Scary Movie

It's not everywhere that boasts a restaurant in an empty building, but tonight we have booked and plan to experience it first hand. We’ve been warned that it is a bit strange.

It is in the very centre of town, and as we approach it the buildings get grander and more interesting. One of the most beautiful is a two storey building on the corner fronted by a very elegant arcade. The arches are so well proportioned that it could have come from the hand of an Italian architect in the Renaissance. Truly special.

But wait. The arches are there, and there is a building behind, but it stares at us with the empty eye-balls of the derelict. And at the end, a tree has taken root on the roof, a tree that is famous in Africa for being able to root out of the soil. Its roots clasp the last arch and its columns in a grotesque sculpture of an alien plant, half octopus, half Medusa. The roots twist and turn over each other as they head for the ground, and then bury themselves deeply into the tar of the pavement.

The road must have been the classiest of all in earlier times: the Kinshasa equivalent of Bond Street. It is beautifully paved with concrete stones, and even now one can feel the pride with which shopkeepers in that street looked out onto the tree lined Avenue and admired the classy ladies window shopping.

At night, however, it has no glamour, only the sadness of a defeated place in which decay and abandonment have won.

Shortly afterwards we see the neon light of the restaurant, and are deposited at the front door. Not of the restaurant, because it is on top, but of a dirty, echoing passage which leads to the lifts. A man who looks, as far as the dim light reveals, rather like a beggar, jumps up and shows us to the lift. One small light reveals him in more detail: his beggarly appearance derives from a strange attempt to dress him up as a Rajah. Around us is nothing but abandonment – no paint, no notices, just dirt and dereliction.

He ushers us into the lift. I think it takes more than a little courage to get into this lift: if everything is so run down surely the chances of the lift getting stuck are pretty high. But the alternative is worse. The building has a menacing atmosphere made far worse by the lack of light. This surely is a perfect setting for a horror movie. Every corner has within it the potential to house a dreadful monster, or, to be more practical, a knife-wielding thief.

The lift is one of these without an inside door. They’ve made a tentative effort to decorate the inside of the lift with some vaguely exotic wall paper, but it is dirty and torn, so one wonders whether a clean coat of paint might not have been more effective. The beggar gets in with us, and presses the button for the top floor. No words are exchanged, as we glance uneasily at the lift, the lift man and each other. Suddenly it lurches to an abrupt stop. We know that the restaurant is on the top floor, but this isn’t the top floor, it is the one below. The heart sinks. But no problem. Whether this is a device to fool bad people, or a fault that only a long-lost Belgian can repair we do not know. But the lift man does not share our anxiety: he presses the button for the top floor a second time, and voila: we’re on the move again.

The lift door opens onto another scary dark passage, but at the end is a light! Joy, pure joy, to see light, and quite bright light as well. We forget the scary movie monsters lurking in the shadows and make hastily to the doorway. A flight of stairs and there we are, in normalcy. A restaurant with nicely laid tables, and big bar (rather empty of interesting bottles, but the bar itself is there) and an outside terrace.

From here we can see the whole of Kinshasa. The noise and hassle of the streets do not matter up here: we can sit in the lovely warm darkness of the tropical night, exchanging all the clichés about the hardships of life in the tropics, as we sip our gins and tonic. And what is even better, we’re so high up here, there’s definitely no malaria.