Chapter 4
Kampala
The city did not announce itself. It simply grew, over three hours, out of the road.
First there were more houses, and then closer ones, and then a place where the banana plantations stopped altogether and the land was nothing but roofs, tin on tin on tin, stacked up the hillsides in rust-red and silver and blue, with washing strung between them like small flags. The traffic thickened. Lorries, taxis, boda bodas with their riders crouched low, a man on a bicycle with a mattress strapped to his back. The air changed. It smelled of diesel and frying dough and hot tar, and under it, faint and sweetish, of the open drains.
Nabirye pressed her forehead against the glass.
She had been to Kampala twice. Once at ten, on a school trip, to see the museum, when she had been so carsick she remembered nothing but a green bucket. Once at sixteen, for her cousin's wedding, in a borrowed dress, when she had been kept inside a hall in Nakawa for nine hours and seen the city only through the window of a car at night. She had thought she knew what it was. It had been a collection of lights.
This was not lights. This was a creature. It breathed. It roared and shifted and ate, and every part of it was in motion, the vendors weaving between the cars with trays on their heads, the boys running alongside with baskets of boiled eggs, the women in bright gomesis picking their way across six lanes of traffic with a baby on one hip and a basin on the other. It did not look at her. That was what she noticed. In Kisaana, every passer-by knew her name, her mother's name, and the number of her goats. Here, a thousand people went by in the first minute, and not one so much as glanced.
It was terrifying. It was also, she found, with a small guilty flicker, a relief.
Nobody knows who I am.
The taxi crawled into the old taxi park at half past ten, and stopped, and everyone began shouting at once.
She stood on the red earth with the suitcase between her feet and her bag clutched to her chest, in the middle of what looked like a field of white metal beetles, and tried to remember the instructions.
Take a boda. Do not take the first one. Ask for Katwe, behind the stadium. Give them eight thousand and not a shilling more. She had written them on her hand in biro, in Ssenga's loud voice. They were smudged already. Round her, the park roared. A conductor yelled, "Masaka! Masaka! Mbarara!" A man tried to sell her a phone case. A woman pressed a plastic bag of mangoes into her hand and said, "Five thousand, sister, special price, because you are new," and when she said no, followed her for twenty metres, calling, "How did you know? How did you know?"
"Are you lost?" said a voice.
She spun round. It was a young man on a motorcycle, a skinny boy with a reflective vest and a wide, friendly, toothy smile. SAFE RIDER, said the vest.
"I'm going to Katwe."
"Katwe is far. Katwe is very far. Katwe is twenty thousand."
"It's eight."
"Eight?" He clutched his chest. "Madam, you wound me. Where did you learn this number?"
"My aunt."
"Your aunt is a very clever woman. And it is only that she is not here with her bag." But he was grinning. He took the suitcase and strapped it across the back with a length of rubber. "Ten. Final. Because I like your face."
She paid ten. It seemed a very large amount. She climbed on behind him, clutching the bag, with her knees clamped to the seat, and the motorcycle shot forward into the traffic, and she shrieked.
"Don't be afraid!" he shouted, over his shoulder.
"I'm not afraid!"
"You are shouting!"
"It's a normal voice!"
They cut across a lane of lorries with a hand's breadth to spare. They went up a hill, and down it, and through a street so narrow and so crowded that she could have reached out and touched the fruit on a vendor's table. She saw a mosque and a church side by side with a bar between. She saw a billboard of a woman with improbably white teeth holding a bottle of oil. She saw a man in a suit asleep on a bench with a newspaper over his face and a boy methodically unlacing his shoes.
She was laughing. She did not know when she had started.
The room was in a compound in Katwe, behind a small mosque, down a lane of red mud that the boda man refused to enter. He set her down at the end, took his ten thousand, shouted something cheerful in Luganda about village girls and good luck, and was gone in a blare of exhaust.
