“I’d give anything for a bath” I murmured wistfully. What was the possibility of a bath, out here in a middle of a Game Reserve? We were miles from anywhere, stuck here in the middle of the bush. Baths were not on the programmed schedule of events, our purpose here was to tabulate animal life and work out statistics all day long.
“Haven’t you had one?” flashed Bob, teeth flashing
“What, here?”
“Yeah, in the river, you know…”
“The river? It’s muddy! And besides, it’s full of Wild Life.”
“So what, it’s still water…”
“I’d be scared!”
“Hmmm. Tell you what,” he looked at me with candid blue eyes. “I’ll go with you if you like…”
I gave him an old fashioned look. He laughed.
“Oh, if you’re worried about it…Look, all we do is this; we go down to the river, I know a spot where there’s this really tall grass so no one can see you . It’s quite private. We can take some soap. We get clean, we come back. Simple.”
Clean. What a lovely word. The departmental Zoology field trips did have that one disadvantage, you couldn’t get clean. We brought enough water with us for drinking and cleaning teeth, but not enough for bathing, and there were no water faucets near our camp.
We’d been in the bush two days, about two hundred and fifty miles from the Lagos campus. Twelve of us students with three of our lecturers had crowded into the university bus; by coincidence the three lecturers all happened to be English, Dave, Bob and George, but there their similarity ended. Dave was little and clever and studious with the sharp darting looks of the lower vertebrates that were his specialization. Bob was a handsome devil, with jet black hair and beard a contrast to his startling light blue eyes and creamy skin, a bit like a film star, with an enormous personal vanity to match. George on the other hand, a tall man with curly red hair and beard, had pale white skin that seemed translucent, a detail I ascribed to his only being two weeks old in the country.
My fellow students, mainly irreverent noisy young men, I didn’t really know well and was never going to either in the three years I spent at university. When we arrived at the game reserve they all tumbled out of the bus and ran off to form a line to pee against the foliage; while the other girls and I collected our belongings we could hear the pissing and their comments, ‘Phew! I needed that’ etcetera. One of their number had walked a few steps further for privacy and was teased, ‘a man who cannot urinate with his friends has something to hide’!
It was the dry season and there’d been no rain for months, the mighty River Ogun had dried up into intermittent pools and elevated sections, we were camped on one such dry portion of the river bed in huge tents made out of mosquito netting. Everything was covered with a layer of red Harmattan dust, omnipresent particles hanging in the air that seemed to penetrate the top layer of your skin. We were all dressed in old clothes, androgynous in baggy shirts, shapeless jeans and ragged plimsolls, more like a coolies than a university students. The skin on my arms felt like old leather, and my clothes felt rubbery. The thought of being clean was enormously tempting.
“I don’t know…”
“Come on, what’s the danger? If we get into the water, the animals will move out, you’ll see…”
Too tempting. I’d actually be clean. Well, cleanish. The river was a muddy old thing, grey and turgid, she slumbered morosely in the rock pools and mini lakes, waiting for the rains to start her on the move again; still, it was water.
“All right, I suppose,” I looked up at him. He looked far into the distance, like a man with great plans.

After lunch, we collected our things, soap, towel, change of clothes, and set off along the path to the secluded part of the river bank he knew.
The grass grew taller and taller, until it was high above our heads, huge pale golden clumps, seven foot spikes waving in the breeze. Suddenly we came to a small clearing of flat rocks just on the river bank.

We sat on the rocks in the sun and both smoked a cigarette. I looked at Bob, sitting there elbows balanced on his knees, how was I going to get changed while he looked? He must have read my mind.
“Look, just go behind the grass when you want to get changed. I won’t be able to see you.”
I had no reason not to believe him; I changed in the privacy of the high grass curtains, and came out wrapped in my towel.
“You won’t get very clean like that,” he said, eying me speculatively.
“I’ll take it off when I’m in the water…” I waded into the shallows, clutching the soap as a weapon.
He waited watching from the bank, blue eyes twinkling. “When you get in deep enough, throw the towel back to me on the bank or it will get wet.”
“Okay.” In those days I didn’t think very far ahead. I lowered myself carefully inching the towel upwards; when the warm muddy water was up to my neck, I threw the towel back to Bob.
“I’m going to get changed now,” he called out. “Would you mind turning your head?”
I obeyed and got busy with the soap.
White clouds swirled around me in the murky water, and the thought that what I was doing wasn’t terribly safe. This part of the river was remote, really secluded; there wasn’t a sound except for the gentle lapping of the water on the river bank. Suppose he swam towards me and ravished me a thousand times. What had I let myself in for? I’d never done it with a foreigner. Would it be different? Would it be horrible? Would it be all jerky and out of synchronization, like some of the foreign students on the dance floor?
What the hell, it would be different; it would be a new experience. I used the soap languorously, trying to look like an advertisement for soap, one arm stretched up in the air in a balletic pose, the other sensuously lathering from fingertip to underarm. I straddled the water, toes gripping the sliding mud. My breasts buoyant from the enveloping river, jiggled nicely just beneath my shoulder blades, each nipple threatening to surface like a dolphins nose.
How delectable, how irresistible I must look, I told myself. Soon handsome Bob would swim toward me to help me with the job of rinsing and soaping and massaging my hungry young body, he’d come to make the hot young blood race quicker in my veins. He’d take the soap and wash my nether parts, he’d be behind me and I would wriggle back against him, and feel his love sword rise up against my buttocks, then the water would steam and bubble with our passion as he would effortlessly part my willing legs and plunge….Hmmm.

