Chapter 7
The Friend
The market at Owino smelled of everything at once.
Fish, onions, old rubber, frying dough, sweat, rain on tin. Amara had been there before, with Shanice, once, to look for second-hand jeans. But she had never really seen it. She had walked through with her eyes down, holding her bag against her chest, as everybody was told to do.
This time she walked through it with a notebook in her hand, and an Entrepreneurship assignment, and Nathan Mwesigwa a step behind her saying, "Which way? Left? Is it left? I think that was the left."
"It's right."
"You said left."
"I said left, and then I said right."
"People who change directions in the middle of a market should be fined." He ducked under a line of hanging bras. "I have a theory that this place is not on the map. I think it is a different dimension."
"It's the biggest market in East Africa."
"Which is how they hide the portal."
She laughed. The path between the stalls was barely wide enough for two people, and every few steps someone pushed past with a sack on their head, calling, "Excuse, excuse!" The ground was wet. There were boys carrying jerrycans, boys carrying live ducks, boys carrying nothing and watching everything. Women sat behind pyramids of tomatoes and heaps of dried fish, shouting prices in cheerful, practised voices.
It was a Saturday in October, three weeks after the socket. The group had decided it needed "field research," meaning someone had to talk to the people they were building for. Peace had a lab test. Brian was sick. Joan from Tourism had a wedding. So it was Nathan and Amara, with a clipboard and a bottle of water.
"There," Amara said. "That one."
A woman of about fifty sat on an upturned crate behind a mound of tomatoes. She wore a faded kitenge wrapper and a scarf tied low on her forehead, and her hands moved without stopping, sorting the good tomatoes from the soft ones and dropping them into two separate basins. A school exercise book sat beside her on a plank, held open with a stone.
"Good afternoon, Mama," Amara said, in Luganda.
"Good afternoon, my child." The woman did not look up. "Tomatoes? Five for two thousand."
"Not today, Mama. Thank you. We are students. We are doing a project."
"Ah." The hands paused. Now the woman looked up, and her face was sharp and curious. "What project? About what?"
"About how you keep track of your money."
"Track?" The woman laughed, a dry bark. "I don't track. I sell."
"But you have a book."
"This?" She picked up the exercise book. "It's for the credit. When somebody takes and says they will pay on Friday. I write them in. If I don't, I forget, and they forget, and then it's a quarrel."
"Can we see?"
The woman hesitated, then handed it over. Amara turned the pages. They were covered in tidy, round handwriting, with names and numbers and small drawings of tomatoes beside the amounts. Some had been crossed out. Some had been written over again. A coffee ring marked one corner.
"This is very good," she said, and meant it.
"It's only what I need."
"But how do you know, at the end of the week, if you made a profit?"
"I don't."
"You don't?"
"I know if I have money in my pocket. That's the profit." She shrugged. "If I have none, I have lost. If I have some, I have won. What else is there?"
"But what if..." Amara hesitated. She looked at the woman, at her fingers stained red from tomato juice, at the careful rows of numbers, and she felt a warmth she could not explain. This was her mother. Not in the face, not in the voice, but in the quick, proud, wary way she held the book. "What if the price of tomatoes goes up, Mama, and you pay more than you think? Do you know?"
"I know when I buy."
"But do you know how much you paid, in the week? In total?"
The woman was silent. Her eyes flickered to the exercise book, and away.
"No," she said. "I don't."
"If someone made you a thing, on your phone, that told you each day how much came in and how much went out, would you use it?"
"A phone thing?"
"A very simple one. You press a picture of the tomato. You press how many. It does the rest."
"With words?"
"With pictures. And Luganda, if you like. You speak, and it writes."
The woman looked at her for a long time. Then she looked at Nathan, who stood a little way back with his clipboard and his anxious face, and she said, "Is he your husband?"
"No, Mama!" Amara felt her ears go hot. "He's just from my class."
"He's the one who knows the phone?"
