Chapter 4
A Life She Didn't Plan
Christmas in Kyotera was louder than she remembered.
Amara came home on the twenty-third of December with a suitcase that was lighter than when she left, because she had given most of her old clothes to Brenda. In its place she carried two plastic bags of presents. A scarf for her mother. A school bag for Esther, bright pink, with a pen that lit up. A pair of football boots for Joel, new, still in the box, which had cost her one hundred and ten thousand shillings and which she had paid for with money she did not like to think about.
"Where did you get such a thing?" Joel asked, holding the boots as if they might go off.
"I bought them."
"With what?"
"I have a job. On Saturdays."
"For doing what?"
"Accounting. For a man who sells car parts."
"A hundred thousand for football boots?" He turned the box over, looking for the price. "Amara. These are real. These are the ones the players use."
"Do you like them?"
He looked up at her, and his whole face broke into a grin that made him seven years old again. "I love them."
"Then that's all I need to know."
It was the best moment of the whole holiday, and she kept it carefully, like a coin in a pocket.
Her mother cried when she saw the scarf. She held it in both hands, a soft blue one with a thread of silver, and turned it over and over. Then she wound it around her neck and went to look in the small mirror on the wall, and stood there a long time, touching it.
"It is too beautiful for me."
"It's for you, Mama."
"Where do I wear this? To the market?"
"To church. To funerals. To anywhere."
"Ah." Her mother pressed it flat. "Then I will wear it to your graduation. I will keep it for that."
She said it with such certainty that Amara felt the floor tilt. Three years away. Her mother was already holding a day that was not yet real.
It was a hard house to come back to, and a good one.
It was a small house, with iron sheets on the roof that clanged in the rain and a veranda where her mother hung charcoal sacks to dry. There was a mango tree in the yard that her father had planted, now taller than the roof. The kitchen was a separate hut with a black ceiling. In the main house there was a living room with a sofa and two chairs, a bedroom for her mother and Esther, and a smaller one that had been Amara's and Joel's, divided by a curtain.
Every corner of it was full of the past. Her father's old radio on the shelf. His boots by the door, which nobody had moved. A framed photograph of him and her mother on their wedding day, her mother skinny and nervous in a white dress, her father holding a bunch of plastic flowers and smiling with all his teeth.
Amara looked at it each morning when she woke. She said, Good morning, Taata, and felt the usual small ache. She had been twelve when he died. He had been on his way home from Masaka, carrying a bag of salt for a neighbour as a favour, when a lorry took the corner too fast. That was all. A bag of salt, a favour, and a corner.
Her mother did not talk about it. She worked. The week after the funeral she went back to the market, and for seven years she had gone every day, in rain and sun, with a basket of tomatoes on her head and a face like a closed door.
"Eat," her mother said at the table, piling more food on her plate. "You are thin."
"I'm not thin, Mama."
"They are not feeding you."
"They are."
"The city is eating you." She looked at Amara's face with narrowed eyes. "But you look well. Your skin is good. You have a glow. Is that the new phone?"
"What?"
"The glow." Her mother nodded at the phone beside Amara's plate. "I told you it would make a difference."
"It's for work. They gave it to me."
"They are good people, then. They have a heart." She touched her chest. "I have been praying for them."
Amara chewed her food slowly. It tasted like cardboard. "Thank you, Mama."
"I pray for everyone who is kind to my children. It is the only payment I have."
The trouble was the money.
She had told herself she would solve it before she came home. She would arrive with the thing worked out, and she would talk to her mother calmly, like an adult. But the second night after dinner, when Esther was asleep and Joel was out playing cards with his friends, her mother sat down across from her at the kitchen table, folded her hands, and said, "We must talk about the second semester."
Amara said, "Yes."
"How much is it?"
"One million, nine hundred thousand."
"The same." Her mother nodded, as if she had expected nothing else. "I have been to the savings group again. They will not give me more. I owe them already. But I have sold the two pigs, and Prossy has promised something. And Bwanika at the church says he will lend me a little. In all..." She counted on her fingers. "Six hundred thousand. Maybe seven. By January. I will find the rest."
"Mama."
"I will find it."
"Where? There's nothing left to sell."
"There is always something."
"What?"
"The bicycle. The sewing machine."
"Mama, that's your income."
"It's for your studies." Her mother's voice rose, then dropped. "Amara. Listen to me. I did not send you there so you could come home in the first year. I would rather sell the roof."
"Don't say that."
