Chapter 11
The Truth
She had decided to tell him on a Saturday.
It was the second week of June. Five weeks since the lake. Five weeks of rolex and long walks, of studying in the same room and not reading a page, of a hand reaching for hers under a library table. Five weeks of Nathan saying, in the middle of an ordinary sentence, "You know, you have a very good face," and Amara saying, "You've told me," and Nathan saying, "I'm going to keep telling you."
It had been the best month of her life. She knew it, and the knowing was a weight. Each day she woke up and thought, Today. Each night she went to bed and thought, Tomorrow. She was like a woman carrying a full cup across a room, afraid that if she looked down she would spill it.
On the Friday night, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror at three in the morning and decided. She said it aloud, to the girl in the glass. She took off the wig and wiped off the brown lipstick. Then she lay on her bed with her phone face down and her eyes open until it was light.
Saturday. Four o'clock. The gate. I will tell him everything.
She had it written in the green book, on the last page, in a line by itself.
Saturday morning was warm and clear. Brenda was away at the mission in Mityana. Amara washed her clothes and hung them on the balcony. She cooked beans. She ate two spoonfuls and gave up. At noon she sat on the bed with the green exercise book and went through her accounts, one more time, line by line, to be sure she had it right.
Thirteen million, three hundred and forty thousand. She had added again the money for the phone, and for the salon, and the clothes she could remember. She did not have an exact figure. She never would. But she had a list, and that was something.
She also had a second list, in the margin. It was shorter.
What I want him to know.
That I was afraid.
That I thought it was only for a while.
That I am not asking him to forgive me.
That it was not only the money.
She stopped there. She did not know how to write the end of that sentence. It was not only the money. What else had it been? A feeling, a hunger. A voice that said, You are not enough. Hers or someone else's, she could no longer tell.
At two o'clock she took a bath. At three she dressed in her yellow dress, and her old shoes, and looked at herself in the mirror and did not recognise her. But she did not look away this time. She said, "It's you," out loud, and the words sounded foolish. She said them again.
At twenty to four, she left the room.
Nathan was already at the gate.
He stood by the guard's hut, in the blue shirt, with a newspaper-wrapped bundle in each hand. He saw her coming and did not wave. He did not smile. He just watched her walk up the lane, steadily, as if counting each step.
"You're early," she said.
"Yes."
"I thought you'd be late. You're always late."
"I know." He held out one of the rolex. His hand was not quite steady. "Here."
"Thank you."
"I didn't know if you'd want it."
"I always want it."
"Okay." He nodded, and did not look at her face. "Amara. Can we walk?"
Something in her stomach turned. She knew that tone. It was not the tone of a boy who was in love. It was the careful, flat, inward tone of a person reading from a page.
"Is something wrong?"
"I'd like to talk. Somewhere quiet."
"Okay."
"Not here."
"Okay."
He walked ahead, and she followed. He did not take her hand.
They went up the hill without speaking, past the bank, the stationery shop, the restaurants with their hopeful names. They went through the main gate, and the guard waved them in, and they crossed the lawn where, almost two years earlier, she had stood in a queue under the sun with a stranger's sweet in her mouth. The statue of the man nobody looked at stood in the same place. A few students sat on the grass in the late light, reading. The bells of a church were ringing somewhere below.
Nathan stopped at the lecture block. He pushed open the door of Hall B3, a mid-sized room at the end of the corridor that was almost never used on weekends. It was empty. The seats rose in rows toward the back, and the blackboard was blank and grey. Dust floated in the stripes of light from the high windows.
"Here," he said.
He sat in the front row. She sat beside him, leaving a space between them. The rolex lay in her lap, getting cold.
For a while he said nothing. He was looking at the floor, at his own hands. In the quiet she could hear a fan ticking in the corridor, and her own breathing.
"A man came to the kiosk yesterday," Nathan said.
She did not move.
"Around noon. I was on my own, Mzee Otim was at his daughter's. He had a phone with a bad screen. A good phone. An expensive one." He cleared his throat. "He was very polite. He said he'd heard I was the best in Wandegeya. He asked me what I charged. He asked about myself, my course, my father. He was funny. I liked him."
"Nathan."
"I fixed the screen. It took forty minutes. He sat on the stool the whole time and we talked. About football. About a girl he'd known." He swallowed. "When I finished, I gave him back the phone. He paid. He gave me an extra five thousand, for my trouble. And then he said, Thank you. Now I can see everything clearly."
