Isabelle was swaying back and forth, her eyes fixed on me. I tried to play along with her, but my mind was too occupied to do anything other than shuffle my feet aimlessly and try to avoid colliding into others. The song was very repetitive, almost like a stuck record. With the heat and humidity, the frantic jostling crowd, the headiness of the marijuana and the nearness of Isabelle’s body, I struggled to keep a clear head. After a few minutes, the song built to a dramatic climax, and my ears were left ringing in the relative quiet that came after.

Isabelle was smiling ecstatically, sweat dripping off her. ‘C’est magnifique, non?’ she shouted in my ear, and I nodded. The band began making their way offstage, and were disappearing through an entrance covered by a beaded curtain. Isabelle found the doorman who had let us through. Money changed hands, and we were passed to one of his colleagues. Another swift transaction and we were shown through the curtain and led down a long corridor until we reached a door marked ‘Artists’ Green Room’.

‘Welcome to the Afrospot, my friends!’ said the trombonist, after he had been told by the doorman that we were press. ‘My name is J. J. Thompson-Bola. Have you been enjoying the show?’

We nodded our heads like obedient schoolchildren. The room was almost as packed as the dance floor, with musicians and hangers-on chatting and smoking and laughing. Standing in one corner was a rather stern-looking middle-aged woman in a traditional dress and headgear made from the same material. She was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t place - it was almost as though she knew me, or thought she did.

J. J. was now bare-chested, and a couple of young women were wiping his torso down with a sponge: he looked like a boxer limbering up for another round. As he rotated his shoulders and rolled his head around, his eyes fixed on Isabelle. ‘You are reporter?’ he asked her. ‘For which newspaper?’

‘Agence France-Presse,’ she said. ‘It’s a news agency . . .’

‘I know what it is,’ he snapped, bringing his head back to its natural position. He paused, perhaps realizing there was little point in antagonizing the press unduly. ‘I think I have met you before. Is that so?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I wrote an article on the cultural festival last year—’

‘Ah, yes, I remember.’ A woman handed him a bottle of Fanta orange squash and he gulped down a few swigs. ‘So why have you returned? Could you not resist my charms?’ He grinned impishly, and the middle-aged woman smacked her lips in mock disapproval. Could she be his mother, come to cheer on her son’s performance?

Isabelle smiled at the flirtation. ‘I told my editor about how your brand of high life is becoming more popular, and he was interested in another story, but this time to be centred around only you.’