"I mean it." She leaned forward. "You think I don't know what it costs? I was the one who counted it. Every shilling. I count it at night, I count it in the market, I count it in my sleep. I know exactly how much we are risking. And I would do it again. Do you hear me? I would do it again tomorrow."
Amara could not look at her. She stared at the table, at the grain of the wood, at a small burn mark where a pot had once been set too close.
"I have a job," she said. "At the shop. I earn four hundred thousand a month. I can send you something. And I'm saving."
"Four hundred?" Her mother's eyes opened. "Thousand?"
"It's a good position. He pays well."
"A hundred thousand a week? For a student?"
"A hundred thousand a Saturday. But I only work Saturdays."
"Eh." Her mother sat back. The shock on her face slowly turned to something else. Wonder. Hope. "My daughter. A hundred thousand a day. God is working."
"Yes."
"Then perhaps we will manage."
"We will manage."
"We will manage," her mother said, and began to laugh quietly, with her hand on her mouth, and then she was crying a little too, and then she got up and kissed the top of Amara's head. "I told them. At church. I said, my child is not like the others. She is blessed. She will be fine."
Amara sat very still while her mother's hands rested on her shoulders. She had never felt so far from them.
She had told the truth. Every word of it. And yet when she walked back to the bedroom that night and lay down under the mosquito net, she found she could not breathe.
The truth was that she had not yet lied. Not properly. Not in a way that anyone could point at.
Mr. Kato's Saturdays had gone well. She had finished the stock register in three weeks. She had set up a system for invoices and a monthly report, and he had read it at his desk with his glasses on, nodding slowly, and said, "You have saved me about two million shillings." She had been glowing for days. But somewhere in the same weeks, without any one moment she could name, something else had begun.
It had begun with a drive.
The second Saturday in December, after work, he had asked her to dinner. "To celebrate," he said. "The register is finished. You deserve a proper meal."
She had said yes. It was only dinner. They had gone to a restaurant in Ntinda with soft light and a guitar player, and he had ordered wine, and she had had one glass because she had never tried it, and because he said it was too good to waste. It had made her warm. It had made her laugh at things that were barely funny. He had told her about the first year of the shop, when he slept on the counter to guard the stock, and about his father, who had never believed he would make it. She had told him about her father. She had not meant to. It had simply come out of her, the salt, the lorry, the corner, and he had not said he was sorry. He had only listened, very still, and then said, "Thank you for telling me."
It was a better answer than sorry.
On the way back he had parked outside Lucky Star Hostel and turned off the engine. The street was quiet. A tin roof ticked as it cooled.
"I should say something," he said.
She had waited.
"I like you very much, Amara. More than I should. I thought I would tell you now, so you can decide what to do with it."
"You're married."
"I am."
"You told me so yourself."
"I did." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I'm not going to say I will leave her. I won't. I would not do that to my children. But I'm tired of being lonely in my own house. And you are the first person in a very long time who made me feel that I had something to say." He looked at her. His eyes were wet. "I'm sorry. I should not have said that."
She did not know what to do with her hands.
Leave, she thought. Open the door. Go upstairs.
She did not. She sat in the quiet car, looking at the dashboard, at the small wooden beads swinging from the mirror, and her face was hot, and she felt the thing she had been trying not to feel for weeks. She felt chosen.
It was a terrible, wonderful feeling. In nineteen years, nobody had picked her out from the rest and said, You. She had been the clever girl. The good girl. The one who was no trouble. She had never been the one someone wanted.
"I'm not looking for anything from you," Mr. Kato said. "I only wanted you to know."
"Okay."
"You can still work. Nothing changes."
"Okay."
He had reached across, then, and taken her hand. He had held it in both of his for a moment, gently, and she had let him. That was all. That was the whole thing.
But when she climbed the stairs to Room 14 that night, her fingers were still warm, and she knew that something had changed, and that she had let it.
January was a month of arithmetic.
Her mother's money came in pieces: six hundred thousand from the sale of the pigs and the loan, sent in two bits by mobile money. It was a good effort. It was a mountain. But it was not one million nine hundred thousand, and the registrar's office did not accept mountains.
Amara stood in the finance queue on the second day of the semester with a bank slip in her hand and a hole where her stomach should be. Three hundred students stood before her and behind her. Some were laughing, because they had paid in November. Some looked grey, because they had not.
When she reached the window, the clerk, a bored woman with a pen behind her ear, typed her number and said, "Nakamya Amara. Balance, one million, three hundred thousand."
"I know. I'm paying it. By the end of the month."
