Epilogue
Amara
Three years later, on a Sunday morning in March, Amara woke before the alarm and lay still in the half light, listening to a man try to be quiet.
He was in the kitchen. She could tell by the sounds. The scrape of a chair. The small, careful clink of a spoon. A pause, followed by a very quiet word, which she would not have repeated to his father. Then the whisper of the tap, running thin, as if he thought that a tap could be run politely.
She smiled at the ceiling.
It was a good ceiling. White, plain, with a faint stain in one corner where the roof had leaked in the last rains. The landlord had promised to fix it. The landlord had been promising since January. She and Nathan had made a joke of it, and had named the stain Kampala Road, because it had the same shape, and a tendency to flood.
The room was small. A double bed, a wardrobe with one broken door, a table by the window piled with papers. On the wall hung three photographs in plain wooden frames. One showed a woman in a green dress with yellow flowers, standing in front of a half-built house in Kyotera, with one hand on her hip and a look of fierce satisfaction. One showed a boy in a football kit holding a cup. And one was of a market woman in a headscarf, holding up a phone to the camera, mouth wide with laughter. Under it Nathan had written, in marker, Mama Jalia — Customer Number One.
She turned on her side. The window was open, and the air was cool, and from the compound below came the Sunday sounds of the neighbourhood: a radio, a child singing, the clang of a saucepan. Someone was frying onions. A rooster, somewhere, was confused about the hour.
She was twenty-five years old.
She lay and let the number sit. She had never expected to be twenty-five. It sounded very old. It sounded like a woman who had a pension fund and opinions about paint. But she was also, she had come to see, a person who was still being built. She had been told it would stop at some point. She was not sure when. Madam Okumu, whom she still visited, once a month, in the low brick building behind the ferns, said, "It doesn't. That's the good news." She had meant it as a comfort. It had taken Amara a year to hear it that way. The card with her number on the back was still in the green book, soft at the corners. Amara had not needed it in two years. She kept it anyway, the way you keep a spare key.
She found him at the stove in his boxer shorts and an old T-shirt that said Entrepreneurship Is Hard, stirring something that was supposed to be porridge.
"You're up," Nathan said, without turning. "I was being quiet."
"You were being a herd of goats."
"I was being a very small herd of goats." He held up the spoon. "I wanted to bring you tea in bed. It's Sunday. I read it in an article. It said, Surprise your partner."
"What happened to the tea?"
"It's in the porridge."
She came and looked into the pot. It was grey. It had a skin on top, and a few suspicious lumps, and a tea bag floating gently near the middle like a drowned fish.
"Nathan."
"I know."
"That is not porridge."
"It's a new form. It's experimental." He looked at her with enormous dignity. "I think it needs salt."
"It needs a priest."
He began to laugh, and then she did, and they stood there together at the stove, in the thin morning light, laughing like two people who had been up all night, though they had slept for nine hours. She leaned her forehead against his shoulder. He smelled of sleep, and soap, and a faint trace of lemon. He always did. It had never changed.
"I'll cook," she said.
"I wanted to."
"I know. You can wash the plates."
"That is a very unequal division of labour."
"It's a fair one. I'm better at the first part, and you're better at the second." She took the spoon from him, and gave the pot a long, suspicious look, and carried it to the sink. "Go and sit. You can tell me about your week."
"It was a good week."
"Tell me the bad bits."
"There weren't any."
"Nathan."
He sighed, and sat down on the chair by the table, and picked at a thread on his sleeve. "There was one. On Tuesday. I got an email from an investor. Very polite. He said he loved the product, but he wondered whether it was scalable. He said maybe we should consider charging the market women a small fee."
"What did you say?"
"I said I would think about it." He looked miserable. "I didn't say no. I wanted to. But the server costs are going up. We have forty-one thousand users, and it's only me and Brian and two interns, and I don't know. Maybe it's reasonable."
"Maybe."
"Maybe it isn't."
"Maybe." She put the kettle on, and set out bread and margarine and a jar of groundnut paste. "Do you want me to tell you what I think?"
"Always."
