Red Monday

The cleaning lady at Wine Bar has made some sage life choices. I know this because when she sees my head bobbing about in the region of a German woman’s crotch, my hands making frantic movements below her dress in the establishment’s toilet, she scurries away with the wisdom of the ancients. Clutching mop, shaking head, considering eye-gouging.

It’s not what it looks like.

It’s about 18h30 on a Monday evening. A pretty sober hour on the dourest day of the week so it’s no time to be fooling around in bathrooms even if I were an exhibitionist, a lesbian and unfamiliar with locks.

This runs through my mind with the speed at which I’m rubbing but if I hurry after her to protest assumptions of public indecency, I may lose the war against the stains.

The whole thing happened in slow motion.

The sun finally setting in the spectacular way it does in Namibian skies, me grabbing my camera, jumping up, knocking over a glass of red wine still in position on a ledge from an Instagram photo and it shattering on the concrete splattering blood of Christ all over a tourist in a lily white dress before a mutual “oh my God!”

Our Lord and Saviour has little comment but the woman’s husband does mutter a couple of things in German. Things that narrow his eyes, purse his lips and make him look far more like her father than he did when he walked in.

He’s less her dad than he is the love of her life. She tells me this while I’m kneeling on the toilet floor thanking her for not biting my head off and remarking that her pops seems more pissed off than she does.

She laughs and tells me that they’re married, he’s just being protective, he’s eight years older and a demonic part of me says he looks it.

I don’t mean to be mean but I’ve been rubbing at these red wine stains for 10 minutes straight and the absurd reality is that my knees have begun to beg, my eyes are starting to see spots and I’m almost out of soda water.

I sent for some in the midst of all the staring.

I saw it on television or maybe read it in a book once so, as soon as I noticed the red wine adding unwanted polka dots to the woman’s pristine dress, I instinctively yelled “get me some soda water!”

The waiter already thinks I’m some kind of special case.

I’m dressed entirely in black, wearing a snapback cap that says ‘Royal’ and I’ve been reading snatches of Petina Gappah’s unreleased novel in between sips of red wine and furtive glances at the horizon in a way that suggests some living left of predictable middle.

Crotch-bobbing aside, I’ve actually come to photograph the sunset.

My other sometimes-editor has asked me to chronicle some of Windhoek’s essential experiences and our city’s sunsets are near the top of my list so I’m sitting at Wine Bar waiting to get a good shot.

The scattering of couples and friends have all spared me a curious glance.

Nothing mean or mocking, just that look people give other people when they see them hanging around by themselves in settings usually reserved for looking like you have even just half a friend in the world.

The Great Red Wine Splattering is a spectacle.

Heads turn, a second of quiet descends and the whiteness of the woman’s dress sends feminine hands flying to their mouths in horror because everyone who has ever stepped out wearing white knows to avoid red wine, ice cream and imbeciles.

The request for soda water is met with less urgency than I prefer so I jog to the bar and tell the barman to move his *rse.

The German woman is waiting for me in the bathroom about a beat from hyperventilating and I know if I don’t get to those stains fast, there’s going to be a scathing nation-condemning review on TripAdvisor.

Frau Rotwein makes me douse invisible spots until I can’t remember a time before I was dousing invisible spots. I can’t see them any more but she insists on stepping into the light and hallucinating tiny stains that are either long gone or beyond help.

A professional stain locator would consider her dress pristine but her fault-finding comes from a lack of foreseeable washing.

I keep telling her that there is nothing there and there will be even less nothing after she washes her dress but she assures me she won’t be washing her clothes during her three-week trip through Namibia.

It’s around then that I stop rubbing.

We part ways after she daintily accepts a brand new chair to replace her bone dry one and I don’t ask her if she generally sees spots or just this one time.

I don’t ask her if she’ll be pressing charges based purely on the look on her husband’s face and I don’t ask why she won’t be washing her clothes with good clean, stain-lifting water.

I just apologise, leave and think:

In an age of information overload, Sunrise is The Namibian’s morning briefing, delivered at 6h00 from Monday to Friday. It offers a curated rundown of the most important stories from the past 24 hours – occasionally with a light, witty touch. It’s an essential way to stay informed. Subscribe and join our newsletter community.