"The deadline is the fifteenth."
"I'll have it by the fifteenth."
"If it's not here by the fifteenth, you will not sit exams." The clerk did not look up. "You can attend lectures. But you will not be on the exam list. Next."
Amara stepped aside. She stood there with the slip in her hand, and the noise of the corridor came back to her in pieces. Someone laughing. Someone arguing. A phone ringing a cartoon song.
She had known. It was not a surprise. She had known it for a month. But she had been carrying the knowledge like a stone in her shoe, and now the stone had a number and a date.
One million, three hundred thousand. By the fifteenth.
She had thirty-eight thousand in her account.
She went to Peace first, because Peace was the sensible one. They sat on a bench outside the library, and Amara explained, not looking at her. When she finished, Peace said nothing for a while. She took off her glasses and cleaned them on her skirt.
"Could you ask for a payment plan?"
"I did. They said no, because I'm already on a reduced rate from the first semester."
"A bursary?"
"The deadline is closed."
"What about your mother's family? Uncles? A church?"
"They've already given what they can."
Peace put the glasses back on. "Then I don't know. I'm sorry. If I had it, I would give it to you. But my own fees..."
"I know. I'm not asking."
"You have the Saturday job."
"It's four hundred thousand a month. I can't make a million in two weeks."
"No."
They sat together in the silence. A student ran across the lawn with a folder over her head, though it was not raining. A security guard whistled at somebody. Peace reached out, awkwardly, and patted Amara's knee, and then looked as though she regretted it.
"You'll find something," she said. "You always do."
It was meant kindly. It made Amara want to scream.
She did not go to him. She told herself she would not, and she held to it for eight days.
There was nothing left to sell. She applied for a student loan and was told the process took three months. She wrote a long email to the Dean of Students, and he wrote a polite reply saying that unfortunately the policy was fixed. She walked up and down the hill with her bank slip in her bag. She skipped meals, and did not notice.
On the evening of the thirteenth, two days before the deadline, Brenda found her sitting on the floor of Room 14 with the lights off.
"What are you doing?"
"Thinking."
"In the dark?"
"It helps."
Brenda put on the light. Amara covered her eyes. "Don't."
"I'm going to." Brenda sat beside her on the floor, in her skirt and head scarf, with her Bible on her knee. "Amara. Tell me."
So she told her. All of it. The balance, the deadline, the clerk with the pen behind her ear. When she finished she realised she had been talking for a long time, and her voice was ragged, and Brenda was holding her hand.
"I will pray," Brenda said.
"I know."
"No, listen to me. I mean I will pray and also I will do something. I have forty thousand. It's yours."
"I can't take that."
"It's not a gift. It's a loan. You can pay me back."
"Brenda, it's one point three million."
"Then it's a start." She was trembling, and her eyes were bright. "I wish I had more."
Amara looked at this small, round, serious girl who had known her for five months, and who was offering her the contents of her purse, and she felt something inside her give way. She put her head on Brenda's shoulder and cried, quietly, like a child, and Brenda stroked her back and said, "Shh, shh, God sees you," over and over, and for a while she believed it.
When she had finished she wiped her face and said, "Keep your money. You need it."
"Amara."
"I mean it. I'll find a way."
"What way?"
"I don't know yet."
But she did. She had known for days. She had known since the night in the car. She had known, in a small cold corner of herself, since the moment he put his hand on her back at the mall.
On the fourteenth she called him.
She did not say why. She said, "Can we meet? I have something to ask." And he said, "Of course. I'll send a driver," and she said, "No, I'll come myself," and put down the phone and sat on the edge of her bed, shaking.
He was waiting at his yard in Ntinda, on a plastic chair in the shade of a big tree. Rows of cars stood behind him, polished, with prices written on the windscreens in white chalk. When he saw her he got up quickly, and took off his glasses, and his face was full of concern.
"Amara. What is it? You look ill."
"I need to ask you for something."
"Anything."
"Don't say that until you hear it." She sat down. She had practised her speech all the way in the taxi, and every word was gone. "It's my fees. I have a balance of one million, three hundred thousand. If I don't pay it by tomorrow I'll be removed from the exam list. I don't have it. I tried everything. I wouldn't ask if there was another way."
He listened without moving. When she stopped, he asked, "How long have you known?"
"Since December."
"And you didn't tell me."
"I didn't want to ask."
"Why not?"
"Because it's not fair. Because you've already done so much."
"I have not done enough." He said it quietly. "If I had known, I would have paid it a month ago. Why do you think I gave you the job?"