Patrick.
She closed her eyes.
"He asked me if I was the one who was with Amara Nakamya. I said yes. He said, Nice girl. He said, You're lucky. Then he took out the phone, the one I had just repaired, and opened it, and showed me something."
"Nathan, please."
"A screenshot. A transfer. Three hundred thousand shillings, from him to you, with a message. It said for my beautiful girl, for last weekend." His voice was perfectly even. "And then a photograph. You, in a car. With a man's arm around you. Not him. A different man. Older. In glasses."
She felt as though the floor had tilted. The room seemed very bright.
"He said, Ask her about the apartment in Ntinda. He said, Ask her who paid for her phone. He said, I'm only telling you because you seem like a decent guy." Nathan's mouth moved, once, not quite a smile. "And then he left."
"I'm sorry."
"I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I just stood there with the five thousand in my hand." He turned his head, finally, and looked at her. His eyes were red. He had not slept. "I sat in the kiosk for three hours. I didn't repair a single phone. Then I went home and Moses asked what was wrong and I said nothing. I didn't sleep. I walked around the compound. At six in the morning I thought, Maybe it's a lie. Maybe he's some kind of... I don't know. Some man who is angry. Maybe none of it is true."
"Nathan."
"Is it true?"
She opened her eyes.
He was looking at her. There was no accusation on his face. That was the worst of it. It was all open, all questions, a face from which every defence had been taken. He looked at her like a child waiting to learn whether something was broken.
"Yes," she said.
It took a very long time for the word to leave the room.
She sat with her hands pressed together in her lap. He had turned away again, and was staring at the blackboard. A clock somewhere ticked. A pigeon landed on the high window sill and shuffled, and flew off.
"Which part?" he said at last.
"All of it. Probably."
"I don't know what all of it is."
"I know." She was surprised how steady her voice was. "I was going to tell you today. That's why I put on this dress. That's why I asked to meet at four. I wrote it down. I have it in a book. I decided last night."
"Were you?"
"Yes."
"That's what you would say."
"I know it is." She turned to face him. "I can't prove it. I don't expect you to believe it. I only know that it's true."
"Why today?"
"Because I couldn't do it any more. Because I love you."
She heard herself say it, and it was out in the air, and she could not take it back. It had not come as she imagined. There was no music in it. No lake. It came out flat and plain, in a dusty room, like the answer to a question on a test.
Nathan flinched. It was a small movement, but she saw it.
"Don't," he said.
"It's true."
"Not now. Not as a... not as a way of..."
"I'm not using it. I swear." She put her hand over her mouth, and took it away. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say it like that. I only wanted you to know there is nothing in this that is a game. I'm not telling you because he told you. I would have told you anyway."
"Okay."
"Do you want me to tell you? Or do you want to go?"
He was quiet for a long time. When he answered, he did not look at her.
"I want you to tell me," he said. "All of it. From the start. I'd rather hear it from you than from him. I want the whole thing. And I don't want you to be gentle."
"I don't know how to be gentle about it."
"Good."
She took a breath. She looked at the blank blackboard. And she began.
She told him about the first day.
It seemed ridiculous, at first, to start there. But it was where it had begun. She told him about the sack of matooke and the goat called Pastor. She told him about the queue, and Shanice's white shoes, and the sweet that tasted of strawberries. She told him about the cracked school shoes under the bench in Lecture Hall 4. She told him about the party, and the twenty thousand shillings at the door, and the single word, poor, which had sat in her ear like a pebble.
"I'm not saying that's why," she said. "I'm saying that's when I started to count."
She told him about the red dress in the shop window. She told him about November, when the money was late and she lived on bread and Brenda's rice. She told him about the lunch in Kololo, and the man who stood up when she came to the table. She told him that he had listened to her. That he had asked what she wanted. That he had called her Madam Accountant.
Nathan's head turned a fraction at that. He did not speak.
She told him about the phone, and the hand on her back, which she had not moved away from. She told him about the dinner in Ntinda, and the glass of wine, and the night in the car. She told him about the balance, one million three hundred thousand, and the clerk with a pen behind her ear. And the yard, with the cars and the tree. And what she had said. Okay.
"He didn't make you," Nathan said. It was not quite a question.
"No."
"He didn't threaten you."
"Never."
"He gave you the money and you..."
