Chapter 5
Small Hunger
It began with her mother's telephone.
It was a small grey Nokia with buttons, the kind with a torch on the top that could be lit by holding down a key, bought at the trading centre for twenty thousand shillings from a boy who had found it, he said, on a bus. It had a cracked screen and a battery that had to be charged in the shop at the crossroads for five hundred shillings an hour. Maama had never owned a phone. She held it as one holds a small, nervous animal. She called on Sundays, at six in the evening, when airtime was cheap, and she shouted.
"HELLO? NABIRYE? IS THAT YOU?"
"Yes, Maama."
"I CANNOT HEAR YOU."
"I can hear you perfectly."
"WHAT?"
"I SAID, I CAN HEAR YOU."
"Ah, there you are. Wait. Let me move to the road." There would be a rustle, and a pause, and the sound of her mother's sandals on gravel. Behind her, the frogs. "Can you hear me now? It is better by the mango tree. Are you eating?"
It was the happiest thing in her week. She would take the phone out to the lane behind the compound and stand under the one working streetlight with her free hand pressed to her other ear, and talk for the whole of the five minutes of airtime her mother could afford. About the lectures. About the ward. About Shamim, who was a clown, and the sisters, who were saints, and the fish at the corner, which was excellent. Her mother listened and said Good and Praise God and Is it clean? and at the end, always, in the same stern voice, "Have you been to church?"
"Yes, Maama."
"Which one?"
"The chapel at school."
"Good. And the clinic?"
"I'm not sick."
"You are not sick yet. Go and see them. Meet the people. It is useful to know where the door is."
In October she called on a Wednesday, which was unusual.
Nabirye was in the common room of the nursing school, a big tiled hall with a television and rows of plastic chairs, surrounded by thirty girls in blue uniforms, watching a soap opera. Her phone rang. She pulled it out, and the screen said MAAMA, in the capital letters she had typed herself, and she answered at once.
"Hello? Maama? Is something wrong?"
"NABIRYE! IT IS ME!"
The whole room turned.
It was not that her mother was loud. Everyone's mother was loud. It was that the voice came out of the little phone, in the quiet pause of an advertisement, in thick, rolling, rustic Luganda, with a clear village accent, and the girls near her stopped talking. A pretty girl in the second row, with her hair in fashionable twists, put her hand to her mouth. Somebody giggled.
"I CALLED BECAUSE THE COFFEE MAN HAS PAID!" shouted Maama, joyfully. "I HAVE THE MONEY! I AM SENDING YOU TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND BY THE PHONE! DO YOU KNOW HOW TO RECEIVE IT?"
"Maama..."
"IT IS ON THE MOBILE MONEY! THE BOY AT THE SHOP SAYS YOU PRESS THE STAR!"
"I know. I'll... I'll call you back."
"WHAT?"
"I'll call you back!" Her face was burning. She stood up. She turned her shoulder to the room, and walked quickly toward the door, and heard behind her a whisper like a ripple on water. She did not catch the words. She did not need to. She caught the tone.
In the corridor she leaned against the cold wall, with the phone against her ear and her eyes shut.
"Nabirye? Are you there? Why did you say that? Is there a problem?"
"No, Maama. I'm fine."
"You sound strange."
"It's a bad line."
"Ah." A pause. "Then I will be quick. Two hundred thousand. It should come this evening. For the practical kit. And something for yourself. Buy a good meal."
"Thank you."
"Eat meat."
"I will."
"Do not tell me you will and then buy cabbage."
"Maama, I have to go. I have class."
"God bless you, my child."
She turned the phone off. She slid down the wall until she was sitting on the floor of the corridor, with her knees drawn up. She felt a hot, sick, confused shame, and, under it, a colder shame at the first. She had not known she would feel it. She had been so sure.
It's only a phone call, she told herself. They are only girls.
She heard the laughter from the common room, small and distant and not even unkind. And in the loneliest part of her mind, very softly, she heard a voice, the voice of a woman in a taxi, saying, Ah, a village mother. Look at the feet.
It was not that anyone was cruel.
She would try, afterward, to be fair about that. She would sit alone in a small dark room and go back, with great care, over every day, looking for the villain. She wanted one. It would have been so much easier. But the girls at St. Veronica's were, for the most part, kind. They were polite, and clever, and most of them were tired. They shared their notes. They lent her a stethoscope when hers was late. When she cried over a failed practical, in the second month, a girl called Brenda put an arm round her and gave her a handful of sweets.