"It's a loan," she said. "I'll pay it back. Every shilling. From my wages."
"Amara."
"I'll sign something. Whatever you want."
"Stop." He raised a hand. "Look at me."
She looked.
"I'm not going to take a signature from you. I'm going to give you the money. Today. This afternoon. We'll go to the bank, and I'll pay it directly to the university, and by evening your name will be on the list."
"I can't just..."
"You can."
"It's too much."
"It is a lot of money," he said. "It is also a very small part of what I have. I can give it to you without feeling it, and it can change your whole life. Does that not make sense? Why should I keep it, if I can do some good?"
She said nothing. A bird sang in the tree above them. In the yard behind, two workers were washing a silver car, and the water ran in streaks down the windows.
"There's something else, though," Mr. Kato said. "I don't want you to think I'm buying anything. I'm not. If you wish, you can walk out of here and I'll still pay your fees. You owe me nothing. You can go back to Saturdays or stop completely, as you like."
"Then why..."
"Because I care for you." He took her hand. "That's all. I care for you, and I can help, and I don't want you to suffer."
She looked at him, at the kind eyes behind the gold glasses and the wedding ring on his finger, and the words came out before she could stop them.
"Okay."
That was all she said. Okay. She did not say thank you. She did not say I will pay it back. She did not say anything about what it would cost. She did not know the word for that. She only knew that she was twenty hours from being sent home, and that a man had offered her a way out, and that she was going to take it.
They went to the bank. He paid the money. A clerk gave her a receipt, a small paper stamped in blue, and she held it in both hands and read the line again and again: One million, three hundred thousand shillings. Balance cleared.
Outside in the sun he said, "Are you hungry?"
"A little."
"Then let's eat. And afterward..." He hesitated. "Afterward, if you want, I have a place you could see. A small apartment in Ntinda. Two rooms. It's quiet. I use it sometimes when I have late meetings. I thought you could use it too, for studying. Away from the noise of that hostel."
She understood. She understood it entirely.
She stood on the pavement outside the bank with the receipt in her hand and the afternoon wind lifting her hair. She could have said no. It was still possible. She would have walked home, and he would have driven away, and in the morning she would have been on the exam list anyway. He had promised that, and she believed him.
She had understood that, too.
But she thought of her mother counting the notes at night. She thought of the pigs, and the bicycle, and the scarf that her mother had folded away for a graduation that was three years off. She thought of the long road from Kyotera, and of the sack of matooke, and the queue under the hot sun. She thought of Shanice saying, It's not the one with the best marks. It's the one who knows someone.
It's only a place to study, she told herself.
It was the first of many times she said it.
"Yes," she said. "I'd like to see it."
The apartment was on the second floor of a quiet building in Ntinda, behind a gate with a guard who did not look up. Two rooms, a kitchen the size of a cupboard, and a balcony with one plastic chair. The walls were cream. The curtains were heavy and drawn. In the bedroom there was a bed with a white cover, so smooth it looked as if nobody had ever lain on it.
She stood in the middle of the living room holding her bag in both hands, like a girl waiting for a bus.
"Sit," Mr. Kato said. "Please. Anywhere."
She sat on the edge of the sofa. He brought her a glass of juice, and sat down on the other end, with a careful distance between them, and for a while they talked about nothing. The traffic. The price of fuel. Whether it would rain. She drank the juice and did not taste it. The clock on the wall made a small dry sound, and she could hear her own pulse in her ears.
"You can leave," he said gently. "At any moment. I want you to know that. I will drive you home, and we will have a very nice lunch, and that will be that."
"I know."
"Do you want to leave?"
She looked at his hands. They were big and clean, with a pale band on one finger where he had taken off his ring and put it in his pocket. He had done it in the car, and she had seen him do it, and neither of them had said a word.
"No," she said.
He moved closer. He did it slowly, the way you approach an animal you do not want to frighten. His hand came up and touched her face, and she closed her eyes. It was dry and warm. It smelled of soap and a little of car oil. His thumb moved along her cheekbone, and down, and lingered at the corner of her mouth.
"You're trembling," he said.
"I'm cold."
"It's thirty degrees."
"Then I'm afraid."
"Of me?"
"Of myself."
He was quiet. Then he kissed her, and it was nothing like she had imagined. It was unhurried, and patient, and practised. His mouth was warm and tasted faintly of mint. His hand slid into her hair and held the back of her head as though it were something precious, and when she made a small sound against his lips, she felt him smile.