"I think you should do a survey. Ask the women. Mama Jalia. The ones in Nakasero and Kisenyi. Ask what they'd pay, and what they'd pay for. Don't guess." She cut the bread. "I think you'll find that some of them would pay a little, if it meant they could use the records to get a loan."
"That's your department."
"I know. That's why I'm saying it." She put a plate in front of him. "At the bank, I have six traders who got credit last month on the strength of their records in your app. The numbers were good enough. The managers couldn't argue. A woman who has never had an account walked out with a loan for her stall. If we can make that work for twenty, we have something real."
He stared at her.
"You didn't tell me that."
"I was going to. On Wednesday."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because you were already tired." She smiled. "I'm saying it now."
Nathan put down his bread. He looked at her for a long moment, in that open, startled way he had, as though he were seeing her for the first time and the second time at once. Then he stood, and came round the table, and kissed her, firmly, on the mouth.
"You are going to be impossible to argue with," he said.
"I'm already impossible."
"It's a worse impossible. It's one with data."
She laughed against his collar.
They did not have a perfect life.
She would have said so, if anyone had asked, and often did. It was not the kind of thing to hide. They had a leaking roof and a landlord who lied. They had a loan on a second-hand motorcycle, which Nathan had bought without consulting her, and which she had forgiven, slowly, after eight days. They argued about money. They argued about whose turn it was to wash the bucket. Once, last August, they had argued so badly about her working late that Nathan had gone to his father's in Masindi for four days, and neither of them had slept.
He still went quiet sometimes. It was less often now. When it happened, she had learned to say, "What is it?" in an ordinary voice, and leave a space, and wait. Sometimes it was a memory. Sometimes it was only the old fist, rising, from a place that no amount of love could reach. He would say, "It's the January thing," or "It's the man in glasses," and she would say, "Okay," and they would sit with it. It would pass. It always passed. It got smaller each time, like a stone in a river being worn away.
And she, too, had her bad nights. She still woke at three in the morning, once or twice a month, with her mouth dry and her heart going hard, and the old shame moving through her in the dark. She would lie there, and not fight it. She would put a hand on Nathan's back. He never woke, and always knew. In the morning she would say, "I had one," and he would say, "I know," and make her tea.
It did not go away. She had stopped expecting it to. It was part of her now, like a scar, or a certain way of walking. It did not rule her. It only reminded her of where she had been, and how far she had come.
Last month, on a Tuesday, in the library, over a plate of chips, he had asked her to marry him.
She had been furious. He had not planned it. He had no ring. He had taken a paper napkin and written on it in biro, Will you? and slid it across the table, and sat there with his ears turning red. "I thought about doing it at the lake," he said. "Or in the gardens. But I thought, no. It should be here. With the socket."
"You didn't buy a ring."
"I'm getting one. After. I wanted to ask first, in case you said no."
"You're a fool."
"Is that a yes?"
"It's a yes. It's a yes and a fool."
She had cried into the chips. A first-year at the next table had applauded. They had both been so embarrassed that they left without finishing, and walked home in the rain, laughing, and she had said, at the door, "I'm going to tell people you proposed on a beach," and Nathan had said, "Please do."
The ring was a small one, a plain silver band, bought together at a shop in Wandegeya, with a discount, after a long argument about whether they could afford it. They could. Barely. It sat on her finger like a very quiet promise.
The wedding would be next year. Her mother had already begun to make a list.
After breakfast, she called Kyotera.
It was a ritual. Every Sunday, ten o'clock, from the balcony, with the sun beginning to climb over the water tanks. Her mother answered on the second ring. She had a smartphone now, a gift from Joel, who was in his first year of Engineering at a university in Mbarara, and she had learned, with great ceremony, to use video.
"Good morning, my daughter!"
"Good morning, Mama."
"I can see your forehead."
"Hold it lower."
"It is lower." The screen swung wildly, a blur of green, a flash of a doorway, and then settled on her mother's face, closer than necessary, and smiling. She wore the green dress, and the blue scarf was tied round her head, like a banner. Behind her, the afternoon sun poured through a wide, open door.
