Chapter 8
New Clothes
The house in Munyonyo had a gate that opened by itself, and the first night she stood in front of it for a full minute, afraid to walk through.
It was a tall cream wall, with a pair of black iron gates, and a camera on a pole. A small light blinked red above the intercom. She had come in Sam's car, with her suitcase on the back seat and her stethoscope round her neck, and he had pressed a button on the dashboard and the gates had swung apart with a soft mechanical sigh, and she had thought, There is no one inside. It does it on its own. Beyond them a curved drive of grey paving stones wound between two lawns, so green that they seemed to glow in the headlights, to a long, low, modern house with a great deal of glass.
"Well?" said Sam.
"It's very big."
"It's only a house."
"It has lawns."
"It has a gardener to go with them. His name is Wasswa. You will like him. He is very deaf." He stopped the car at the foot of a flight of broad steps, and turned to her, with his hand on the wheel, and she saw that he was nervous. His face, in the light from the porch, was young and anxious. "I want you to know that you can leave. Whenever you wish. I do not want you to feel it's a... that it's a trap."
"I don't."
"Because it is not."
"I know." She touched his hand. "Show me."
He showed her. There was a hall of white marble, with a staircase and a vase of lilies. There was a sitting room the size of the whole of her mother's compound, with a long grey sofa and a flat television as large as a door. There was a kitchen with a gleaming steel fridge, which he opened with a flourish, to show her the shelves, crammed with food, yoghurt and fruit and meat and cheese and little bottles of juice, a quantity that she could not at first process. "Eat anything," said Sam. "Anything. It's all for you. I don't cook."
"Who does?"
"Mama Ritah. She comes at eight. She makes a stew you would die for." He opened a door. "And this is the room."
It was at the end of a long corridor, with a window onto the garden. A large bed, with a white cover. A wardrobe with sliding doors. A small desk, by the window, with a green-shaded lamp, and on it a stack of new exercise books, a box of pens, and a glass jar of sharpened pencils. A bookshelf, empty. A framed picture of a hospital on the wall. He had gone to some trouble. She saw it in the details, the little tissue box, the glass of water on the bedside table, the reading glasses she did not need, which he had bought, he said, in case she did.
She walked to the desk, and ran a finger along the lamp.
"For studying," said Sam, behind her. "In quiet."
She did not turn. She could not trust her face.
A desk. She had been writing, for four months, on her knees, on a bed, in a room with a pink curtain, by the light of a bulb that flickered in thunder. She had thought a desk was a thing for other people. A desk was a thing you had if your parents had one. She stood with her hand on the cool glossy wood, and her eyes full, and she said, "Thank you," and she meant it more than she had ever meant anything.
"You're welcome," said Sam. He came up behind her, and put his arms round her, and laid his chin on her hair. "I promised."
It was the nicest month of her life.
She would think that, later, with a kind of dumb astonishment. A month. She had been inside it, and it had been real. She woke at six, in the huge white bed, with the sun on her face, and lay for a time listening to the sprinkler on the lawn. She went to the kitchen and found Mama Ritah, a broad smiling woman in a headscarf, frying eggs, and a pot of tea, and a plate of fresh mandazi. She ate. She ate as she had not eaten since the day of the results, slowly, with a full stomach, and at the end she sat with her cup in both hands and looked at the garden, and felt a quiet that she had forgotten.
Sam drove her to school at seven. He dropped her at the gate, in the silver car, and she walked across the lawn to the lecture room with her head up. People looked. She saw them. Veronica, on the steps, with her gold watch, lifted her eyes and watched the silver car pull away, and turned to the girl beside her, and said something, and the girl laughed.
She did not mind. She found, with a flicker of astonishment, that she did not mind in the least.
Let them look.
In the evenings she studied. She sat at the desk, under the green lamp, with the window open and the crickets singing in the garden, and she went through her notes in a clear, steady, quiet mind. She did the work of three weeks in four days. She knew the anatomy of the pelvis as well as she knew her own name. She was, for the first time since she had arrived in Kampala, not tired. It was extraordinary. She understood, then, what people meant when they said that money was freedom. It was not the clothes, or the car. It was the quiet. It was the absence of the thing that ate at the back of the mind. It was having room to think.
"You see?" said Sam, one night, standing in the doorway with his tie loose. "This is what you were made for."
"It's what I want."
"It's what you deserve."
She smiled. She turned the page. In the corner of the desk lay a small plastic bag from a pharmacy, which she had been meaning to open, with a single test inside. It was a different test. She had bought it herself, at a chemist in Kabalagala, on the Monday, when the second week had passed and she had thought, Quickly, before it's late. It sat, still sealed.