She had been kissed before. Twice, by boys from her S6 class, clumsily, behind the chemistry lab. This was another thing altogether. It went through her slowly, like heat spreading through cloth. Her fingers found the front of his shirt and held on. The sofa creaked. A bar of afternoon light, coming through a gap in the curtain, lay across her knees, and she watched it move as he drew her down against the cushions, his weight on her, solid and certain.
"Tell me to stop," he murmured against her neck.
She did not.
His hands were sure. They found the zip at the back of the green dress and drew it down, one slow inch at a time, and the cool air touched her shoulders, and then his mouth did. She arched without meaning to. Her breath came short and uneven. Somewhere beyond the curtain a motorcycle passed, and a child shouted, and a radio played a song with a slow, aching beat, and all of it seemed to belong to a different world, one she was leaving by degrees, with each button, each whispered word, each time he said her name as though it were a gift.
She remembered afterward only pieces. The heat of his skin under her palms. The way he held her face in both hands and looked at her, hard, as if memorising it. The tangle of the white cover. The sound of her own voice, which she did not recognise. And the moment, near the end, when she opened her eyes and saw the ceiling, plain and cream-coloured, with a small crack running across it, and thought very clearly and calmly, This is the door. I have gone through it.
Afterward she lay with her head on his shoulder while he stroked her hair and talked in a low voice about the future. He said she was extraordinary. He said she must never worry again. "Leave everything to me," he said. "You study. I'll look after the rest. You'll finish your degree, and I'll see to it that you get a good job. A very good one. I know people. In a year you won't recognise your own life."
"Do you promise?"
"I promise."
She believed him. That was the part she would find hardest, later, when she tried to explain it. It was not that she was fooled. She knew what kind of afternoon it had been, and what it would cost, and whose ring was in his pocket. It was that, lying there under the cream ceiling with his hand moving slowly in her hair, she wanted so badly to believe that somebody would look after the rest.
That was January.
By March she had a key. By April she had a routine, which she kept so carefully that it almost looked like a life. Monday to Friday she lived in Room 14, attended lectures, studied with Peace and Brenda, and ate beans. On Saturdays she went to Nakawa and worked at the shop. And on some Saturday nights, and some Wednesdays, and the occasional Sunday afternoon when his wife took the children to church in Muyenga, she went to the apartment in Ntinda.
It was nicer than anything she had ever lived in. It had a bed with a white cover, a fridge that always held juice, a small balcony with a plastic chair. There was a wardrobe, and each week there was a little more in it. A dress. A pair of heels. A silk scarf. A bag that she did not dare to ask the price of. He did not give them as presents, exactly. He left them on the bed, wrapped in paper, with a note that said I saw this and thought of you. And she took them, because it was easier than refusing.
Her skin became softer. Her hair, which Brenda had always braided for her in the corridor, was done now at a salon in Ntinda with a woman named Sylvia, who said, "Such a lovely head," and charged forty thousand without blinking. She ate in places with menus. She learned the names of dishes. She learned that when a waiter asked, "Still or sparkling?" you said "Still." She started saying "brunch." She started taking photographs of her food.
She did not hate it. That was the shameful part. There were moments, driving through Kololo in the grey Land Cruiser with the air conditioner humming and the whole city sliding by outside, when she felt something close to happiness. She had arrived, she thought, somewhere good. She had found the secret of the place.
But there were other moments.
There was the Sunday when he left early, because his wife called, and she sat alone in the apartment for two hours with the rest of the afternoon in front of her. She heard him on the phone in the corridor, speaking in a different voice, softer and more tired, saying Yes, Winnie, I'm coming, and she sat on the white bed and looked at her own hands.
There was the afternoon at the salon when Sylvia said, "Your uncle is very generous," and Amara smiled and said yes, and walked out feeling like a coin that someone had spent.
There was the night she lay awake in the apartment while he slept beside her, and listened to him breathe, and thought, He is not a bad man. He was not. That was the trouble. He was kind. He remembered her mother's name. He asked about her exams. He had given her a hundred small pleasures, and he gave them without cruelty and without being asked. If he had been a monster, it would have been easy. She could have hated him. She could have left.
Instead she only felt tired. A strange, thin tiredness, the kind that comes from pretending, that no amount of sleep could fix.
There was Patrick, too. She did not plan him either.
