Gazing out his window, Dawson tried to stop his brooding as the bus sped along the George H. Bush Highway. He turned his thoughts to his destination, the twin city of Sekondi-Takoradi. It was the capital of the Western Region (WR); Sekondi was the administrative section, while Takoradi was more commercial. Dawson’s father, Jacob, had grown up in Takoradi and moved to Accra as a young man. In Accra, he met Dawson’s mother, Beatrice, an Ewe woman. Although Jacob seldom if ever visited Takoradi these days, he still had family there, including a nephew called Abraham, or “Abe.”
Dawson had called his cousin to ask if he could possibly stay with him while in town. The Ghana Police Service (GPS) was so unlikely to pay for accommodation or transportation costs that submitting receipts for expenses was a waste of time.
Abraham, who lived above his stationery store in downtown Takoradi, had told him that with his two teenage children at home, there was no space. But he had a better idea. He was remodeling a small family bungalow a mere ten minutes away. Hoping to profit from the boom in the hospitality industry spurred by the discovery of oil, he planned to rent the bungalow once he completed it. If Dawson didn’t mind the state of incompletion of the place, Abraham had said, he was welcome to bunk there. It was an offer Dawson would have been a fool to refuse. When he had visited Takoradi as a teen, Abraham had been in his early twenties. It had been a long time since the two had seen each other, but that didn’t matter. Family was family, and Abraham was more than happy to help.
On the open road, the bus passed Weija Lake on the right. It was the beginning of November, and although heavy rainfall was over for the year, the landscape was still verdant and rich. Deep green foliage covered the hills and hugged the roadsides. Soon, the dry season would arrive with its persistent Harmattan haze: fine particles of dust blown down from the Sahara from November to March.
Immediately after they’d passed Cape Coast University in the Central Region, the beach made its appearance on their left. The blue-green of the sea looked like a painting with the foamy white of the waves breaking at the shore, and the coconut palm fronds, atop spindly trunks that grew off vertical. It all looked freer and wilder than Accra’s beaches. Dawson shuddered at the thought of swimming in the sea. He had not spent much time at the beach as a child, and he could barely swim. On the few occasions he’d ventured into the surf at Labadi Beach, he’d been frightened by the strong undertow.