"Yes."
"Hmm." The woman looked Nathan up and down, with great seriousness. "He is too thin."
"I've been told," Nathan said, in his careful, formal Luganda, which was clearly learned from books. "I am working on it."
The woman burst out laughing. She laughed so hard she had to hold on to her crate. Two neighbours looked over, and a man selling plastic basins called out a question, and she called back something in rapid Luganda that made them all roar. Amara caught only part of it, but it included the words thin boy and clever girl.
"Sit," said the woman, wiping her eyes. "Sit, sit. You want to learn? I will tell you what is wrong with all your phone things. Sit, my children. I have a few hours."
It was nearly six o'clock when they came out of the market. The rain had been and gone, leaving the air cool and the roads shining. The sky over the old taxi park was a long band of gold and grey. They sat on a low wall near the gate, tired, with the clipboard between them, covered in notes.
"Her name is Mama Jalia," Nathan said. "Did you get that?"
"I wrote it down."
"I can't believe it. Three hours. She told us everything. About the suppliers. About the boys who cheat on the scales. About the woman at the next stall who owes her forty thousand." He rubbed his eyes. "Do you know what I realised? I've been designing this thing for a person who doesn't exist. I imagined a woman in a nice blouse, with a nice shop. This woman has been selling tomatoes for twenty-six years. She has put four children through school. She does not need us to teach her anything. She needs us to be useful."
"That's what I said."
"You said it in the library. But you really meant it, I think." He turned to her. "You talked to her differently. In Luganda. You were so... I don't know. Soft. Not weak. Soft, like it was your mother."
Amara looked at the road. A boda went by with a girl on the back, holding a bag of mangoes.
"It was my mother," she said. "In a way."
"I thought so."
"How?"
"The way you held the book. I have seen you hold your laptop and your phone and your pen. I've never seen you hold anything like you held that exercise book." He smiled. "You went very quiet. Like a person in church."
She felt something move inside her, a small shift, like a drawer slid out of place. She did not want him to see her face, so she kept her eyes on the road.
"My mother does exactly that," she said. "Every night. She writes in a book. I watch her from the door. She has done it for as long as I remember."
"And you want to make it easier for her."
"I want to make it so that nobody has to count by candlelight."
He did not reply. He only nodded slowly, and they sat for a while in the dusk, watching the lamps come on along the road. The taxi park beyond the wall was a sea of white vans, packed in rows, with conductors hanging from the doors shouting destinations. Masaka, Masaka, Masaka! Her own town's road. She could hear it.
"I don't have a mother," Nathan said.
He said it so lightly that she thought she had misheard. "What?"
"She died. When I was fifteen." He kept his eyes on the vans. "It's okay. I'm not saying it for sympathy. It's just that when you said your mother, I thought of mine. And I thought, I haven't thought about her book in a long time."
"What book?"
"She was a tailor. In Masindi. She had a notebook with measurements. Names and numbers, the length of a sleeve, the width of a hip. Everyone she ever made a dress for was in there." He smiled, a little twisted. "After she died my father could not look at it. He put it in a drawer. Last holiday I opened it. There was a page for me. I did not know. She'd measured me every year. From when I was a baby. She wrote my height on the margin, like a doorframe."
Amara said nothing. She did not trust her voice.
"I'm sorry," he said. "That was too much. We were doing a market survey."
"No. It wasn't."
"I never talk about it."
"Then why now?"
"I don't know." He laughed softly. "It's you. You have a way of asking things without asking. It's quite dangerous."
"I didn't ask."
"No. That's the dangerous part."
They sat for a bit longer. Then Nathan stood, brushed the dust from his trousers, and said, "I'm starving. There is a place near Wandegeya that makes the best chips. I'll buy you chips."
"You bought me a rolex last time."
"That was a different rolex."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning I'm building a long-term relationship with you based on food." He held out a hand to pull her up. "Come on, Madam Accountant. Don't make me beg."