"Yes." Her face burned. "He gave me the money. And then he gave me the apartment. And then it was..." She spread her hands. "It was a thing that happened. Slowly. I don't know how to say it. There was no day when I decided. There was only a day when I realised I had."
She heard him inhale, sharply.
"Did you..." He stopped. He tried again. "Were you with him?"
She had known the question was coming. She had known for a year. She had prepared a hundred answers, soft ones, careful ones, ones that left out the worst. Now they all fell away.
"Yes," she said.
"For how long?"
"About a year. Until January."
"And the other man?"
"Patrick. Not as long. Ten months, maybe."
"At the same time."
"For some of it. Yes."
He lifted his head. "Only two?"
She had thought she was ready. She was not.
"No," she said. "Those are the two who lasted. There were others. For a few months, in the middle of that year. A man in government. A boy from our year who said he'd take me to Dubai. A contractor who said he would build my mother a house. And some whose names I never learned." She forced herself to keep her eyes on his face. "Five that I could name. More that I can't."
Nathan stared at her. For a moment he looked like a man who has put his foot on a stair that is not there.
"Five," he said.
"Yes."
"At once?"
"Over about eight months. Some of it overlapped." She swallowed. "They all said the same thing. That they would give me a good life. A job, a house, a ring. I wrote the promises down, in a column. Not one of them had a date."
A long breath went out of him. He put one hand on his knee and pressed it flat, hard, as if to keep it still. She could see the bones of his knuckles.
"Okay," he said. "Go on."
"Do you want me to..."
"Go on."
She told him about the lies. The aunt in Ntinda, the cousin who did not exist. The scholarship, the group of businessmen, the pastor in Kyotera praying for them. She told him about the Saturday in January when she paid her fees from the account in a single transaction and stood in the sun outside the bank feeling sick. She told him about the green book, and she took it out of her bag and put it on the desk between them, and he looked at it but did not touch it.
"Thirteen million," she said. "Roughly. That's what I took. I wrote it all down. I don't know why. I think I wanted to see it."
"You took it," Nathan said.
"I took it."
"You said took. Not was given."
"I was given it. I took it. It's both."
He nodded, slowly.
"I'm not telling you I had no choice," she said. "I want to be clear. I had a choice. Everybody does. It was a very small one, a door the size of a window. But it was there. I went through it. I'm not saying that anyone else would. I'm only saying I did."
"Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why did you?" His voice cracked, for the first time. "I'm not asking to shame you. I'm asking because I don't understand. You were so... You had such a clear head. You were the one who said, what she bought, what she sold, what is left. You know what money is. You're not stupid. So why?"
She looked down at the green book. She put her hand on its cover.
"Because I was tired," she said.
"Of what?"
"Of waiting. Of being the good one. Of watching other people have things and being told to be patient." She heard her voice thin, but she kept going. "I thought, if I just work hard, one day it will come. But the fees came every semester, and my mother sold her last goat, and every time I opened my bag there was less. And there was a man who said, Let me help. And I thought, Why not me? I'd always been the one who said no. Just once, I wanted to be the one who said yes."
"That's not a reason."
"No."
"It's an explanation."
"I know the difference." She almost smiled. "I'm not asking you to think it's a reason. I only want you to know it's not nothing."
"And the other part? You said it wasn't only the money."
She had not realised he'd noticed. She felt her eyes fill.
"I wanted somebody to look at me," she said. "As if I was worth looking at. I'd never had that. I was the clever one, the quiet one. A person who passed exams. And then there was a man who stood up when I came to a table. And I thought..." She stopped, and began again. "I know how it sounds. A girl who needs a man to tell her she's pretty. I hate it. I hate that I was that girl. But I was. I wanted it so much that I stopped asking what it would cost."
"And now?"
"Now I know." Her voice broke. "Now I know exactly what it cost."
He did not speak. His hands were clenched on his knees. After a long moment he said, very low, "Is there more?"
She had known this was the part. She had left it for last, the way you leave the heaviest bag at the bottom of the stairs.
"Yes," she said. "I got pregnant."
The word landed in the silent hall like a dropped plate.
"At the end of that first year. In July. I didn't know whose it was. That's the truth. I couldn't work it out. I counted, and counted, and it could have been any one of them." Her voice was flat and level, and she kept it that way, because she knew that if she let it move, it would not stop. "I told them. Every one. And each of them said the same thing. Not mine. The man in government sent his assistant to give me an envelope. The boy was at the airport. The contractor said he'd give me the name of a doctor. Ronald said it couldn't be his. Patrick laughed."