She met him again at Easter, at a pool party in Bugolobi, because Shanice dragged her along and said, "You've been behind a desk for months, you look like a lawyer." He remembered her from the Freshers' Night. "The girl who did not give her number," he said, and laughed, and put his hand to his chest as if she had wounded him. He was funny. That was the first thing. He talked fast and well, and he made her laugh until her stomach ached, and when the others moved on to the pool he stayed with her at the edge of the garden and asked what she was afraid of.
"Nothing."
"Everybody is afraid of something."
"Failing."
"Ah." He nodded, with the smile gone. "That's a good one. I was afraid of the same, once."
He was not like Mr. Kato. He was twenty-seven, and loud, and in a hurry. He ran events and sold forex tips and had a white Mark X with music that you could hear before you saw it. He liked to be seen. He took her to places where people looked up when they walked in, and he held her hand across the table so that people would notice. Mr. Kato took her to quiet rooms. Patrick took her to loud ones, and for a while the noise was a relief. Nobody in a loud room could hear you think.
She told herself it was different from the other thing. Pato was not married. He was her age, nearly. He was somebody she might have met at university in any ordinary life. But he also paid for the bottles and the taxis and the hair, and when she tried to pay for her own drink he put his hand over hers and said, "Don't insult me."
So there were two of them. She did not call it that, even in her own head. She called it friends. She called them my friends, the way you might call a pair of shoes your good shoes, one for work and one for parties, and never say that you were walking in both of them at once.
With Patrick it was fast and loud and funny, and that was how she let it begin. A hotel room in Entebbe after a pool party, with the window open to the lake and a song playing from a phone on the bedside table. He did not ask permission the way Mr. Kato did, with his eyes and his patience. He laughed against her mouth, spun her round, pulled her down onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and silk and his cologne. He was hungry and quick and warm, and he made her laugh in the middle of it, which no one had done before, and for a little while she felt young. Afterward he lay on his back with one arm behind his head, grinning at the ceiling, and said, "You and me, Amara. We're going to build something. I've got plans. Events, forex, a studio. In two years I'll own half of Bugolobi. And you'll be right next to me, in the front row. I'll make you a queen."
"A queen of what?"
"Whatever you want." He turned his head and kissed her shoulder. "A good life. I promise you. Nobody will ever say no to you again."
She laughed. It was easy to laugh. But she noticed that she had stopped counting the promises, because there were too many, and they all sounded the same.
There were others.
She never planned any of them, and could never afterward say exactly how it happened. It happened the way water finds a crack. A door opened, and she stepped through, and somewhere behind her, quietly, a lock turned.
The first was an Honourable. She met him at a dinner that Shanice's friend Ben gave in a private room at a hotel in Kololo, in late April, a long table with white cloths and silver and too many forks. He sat at the head. He was fifty-one or fifty-two, grey at the temples, with a deep voice and an easy, patient way of speaking that made even the waiters stand straighter. People called him Honourable, and he let them. He was something in the government, a chairman of a committee, a man who sat on boards. Amara never learned exactly what. He wore a ring with a green stone and a pin in his lapel shaped like a small flag.
He asked her to sit beside him. He asked what she studied. When she said accounting, he nodded slowly and said, "Good. We are short of honest numbers in this country."
"I'll try to be one."
"I think you already are." He looked at her over the rim of his glass. "I have a daughter. She is nineteen, like you. She studies in London. Nobody will tell her that her laugh is too loud." He smiled. "I like your laugh."
It was ridiculous how that landed. She went pink to the roots of her hair.
Three weeks later his driver came for her, in a black car with tinted windows, and took her to a house on a hill in Muyenga with a long drive and a wall of bougainvillea. The Honourable received her in a study with a leather chair and shelves of books he had clearly never opened. He poured two glasses of something amber and told her about his plans for her. A position, after graduation. In his own office. Assistant to the Committee. A salary with a car allowance and a housing grant. "People like you should not be wasted in a bank," he said. "I will see that you are placed."
"I don't know what to say."
"Say yes." He took the glass from her hand, and set it down. "Say you will let me look after your future. In return..." He touched the side of her neck with two fingers, and she held very still. "I only ask for your company. Now and then. A woman who listens. My wife is a very busy person. She does not listen."
That evening was long, and slow, and cold in its own way, like a very large room with beautiful furniture and no one living in it. He undressed her himself, piece by piece, with the same unhurried deliberateness with which he did everything, and he looked at her in the lamplight as a man looks at something he has bought and is pleased with. She stood very straight, and let him. Her skin prickled. His hands were smooth and heavy, and he spoke softly, in Luganda, the kind of old formal phrases her grandmother used. She did not answer. She watched the green stone on his finger catch the light, again and again, a small hard eye, and thought of nothing at all, and found afterward that she was lying in a very wide bed under a very soft blanket and could not remember how she had come to be there.