She froze, for half a second.
Madam Accountant.
He had said it as a joke, the way he said everything. He had no idea. It was a name that belonged somewhere else, to another man in another life, and she heard it now in Nathan's mouth like a wrong note in a familiar song.
But she took his hand. It was warm and a little rough. He pulled her to her feet, and let go at once, and they walked to the chip place together without saying anything more about it.
By November, she had a new rhythm.
It was not an easy one. She still went to Nakawa on Saturdays. She still went to the apartment in Ntinda on some nights, and sat through dinners, and answered messages with the words thank you and yes. She still called her mother on Sundays and said good, good, very good. All of that went on, steady, like a machine she had learned to run without watching.
But she also went to the library at four. Every day, Monday to Friday, because the group had a deadline. And when the others had gone, she stayed.
It began by accident. They would finish the work, and Peace would pack up and leave, and Brian would drift off to his hostel, and Nathan would say, "I'm going to fix one bug," and not leave for two more hours. She would stay to finish her notes. Neither of them mentioned it. It was simply how it went.
They did not only talk about the project. That was the unexpected thing. They talked about everything. About a lecturer who wore the same tie every Tuesday. About a stray dog that slept on the steps of the Engineering block. About the best way to eat a rolex without it falling apart, which Nathan claimed to have solved and which turned out to be completely wrong. He told her about his father, a primary school teacher at Kigumba, who still marked homework at night with a red pen by a paraffin lamp. He told her about his sister, Grace, who was sixteen and wanted to be a pilot and had never seen a plane that was not in the sky. He told her about the kiosk in Wandegeya where he repaired phones on weekends, and how he had learned the trade from a man called Mzee Otim, who used to say a phone was like a person: it did not break all at once. It broke in small parts, and if you listened, it would tell you which.
"What does yours say?" Amara asked, nodding at his cracked laptop.
"That it's tired. And that I should be nicer."
"Are you?"
"No. I hit it." He looked at the screen. "But I'm working on it."
She told him things too. She was surprised how much. She told him about the goat named Pastor. About the plot of land behind the church. About Joel's football boots, and Esther's pink pen. She told him about the mango tree her father planted, and the way her mother ironed her dress before she left. She told him all of it, in small pieces, over weeks. And every piece was true.
That was what she kept noticing. All of it was true. She had never lied to Nathan Mwesigwa. She had only left out an entire half of her life, like a person taking a photograph who simply stepped out of the frame.
It was easier than she expected. He never pushed. He never asked what she did on Saturdays, or why she went quiet when her phone rang, or who sent her the flowers that appeared once, mysteriously, at the hostel gate, with no card. He only said, "That's a nice bag," once, and she said, "It was a gift," and he said, "Good," and moved on.
She did not know if he suspected. It made her more nervous that he did not ask than it would have if he had.
One rainy evening toward the end of the month, they got stuck.
They had left the library at nine, with the plan to walk to the gate together, as they always did. But the sky opened before they reached the lawn, and they ran for the nearest shelter, the covered walkway outside the Faculty of Arts, and stood there breathing hard while rain hammered the tin roof and ran down the pavement in sheets.
"Typical," Nathan said. "I have no umbrella. I have never in my life had an umbrella."
"I have one."
"Then why are we running?"
"I forgot." She dug in her bag. "It's very small."
It was small. It was a pink fold-up one that Esther had bought her for her birthday, with a handle shaped like a duck. She opened it. It had room for approximately one and a half people.
"I'm not going to fit," Nathan said.
"You don't have to."
"I'll fit my head."
"That's not what I..."
"My head is the important part." He held out a hand. "Give it here. I will carry it. I'm taller."
She gave it to him. They stepped out together. It did not work. The wind caught the umbrella and flipped it inside out, and the rain came down on both of them, cold and heavy, and Nathan held the thing over their heads like a flag as they ran. They were soaked in three seconds. Water streamed down their faces. Amara was shrieking with laughter, though she did not know why, and Nathan was shouting something about duck-based engineering.