It was only that they were different. And the difference was made of small things. It was in how they sat, a certain ease in the shoulders. It was in their phones, flat bright rectangles, new each term. It was in their shoes, which did not need polish. It was in the way they ate lunch, not in the canteen, where a plate of posho and beans cost a thousand shillings, but at a cafe across the road, where a girl could order a juice and a samosa and a piece of cake and say, without looking at the bill, Put it on mine.
Veronica, with the gold watch, was the centre of it. She was a tall, graceful, lazy girl, with long legs and long nails and a laugh like a soft bell, and she moved through the school the way a swan moves through a pond, without effort, with a little wake of admirers behind. She had a driver. He waited outside the gate in a silver car with the engine running. She was not unkind. She was merely, serenely, entirely unaware that anyone else was counting.
"Where are you from?" she asked Nabirye, in the second week, in the corridor.
"A village. Near Masaka."
"Oh, lovely. Which one?"
"Kisaana-Nabbale."
"I haven't heard of it."
"It's small."
"It would be." Veronica smiled. It was a kind smile. "Do your parents farm?"
And where do you come from?
She opened her mouth to say, My mother is a farmer and a midwife. My father is dead. We sold a cow. She had said it a hundred times, in her head, on the taxi, in the dark. She had made it into a small hard stone of pride. She had meant to hold it up.
"My mother is a nurse," she said.
It came out smoothly. She heard it with a kind of distant surprise.
"Oh! Really? Where?"
"At a clinic. Near home."
"How wonderful." Veronica's face lit up. "That's why you're here. It runs in the family."
"Yes."
"I knew it. You have the look."
"Thank you."
"It's good to have a mother who understands. Mine hates it. She wanted me to be a lawyer." Veronica rolled her eyes, gracefully, and drifted away down the corridor in a drift of perfume. Nabirye stood still against the wall.
My mother is a nurse.
It was not a lie, exactly. Her mother had caught babies for twenty years. She had held a woman's hand through the longest night of her life. She had known more about the female body than half the lecturers. It was a smaller version of the truth, trimmed like a hem, to fit a different room.
It's only for convenience, she told herself.
But she had felt it go, in her chest, like a coin dropped down a well. It fell for a long time, and she did not hear it land.
By November the money was gone.
She had known it would be. She had made a budget, in the green exercise book that her mother had given her, with columns, and had followed it for three weeks with an almost religious devotion. Transport, two thousand a day. Food, three. A little for airtime. A little for soap. But the budget had been made in a world that did not include the practical kit, which cost two hundred thousand, or the second instalment of the fees, which was due in three weeks, or the shoes, which split, or the thermometer that she dropped on the ward, or the fact that she was always, always hungry.
She had not known what hunger was. She had thought, in the village, that she did. She had gone without lunch in secondary school. She had eaten cassava for three days when the beans ran out. But that had been a communal poverty. Everybody had shared it. Here, it was a private thing, a thing hidden under the uniform, like a stone in a shoe. She walked among girls who ordered cake. She smelled their lunches. She sat in the lecture hall with a stomach that spoke aloud in the silence, and a girl next to her would politely pretend to cough.
She began to skip meals. First lunch. Then, some days, supper.
"You're thin," said Shamim, one evening, looking at her over the curtain.
"I'm fine."
"You are not fine. You are a coat hanger." Shamim sat up on the pink mattress, with a plastic cap on her head and a face mask of green clay. "Listen. When did you last eat?"
"Yesterday."
"What?"
"A banana."
"Eh!" Shamim threw back the blanket. "Get up. We are going to the corner. I am buying you fish."
"I can't let you."
"You can and you will. I have two heads on Saturday. I am rich." She was already pulling on her sandals. "And do you know why I'm doing it? Because it is not a favour. I am a hairdresser. I do the heads of eleven women a week, and I have a theory. A woman who is hungry cannot be beautiful, and a woman who is not beautiful cannot be loved, and a woman who is not loved is a very expensive burden on the people around her. So. I am investing."
"That's a terrible theory."
"It's an excellent one. I will explain it over fish."
They ate, at the corner, at a plastic table under a tarpaulin, in the soft yellow light of a paraffin lamp. It was a whole fried tilapia with chips and a pile of cabbage and a bowl of pepper sauce, and Nabirye ate it with her fingers, slowly at first, then fast, with her head bent. She was ashamed of how much she wanted it. She could feel Shamim's eyes on her. When she looked up at last, her face was wet.
"It's good," she said, thickly.
"I know." Shamim handed her a napkin. "It's the best in Katwe. It's the only reason I live here."
"I'm sorry."
"For what?"
"For crying over a fish."