"Amara."
"I'm not saying it so you'll be sorry. I'm saying it because it's true, and you asked for all of it." She pressed her hands together. "I went to a clinic in Kabalagala. On a Thursday. By myself. I paid with money from the envelopes. And I ended it."
She heard him let out a breath, long and ragged.
"I'm not going to tell you it was easy. I'm not going to tell you it was wrong, either. I don't know. I've thought about it every day for a year, and I still don't know." She stopped, and began again. "I know that I was twenty, and alone, and there was nobody. I know that every person who had ever promised me anything had just taken it back. And I know that I did it because I could not see any other door."
Nathan had put his hand over his mouth. He was staring at the floor, at a point somewhere between his shoes.
"There's one more," she said. "And then I'm done."
"Amara, you don't have to..."
"I do." She took a breath. "A few weeks after. One night in July. I went up to the roof of the hostel at two in the morning. I stood at the edge. I meant to... I wasn't going to come down."
The room was so quiet she could hear the dust.
"Something stopped me. A voice. My mother's. She says three things to me, every time I leave. Don't forget who you are. I heard it, as clearly as I hear you. And I came down. I rang her at five, and I told her I'd had a bad dream, and she prayed with me on the phone for an hour." She almost laughed, and it broke in the middle. "She still doesn't know."
Nathan made a sound. It was low and rough and not a word. He bent forward, with his elbows on his knees and his hands over his face, and his shoulders shook once, hard.
She did not touch him. She did not move. She sat with her hands in her lap and let him have it, whatever it was, and the dusk crept up the high windows and turned them rose.
He got up.
It happened suddenly. One moment he was sitting, and the next he was on his feet, with his back to her, walking up the aisle between the benches, away from her, toward the far wall. His shoulders were rigid. He stopped at the back of the hall and stood with both hands against the wall, head bowed, breathing hard.
She did not follow. She stayed where she was, with the book in front of her.
After a long while he said, without turning, "I thought you were different."
"I know."
"I thought you were different from..." He stopped.
"From what?"
"Nothing."
"Finish it."
"Amara."
"Please. Say it. I want to hear it."
He turned. His face was wet. His mouth was set in a hard, unfamiliar line. "From the girls who do that," he said. "From the ones I've seen. The ones in Shanice's circle. The ones in cars. I used to see them at the gate and I thought... I thought, that is a different kind of person. And then I met you, and you were so different, and I thought..." He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes. "I thought I was one of the lucky ones. I thought I had found somebody who wasn't like that."
"And I was like that."
"I don't know what you were."
"But you said it."
"I said it because I'm angry!" The words were flung out, loud, and bounced off the empty seats. He flinched at the sound of his own voice. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I didn't mean... I don't think that. I don't know what I think. I'm very confused."
"It's all right."
"It's not."
"It's all right to be angry."
"I'm not angry at you." He came down the steps, slowly, one at a time, like a man very tired. "I'm angry that he got to say it first. I'm angry that I stood in a kiosk and was kind to him. I fixed his phone, Amara. I was nice to him. I laughed at his jokes. And the whole time he was holding that... that knife behind his back."
"He wanted to hurt me."
"He wanted to hurt me." Nathan sat down heavily, two seats away. "And it worked."
She let that stand. There was nothing to say.
They sat in the dust and the failing light. The windows went from gold to a dull rose. The fan outside kept ticking. Down on the lawn somebody was laughing, and a ball bounced, and bounced, and stopped.
"There's one more thing," Amara said.
"What?"
"The last part." She drew a long breath. "I ended it. In January. I told Ronald, the older one, in a restaurant. He was very kind about it. He let me go. And I ended it with Pato, a month later, and that's when he started with the messages. The flowers, the car. He said he had pictures. He gave me a week."
"He threatened you?"
"In his way."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because of this." She gestured at the room, at the silence, at the space between them. "Because I knew how it would look. I knew you'd see it all, and you'd stop seeing me."
"I haven't stopped."
"You left your seat."
"I needed air." He looked at her. "That's not the same thing."
"Isn't it?"
"I don't know yet."
It was the first honest sentence he had said in an hour, and she was oddly grateful for it. I don't know yet. It meant that the thing was still open. That it had not been decided.
"Why did you end it?" he asked. "In January. If it was so good. If you had everything."
