Lara Pawson has arrived in Angola and is writing…

I’m looking for the mermaids in the car-park, the ones who came out at night, who swam to the shore and drifted over the land to mingle among the muddy bars in the evening. I asked my friend who first taught me how to see as sereias if he knew where they were but he looked at me strangely, puzzled at my question. So the mermaids have gone. I looked and looked and all I saw was a ginger cat’s convulsing stomach, two kittens sucking hard on her, kneading around her teats for milk, desperate to feed their tiny frames. She kept on licking her front legs and their heads, her stomach heaving and bursting with air, and soon they gave up and drank from black pools with filthy pigeons sucking at their side. So much hooting and so many cars. Water drips on blouses from exhausted air-conditioners pulling at the air above. ‘I keep my air conditioner on just to block out the sounds outside,’ a large lady said. Dripping water is a form of torture. Water drips from tanks and air-cons, leaking cars and blue and white plastic. I can hear dripping water and hooting cars and police helicopters and sirens, and distorted seventies soul music blasting from black boxes under a layer of dust, and a police whistle, and a killer computer game, and birds – those budgies…