I will do it on Saturday.
She did not do it on Saturday.
The change began, as these things do, in small steps that did not feel like steps.
In May, Sam gave her a dress. It was not an extravagant dress. It was plain, in cream silk, with narrow straps, and it fitted her as if it had been cut on her body. "I saw it in a window," he said. "I thought, it is exactly her colour." She wore it to dinner, at a restaurant in Kololo with white cloths and a pianist. The waiter pulled out her chair. The menu had no prices. She ordered a thing she could not pronounce, which turned out to be duck, and ate it slowly, and was astonished by how much she liked it.
In June, there was a hairdresser. Shamim came to the house, at his request, with a bag of tools and a whole suitcase of extensions, and stood in the bathroom with her hands on her hips, looking round at the marble and the gold taps. "Eh," she said, softly. "Eh. Oh, my friend." She made no other comment. She did Nabirye's hair for four hours, in a long fall of dark braids to her waist, with a thread of gold woven through, and when she had finished and Nabirye looked in the mirror, she did not speak. Her eyes met Shamim's, in the glass.
"You look like a queen," said Shamim.
"I look like someone else."
"You look like someone who has money." She put down the comb. "I'm not saying it is bad. I'm only saying that you will have to learn to carry it."
"I don't understand."
"No." Shamim smiled, a little sadly. "That is the thing about the weather. You don't, until you leave it."
In July, there was a bag. In August, a pair of shoes, in soft red leather, with a heel, that she walked in as if on stilts. In September, a small gold chain, fine as a hair, with a single pearl. Each was small. Each was said to be nothing. Each arrived in a tissue-lined box with a card that said, I saw this and thought of you. And each, taken out of the box and put on, did a very odd, very subtle thing to her. It changed how she stood. It changed how she spoke. It changed the pace at which she walked down a corridor, and the way she looked at the girl at the cash desk, and what she did with her hands.
She did not feel false. That was the strangest part. She felt, if anything, as if she were coming into her true shape. She had been wearing a rough, ill-fitting thing, a village girl's sandals and a secondhand skirt, and it had been taken off, and underneath was a woman who had always been there. She caught sight of her in mirrors and shop windows, tall and graceful and slightly unfamiliar, with long braids and a pearl at her throat. She thought: There she is.
She did not notice that she had stopped saying Maama in the middle of her sentences.
The first thing to go was the ward.
It happened gradually. It happened, as everything did, with a reasonable explanation. In June, Sam took her to a wedding in Entebbe, and they got back at three in the morning, and she slept through her alarm and missed the six o'clock handover. Sister Agatha wrote her name in a book. In July, there was a dinner for a minister, at which Sam was expected, and she was expected beside him, and she missed two practicals. In August she had a cold, a real one, and he said, Stay in bed, and she stayed three days. The ward report, when it came, was polite and brief. Student Kibirige has been irregular in attendance. She is advised to give the course her full attention.
"It's nothing," said Sam, reading it over her shoulder. "A formality."
"It's a warning."
"They give them to everyone."
"They don't give them to me."
"Then they're giving it to you now." He folded the paper, and put it on the desk, and kissed the top of her head. "Nabirye, listen. You are working too hard. You are going to burn out. These nuns, they want you at the ward at dawn and the library at midnight. It is not healthy. You're a person, not a machine."
"I want to be a nurse."
"And you will be. I promise." He crouched in front of her, and took both her hands. "I will find you a school. A better one. In Nairobi, if you like. Or a private course in the evenings. Something that suits your life. You don't have to do it their way. You don't have to be punished."
"It's not punishment."
"It feels like it."
It did. That was the thing. It felt, at four in the afternoon, on a cold ward, with a bedpan and a stethoscope, in a plastic apron, exactly like a punishment, as it had never felt before. She had loved it. She had loved it more than anything. But she had also, in the white quiet of the house in Munyonyo, with the sprinkler on the lawn and the lilies in the hall, begun to see it from the other side. It was a harsh, grey, tiring place. It was full of other people's pain. It smelled of urine and boiled linen. It paid, at the end of three years, a salary of four hundred thousand shillings a month.
Four hundred thousand. She did the sum, lying in the big bed, with the sun in her eyes. It was what Sam spent on a dinner.
She did not say it aloud. But she felt it, like a small cold stone, settle beside the dream.
Why would I wear myself out?
She had a better question, and it was the real one, and it came to her in the first week of September, in a shop in Garden City, in front of a mirror, with a red dress held against her chest. It came without warning. It was plain and calm. It was only this:
What if I don't have to go back?
