Chapter 2
The Boy I Was
Yesterday I wrote that I'd tell you about a football. I have been sitting here for an hour with the pen in my hand, trying to decide how to begin, and I think I have to begin by taking something back.
I called myself a boy who was glad his father was dead, and I let that stand as though it were the whole of the story. It isn't. Nothing is only one thing. Over the next seven years I was also a boy who laughed so hard at a joke in church that he fell off the bench. I was a boy who could do long division in his head faster than the teacher could write it up. I was a boy who once walked four miles in the rain to return a pencil case that wasn't his. If I'm going to tell you how I became what I became, I owe you the truth that I started as someone else, because that is what makes it sad. If a man begins rotten, there is no tragedy in him. The tragedy is that I began with something.
So. The football.
It belonged to a boy called Brian Lule, who lived in the next compound and was my friend for twenty years in the way a stone is friends with a river, which is to say it was an accident of position and it nearly wore him away.
Brian was thin and quick, with enormous ears and a laugh like a tin cup dropped on concrete. His father sold second-hand shoes at Owino. His mother had a stall of tomatoes. He was the youngest of seven, and nobody had ever told him he couldn't do anything, because nobody had ever noticed what he was doing. We met when I was ten and he was nine, a month after my father's funeral, over a ball made of plastic bags and string, which he'd kicked over the fence into my mother's washing.
I remember my mother came out to see what the noise was, with her sleeves rolled and her hands red from the basin. She looked at the grey, sodden lump lying in the middle of her clean sheets, and then at Brian's face above the fence, and I waited for the shout.
She laughed.
It was the first time I'd heard her laugh since the funeral. It startled me so much that I laughed too. Brian, on the other side of the fence, who had been preparing to run, stood there with his mouth open, and then he started, and the three of us stood in the yard in the sun making a ridiculous noise over a ball of bags, and I thought, the house is breathing again.
She gave him a piece of fried cassava. He came back the next day. And the day after.
I want to describe what we did, because if you only know the man I became, you will not believe the boys.
We played in the road behind the church, where the red earth was packed hard and pale by the feet of a hundred other boys. We used two stones for each goal. Sometimes there were twelve of us, sometimes thirty, and I never understood the rules except that the ball must not touch the ground more than necessary and that if you scored you ran with your shirt over your head. I was good. I need to say that. I'm not boasting. I have little to boast about, and I would be a fool to waste the one true thing. I was good the way some children are good at singing: it wasn't effort. It was a place my body already knew.
I had a left foot that could bend the ball around a standing boy and put it in the corner of two stones. I had a feeling, when I was running, of the whole pitch laid out in my head like a map, and the other boys moving across it in lines, so that I knew where they would be before they did. Brian said I had eyes in my knees. The old man who sold roasted maize at the corner used to watch us, with his hands behind his back, and once, when I was twelve, he said to my mother as she passed, "That one. He should be taken somewhere."
"Where?" said my mother.
"Wherever they take them," said the old man, and shrugged.
She never forgot it. She told me later that she had gone home and counted what she had. It wasn't much.
I wanted to play for the Cranes. Every boy in Uganda wants that, and every boy I ever knew said it in the same voice, half boast and half prayer. But I wanted it with something that frightened me, a kind of hunger. When I was running with a ball, I could not hear anything. Not the rain, not my mother's cough, not the memory of a particular sound. There was only the next touch. It was the only place in the world where I was not under a bed.
I know now what that was. It was a boy looking for a door out of a house that had already burned down inside him. I thought the door was a football.
I should tell you about Timothy, because I have been unkind to him in this telling by leaving him asleep on a mattress.
My little brother was the opposite of me. Where I was quick, he was slow; where I was angry, he was patient; where I had questions, he had the answer already, and was embarrassed by it. He was the kind of child who picks up the beetle that has fallen on its back and turns it over. He used to follow me everywhere. I resented it like poison. When I was twelve and he was seven he would stand at the edge of the football road holding my school bag against his chest, and when I ran past he would shout, "Jonah! Jonah, I'm still here!" as though I might forget him, and the other boys would laugh.
