The following is from Olufemi Terry’s Wilderness of Mirrors. Terry is a Sierra Leone–born writer, essayist, and journalist. His short fiction has been published in Guernica, The Georgia Review, Chimurenga, and The Granta Book of the African Short Story, and translated into French and German. His nonfiction essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Africa is a Country, and The Guardian. He is the 2010 winner of the Caine Prize for his story “Stickfighting Days.”

They are south of Kampsbaai, where he and Tamsin had first met. This flank of the peninsula is less densely settled than the other; the only settlement he can name is Llandudno, and he scans the road signs coming into view with interest. Nordhoek. Kommetjie. At the end of Kommetjie, beyond its lighthouse, an old yellow-skinned man with long narrowed eyes and outturned nostrils sits on a broken chair next to the road. In him, the Boesvolk blood is strong. He offers a two-handed wave in response to Emil’s nod.

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“They ought not to swim there.” Tamsin shakes her head. A knot of yellow children are up to their necks in the ocean playing some game that involves a great deal of bobbing and ducking. None is likely a good swimmer, but perhaps they understand how far out they can venture and which places to avoid. Here and there, barely submerged rocks cause the water to dimple and roil. Tamsin points with her chin at a splintering sign planted in the sand. No swimming: Waste runoff. The heedlessness of the children has touched her mood. Emil in turn becomes a little withdrawn.

To cheer them, Tamsin drives first to a place for swimming above the village of Scarbrough. A bit like Silvermine, she says, save that swimming is not allowed. It is a reservoir that provides the city with drinking water. “Bloody hot.” Tamsin flaps her hand to fan herself. “Rangers patrol up here, but most afternoons they retire to their shed for a kip.” She has parked the car in the lee of a tor, though there is scarcely any shade. “We’re going to earn our swim,” she says, gesturing toward the foot track they will follow. She seems to relish the prospect of trekking two kilometers uphill.

They come under immediate assault from sandflies. Emil is beating them off his neck and shins the whole way, but it pleases him how well he manages the exertion. He has recovered from the fever.

At the edge of the reservoir is a perimeter where the grasses and scrub have been cut back. The shallow water is the same tawny color as at Silvermine, but the reservoir floor is concrete-lined. “Scarbs is down there.” Tamsin is pointing toward the opposite shore; in the haze, it appears farther away than it is. “We could walk to the house, but we’d have to leave the car.”

His head aches. The sun casts a flat white glaze off the reservoir surface, which is reflected by the low sky. The place has an atmosphere of apprehension that he acknowledges is his own mood. They are trespassing in a place without cover of tree or bush. But there is more: a little way back from the water, knuckle-like boulders of sandstone or some other friable rock sharpen the ambience of a consecrated space. He hunts for signs of how the Boesvolk might have used this place a thousand years ago, supposing of course there had been water here then. Braeem Shaka’s anecdote about Dead Woman’s Beach has loosened something within him: a sense that he too can claim these stories as his own history. A feeling of roots even if not quite as Errol means it.

Tamsin slips free of her dress and slippers, leaves them where they fall on the scrubby ground, and levers herself into the water. Sandfly bites mark her upper back and arms, the skin hectic and already wealing. With his thumb, Emil peels a mandarin from his pocket and eats it in two bites. A dark bundle hits his shin as he is teasing open a second mandarin: her swimming costume, bra, and shorts. Perhaps an invitation, although Tamsin is not even looking toward him.

At last, he enters, dragging his feet over mossy, smooth concrete. There has been no letup from the sandflies and he dives and resurfaces, pulling in an unwieldy breaststroke in Tamsin’s general direction. She’s the better swimmer, but his greater strength would ensure that he would overpower her. Idle musing: a reaction to the illness he has experienced and the persisting weakness, but which he cannot now easily shake off.

The way he’s looking at Tamsin seems to convey something of this dark thought. Just an idle musing, he tells himself again. Paddling her arms in a kind of half freestyle, she circles around him and exits the water. Trying for nonchalance, Emil treads water. Best not to be overly solicitous with Tamsin. When he looks up, she has vanished, and curiosity pricks him to follow.

She’s squatted on her heels within a tight copse of five or six stones leaning like dolmens, chin on chest as if an engrossing thing lies between her feet. Pissing, he guesses from the posture; attempting to retreat, he treads on a thorn and feels a stabbing pain in his heel that causes him to freeze before starting again to duck out of view. Peeping Tom. Tamsin is aware of him. Her eyes meet his and then they shut in a long blink; bowing her neck once more, she defecates in a hot rush. Her left hand is scrabbling over the surface of the thin soil, grasping at dead leaves, something to wipe herself. An automaton, he backs out of that place with its animal stink and slinks back into the reservoir.

