The area in which the hotel was situated was markedly smarter than almost everywhere else Hannah had been in this country. The tree-lined roads were marked by consulates, embassies and the national headquarters of many multinational companies. Albert parked the car in the hotel's vast but nearly empty car park, and the two of them sat in the hotel bar. A man in a black suit and tuxedo was playing a selection of inoffensive standards on a huge white piano, while the large leather seats were occupied by a mixture of black and white guests speaking to each other in a multitude of languages, of which, naturally, English was the most prevalent.

A few drinks and a conversation about Albert's job was all that it took for Hannah to proffer Albert the invitation to join her for a coffee in her hotel room. Albert wasn't at all surprised by this, though most such conversations he'd had with women markedly younger than him which had resulted in such an invitation had usually had a price tag involved, something which Albert accepted as part of normal life and an almost expected feature of his visits to the capital.

He was not at all alarmed when Hannah, in the privacy of her large hotel room, dominated by a huge television screen where two European football teams were silently running around amongst the on-screen score-cards, took virtually no time at all, and with no sign of shame, in removing her top and shorts. He was actually more surprised to note the light rash that coloured her bare shoulders and the bottom of her neck. She pulled down her knickers and Albert saw that the lips of her vagina were pierced just as surely as her navel. He thought it strange that Westerners attacked the tradition of female circumcision, but had no apparent qualms in practising genital mutilation themselves. Typical hypocrisy, he thought.

Hannah took it on herself to unclothe Albert and gave a whoop of delight as his penis sprang up relieved of his boxer shorts. Albert knew that he wasn't the most well endowed man there was (his times showering with other men after playing a game of rugby had disabused him of that vanity), but he'd heard that Western men were quite pitiful in that department, and Hannah's joy as she took his prick in her hands was evidence that this view might be true.

She took his erect prick in her hands and touched the glans with her tongue. Albert quivered with tension as he felt the soft warm moistness of her tongue on its tender edge, causing it to stiffen to its maximum extent. And then she knelt down in front of him and guided his penis into her mouth: placing a finger firmly between his scrotum and his anus, and gulped it up and down her neck, her cheeks bulged out. This was something Albert's wife had never assented to. She had always objected to the smell and the association with urination. The only women to ever have agreed to that were the scrawny prostitutes who hung around the bars at the rather more modest hotels he usually stayed in. And although his penis was almost bursting with the need to release, Hannah had the expertise of these same prostitutes to ensure that he didn't reach his climax too soon.

She removed her mouth from his prick and ran her hands up and down his black torso and thighs, while her teeth worried at the strands of black short curled hair around the base. She took her mouth away briefly and coughed in a wheezy throaty way, while one hand kept a grip on the hard throbbing shaft of his dick. He looked down on her from above. Her hair flopped over her cheeks and he admired the whiteness of her skin. He'd never had sex with a white woman before and he found the contrast between the tanned flesh of her arms, legs and waist a frightening contrast with the anaemic whiteness of her crotch, arse and bosom. He supposed that in America, white people were probably as white as that all over. The strangeness of it almost excited him to ejaculate there and then.

But thankfully that was not to be. Hannah guided Albert back onto her large double bed, the thin sheets pushed back, and as he descended onto his back, she kept herself astride and on top of her. And then, the moment that defined sex, she positioned her crotch above his erect prick, and let it slide, easily and smoothly into her moist vagina. She sank her crotch bit by bit down to its very base, supporting her weight on her long thin tanned legs, her arms falling lengthwise on either side of him.

"Ooh! It's been so long! Days! Maybe weeks!" she gasped as she pushed her crotch slowly and smoothly up and down, while Albert lay recumbent, his own arms stretched uselessly on either side of him.

"Is that so?" he asked, watching with almost academic interest as his penis was alternately swallowed and eased out by her labial lips.

"African men! They're all mouth and trousers!" She explained. "You don't know what a struggle it is to get a fuck round here. I'm just glad there are a few women here who don't mind."

"Don't mind what?" asked Albert, not really expecting an answer, but guessing her meaning. The perversion of the suggestion actually aroused him the more, and he took Hannah's waist in his broad hands, the watch sliding slightly down his wrist, and drew her body close to his. Her breasts, so pert and white, pressed against the short curly hair of his chest, tingling his nipples and urgently commanding his buttocks to thrust harder and faster into her.