"Your shadow," Brian said.
"My leech," I said.
I said it in front of him once, and I watched his face change. It was not the face of a child being hurt. It was the face of a child being very polite about it. He looked at the ground, and said, "Okay," and the next day he was standing at the edge of the road holding my bag.
I'll come back to Timothy. I have to, because he's the reason I have anything to write about. But I want you to see him here, as he was, at seven, holding my bag, because there is a point later in this book where I stand in a doorway looking at the man he became, and it breaks me in half. And it breaks me because of this: he was never angry with me for who I was. Only for who I wouldn't be.
Now the part I don't like.
I told you I was good. I was also, from the age of about eleven, a thief.
It began with a coin. Small ones, at first. A hundred shillings out of a jar. Then two hundred. My mother kept her takings in a tin by the stove, from the washing she did for the families in Kololo and the roasted maize she sold on Saturdays, and I discovered that if I took a little from the bottom, and rearranged the notes on top, she would not notice for a week. She was not stupid. She noticed. She never said.
I told myself I was borrowing. That is the word I used in my head. Borrowing. I would pay it back when I played for Express, and then for the Cranes, and then for a club in Europe, and I would buy her a house with a tiled floor.
At twelve, the thing I wanted was a pair of boots.
They were in the window of a sports shop on Kampala Road, the kind with a sign over the door that said All Stars. Real boots, black with white stripes, studded on the sole. I walked to town on Saturdays just to look at them. I knew exactly how much they cost, forty-five thousand shillings, which was more than my mother made in a month. I saved. I got to eleven thousand. And then one Sunday, in church, while the pastor read the notices, the basket came down the row and I saw my mother put into it the folded note she had earned the week before, her tithe, which she gave first, before the rent, before the food, before anything, and I had a thought so clear that I remember its words.
She gives it to God, and God doesn't need it. I do.
It was the next Sunday that I took it.
I want you to see the way I did it, because it matters. I volunteered to carry the basket. I was twelve and I had a clean white shirt and a face my mother called honest. The usher, an old man called old Mr. Kayiwa, nodded and gave it to me with a smile. I walked up the aisle with the basket in both hands, past a hundred worshippers with their eyes closed, singing, and when I reached the back of the church, behind the curtain where the offering was counted, I put my hand in and took three notes. I folded them into my sock.
I was shaking. I thought the Lord would strike me. I stood behind the curtain with my heart beating like a bird in my throat, and I looked up at the tin roof, and I waited.
Nothing happened.
I went back out. I sat down next to my mother, and she patted my knee, and the choir began to sing. And I sat there in the pew with the stolen money burning in my sock and a feeling spreading through me that was as warm as it was terrible. It took me years to name it. It wasn't guilt. It was disappointment. It was the sharp, secret, adult disappointment of a child who has just learned that the sky has no one in it.
I had expected to be punished. I had wanted to be, in a way. It would have meant that someone was watching. And nothing came. The choir sang. The pastor preached about Daniel in the lions' den. The sun came in through the slats and lay on the floor in long yellow bars.
I got my boots.
I'll tell you how it ended, because it ended in a way that I have never forgotten.
I wore them for three weeks, and I was never so happy in my life. I scored eleven goals in a fortnight. I put the ball over the church wall. I wore them to bed, until Timothy complained that I smelled of leather. And on the Saturday of the third week, my mother came to the football road in the middle of a match.
She stood at the edge in her work dress. The boys stopped playing. Brian said, under his breath, "Jonah. Jonah, your mother."
She didn't shout. She looked down at my feet.
"Those are not my son's boots," she said. "My son has no boots."
"Mama—"
"Take them off."