It was a real door. It had a frame of new timber, and a lintel, and a threshold that smelled of fresh cement. It belonged to a house.
Three years ago, in the second month of her job at the bank, Amara had walked into a land office in Masaka with an envelope. She had come out with a title deed. The quarter-acre plot behind the church had been sold on to a man who farmed beans, and he had been very reasonable. It had taken a year of savings. Then it had taken another year, and a loan, and a mason named Kiwanuka who did good work, and the house had come slowly out of the ground. Four rooms, a veranda, an iron roof that did not clang in the rain, because she had paid extra for the thick sheets.
Her mother had stood in front of it on the day it was finished. She had not said a word. She had walked all round it, once, slowly, with one hand on the wall, and then stood at the threshold and stroked the door frame as if it were an animal.
"Your father," she had said.
"I know."
"He drew it on a paper bag. I still have it. It was exactly this."
"I know, Mama. You showed me."
"It is exactly this." And she had sat down on the step, in the dust, in her best dress, and cried, and Amara had sat beside her, and neither of them had said anything for a long time.
Today her mother sat on that same step. Behind her, on the veranda, Esther was doing homework. She was fifteen now, in S3, and had announced that she was going to be a surgeon, and had begun practising on bananas.
"Where is Joel?" Amara asked.
"At his books. He phoned yesterday, very serious. He says he has an exam, and then a project, and then a girl." Her mother lowered her voice. "I did not ask about the girl."
"Wise."
"He sent a photograph. She has a nice face." She sniffed. "But she is a Munyankole. We will see."
"Mama."
"I'm only saying."
Amara laughed. Across the sky a pair of white birds were crossing, very high, lit gold from beneath. She watched them go.
"And how is Nathan?" her mother asked. "Is he eating?"
"He tried to make porridge."
"God have mercy."
"I know."
"Tell him to come home and I will cook for him. He is too thin. I said so at the introduction. I told his father, My son-in-law is a skeleton." Her mother squinted at the screen. "Are you eating?"
"Yes."
"You look well. You look..." She paused. She studied the small bright face in her hand, for a long moment, with that look Amara had known all her life, the one that went on and on. "You look like a person who is at home in her body."
"Do I?"
"Yes. It's the first time I have seen it." Her mother's voice was very even. "I kept waiting. For years. I used to look at you and think, There is someone standing behind her. I thought it was the sadness. Now she is gone."
"Gone?"
"Or she has come forward. I don't know which. But it's one person now. I like her very much."
Amara could not speak. She held the phone against her chest for a second, with her eyes shut, and the sun on her face.
"I love you, Mama."
"I know." Her mother said it simply. "Go and eat. And tell that boy to call his father."
She was alone on the balcony for a while afterward.
She leaned on the rail and looked out over the rooftops of Kisaasi. A hundred tin roofs, a forest of aerials, a water tank painted with an advertisement for cooking oil. Washing hung from every line. A man was cleaning a motorcycle in the road, whistling. At a window across the way, a girl in a school uniform was combing her hair in front of a mirror, very seriously, as if the day depended on it.
She thought, as she did sometimes, about the people she had been.
She was not ashamed of them. That was the thing she could not have said, years ago, to the girl in the bathroom at three in the morning. She had not made her peace by forgetting. She had made it by remembering, a little at a time, in a room with a counsellor and a box of tissues, until each memory had been picked up and looked at and put in its place. The girl in the cracked shoes. The girl in the silver dress. The girl who had said Okay in a car-yard under a tree. They were all in her. They were not enemies. They were not even strangers any more. They were rooms in a house, and she walked through them without fear.
On Saturdays, now, she gave a talk at the university. It had begun by accident, after Mercy graduated, and had grown into a small club of about thirty students who met in Lecture Hall 4 at ten in the morning. They called it The Two Columns. There were no sermons. She did not tell her story, unless someone asked. She only taught them how to keep a ledger, and how to read a contract, and how to say no to a lunch. She taught them how to write down what came in, and what went out, and what was left. And sometimes, at the end, when the others had gone, a girl would linger by the door with her hands knotted and say, "Madam Amara, can I ask you something?"