They stopped under the shelter of a bus stop at the end of the road. Both of them gasped. Her dress clung to her. His shirt had turned dark. A small stream ran down the road past their feet.
"I owe you an umbrella," he said.
"You owe me a duck."
"I will compensate the duck."
She could not stop laughing. She laughed until she had to bend over, with her hands on her knees, and her whole body shook. It felt like cracking something open. She had not laughed like that in months, perhaps a year. Maybe since before the day she stood in the finance queue.
When she straightened, he was looking at her. He had stopped laughing. He wore a look she could not read, soft and a little startled, as though he had been about to say something and forgotten what.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing."
"What is it?"
"You laugh with your whole face." He said it plainly. "I didn't know that. I thought you were a quiet person."
She did not know what to do with that. The rain poured down on the roof. A taxi went by, throwing a wave of water over the pavement, and neither of them moved.
"Did you eat?" Nathan said.
She went still.
"What?"
"Did you eat? I'm going to buy something. You must be hungry."
Did you eat?
It was what her mother asked. It was what Mr. Kato asked, in every message. It was the most ordinary question in the world. And yet she stood there in the rain, and her throat closed, and for a second she was afraid she was going to cry.
"Yes," she said. "No. I don't know."
"Is that a yes or a no?"
"It's a... I'll eat."
"Okay." He gave her a puzzled look. "Are you alright?"
"It's the rain."
"It's only water."
"I know." She wiped her face. "It's only water."
They bought chips at the stall near the gate, and sat on the curb under a plastic sheet, with the grease soaking through the paper, and neither of them said much. She ate slowly. He ate quickly. When the rain finally stopped, an hour later, the streets steamed in the light of the lamps, and a hundred frogs began to sing from the drain by the road.
"They're loud," Nathan said.
"They're happy."
"Do frogs get happy?"
"After rain, yes."
"How do you know?"
"I grew up near a swamp." She smiled into the dark. "Mama says the frogs are praying. They have been waiting for the rain for weeks, and now they are saying thank you."
"That's a good way to see it."
"It's her way."
They sat listening. A breeze came down the road, carrying wet earth and charcoal smoke. She felt calm, a quiet, spreading calm, like warm water in a tub.
She realised after a moment what it was. It was a feeling she knew from long ago, but had not met in a long time.
It was peace.
Not the kind that comes when a problem is solved. A smaller kind. The kind that comes when you stop pretending, for an hour, that you are anybody but the person sitting on the curb.
She was afraid of it. She did not trust it. But she let it stay for a little while, because it was so rare.
On the twenty-eighth of November, Nathan turned twenty-one.
She found out by accident, from Moses, who came up to her in the canteen with a very guilty face and said, "You didn't hear this from me. He doesn't want a fuss. But it's Saturday, and he has not told anyone, and I thought, someone should know."
"Why are you telling me?"
"Because he talks about you. Constantly. It's a problem." Moses was six foot three, with a dramatic voice, and he said it as though confessing to a crime. "I thought maybe you could do something."
"Like what?"
"A cake. Anything. He hasn't had a cake since his mother."
Amara stared at him. Then she pulled out her phone, and put it away again. She had money. She had a great deal of it, now, in a mobile money account that Mr. Kato topped up without being asked. She could buy the biggest cake in Kampala. She could buy a cake with a name on it and a candle shaped like a rocket.
She did not.
Instead she went to a woman she knew on campus, a second-year who gave extra lessons in Accounting for twenty thousand shillings an hour, and asked how it worked. The woman said, "You need students. First years, mostly. They panic." And Amara put up a handwritten notice on the notice board outside the library. Accounting help for first years. Clear, patient, affordable. Ask for Amara, Room 14.