The driver took her back at midnight. At the gate of the hostel he said, "The Honourable asked me to give you this," and passed her an envelope through the window. It held two hundred thousand shillings in new notes. She stood in the road holding it for a long time after the car had gone.
The second was Collins.
She had known him since the first term, the boy with the gold chain and the car keys, the one who said back in Dubai as if it were a village. She had never liked him much. He was loud, and careless, and treated waiters like furniture. But he was twenty-four, and handsome in a swaggering way, and in June, after a party at his father's house in Bunga, he found her alone on the veranda and said, "You're the only girl here who doesn't want something from me."
"I don't want anything."
"That's why I like you." He leaned on the rail beside her. "Listen. I'm going to say something stupid. I think I'm falling for you."
It was a line. She knew it was a line. But the night was warm, and the garden smelled of jasmine and cut grass, and the music from the house came out in soft pulses. He turned her face toward him with one finger. He kissed her under a string of coloured lights. It was a good kiss, confident, a little reckless, tasting of whisky and mint, and when his hand slid down to her waist she did not stop it.
He took her to a room upstairs, at the end of a corridor of closed doors. It was a boy's room, still, with football posters and a games console and a bed too large for it. He lit no lamp. They fell onto it laughing, half-dressed, with the music thudding through the floor, and the laughter turned to something else. He was clumsy where the Honourable was smooth, fast where Mr. Kato was patient, and it made her feel, strangely, powerful, as though for once she were leading. Her fingers dug into his shoulders. He murmured that she was beautiful, over and over, a boy's delighted stammer, and when it was over he lay beside her breathing hard, and said, "That was the best night of my life."
"You say that to everyone."
"I swear I don't." He propped himself on an elbow. His face in the dark was young and eager. "Come to Dubai with me. In December. My uncle has an apartment. We'll go to the desert, and the mall, and the beach. I'll show you everything. And then, I mean it, when we finish, we'll get married. My mother would love you. I'll buy you a ring the size of a plum."
"You're drunk."
"I'm serious. I always keep my promises." He kissed her wrist. "I'm going to give you a good life, Amara. I'm going to give you the best life."
She laughed and pulled the sheet up to her chin. She did not believe a word. But she remembered it afterward, in the taxi home, with the dawn coming grey over the hills of Bunga and her dress on inside out. She remembered that it was the fourth man in five months who had said the same sentence, in almost the same words, and that she had said yes to all of them.
The third was a contractor.
Engineer Bosco Lutaaya was thirty-eight, with big shoulders, a shaved head, and the weary, easy manner of a man used to being obeyed on building sites. He built roads. He had a company, and a fleet of yellow trucks, and a Prado with a number plate she did not understand. She met him on a boda ride, of all things, when his car broke down on the Ntinda road, and he climbed onto the back of her motorcycle without asking, and shouted directions over the engine, and paid the boda man double.
He did not pretend. That was what she remembered. He took her to a plain restaurant, ate a plate of rice with his hands, and said, "I have a wife in Entebbe, and two children, and a house I built myself. I also like young women who can think. I am telling you now, so you don't get the wrong idea."
"What idea?"
"That I'm a good man." He grinned, showing a gap in his teeth. "I'm not a bad one. But I'm not a good one. I'm a builder. I make things, and I pay for them."
He took her to a lodge outside Mukono, a quiet place with a thatched roof and a view of the swamp. The room smelled of cedar and rain. He was broad and heavy and good with his hands, and his voice, when he spoke into the dark, was rough and low and unexpectedly gentle. "Tell me something true," he said, with her head on his chest. And she told him about the goat called Pastor, and the plot behind the church, and the lorry on the Masaka road, and he listened without moving, and when she finished he said, "I'll build your mother a house."
"You can't say that."
"I'm saying it." His arm tightened. "A proper one. Four rooms. Iron sheets. I'll start in September. And I'll pay for your brother's school. What's his name? Joel? Done." He kissed her hair. "I keep my word. Ask anyone."
She lay awake after he fell asleep. The swamp outside was full of frogs. She stared at the thatch and thought, A house for Mama. She thought of the veranda with its sacks of charcoal, and the roof that clanged in the rain. She thought of how she would explain it, and to whom, and her eyes stung, and she did not know whether she was crying from hope or from shame.