The pattern that has set in between them over recent days has in an instant shattered and, for Emil, without volition. When Tamsin reenters the water like a soiled naiad, her hair piled on the crown of her head, he reacts to her unfamiliar air of vulnerability by lunging at her. Id and ego.

He’s lifted Tamsin clear of the water but his feet scrabble over the reservoir floor, and they fall backward into water of a depth somewhere between waist and knee. He pushes inside Tamsin, whose response is a kind of acquiescence; at one moment she tightens her clasp on his buttock, a gesture he perceives as encouragement, or pleasure, although she is perhaps simply shifting her grip to avoid drowning.

It may be that he has ejaculated, but his erection has yet to subside. Tamsin, matter-of-fact, pulls on her dress and retrieves her swimsuit. The dampness of their skin draws a burring frenzy of sandflies and they are driven from the reservoir’s edge, Tamsin swatting her sunhat in wide arcs to fend them off. She is breathlessly laughing all the while at the fury of the attacks, the impossibility of defending against them, and now Emil is laughing too, and they lurch down the track, and neither is sure how momentous what has happened ought to be.

*

Scarbrough is less than a village, more of a hamlet of twelve, perhaps fifteen houses. In the last bungalow (keys inside a flowerpot, the left one near the front door), Tamsin’s first act is to kneel at the driftwood dining table and tap out three lines of white powder for each of them. After the second line, all sensation leaches from Emil’s gums. His teeth feel like wood chips and his erection persists even now. Tamsin snorts what remains. The drifts of powder, scattered by her haste, gather in the runnels of the tabletop.

Cocaine makes her ugly, limning her eyes red. For reasons that are not entirely clear, he has removed his shorts and lies shoulder to shoulder with her on the floor of timber slats, which are rotted from the effect of damp ocean air. Nothing comes out of him; it is as if he is stopped up. The veins in his glans protrude. “Cocaine can cause priapism,” Tamsin says in a dissociative sort of tone, and she draws in her feet so her legs are folded into a hill, as if lying on the wood floor is giving her backache.

He wakes wanting again to go inside her. The cocaine has worn off somewhat but his vision remains sharp-etched, and he perceives the gooseflesh on Tamsin’s arms, her belly, as obscene. Her thighs hold him, and at the same time her hand is guiding. “Not there. I’m not using birth control.” He ejaculates: the fluid leaking from his prick is clean as ichor. Tamsin has rolled onto her flank, but it is not clear whether this is meant to dissuade him or invite him.

A gray light comes in from outside the windows. What wakes him is the sound of Tamsin’s hunger pangs, her belly creaking like an oar. A gruff booming bark comes from down the hill, something in it so wild he might be dreaming again, but then he recognizes the sound of olive baboons, perhaps more than one.

He gathers Tamsin up and carries her through to the nearer of the house’s two bedrooms and falls asleep next to her but not touching on the bare, stained mattress. His prick is a small and insensate thing.

*

The vacation house has sat vacant over the long winter months, the windows latched tight against cobras and the clever fingers of baboons. The close interior harbors mold and mildew in the cupboards and single bathroom. Emil feels it tickling his nose and throat. In the old-fashioned murmuring fridge is a hard cheese, marmalade, and olives. Tamsin has removed bricks of unsliced bread from the freezer and set them to thaw on the counter. In the pantry is a stovetop kettle and ground coffee wrapped in foil paper.

He washes his clothes in the bathroom sink with carbolic soap. Out on the stoep, Tamsin is finishing a cigarette. Her fingers worry at the sandfly bites on his belly and neck, as if she is making a tally. Wound about her from knees to torso is a striped cloth. The exposed bits of her—throat, ankles, behind her knees—are even more welted than his own flesh. Off somewhere, bull baboons are raising their woofing grunts again.

He draws out his penis and, rearing a little to avert backsplash, pisses off the stoep into the dying grass. The front lawn falls steeply away from the house and on down to the fence, a garden overgrown with reddening watsonias. She squints and jerks her head in the direction of the next house. “Mrs. Marcus is watching you.” The windows are darkened and the place, as rundown as their own, is too large to be a summer cottage. “Adam loved his foreskin as a boy,” she adds, conversational. “We were constantly telling him to stop yanking on it.”

A causeway runs below Esme’s house, at the bottom of Scarbrough, between the village and the retreating ocean. The waves break farther and farther off the strand. In back, the house has a porch with woven rainproof furniture. The land, unfenced, abuts a bald blackened hillside that must be public land. The gorse is reestablishing itself after the blaze that cut it back a few seasons ago.