Three students came in a week. She taught them for two hours each, at a table in the canteen, with a pen and a packet of biscuits. She made forty-five thousand shillings in total. It was very little. It was less than the cost of one taxi ride in Mr. Kato's car.
But it was hers.
She used all of it. She bought a small round cake from a bakery in Wandegeya, white and slightly lopsided, with Happy Birthday Nathan in blue icing. She bought a pack of candles. She bought a secondhand book from a stall near the gate, a battered paperback about the history of computing, because he had once said he wanted one, and she'd kept the title in her head.
On Saturday evening, the three of them waited outside Nathan's rented house in Wandegeya, a squat building with a broken gate and a tree in the yard. Moses went in first. A minute later, Nathan came out, blinking, in a faded T-shirt, with a toothbrush in his hand.
"What is this?"
"Happy birthday," said Amara.
He stopped. He looked at the cake. Then at Moses, who was grinning like a man who had saved a village. Then at her.
"I did not tell anyone," he said.
"Someone found out."
"I'll kill him."
"You won't. You'll eat cake."
She struck a match. The candles caught. Twenty-one little flames wobbled in the dusk, and a moth flew into one and spun away. Nathan stood very still, with the toothbrush in his hand, looking at them.
"I haven't had this," he said quietly. "Since I was fourteen."
"Moses said."
"Did he." He drew a breath. "Okay. Okay. What do I do?"
"You make a wish and blow."
"I don't know what to wish."
"Everyone knows what to wish."
"Not me. I have too many." He bent over the cake. His face, lit from below, was young and serious. For a moment he closed his eyes. Then he blew, and the flames went out in a long, curling line of smoke.
Moses cheered. A woman next door shouted something about the noise. Nathan opened his eyes and looked at Amara, and she knew, absolutely, that if she had said what did you wish? he would have told her.
She did not ask. She cut the cake.
They ate it on the steps, three of them, passing the knife between them because nobody had a plate. Moses told a long story about the time Nathan set his own laptop on fire. Nathan corrected him, and Moses ignored it. A neighbour's radio was playing an old Kenyan song. The cake was dry, and too sweet, and the best thing she had ever tasted.
When it was almost gone, Nathan said, without looking up, "Where did you get the money?"
"What money?"
"For the cake. For the book."
"I taught some students."
"You taught..." He put his fork down. "You did this with your own money?"
"I didn't have a cake budget, if that is what you're asking."
"Amara."
"It's a small cake."
"It isn't about the cake." He looked at her very directly, with something so steady and plain in his face that she had to drop her eyes. "Thank you. Truly. I don't think you know what this is."
"It's a cake."
"It's the first time anyone has done something for me, on purpose, since my mother." He picked up the paperback and turned it over in his hands, carefully, as if it might break. "And you didn't have to. You don't owe me anything. We're only friends."
Only friends. The words went into her, small and sharp.
"I know," she said. "That's why."
She walked home late, alone. He had offered to escort her, but Moses had cornered him about the washing-up, and she said she was fine. The night was warm and clear. The road to Kikoni lay quiet under its lamps.
She had her phone in her hand. It lit up as she walked. Kato Spares. A message. Are you free tomorrow evening? I'd like to take you to dinner. Wear the green.
She read it, and her stomach turned over, slowly, like something heavy in water.
She did not answer. She put the phone in her pocket and kept walking. At the corner, a man was selling roasted maize over a small charcoal fire, and the smell was warm and smoky and sweet. She bought two cobs, with her own money, the money from her students, and stood eating one under the streetlight.
She could not tell exactly what she felt. It was not guilt, because guilt had a shape. This had no shape. It was more like standing at the edge of a field and looking at the far side, and realising the far side was a place she would like to live.
Only friends, she told herself.
The maize was hot and sweet. She finished it. She put the second one in her bag, to give to Brenda.
And as she walked the last few steps to the hostel gate, she found that she had been smiling the whole way. The guard looked at her, and she looked at him, and for the first time in a year she did not feel the need to explain.