I took them off in front of thirty boys. She picked them up and held them in her two hands, the way you would hold a dead bird, and she turned them over and looked at the studs, and the white stripes, and the little label inside, and she said quietly, "Old Mr. Kayiwa counted the basket on Sunday, Jonah. He was two short. Three weeks ago. He thought the clerk had made an error. He has been paying it from his own pocket."
I said nothing.
"Do you know," said my mother, "what he said to me this morning? He said, 'Sister Rebecca, I'm sorry, I'm an old man, I must be losing my head.'"
Then she whipped me. She used the stem of a banana leaf, in the road, in front of everyone. It was not the worst beating I'd had. But it was the worst I remember, because when she had done it she dropped the stem and put both hands over her face and wept as if she'd been the one struck, and the boys looked away. And I stood with my feet bare on the red earth and the welts rising on my legs and I thought, with a cold new thing coming up in me like water into a hole, I'll never let anyone see me cry again.
She sold the boots. She took them herself to the shop on Kampala Road and brought back the money, and she walked to old Mr. Kayiwa's house with it, and made me go with her, and made me say it.
He was very kind. That was the worst thing. He put his hand on my head and said, "It's all right, my son. We all do things." I wanted him to shout. I wanted anyone to shout. I couldn't bear being forgiven by a man I had robbed.
I remember thinking: Then what's the point of any of it?
I'm going to hurry now, because I can feel the page filling and I haven't reached the thing I came here to say.
By fourteen, I was at secondary school on a partial bursary, which my mother had got through the pastor's recommendation, and I was top of my class in mathematics and bottom in everything that required me to sit still. I got into fights. I was not proud of them. But they had a pattern. I would be fine, and then somebody would say a particular kind of thing — about my father, or my mother's work, or my brother's slowness — and I would feel a heat begin at the back of my neck. A kind of pressure, like steam behind a lid. I knew the heat. I had watched it cross my father's face.
I broke a boy's nose with a brick in my second year. His name was Kigozi. He had called my mother a servant. I hit him once, in the face, and he went down, and I stood over him with the brick still in my hand and blood running down my wrist from his cut mouth, and I felt a sweetness. I'm going to say that. A sweetness. I felt strong. And then I saw myself from above, as if from the ceiling, a boy standing over another boy with a heavy thing in his hand, and I saw my father's boots, and I dropped the brick as if it had burned me.
I was suspended for three weeks. My mother never spoke of it. But that night she sat on the end of my mattress in the dark and said, very quietly, "Jonah, do you know why I gave you that name?"
"Because of the man in the Bible."
"Do you know the story?"
I knew it. Everyone knew it. A man runs from God and gets swallowed by a fish.
"He ran," said my mother, "and the Lord sent a storm. And do you know what the Lord did, after the fish?" She waited. "He told him to go again. Same errand. Same city. The Lord never said, You are too much trouble. He said, Go."
I lay there staring at the roof.
"Why did you name me after a man who ran away?" I asked.
She was quiet for a long time. A mango dropped on the tin. She said, "Because I knew you would."
I didn't understand, then, that it was a prayer.
Now the football again, and then I will let the boy go.
At fifteen I was picked to go to a trial. A scout from a club in Kampala had watched us in a school tournament and said he would see six boys on a Saturday at a ground in Lugogo. I was one of them. Brian was not, and he took it well, and I loved him for it, and I promised him I would get him in.
The trial was on a Saturday at nine. The bus fare to Lugogo was three thousand shillings, and we had four hundred.
My mother had been ill that week with a fever. She had missed two days at work. The family in Kololo had given her washing to somebody else. That morning she went out before dawn to borrow, and she went to every neighbour, and she came back at half past seven with her head bowed, and she said, "Jonah, there is not enough."
I looked at her. I was fifteen and angry and I had already been practising for this day in my mind for a month.
"I'll walk," I said.