While he reads from the notebook, indolent flies, small enough as to be scarcely visible, rove across his arms and torso, eking moisture from the skin.

What might an ethics of contingency look like? To most modern peoples the idea would represent a secular analogue to quietism, fatalistic and Luddite. The view is not wrong, but the question is moot. Adoption of such an ethical system is no more plausible than eradicating belief. 

They are slumming, voluptuous in their filth. His tongue and teeth are furred, and there is a rind of dirt he cannot get at beneath his fingernails. Tamsin stands next to his chair, wearing her bandeau, and near enough for him to smell the same mildew odor he detects on himself. Sawdust and carbolic soap. “There’s a cobra living in the garden. Nomvuyo says she’s watched it come onto the stoep to sun itself.” Tamsin takes in his naked chest, his belly. It is not vanity, this going about without a shirt, but too few clothes. Nomvuyo is the cleaner; she lives just on the other side of this hill. “I need to call her.” Emil thinks to slip his hand under Tamsin’s wrap, but it will have no effect on his penis, so he reopens the crime novel he

has been attempting to read for a day and then closes it. “I’m not sure I met Bolling by accident.”

“What do you mean?”

“We met in a bar in Muttie seemingly at random but he knew things about me, knew I was in med school, that I had moved from eGeld.”

“He was reading you, probably. Trying to pick you up. He invited you back to his place?”

“Yes. It was that night I drank the iboga. We went to Bolling’s to look for a friend of his. I think he said it was Shaka.” “That night in Kampsbaai . . . he seemed to know what you were thinking.”

And exactly where to find me, Emil thinks, but he says, “And then, the other night, Bolling brought up my father and I wondered if it was ever about me.”

“I’m sure your vanity didn’t take too big a hit. Anyway, I don’t think Bolling was really looking for information as much as signaling.”

“Does Shaka have a chance, do you think, of creating a real movement?”

“I don’t know. He’d rather still be at Stanford, wouldn’t he? On that beach, he came across as a little ambivalent. There’s some rage in there, certainly, but I’m not sure that it’s the condition of the brown man that riles him up. My guess is, that’s Bolling’s calculation too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Bolling’s curious to see how far the whole thing can go, but he’s not politically motivated. He’s not dreaming of Creole power.”

*

Vivian telephones as Emil walks into the small car park of the Scarbrough general store. “We’re arriving next Saturday,” she says. He has forgotten the Christmas season, which is now here. “The twenty-second. A quick visit. We’ve had to shift our plans back so your father can take off to Lusaka on Christmas Day.” Such a brief visit that he will see his parents only once. “By the way,” his mother tells him, “your aunt would love to hear from you.” An oblique note on which to end the conversation, not least because his mother seems to little care why he has had no contact with Celeste.

Returning to the cottage laden with bread and coffee and meat, he meets a team of brown men, Creoles, dressed in illmade but carefully pressed khaki uniforms. Beaters. Drivers of baboons. With every stride, the leader breathes into the whistle clenched between his lips, producing a noise like the courting sigh of some prairie bird. His fellows punctuate this with a smart rap of their knobkerries on the lids of rubbish bins. All five eye him as he passes, but none returns his nod. He assumes Scarbrough residents employ the men: an odd livelihood, guarding the vacant second homes of wealthy folk against half-tame primates.

He’s set down the provisions and is unlatching the gate when a blue Mini rolls up and halts alongside him. “Hi,” the woman driving calls through the window in a good-natured if overfamiliar tone and gets down from the car. Her style is close to his mother’s. There are chocolate-colored shoes, almost moccasins, on her feet of precisely the sort Vivian wears to go to the shops. In the same assured voice, she tells Emil, “You’re not delivering groceries, are you.”

He is on the point of answering but merely smiles. The woman comes nearer. Her eyes are gray, the face carefully made up. Too young to relinquish sexual vanity entirely. A reflexive thought, with something—too much—of Bolling’s voice in it.

“Friend of Tamsin’s?” she decides. “I’m Esme.” He notes, sourly, that she is ever so slightly taller than he.

“Esme?” Tamsin calls, coming out to them. Her feet are bare, the toenails a little muddied. On the tilted path, just inside the gate, Tamsin kisses her mother’s cheek very close to the lips. A provocation.

“Gone native, Tams? Thought you’d be in town.”

“I needed space to write. You’ve met Emil? I thought you were in town.”

“So I am. I came to find you, give you lunch. Both of you. I have the feeling you could help with something I’m working on,” she tells Emil.

“You two go on.” Emil is walking into the house to put away provisions. “I’ll stay here.”

“Oh, I really hope you’ll join,” Esme calls after him. “Leave him alone, Esme.”