The two kept this up for several moments, uncomfortable as it sometimes was to fuck someone from underneath, even though Hannah seemed to be thrusting with an equal amount of urgency as him. And then they turned round, Albert on top of her: the position he most often enjoyed with his wife and which had resulted in three healthy sons, one healthy girl and a second girl who'd unfortunately died from a bout of dysentery when she was still a very young child. His penis thrust back and forth, feeling redder and rawer against her rough vaginal lips while sweat poured down his chest, lubricated the hairs, and slid against Hannah's own shiny perspiring skin. These white women seemed to sweat so easily, the pearls of perspiration glistening on the pits of her tanned shoulders, and gathering in a pool by his prick. He pushed in and out, while every now and then he felt Hannah's finger press against the skin between his testicles and the hairs of his anus: a trick he'd been told by one prostitute whose body he'd enjoyed would keep his penis erect for that much longer. In. Out. In. Out. Slap. Slap.

And then, Hannah again broke off to cough. This time for longer and more violently. She pushed herself away from under him, and with a weak smile ran into the bathroom, where Albert could hear her cough for several minutes. Long enough for his twitching penis to gradually shrink to half its erect size. He studied the football teams on the silent screen, punctuated every few minutes by a startling spin of the image as a replayed shot or tackle was rebroadcast.

She came out from the bathroom, rubbing her lips with the back of her hand, and the two of them recommenced in their lovemaking as if there had been no break. Although Hannah had to first of all coax his penis back up to its full size. And their lovemaking went on and on, for longer than Albert could recall ever having made love before, whether with a prostitute or with his wife (even in the early days of his greatest sexual enthusiasm and especially now where it was usually perfunctory and not very frequent). She knew how to vary the diet to keep up their mutual interest, and even after he had released a mass of semen all over her breasts and waist (as she bizarrely insisted), he somehow regained the energy to begin again. Outside the sun went down and they put on the bedside lamps to allow some, but not too much illumination on their fucking.

At one stage, she positioned herself head down, arse in the air, and got him to fuck her from behind. This was something he'd never done before, and was not too sure he really enjoyed. The sight of a bare back (especially one with that strange rash) was not as appealing to his eyes as a woman's face and breasts, but the strange tightness of her vaginal opening from this angle gave him fresh desire, and he pushed in and out of her with vigour, supporting himself by arms stretched out alongside her own. But then she took his penis in her hand, while still beneath him and motioned it towards her anus. Before Albert was sure what he was doing, his penis was thrusting into a smaller tighter hole, one whose type he'd never been in before.

At first he was enjoying it. The tight squeeze it gave his prick, the slight resistance it gave to his thrusts gave his lovemaking more passion and more thrust. And then his prejudices took hold. He was no batty boy. This type of sex was quite unnatural and almost certainly would require penance either before or during his after-life. He pulled his penis free and reinserted it into her vagina, enjoying its now familiar warm liquid welcome as it sank into its more capacious depth.

Albert and she spent the night together, their arms around each other, occasionally chatting, but more often sleeping. In bed, Albert found her conversation about the lovers she'd known, the sexual escapades she'd enjoyed, the variations she'd experimented in, that much more acceptable and even quite erotic than when he'd driven her along the African roads.

Albert never saw her again. When morning came and they'd enjoyed breakfast together before his meeting at the bank headquarters, they'd made promises to keep in touch that both of them knew would never result in anything. A final kiss and a friendly squeeze of his sore testicles through his neat linen trousers was the last of Hannah.

At least until a few months later, when his wife drew his attention to the scandal of the death of a famous American Sex Poet who had died of double pneumonia, which it was suspected had been exacerbated by the disease that was decimating Africa. Much of the article concentrated on her fame and her controversial reputation, but also on the quality of her verse. But these parts of the article were the ones that concerned Albert the least.

Hannah had unsuspectingly been carrying the retrovirus for many years, and it had matured into its full-blown manifestation while she was in the African continent. It would not have occurred to a worried Albert as he contacted his doctor, but her lonely agonised death in the top floor of the Garret hotel was not at all unlike the traditional death of a poet that Hannah might have aspired to in moments of foolish romanticism.