It was eleven miles. I ran most of it. I reached the ground at ten past eleven, bathed in sweat, with my shirt stuck to my chest and my legs trembling. The scout was packing up his clipboard. The other five boys had gone.
"Too late," he said. "Come next year."
I said I had walked from Kawempe. He looked me up and down and said, not unkindly, "Then you've already played one match today. Come back when you're rested."
I never went back. Next year there was no next year. But I want to tell you what I did on the way home, because it's the first time I remember doing it on purpose.
I stopped at the Anglican church in Wandegeya, the one with the big iron gate, and stood outside. A service was going on. I could hear the singing. And I stood there with my hands on the bars, shaking with exhaustion and rage, and I said it out loud, under my breath, to the roof of that church or whatever was beyond it: "I asked You for one thing."
"One."
"I didn't ask for money. I didn't ask for a car. I asked for one chance. And You gave me a walk."
I waited. The hymn went up, and the people inside sang it in four-part harmony, beautiful, unhurried, indifferent. I spat on the pavement. I turned and went home.
I have wondered since whether that was the day I truly stopped praying. I don't think so. I think I stopped on the night of the boots, in the room with the iron bed. But it was the day I said it aloud to Him. It was the first day I made it a quarrel.
I want to be fair to the boy. He was fifteen. He had a right to be angry. But I wish someone had told him, standing at that gate, what I know now, which is that the football road was never the road. The road was elsewhere. It went somewhere neither of us could see yet.
I'll finish the boy in the next part. I can hear my landlady on the stairs.
She is a big woman called Mama Joyce, and she brings me tea in the mornings in an enamel mug with a chip on the rim. She doesn't know what I'm writing. She looks at the blue book on my table and says, "School work?" and I say yes, and she says, "At your age!" and shakes her head, and goes away smiling. She thinks I'm doing something sensible.
I may not be. But it's the first time in my life I've sat at the same table for four mornings in a row, and I notice that the tea tastes of something. That's a thing I'd forgotten tea could do.
When I was sixteen, the school fees went up. It was a small increase, just enough. My mother's customers in Kololo were moving, one by one, to a laundry with a machine. The roasted maize was not selling. That term she was forty thousand shillings short, and the headmaster, who was not a cruel man, sent a note home.
I found my mother in the yard with the note in her hand, and her sewing machine in front of her. It was an old Singer with a black iron frame and a wooden hand-wheel, and she'd had it since before I was born. She made all our clothes on it. She had mended the whole street's. She had made my school shirt on it, and Timothy's, and the dress she wore to my father's funeral.
"Mama, no," I said.
"It will be a good price," she said. "Mrs. Nakato's cousin wants one."
"What will you sew on?"
"I will sew on my hands," said my mother, and tried to smile.
She sold it that Thursday. A man came with a handcart and counted out eighteen thousand shillings, and put his arms round the machine like a body, and wheeled it away down the lane. She stood in the doorway and watched until it was gone. Then she went inside and began to cook.
I stood in the yard with my fists shut. And something in me, I think the thing that had been banked since the night under the bed, finally caught.
There was a man, you see, who'd been watching me for a while.
I had been washing cars on Saturdays at a garage in Wandegeya, for pocket money, and a man would come by in a white Corolla that was always freshly clean, with tinted windows, and a gold chain you could see from across the street. He was thick and soft, and about forty, and he never raised his voice. His name was Walusimbi. Everyone called him Walu. He sat in the shade of the garage in a plastic chair with a bottle of soda and talked to the boys as they worked, and he was the first adult I'd met who talked to us as though we were men.
"You're quick," he said to me, one day in the sun. "I've seen you with the ball. You're the one the scout turned away."
I stopped with the cloth in my hand. "How do you know that?"
"I know everything." He smiled at me. "I also know the school's not paying you. I know your mother sold something. A machine, I think."
I didn't say anything.
"I need a boy who can count," said Walu, "and keep his mouth shut. I'll pay fifty thousand for an afternoon. Nothing to it. You carry a bag from one place to another."