She thought about it. She took her time, because it mattered.
"Because of a socket," she said.
He stared.
"A man said that is my socket, in a library at nine at night. And then he gave me half a rolex, and he asked me what I thought. And I realised I had not been asked what I thought in a year." She wiped her face. "I'm not saying you saved me. You didn't. I want to be very clear about that. I ended it because I was tired of being someone's idea. But you showed me what it was like to be a person in a room. And I couldn't go back."
"And you didn't tell me."
"I was afraid."
"Of what?"
"That you'd look at me the way you're looking at me now."
"How am I looking at you?"
She met his eyes, and they were full of tears, and anger, and a kind of terrible tenderness, all at once, like a pot boiling over.
"Like you're trying to find the girl you thought I was," she said.
"Yes," Nathan whispered. "That's exactly what I'm doing."
It was nearly seven when the guard came.
She heard him first, the slow slap of his sandals in the corridor, and the jingle of keys. A torch beam swept the doorway. A voice called, "Madam? Sir? We close at seven. You must go."
"Yes," said Nathan, without turning. "One minute."
"One minute." The guard hesitated, and then went away, grumbling.
Nathan stood up. He picked up his rolex from the desk, looked at it, and put it back. He did not look at her. He stood with his hands in his pockets, shoulders drawn in, small and thin in the dusk.
"I need to go," he said.
"Okay."
"I'm not leaving you. I want to be clear about that. I'm not... it isn't that." He stopped. "I just need to think. I can't think here. I can't think with you looking at me."
"I understand."
"Do you?"
"No." She laughed, a thin, cracked sound. "But I'll try."
"I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"I don't know. I'm sorry for all of it." He wiped his face with his sleeve. He looked at her, finally, straight on, and the grief in his eyes was so naked that she had to look away. "I need you to know, I'm not angry at you for telling me. I'm glad. I am. Even now. It's the first time anyone has told me the truth without being forced."
"I was forced."
"By a man at a kiosk?" He shook his head. "No. You'd already written it down."
He walked to the door. At the threshold, he paused, with one hand on the frame.
"I'll message," he said. "I don't know when."
"I'll wait."
"Don't promise that."
"I'm not promising. I'm just saying what I'll do."
He nodded. For a moment she thought he would turn, and say something, and cross the room, and take her hand. She watched his shoulders. She watched his back go very straight.
Then he left. His footsteps went down the corridor, and faded, and the door at the end swung shut with a long sigh.
"Madam?" The guard stood at the door again with his torch. He was an old man with a grey moustache, and he looked at her with a face so frankly sorry that she nearly wept. "Madam, I'm sorry. It's seven fifteen."
"Yes."
"Are you all right?"
"Yes. Thank you."
"The young man, he is your friend?"
She looked at the empty seat beside her, and at the rolex, wrapped in newspaper, which he had left behind after all.
"I don't know," she said.
"Ah." The old man nodded slowly, as if it were an answer he heard often. "That is a hard one. Please, take your things. It is going to rain."
She gathered her bag. She picked up the green book. She picked up the rolex, and held it in both hands. It was cold now. The egg had hardened. The tomato had soaked a dark stain into the paper.
She walked out of the hall, and along the corridor, and out through the glass doors into the evening. The lawn was empty. The statue stood against a bruised sky. A wind was coming up from the valley, carrying the smell of rain and woodsmoke, and a long way off, on the other side of the city, the first thunder rolled.
She did not cry. That was the strange thing. She had thought she would. She had cried for less, in taxis, in bathrooms, on the roofs of buildings. But now she felt only a terrible emptiness, clear and cold and quiet, the way a house feels after the furniture has been taken out.
She had told him everything. She had said every word. She had put the whole of herself on a desk, in a dusty room, in a yellow dress, and he had looked at it, and had not said what she most feared.
But he had not said the other thing, either.
She stood on the lawn with the cold rolex and thought: He did not say it. He had not said I don't care. He had not said It doesn't matter. He had said, I don't know yet.
And she realised, standing there as the first drops fell on her shoulders, that she was glad. That if he had said it at once, she would not have believed him.
The rain began to come down. She did not run.
She walked down the hill in her yellow dress with a cold rolex in her hand, past the bank and the stationery shop and the restaurants with their hopeful names, and let it fall on her, and it was only water. It was only water, and she was only a girl, and somewhere behind her in the dark a boy was walking in the other direction, trying to decide who she was.