And there were the ones whose names she never learned.
A man at a conference hotel in Jinja, who stood very close in a lift and slipped a key card into her hand. A pastor's son, or a man who said he was, who kept calling her sister in a way that made her skin crawl. A driver who brought envelopes for a man she only ever saw in the back seat, behind glass. A Saturday afternoon in a car with the windows up. A man in a suit at an airport hotel in Entebbe, who told her to call him Uncle, and who paid in dollars. She did not write those down. She did not count them. They went by in a blur of rooms and cars and elevators, faces she would not know again, voices that said good life and take care of you and you're special, until the words were only a sound, a soft meaningless hum, like the noise of a fan.
She never said it to herself in a sentence. She never said, I am doing this for money. She said, I am helping my mother. She said, It is only for now. She said, Everyone does it.
Late at night, on the balcony in Ntinda, she took out the green exercise book, and began to keep a list. A column of names. A column of promises. A column that was supposed to be for what she had received, and was always blank.
A job at the Committee. Dubai. A house in Kyotera. A studio in Bugolobi. My future.
She read them over. They were beautiful. They were the shape of the life she had dreamed of in S6, lying on a mat in the dark, with the rain on the iron roof. A good life, handed to her, by five different hands.
She did not notice, yet, that not one of the promises had a date.
She began to lie in small, practical ways.
To Brenda, she said she was visiting an aunt on Sundays. Brenda said, "Which aunt?" and Amara said, "My mother's cousin, in Ntinda," and Brenda said, "I did not know you had a cousin there," and Amara said, "It's new," and changed the subject, and felt Brenda's eyes follow her across the room.
To Peace, she said nothing at all. Peace asked fewer questions each week, and Amara was glad, and also hurt.
To Shanice, she said as little as possible. But Shanice knew. Of course she did. She sat across from Amara in the canteen one afternoon in April, stirring a cup of tea, looked at the new bag on her shoulder, and said gently, "He's good to you?"
"Who?"
"Amara."
Amara put her fork down. "He's a friend."
"Of course he is." Shanice said it with great kindness. "I'm not judging you. I want you to know that. I'm the last person who would."
"There's nothing to judge."
"Okay."
"There isn't."
"Okay." Shanice reached across and touched her hand. "Just be careful with the one who is married. They always say they will never leave, and then they say they will, and then they say it's complicated. I don't want you to get caught in that."
"I'm not caught in anything."
"I know." But she kept her hand there, and her eyes were full of something Amara could not bear to look at: recognition. As if she were watching a film she had already seen.
And to her mother, every Sunday, on the balcony of the hostel or the white balcony in Ntinda, she said the same things.
"How are your studies?"
"Good, Mama."
"Did you eat?"
"Yes."
"Is the job going well?"
"Very well. I am learning a lot."
"And the fees? Did you sort the fees?"
There was always a pause there. It lasted half a second. It was a very small pause, the kind you could drive a bus through.
"A business association helped," Amara said. "A kind of scholarship. They cleared the balance. I didn't want to tell you until it was done. I didn't want you to worry."
"A scholarship! From who?"
"A group of businessmen. It's for outstanding students."
"Outstanding," her mother said, and began to cry. "Praise God. Praise God. I have told everyone. The pastor knows. They are going to say a prayer for you on Sunday."
"Mama, don't tell the whole church."
"I will tell the whole village. I will tell the radio." Her mother laughed through her tears. "My child is outstanding."
Amara pressed the phone against her ear and looked out across the neat roofs of Ntinda, the water tanks and the washing lines and the little satellite dishes. A woman was hanging sheets on a balcony across the road. A child was kicking a ball against a wall.
"Yes, Mama," she said. "I'm doing very well."
She hung up. She sat on the plastic chair for a long time, with the phone in her lap, and the sun went down behind the roofs, and the sky turned the colour of the inside of a shell.
That was the evening she understood what she had done.
It was not the money. It was not even the man. It was this: that somewhere in the last four months she had become two people, and one of them was telling lies to the other's mother. And that nobody knew both of them.
She was alone in a way she had never been in the crowded corridors of Lucky Star, or in the long bus rides, or in the nights when the rice ran out. She was alone in the middle of her own life, on a balcony, with a phone in her hand and a good dress on, and the girl her mother believed in standing very far away, waving.
It's only until I graduate, she told herself.
The sky darkened. A light came on across the road. And she sat there a little longer, watching the lights go on in the windows of people who were, as far as she could tell, only one person each.