Fifty thousand shillings. It was more than my mother earned in a month.
I know what you're thinking. I'm thinking it, too, writing this. I knew what it was. I wasn't stupid. I was sixteen, not simple. I knew a man like that doesn't pay fifty thousand shillings for carrying a bag. But I also knew that if I said yes, my mother would keep her sewing machine's replacement, and my brother would have shoes, and I'd stop watching her count notes in the dark. I said I would think about it. And then I stood there, looking at the white car in the sun, and I thought: this is it. This is the thing God has sent me, since You won't send me anything else.
I made it a joke. I told myself that if there was a God, He could stop me.
He didn't. Or I didn't hear.
I carried the bag on a Saturday, and I came home with a fifty-thousand-shilling note in my shoe.
I told my mother I had found work at the garage. She looked at me for a long time. I am sure she knew. She had known me since the minute I was born. But she was tired, and I had brought her the fees, and there are moments when a person chooses to be deceived because the other choice costs too much. She thanked me. She put her hand on my cheek. I felt the roughness of her fingers.
I did it again the next week. And the next.
Brian came to me in the third month and said, "Where do you get it? Jonah. Where?" and I said, "Don't ask," and I watched his face go quiet, and I thought, I am protecting him. I was fooling myself, as I would for years.
The night I left was in the rainy season, in April. I was sixteen years and four months. I had a bag, a bundle of notes, and a story prepared. I came in late, wet to the skin, with the smell of cigarettes and a stranger's cologne on my shirt, and my mother was awake. She'd been waiting up. She sat at the table with the candle, with her Bible open in front of her, and she looked at me, and she said, "Jonah."
That is all. My name.
"Mama, I'm going," I said.
"Where?"
"To work. In town. I've got a place."
"With whom?"
I didn't answer. She closed the Bible slowly and put her hand flat on it, as if to keep it from flying away.
"Jonah," she said again. "There is a way out of every storm, and it is never the one where you leave the boat."
I should tell you I felt something. A moment of doubt. A hand on the back of my neck, if you like. I did. But the heat came up behind it, the old heat, the steam behind the lid, and I said the thing that I have heard every night since, in the silence between one sleep and the next.
"Where was your God," I said, "when Dad was kicking you across the floor?"
She went white.
"Where was He when I was under the bed? Where was He on the football road? He took my father in the road, Mama, but He let him do it first. You've sung to Him for eleven years and what has He given you? A cracked rib. A tooth. A son who steals." My voice was rising. "You think He's looking after us? Look around! Look!"
She did not shout back. That was the worst thing. She sat there in the candlelight, with the Bible under her hand, and she said, very quietly, "He is looking after you now."
"No, He isn't."
"He is."
"Then He can do it from here," I said, and picked up my bag.
I went to the door. At the door I turned, I don't know why, and I looked at her. She had not moved. Her hand was still flat on the book. She wasn't crying. Her face was perfectly still, and the candle trembled in the draught, and the light moved on her high forehead, and I thought she looked like a woman at the bottom of a well, looking up.
Behind her, in the doorway to the back room, stood my brother, eleven years old, in his pyjama shorts. He had been listening. He was holding the doorframe with both hands. He did not say Jonah, I'm still here. He didn't say anything. He only looked at me with that polite, terrible face.
I went out into the rain.
That was twenty-five years ago this April. I did not come back to that house for eight years, and when I did, it was too late.
I've just counted something on the wall beside the table, with a nail, because I wanted to see it.
If I left on the ninth of April, and today is the fourth of the next April, a quarter of a century later, then I have been gone from that door for nine thousand, one hundred and thirty days. It's not exactly the figure I'd have expected. It looks smaller than it feels.
My mother's candle would have burned down a long time ago.
But I wonder. I wonder whether, in some sense I don't yet have words for, it never went out at all.