He is still hiding out in the kitchen drinking warmed-over coffee when he hears Esme saying, from very near, “I’m just using the little girls’ room.” There are footfalls on the front stoep. “Where did Emil vanish to? I’m serious, Tams, about picking his brain.”

She insists on peering into all the rooms—it is her house. Tamsin waits in the kitchen with Emil, smiling; the tour concluded, Esme enters the kitchen. With a glance at Emil, she asks Tamsin, “You’ve not had Nomvi in?”

News of rioting in the city casts a pall over the Scarbrough house, but neither of them is inclined to discuss what it might mean for Shaka. In the cottage, there is no radio or television, and Tamsin goes out to sit in Emil’s car two or three times to hear if there have been any developments before giving it up. Over the next days, the last in Scarbrough before they return to the city, Errol attempts to ring several times, without success. Emil is thankful the mobile network is so poor. “Tell me of a time when you felt normal,” Tamsin asks as they sit in the garden absorbing the sun. “As a child, or in your teens even.”

Roused from a light sleep, Emil has no ready answer. He lets a little time pass before venturing a response that does not feel inadequate. “Playing rugby. On the rugby field I felt normal.” “The elation of running the ball, scoring a try, that sort of thing?”

“No. Or not only that. Also in the changing room, or training. Being with the other members of the team. Camaraderie.” “I wasn’t friends with the other players,” he confesses to her, later still. “I wasn’t the most popular member of the team, but

I was part of it, you know.”

Are he and Tamsin much alike? Will she redeem him, be both the alibi and trigger of his humanity? His worth to her is no clearer now than before. He expected Tamsin to disavow him before her mother, put distance between them. Emil is my assistant. I’m mentoring him. He finds that he quite likes the amorphousness of the relationship.

*

The cottage retains its utopian squalor. They are squatters, lying about, scarcely stirring from the house. The fugitive mood breaks when the cocaine runs out and Tamsin must wait a day for Ekow to make his delivery.

From the porch, Emil watches as the familiar silver-blue car pulls to a stop in the road. Ekow gets out, unlatches the gate, and mounts the stairs with a bouncing step. His hands are empty but then he is wearing a coat. Emil cannot tell whether the dealer has seen him. His eyes are concealed behind sunglasses. Of course he has. The silence, the mutual refusal to acknowledge the other man, feels foolish. He wants but cannot bring himself to call out to Ekow and dispel the animal feeling. And what is there to say?

He reads: What is the backlash against ‘cancellation’ and political correctness but master morality—a sly co-optation of Nietzschean slave morality that adds manufactured victimhood to the long list of tools the wealthy and influential wield against the powerless.

Tamsin has done a line or two, but she is being oddly self-denying with her package of cocaine in spite of the privations of recent days. She sits now on the edge of the bed absorbing Emil’s scrutiny. Unmoving but for the butterfly-slow blink of eyelashes. The quality of his erections, their persistence, changed when the cocaine ran out and the only thing left to him was zoll. He pulls down his shorts to let her see that he wears her underwear, a lime-green pair that he lifted from her tote bag a day earlier, the feel of them in his hand enough to stiffen him. There had also been a tube of lip balm, a stick of mints, and a dog-eared paperback novel by Gabriel Matzneff. The book confused him. She reads French and German?

His prick, his runner’s thighs have stretched the underwear beyond salvage (the slipperiness of the silk keeps his penis in a state of more or less permanent hardness). Seeing him in her briefs draws no reaction. Her fingers are on him, tracing the nearly healed sandfly weals, but the excitation is all on his side. Very likely, she finds his shallow cross-dressing banal, predictable, although for this too there is no evidence.

If he loves Tamsin, it is for this reason. He has absorbed enough from her—also from Bolling—to recognize the banality of his love, and he has ceased to think of himself as emotionally deficient.

She delves one hand into the waistband, pulling at the elastic. He reclines on the soiled mattress, obedient to her hand. More banality: here is what he has sought—power that does not need to coerce. At last, he’s ready. Now, each time is like this, complaisant, Emil pretending to be only half awake. Afterward, overstimulated, he wills Tamsin to go to the other room—it is smaller but no less filthy—and sleep. She is being deliberately obtuse; her hip is glued against his. “It’s a common response, postcoital revulsion,” she told him a few nights before, reading his mind as he’d once suspected Bolling did. It was no admonishment. Anyway, she prefers talk to cuddling. Although the back of her hand presses along his throat. Still feeling for fever.

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Excerpted from the forthcoming novel Wilderness of Mirrors by Olufemi Terry. (Restless Books, Sept. 9, 2025). Copyright © 2025 Olufemi Terry.