She stood in the lane. It was lined with low brick buildings, painted in faded greens and yellows, with iron doors and tiny windows and washing hung from every possible fixture. Children played in the mud with a ball made of rags. A woman was cooking something on a charcoal stove outside her door, and the smoke drifted across the lane in a blue cloud, smelling of onions and old oil. Someone's radio was playing Kiganda music, the ndere flute, high and trembling, and under it, from the other side, a loud bass beat from a bar.
Number 14, the blue door.
She found it. It was a small iron door, peeling, with a padlock on the latch. She stood in front of it, not knowing what to do.
"You must be the village girl," said someone behind her.
She turned. A girl was leaning against the wall of the next house, with her arms folded, a plastic basin of washing balanced on one hip. She was about twenty-two, short and curvy, in a tight pink T-shirt and a pair of leggings, with her hair done in elaborate long braids tied up on top of her head in a sort of fountain. Her nails were green. Her lipstick was a deep, dramatic plum. She was looking Nabirye up and down with her head on one side and an expression of frank, delighted curiosity.
"I'm Nabirye."
"I know." The girl put down the basin and came over, wiping her hands on her leggings. "Ssenga Rehema phoned. Twice. She said, If anything happens to my niece, I will come with a stick. She said I was to look after you." She stuck out a hand. "I am Shamim."
"Hello."
"You are tiny."
"I'm average."
"You are a tiny, serious, scared little villager with a suitcase and I love you already." Shamim seized her hand and pumped it. She had a grip like a wrestler. "Come in, come in. I have been cleaning since six. Well. I have moved things from one side of the room to another, which is the same thing. You will not find a fly in there."
"How many are there?"
"Eleven," said Shamim, and unlocked the door.
It was a very small room. It was perhaps three metres by four. A curtain of printed cloth hung from a string across the middle, dividing it in two. On the left side was a double mattress with a pink blanket, a heap of cushions, a mirror hung on a nail, and a shelf crowded with bottles of oil and relaxer and coloured thread. A pile of wigs on a stand. A poster of a woman in a gold dress. On the right was a narrow wooden bed, a small table, and a bucket. The floor was cement, painted red, and cracked. A single bulb hung from a wire in the ceiling.
"The right side is yours," said Shamim. "It has the better window. I take the left because of the wigs. They are sensitive."
"It's lovely."
"It is a cell. But it's our cell." Shamim dropped onto the mattress and patted the pink blanket. "Sit. Tell me everything. Is it true you are the first in the whole sub-county? Is it true your mother sold a cow? Is it true that you want to build a hospital?"
"A health centre. And I haven't..." She sat, a little stiffly, on the end of the bed. "How do you know?"
"Ssenga told me. For an hour." Shamim grinned. "She also told me you have a very good heart and no sense, and that I am to teach you about men."
"I don't need to learn about men."
"Everybody needs to learn about men. It's the first subject." She rolled onto her back, and waved her green nails at the ceiling. "But I'll teach you slowly. First, you need to eat. Do you eat fish? I have a woman who sells it at the corner. And then I will show you the way to your school, because if you take the wrong road at the roundabout you will end up in a place called Kibuye, and that is not a good place for a girl in new shoes."
Nabirye laughed. She could not help it. Something that had been wound very tight inside her since five o'clock the previous morning, unwound a little, and she sat on the end of the bed in the red-floored room and felt the world stop moving.
"Thank you," she said.
"For what?"
"For being nice."
"I'm not nice. I'm lonely," said Shamim, cheerfully. "My last roommate stole my wigs. Don't steal my wigs."
St. Veronica's School of Nursing and Midwifery stood on a low hill in Nsambya, behind a high white wall with a green iron gate, and from the first morning Nabirye was in love with it.
It was not a grand place. It was a long low block of grey buildings, with a chapel at one end and a hospital annexe at the other, surrounded by lawns and frangipani trees. It smelled of floor polish and chlorine and, faintly, of boiled cabbage. A statue of Saint Veronica, a white plaster woman holding out a cloth, stood in the middle of the quadrangle, with her nose chipped and one hand raised. There were sisters in grey habits, gliding along the corridors with their hands tucked into their sleeves. There were girls in blue uniforms with white aprons, laughing, in groups, at the foot of the steps.
