our first week) seemed instantly twitchy in front of Amelia. She’d changed out of her travelling clothes into a swimsuit as soon as she clocked the pool, and chucked her towel onto the lounger next to Xander’s now, eager to get in the water.

‘Nice to meet you, Amelia,’ Xander said so stiffly I laughed out loud. ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’ He immediately started doing up his shirt buttons with jittery fingers.

‘How many of those have you drunk?’ asked Amelia, twisting her long black hair into a bun to fit beneath her swimming cap.

‘It’s Coke.’

‘Yes, fully caffeinated and rammed with sugar,’ she replied. ‘You look wired.’

‘Three,’ he admitted, his face set to Who-are-you-anyway?

‘That’ll be why. Who’s coming for a swim?’

Without waiting for a reply, she dived straight in, did four lengths of butterfly very quickly indeed – she’s on the county swim squad – and stood up in the shallows to announce, ‘It’s approaching blood temperature in here, at least thirty-five degrees.’

‘You’ll get used to her,’ I told Xander. ‘Did you see the guy with the rifle out front?’

‘I didn’t notice him,’ he said. ‘But … you’ll get used to it. I told you: Africa’s different.’

‘Yeah. We’ve already been robbed, sort of.’

‘Don’t stereotype.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Well, that’s either astonishingly bad luck or you were asking for it.’

I fought the urge to tell him how I’d hit the motorcyclist with the golf ball. I’m not ten any more and I’ve learned that a person’s achievements sound more impressive if retold by someone else. It’d come out in time.