never no flashlight

10:00 p.m..

Walking home at night, alone, from L's house.

It's about a kilometre to my house. This walk used to terrify me. There are, of course no lights – and using a flashlight just makes it worse, because you get a tiny island of light and the rest of the dark is even darker. I haven’t used a flashlight on this walk for about a year. If you have ever walked a country road, not a single electric light visible in any direction, you probably know what this is like.

It’s dark, of course. So dark. But it's never true dark. There's no such thing as a completely black night sky – the stars give more light than you’d imagine, and when the moon is out it’s like daylight. When the sky is cloudy, it's dark, but if it gets too cloudy then there's lightning, and either way the stars shine through somehow. If the cloud is thick enough to block out the stars entirely, then it’s also stormy enough that the wind shreds the cloud here and there and you can see the sky. If the cloud covers the entire sky, then it’s not thick enough to completely obscure the moon and stars.

I walk home in this dark. On a cloudy night, I cannot see my hand in front of my face. I can see only the barest distinction between earth and sky - bushes converging as a lumpy horizon, a line between pure shadow and the slightly lighter sky on the horizon. It gets darker up in the dome of the sky, where the cloud is thicker. I walk towards that convergence, the V of lines of perspective showing me where the road is. It is a straight road, gravel, lined with acacias. Occasionally I can see a dim cooking fire in the bush, or hear the murmur of voices, but at 10 p.m. almost everyone is sleeping.

On a night this dark, there is sure to be lightning, and when the lightning strikes it lights the world IN COLOUR. At night, you don't expect colour, even if you never thought of it that way. Your cones are off. Your rods are on. Your brain adjusts to the greyscale night, and when the lightning flashes it shocks – it's not just the light, although it makes you feel the craziest kind of high, your pupils dilated 110% for the dark and suddenly stunned by the sheet lightning blowing up the world – it's not just that, it’s the COLOUR. Colour when there should never be any colour, no, not at midnight, and somehow your brain knows this, interprets the sudden appearance of the spectrum as severely strange, an anomaly, an unreality.

It is so dark I literally cannot see my hand in front of my face, unless I hold it against the sky to get the dim silhouette against that slim band of light on the horizon. There are always goats asleep on the road at this time of night, and I smell them before I hear or see them – the pungent odour of goat fur and hooves and dung, and the smell of the leaves and grass they have eaten, half-digested and flavouring their exhalations. As I get closer, the goats scuffle to their feet and I can catch glimpses of the white ones as I walk among them, feeling the air stirred by their passing, the movements of the pebbles kicked up by their hooves. The darker goats are invisible.

I know the route well, of course. It’s impossible for me to measure a kilometre when I walk in the dark, and it always seems to take longer than the 10 minutes it actually does, so I have to judge my progress by landmarks. I steer by the big square water tower, which can usually be discerned as a fuzzy silhouette against the inky sky. After that it’s not so far to my house, and I look for the shape of the particular bush that marks the turnoff. Usually someone’s left a light on in the office, and if I peer through the bush at the right spot, I can see it and it will guide me home. If the office light isn’t on, I wait for flashes of lightning to show me the special bush that heralds home.

I've been here so long now that I know the bushes. I never miss my house, never walk too far, never turn too early. I love this walk, my solitary journey home in the dark.

I don’t even bother bringing a flashlight to L’s anymore.