She was assigned to a lecture room with thirty-eight others. They sat in rows of wooden desks facing a blackboard, in a hot, quiet, serious room with a high ceiling and a single slow fan. A sister called Sister Benedicta, tall and thin and ageless, with a voice like a closing door, stood at the front with a pointer and said, "You are here to learn how to hold human beings. That is all. I will teach you the rest."
The first week, they learned to wash their hands.
It sounded absurd. Thirty-nine girls in a row, in a white-tiled room, at a long steel sink, soaping each finger, each thumb, each knuckle, the backs of the hands, the wrists. They did it for twenty seconds, counting under their breath, and then they did it again. "Between the fingers," said Sister Benedicta. "In the corners. Where the dirt hides. Most of the world's suffering lives on a pair of unwashed hands." She walked along the line, inspecting. "Again."
Nabirye washed. Her hands were red and sore. She did not mind. She was too happy. She stood at the sink in her stiff new apron, with the cold water running over her fingers and the white light coming through the high window, and thought, This is it. This is what it feels like. She was inside the shape. She had walked into the house she had seen from the top of the hill, and it was real, and it smelled of soap.
In the second week they began to go to the wards.
The women's medical ward at St. Veronica's Hospital was long and green, with thirty iron beds in two rows and a smell that she would never forget. It was a mixture of disinfectant, boiled linen, old urine, and something sweeter and more cloying, underneath. A smell of bodies. It hit her at the door like a damp hand.
She stood in her blue uniform, in a line of seven students, behind the ward sister, a short broad woman called Sister Agatha, and tried to keep her face still.
"Today," said Sister Agatha, "you observe. You do not touch. You do not speak to the patient unless she speaks to you. You do not make a face." She looked along the line with eyes like polished stone. "I will know."
They walked down the ward.
There were old women, curled on their sides like dried leaves. There was a girl with a bandaged leg, reading a magazine. There was a mother with a baby on her chest, asleep, both of them wrapped in the same cloth. Visitors sat on the beds, with baskets of food. A man in a skullcap was reading aloud from the Quran to a woman whose face was turned toward the wall.
In the third bed from the end lay a girl.
She could not have been much older than Nabirye. It was hard to tell. She was very thin. Her face had a sharpness that did not belong to youth, the cheekbones standing out, the eyes sunk deep in their sockets. Her hair had been cut close to the scalp, and what grew was thin and dry, like the fur of an old cat. Her lips were cracked. There were white patches on her tongue, visible when she breathed through her open mouth, and a rash of small dark spots along her arms. She lay on her back, with a sheet pulled up to her ribs, and she was looking at the ceiling, with an expression of such vast, patient, exhausted blankness that Nabirye felt the skin on her arms prickle.
"This is Mercy," said Sister Agatha, in a quiet, ordinary voice. "She is twenty-two. She has advanced HIV. She came three days ago with a fever and a cough and a very low blood count. We are treating her for TB. We have also started her on the antiretrovirals. She is going to be here some weeks."
The students were silent.
"She has a mother, who comes in the afternoons. She has a little boy. She is expected to get better." Sister Agatha did not lower her voice. She said it in front of the girl, as one talks across a sleeping patient who is not asleep. "Mercy, these are the new students. They are going to help."
The girl turned her head.
It was a slow movement, an effort. Her eyes went along the line of blue uniforms, one by one. They stopped on Nabirye. They were large and dark and perfectly clear, and in them, for an instant, there was something so naked and so ordinary that Nabirye felt it in her stomach. It was the look of a person asking, without hope or hurt, whether she would be allowed to be a person here.
Nabirye smiled. She did not decide to. It came by itself.
The girl's cracked lips moved. They made a small, dry, surprising shape. It was a smile, thin and faint, but a smile.
"Hello," said Mercy.
"Hello," said Nabirye.
"Don't be afraid," said the girl. Her voice was a husk. "I'm not catching."
"I know."
"They always look like that. The new ones." She breathed. "It's all right. You'll stop."