And Amara would say, "Of course."
It was not much. It was a handful of girls, one Saturday at a time. But it was a door the size of a window, and a hand on the frame, and it was hers.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She took it out.
It was a voice note from her mother.
It had come in at eight minutes past ten, just after the call. It was one minute and forty seconds long. She looked at the little waveform, the thin grey line, for a moment, and thought of another night, three years and several lifetimes ago, in a bathroom in Kikoni, with a bad bulb flickering overhead.
She pressed play.
"Amara, my daughter. I forgot to say. Joel has passed his first semester. Esther's teacher says she is the best in biology. The new tomatoes are doing well. Your Aunt Prossy sends greetings, and says you must visit. I have been to the grave, and I told your father about the ring. He was very quiet. But I think he was pleased.
"I'm praying for you, my child. Always. Eat well. Sleep. Don't work too hard.
"And don't forget who you are."
The recording clicked off.
She stood very still on the balcony, with the phone against her ear, listening to the silence after the voice. The sun was warm on her arms. The rooster across the road had finally made up its mind, and was shouting at the top of its lungs. Somewhere in the room behind her, Nathan was running the tap, and humming, badly, a song from the radio.
She lowered the phone. And for the first time, she said the answer aloud.
"I haven't, Mama."
It came out quite softly. She had not known it was true until she heard it. But she said it again, to the roofs and the washing and the wide blue morning, and this time she did not have to reach for it.
"I haven't."
Later, she stood in the bathroom with the door half open and brushed her teeth.
It was a small room. A basin, a shower curtain with a pattern of fish, a window of frosted glass. The mirror over the sink was cracked at one corner, from a tenant before them, and the bulb over it had been changed, and now burned steady and white. Beside the tap sat two toothbrushes in a cup, one blue and one green, and a bar of soap, and a tube of face cream.
There was no wig on the hook. There had been none for years. Her hair had grown into soft, short curls, which she wore as it came, and sometimes oiled, and sometimes forgot. A little grey had begun to show near the temple. She had decided she liked it.
She rinsed her mouth. She wiped her hands. And she looked up.
The woman in the mirror looked back.
She had good skin. People said so. A straight nose from her father, and a wide mouth from her mother, bare today of any colour. There were fine lines at the corners of her eyes, from laughing, and a faint shadow beneath them, from late nights with a laptop. She wore an old T-shirt and the silver ring and nothing else. Her face was tired, and clear, and in no particular hurry.
She did not have to think about who she was.
She knew her. She knew her the way you know a house you have lived in for a long time, every creak of the stairs, every patch of light on the floor. She knew where she had been, and what she had broken, and what she had mended. She knew the sound of her laugh. She knew that she was kind, and stubborn, and funny with the people she trusted. She knew that she could be wrong, and could say so. She knew she was not perfect, and that this was not a flaw in the plan.
She was Nakamya Amara, first-born of Rose, sister of Joel and Esther, daughter of a man who had drawn a house on a paper bag. She was a credit officer, and a teacher on Saturdays, and a woman who was going to be married in a year, to a thin, difficult, honest man who could not make porridge.
She was also a girl who had stood in a queue under the sun, in cracked school shoes, with a sweet melting in her mouth. And she was a girl who had stood in a bathroom at three in the morning with a wig in her hand. And she was both. She was all of them. She had stopped trying to choose.
Who are you? she had asked, once, to the glass.
This, she thought now. Exactly this.
The woman in the mirror began to smile.
It was not the bright smile, or the careful one. It was a small, plain, slightly crooked smile, and it started at the corners of the eyes, and spread slowly, like light coming into a room. It was the smile of someone who has been away for a long time, and has come back, and finds that the door was never locked.
She smiled at her. And the woman smiled back, because she recognised her.
From the kitchen, Nathan called, "Amara! Are you coming? I've burnt the toast!"
"I'm coming!"
"It's not a joke this time! It's actually on fire!"
She laughed, out loud, in the bathroom, with the water still running. She turned off the tap. She took one last look at the girl in the glass, and nodded to her, as to an old friend.
Then she went to put out the fire.