Body tingling, I glanced back to the bank. Bob was sitting naked in the shallows, the murky water lapping at his outstretched legs as he splashed and rinsed his pale torso.
“What are you doing over there/” I’d heard somewhere that Englishmen are shy, you had to lure them. Surely I’d lured enough?
“Can’t swim,” he said, and blushed.
“Not even a little?”
“No” he said glumly, and blushed some more. He was a handsome devil; but he did look silly sitting there in six inches of water like a baby in its bathtub.

The long grass crackled and waved, and George suddenly appeared. I felt disappointment, the tide of rising lust ebbed, the daydream faded.
He changed too (discrete behind the grass curtain) chatted a little while with Bob in the shallows, and slid into deeper water .He could swim. I didn’t like George. He had red curls all over his chest, sandy eyebrows and a pale maggoty skin.
“May I borrow your soap?” he called as he swam towards me. I trod water and held the cake out, which he took with a long look into the water below my neck. He broke the cake in two, and gave me back the other half.
“Thanks,” giving me an appreciative greenish grin. He swam back to the shore.
The long grass heaved and cackled again; this time Dave appeared. The other two exchanged horrified glances; Dave was a bit of a geek, the type of man who makes a good headmaster.
“Just thought I’d join you,” he announced in his stiff maiden aunt kind of way. Dave was, after all, in charge of the expedition, and therefore responsible for the safety of the entire students. He stripped off and got in too. He swam about for a bit. I washed some more, and Dave looked over to me.
“May I borrow your soap,” he asked.
“Not again,” I thought, but he very decorously turned his head away from me and held his arm outstretched, looking far away to the river bank opposite us.
Eventually all the men went back to the riverbank. I swam about like a mermaid in the deep water, showing off, doing backstroke.
“Turn your head, we’re going to change now,” came the officious command from Dave.
I heard them splash out of the water and the rumble of their voices as they dressed, then there was quiet. I turned to look, but all three men were still naked, two of them with their backs to me, but George, covered in red fur from head to toe, shouted , “Hey not yet!”, hastily re-arranging his towel so I couldn’t see if it was true what they said about white men’s private parts.
“Okay, we’re finished now. We’ll set off back to camp, and you can come out of the water and get dressed!”
“Bye!” I called after them as they set off into the long grass.
I scanned the swaying grass screen again and again. I could hear it crackling. Were they waiting for more to come out? The water felt hostile; we found hippo prints in the soft mud downstream when we’d arrived two days before, and yesterday one of the boys had unearthed a nest of crocodile eggs. Without our voices, the animals who owned this bit of river would come back into the water. It was time for me to brave the animals on dry land. If they were still there . All three? Two of them? Only one?
The long grass crackled some more. I was sure they were still there peeking through the elephant grass. I couldn’t stay in the murky water any longer, it was too scary. How I wished I hadn’t put my towel on dry land. It looked very far away.
Nothing else to do but make the best of it. I swam over to the shore, straightened my back and sucked in my tummy, sticking my chest out as far as possible, to wade out of the shallows in naked splendor with slow strutting prance as Lady Godiva must have in ages past, and Venus de Milo before her, and Ursula Andress in my living memory. The towel at last, and hurried dressing, and setting off back to camp. Unraped. Unmolested. Except perhaps by eyes. And so what? I’d seen them too, long white haunches and hairy chests.
No one said anything back at the camp; it was as if the interlude never happened. We left the next day back for campus, back to civilization and showers and clean clothes. Once back at my Hall of Residence, I bathed and tugged on my usual uniform of miniskirt, tight t-shirt and high heeled mules, and went down to the Department to check my projects and the notice board. On my way back, Mick Jackson, my ecology lecturer roared past me in his Volkswagen, screeched to a halt then reversed back in a cloud of dust.
He poked his head of the window, his bearded face split from ear to ear in the widest grin I’ve ever seen.
“Oooohhh!” he cackled. “Some people are naughty!!”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“I heard all about you!”
“Me?”
“Remember the field trip? Remember the mixed bathing? Remember the playing in the water with all the boys?” He wagged his finger under my nose.
“Don’t be silly, Mick.”
“I heard all about it at the staff club bar1” He breathed beery fumes in my face. “Oooohhh!” He could hardly speak for glee. He wagged his finger again. “Oh, you are a naughty girl!” and with that parting shot, sped off..
For a while I reflected on the absurdity of it, I mean those men were crazy! Nothing had happened worth talking about, yet they’d made a story out of it. Nothing had happened. Poor me, I didn’t even get a good look.