The Owl

Computers were devouring me. They were eating me alive. The internet was a monster sucking nervous energy from my insides. My social life in messages and posts, gambling, porn. Yeah. Porn. Such rich colors. Real life was dull fare. Then I was sacked for spending so much time on my phone at work. I knew better but Mr Should was not Mr Driver.

“Take a holiday,” my sister said. I was staying at her apartment in South London. The sky was full of milling airplanes because Heath Row was not far away. We were on the balcony. The gardens of Clapham Common below us.

"You need to get back to nature," she said looking at a gin and lemon soda in front of her as if watching the bubbles for advice. "Somewhere interesting but without any glowing thing. No phone. No pad. Get so close to nature that nature can smell you. ” Then, being wealthy, she showed how much she loved me by spending oodles on the problem: a trek-tour into the heart of the darkest continent. Nairobi Hilton then go bush. “Come on John Everyman,” she said. “those computers have a straw into your mind and are sucking you dry. Don't take one phone. Go mute."

Then she beamed at me. Satisfied that she had sorted me out. My generous sis. But she has crooked teeth at the side. Has never bothered with it. Her smile looked like a crocodile.

Africa it was.

And I left behind the internet. I was out of the whale. In the wild heart of the dark continent without the devices that had so consumed me. I was striving to break free. Smell nature. Right sis. Have nature smell me. Yeah, sure. A bus tour. On the bus, on the bus, on the bus. Herded onto observation towers with glass fronts. Camping grounds. They rope us in. A white rope we are not supposed to cross - outside the flood lights.

“ Don’t go out in the dark,” they say.

“What?” I reply. "Is Nature out there?" Sarcastic. I was getting a bit annoyed. I felt we were being corralled away from the great outdoors.

"Yep, nature," they said back. "You don’t want that.'

So we saw everything through windows. Though that, itself, was sometimes amazing. Once a giraffe stood in the middle of the road unperturbed by the speeding bus approaching it.

The bus driver was a guy we liked. He was from Nairobi but grew up in South Africa. A great manager who could give you long answers completely without information. A big lazy smile. But behind the wheel he turned ferocious. Any bird, animal, person, car, taxi truck or other bus got in his way he would immediately lurch at it and terrify.

We knew he kept a very ancient looking submachine gun underneath the driver's seat. It was kind of reassuring he had that. Kind of.

When he saw the giraffe he honked his horn again and again. "Get out of the way you big goat," he called and starting reaching under the seat for the gun. "No, no, no," we all went so he had to admit defeat and grind to a halt in front of the huge animal. It wasn't not going to budge. The head looked down and gave us the hairy eyeball, the four legs a solid tower.

It was the power. Nature.

We stopped and waited. Incredible. But it meant nothing to me. I did not have a camera to validate it. Everybody else some doing exactly that, all the other people on the bus making oohs and ahs at their phones, including little clucking sounds, contented hens over the dearly beloved cellulars. But me? No, no, no! For them it was the true golden moment, a time of real significance: great Facebook photos. For me. Outcaste. I was an outcaste.

I don’t know what made me go outside the ropes. But it was the third night. Twelve of us on a 4WD monster-bus. Huge tires. There was me, a Chinese guy, a Japanese man, and nine women from Wisconsin, on the lamb from married life. Loud voices, nasal, always pleased with themselves.

One the first night the women made a big show of building their own camp fire. They were clearly very hostile to us men. But then the big one, Nora, the one who did all the talking, full of that wiseacre American gotta-challenge-you thing came over and apologised. Turns out the tour company had sold them a women's only tour. At the last minute three men were slipped in.

"Not your fault," she said to us but they remained surly. Great, we come all this way and have our faced rubbed in the backside of the human game. And who was this travel company anyway? Talk about dropping us in it. Dammit! I was unable to Google the company name. I was ignorant. Did not have a phone.

So I wandered away, bored, pissed off.

In the half dark, just meters from the perimeter light, the lioness attacked me with the slightest of warnings: a growl, a rush, a double push of mat-sized paws at my chest, claw armed and drove me to the ground. She tossed her head back with a triumphant roar then, with a plunge, mauled my right arm from my body and chewed it as a first snack. Chomp, chomp, chomp. “Yum,” she was thinking. Pain in me had not kicked in. Unreality. I was watching her crunch the bones of my arm. She started a new growl with slight look sideways. Then BANG! a thunder-clap, my ears ringing, the creature knocked side-wise, the starting-up lion-roar becoming a dead-moment grunt - and there stood that Wisconsin woman, Nora, above me, a shot-gun in her arms like two thick cannons, both barrels smoking. Poor cat. How did she have that weapon?

She drew back and re-loaded in a deft crouch then scanned for trouble. Nature, remember, was all about us.

That’s when my pain kicked in. My bare stump of arm squirted blood. “Arrrr!” A couple of the travelers were nurses and sprang forward to save me, but it was too late. Massive blood loss.

I drifted to the edge of consciousness. “Oh help,” a little voice said in me, “I am going to die.” Then my body started convulsing. Some sort of death throe? No, no, my stump of an arm was searching for the absent phone. I was composing the selfie: “Fading fast.” But no phone. No being. Even at the point of death, it wasn’t real. Not valid. My stump convulsed one last time. One last reach for dear cellular.

So, I died. And woke with a Labrador dog leaping into my face and licking me. Ah ha! A new incarnation. Still in Kenya. Reborn. Given the grace. I did not know it would be like this - in an already established life: sixteen years old, a boy in the locker room booting up for soccer practice. Somehow a dog has got in the training room, excited leaping. “Bleah! He got his tongue in my mouth,” my voice. My friends laugh.

“Did you hear that?” It is my mate, Harry. Big guy in every sense of the word. “Simon tongue kissed the dog.”

“Wait till we tell Sharon!” says another but I laugh with them.

I had made it. Thank you, Africa. Realness. Death and reincarnation: I had beaten screen addiction.

I was a young African boy about to play football.