"I'm not afraid."
"You are. A bit." The faint smile deepened. "It's all right. I was."
Sister Agatha moved them on.
They walked to the next bed. Nabirye walked with the others, in the line, with her back straight. But she looked round once, at the end of the ward, and saw that the girl was watching her go, with those large, clear, tired eyes, and she lifted a hand.
"It isn't contagious like that," said Sister Agatha afterward, in the corridor, to the whole row. "I know you know. But I want you to hear it from me. You do not catch it by sitting. By touching. By washing a patient. By holding her hand." She stood with her arms folded in the light from the window, short and square and certain. "You catch it in one way. And that is why we do not wait to be afraid. We know."
She took them through it, slowly, in a flat clear voice. How the virus lived in the blood. How it lowered the body's defences, bit by bit, over years, until ordinary things, a cough, a rash, a bad cold, became dangerous. How the pills worked, three medicines in one, taken once a day, to keep it quiet. How a person who took them every single day, for the rest of her life, could be as healthy as anyone. How most of the patients on the ward, the ones who were dying, were the ones who had waited.
"They come late," said Sister Agatha. "They come when they cannot walk. They have been to the herbalist, to the prophet, to the pastor, to the cousin who sells medicine from a suitcase. They have been afraid. They have been told it is witchcraft, or a curse, or a judgement. By the time they reach me, they have four hundred thousand copies of the virus per drop of blood and no defences left." She paused. "I'll tell you something. In twenty-six years of nursing, I have never lost a patient who came early and took her pills."
Nabirye's mouth had gone dry.
Not one.
She thought of a tin box with a lion on the lid. She thought of a pencil, trailing off in a line.
"The sickness is not the killer," said Sister Agatha. "The silence is. Remember that. When you go home tonight, you will lie on your bed and think, poor Mercy. That is correct. But do not think it as a person looking down. Think it as a person who might, one day, stand in the same ward. Because you will. Some of you." She looked at them, one by one, with the polished-stone eyes. "Not because you are bad. Because you are human. You will be careless, or deceived, or in love, or tired. It happens to nurses. It happens to the very best."
"It won't happen to us," said a girl at the end of the line. She was a tall, elegant student called Veronica, from Entebbe, who wore a gold watch under her cuff and had told everyone, in the first hour, that her father was a magistrate. "We know too much."
"Yes," said Sister Agatha, drily. "That is what Mercy thought. She was a final-year student at Mulago."
There was a very long silence.
She turned, and walked away down the corridor, with her keys clinking.
That night, in the room in Katwe, Nabirye could not sleep.
She lay on the narrow bed under a thin blanket, with the curtain drawn between her and the pink mattress, and watched the shadow of the bulb swing slightly on the ceiling. The bar across the lane was playing its heavy bass. Rain pattered on the iron roof. Somewhere a baby was crying, and a woman's voice was shushing it, over and over, in the dark.
She thought about Mercy.
She thought about the white patches on her tongue and the spots on her arms, and the way she had said, You'll stop. She thought of her mother, saying, I'm not telling you to make you afraid. She thought of the green tin, the pencil, the long line. They will know. It was the same thing. It was always the same thing, in a different dress.
It won't be me.
It was a quick, hot, defensive thought, and she knew as she had it that it was the thought of Veronica with the gold watch. She turned it over, in the dark, with a feeling of faint disgust. She was cleverer than that. She was a girl who had heard the story, and understood it, and would never be fooled. She had a plan. She had a mother who loved her. She was going to be careful.
She put out a hand, and found the watch, where she had left it on the table beside the bed. It was still ticking. She held it to her ear.
I will be careful, she thought.
She said it three times, like a prayer. It did not occur to her that it was the same prayer the girl in the third bed had said, at twenty, in a different room, in a different year, on the same kind of night.
On the other side of the curtain, Shamim turned over on the pink mattress and mumbled, in her sleep, "Don't steal the wigs."
Nabirye smiled in the dark.
She turned on her side, and closed her eyes, and in the long wet sound of the rain, slowly, she slept.