"Everybody does. It is a very emotional fish." Shamim leaned back. She was quiet for a moment, picking at a bone. "Nabirye. Can I say something?"
"Yes."
"I'm not your mother. I am not clever. I did not finish S4." She looked at the lamp. "But I've been in Kampala since I was sixteen. And I will tell you what I know."
"Tell me."
"It is not a fair city." She said it simply. "You will do everything right. You will study, and wash your hands, and go to church, and it will not be enough. Not because you are not good. Because there is more to it. A kind of... weather. It is made of money. You will feel it on your skin, like heat. And if you stand in it long enough, you start to think it is your fault that you are cold."
"I'm not cold."
"You are starving." Shamim smiled, sadly. "Listen. There are two ways to deal with the weather. You can build a roof. That takes years. Or you can find someone who has one already, and stand under the edge."
"That's what you do?"
"It is what everyone does." She shrugged. "I am not saying it is right. I'm only saying it's the shape of things. I did my first head at fourteen. I learned fast. And I learned that in this city, a woman with a skill is a woman with a roof." She tapped her chest. "And a woman with a face is a woman with a door."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that you are pretty." She said it kindly, with no malice, as one tells a friend about a mole. "You don't see it. You don't know. You think, I am a clever village girl with a stethoscope. But I see the way the boys look. In the lane. At the stage. And the men. Oh, the men. Do you know how many have asked me about you?"
"Shamim."
"I only say it so you know. It is a currency. You do not have to spend it. But it is yours." She shrugged again. "I am not telling you to. I am telling you it exists."
Nabirye put down her fish.
She thought of Ssenga, in the taxi, wagging her finger. A girl who is ashamed will do almost anything to stop it. She thought of a roof, and a door. She thought of a hundred thousand shillings she did not have.
"I'm not going to do that," she said.
"Of course not."
"I mean it."
"I know." Shamim reached over and patted her hand. "You are a good girl. I would not let you. I'd bite you first." She grinned, a quick flash of white. "But if you ever want a nice dinner, and nothing else, and a little company, I know people. That's all. A dinner is only a dinner."
"Is it?"
"It is until it isn't." She took a chip. "Eat."
The invitation came on a Friday, in the last week of November.
"It is my cousin's wedding," said Shamim. She stood in the doorway of the room with a dress over her arm, a deep green satin with a low back, and an expression of exaggerated innocence. "On Saturday. At Munyonyo. It is a big one. The groom is in oil, or fuel, or something that flows. Four hundred guests. A band. A buffet with rice."
"No."
"I haven't asked yet."
"No, thank you."
"Nabirye." Shamim came across the room. "You have been in a ward for fourteen hours a day. You have a test on Monday. You are skinny and sad. I am only asking you to come and eat. In a nice room. For three hours. And then go home."
"I haven't got a dress."
"I have a dress."
"It will not fit."
"It will fit with a safety pin." She held it up. It shimmered in the light of the bulb like water. "And I will do your hair. And a little gloss. Nothing more. I swear. I do not want to turn you into a person. I want to turn you into someone who has had a good meal."
"I have an exam."
"You will study on Sunday. You will be better for it." Shamim sat down on the end of the bed, and her voice softened. "It is only a wedding. It is one night. When did you last do anything that was not a book?"
Nabirye looked at the dress.
It was a beautiful thing. It was the colour of the inside of a banana leaf. She had never in her life worn anything made of satin. She thought of the ward, and the small grey cold of the common room, and the wet rustic voice of her mother on a phone. She thought of a girl in a driver's car, laughing like a bell.
One night, she thought. It is only a dinner.
It was the first time she had told herself that. She would tell herself again, many times, in the next two years, in different rooms and with different men. It is a very easy sentence to say. It has a lovely lilt. It sounds like a door being left, only slightly, ajar.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"Okay. But I'm leaving at ten."
"You can leave at nine." Shamim bounced up, clapping, with the dress held against her chest. "I'm so happy. I'm going to do your eyes. You have the most beautiful eyes and you hide them under a uniform."
"I'm only going for the rice."
"Of course," said Shamim, with a perfectly straight face. "That is why everyone goes."
She went out, humming, with the dress over her arm, and Nabirye sat on the bed in the shadows with the bulb swinging gently overhead and listened to her go.
On the table beside her, in the dim yellow light, her father's watch lay face up and ticking. She did not look at it. It said twenty to ten. It was exactly the time, though she did not know it, that a small silver car was leaving a showroom on Ggaba Road, with a man in the driving seat who had just received an invitation to a wedding.