She looked at herself. A woman in the glass, long-necked and elegant, with a pearl, and a dress the colour of a ripe cherry. A woman who did not look like a nurse. She turned her head. A salesgirl, in the corner, was watching her with a look of respectful envy.
What if I could be this?
She bought the dress. She did not even look at the price.
It was Ibra who saw her.
She was in the car, in the early afternoon of a Thursday in October, with the window down. She was in the passenger seat of the silver car, in the red dress, with her braids loose over her shoulder and a pair of sunglasses on her nose. Sam had stopped at a petrol station on Entebbe Road to buy a newspaper. She was looking at her phone. She was scrolling through photographs of a house on the lake. It was a very large house, white, with a green roof. A small caption said, Dream.
"Nabirye?"
She did not hear the first time. The second, a little louder, with a questioning, broken note, made her look up.
He was standing at the edge of the forecourt, in a clean white coat, with a plastic bag and a small battered rucksack. He was very thin. He had grown a faint moustache. His glasses were crooked. He wore a hospital badge on his lapel, MULAGO NATIONAL REFERRAL HOSPITAL — LABORATORY TECHNICIAN (ATTACHED), and his face, as he looked at her, was so open and so glad that, for one short moment, she could not move.
"Ibra."
"It is you!" He came over to the car. He bent to the window, and she saw the whole of his face, the shining eyes, the shy delighted grin. "I thought it was. I said, It can't be. You look so..."
"I know."
"You look... wonderful." He stopped. His eyes had gone over her, from the sunglasses to the dress to the gold at her throat, and something in them flickered. "I did not know you were in this part of town."
"I live in Munyonyo."
"Oh."
"I'm staying with a friend."
"A friend." He looked at the silver car. "That is a very nice car."
"It's not mine."
"No." He smiled, uncertainly. "No, of course. I only meant..." He pushed his glasses up his nose. "I wanted to say. I'm at Mulago now. For six months. For the attachment. I'm in the lab. I do the bloods, and the CD4s. I thought, if you were passing. I wrote to you. On the number."
"I got no message."
"I sent three."
"My phone changed."
"Ah."
There was a pause. A lorry went by, with a blare of horns. In the shop, through the glass, she could see Sam at the counter, with his back to her, laughing at something the cashier had said.
"How is your mother?" said Ibra.
"Fine."
"And Kizito?"
"He's well."
"I saw her in July. At the market, in Masaka. She was selling beans. She looked tired." He did not say it as a reproach. "She asked about you. She said you hadn't been home since Easter. I told her you were busy. That it was a hard course."
"It is."
"Yes."
"I'll go soon."
"She'd like that." He shifted his bag. There was something unspoken in his face, something hesitant and troubled. "Nabirye. May I say something?"
"I'm in a hurry."
"It will take a moment." He lowered his voice. "I wanted to say, if you ever need anything. I'm at the hospital. I know where things are. If there's anything you want to ask. About... any test. Or any clinic. I could take you. Quietly. Nobody would know."
She stared at him.
She did not know why it hurt so much. It was kind. It was entirely kind. It was a boy from her village, in a white coat, with a wet-eyed anxious face, offering her the thing she had been intending to do for six months. But it fell on her like a slap. It was so accurate. It was the very thing she had been hiding from, in the green book, in the pharmacy bag, on a desk, under a lamp. And he had said it, out loud, in a petrol station, in the sun.
"What are you suggesting?"
"Nothing. I..."
"You think I'm sick?"
"No! I only..."
"I'm a nursing student. I know where the clinic is." Her voice rose, high and bright and cold. She heard it, from a distance, as one hears a stranger. "I don't need a lab technician to show me. I don't need anyone to take me. I'm a grown woman. I can take care of myself."
"I didn't mean..."
"Just because I'm not in the village does not mean I'm doing something wrong."
"I never said..."
"I know what you think. You and all of them. You think I've changed." She took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were hot and furious, and, she realised, wet. "Well, I have. I'm not the girl in sandals. I'm sorry if it makes you uncomfortable."
He stood very still.
For a moment he looked at her with the whole of his face, naked and unprotected. He did not look angry. He did not look surprised. He looked like a man who has been handed a thing he has been carrying for years and told it is worthless, and who is deciding, with great care, not to say so.
"I'm sorry," said Ibra.
"Good."
"I did not mean to insult you."
"You didn't."
"Then I'll go." He stepped back from the car. His hands were shaking, slightly. He tucked them into the pockets of his white coat. "I only wanted to say. You were the best of us. You still are. I don't want you to forget that."
"I haven't."
"Good." He smiled. It was a small, crooked, terrible smile, a smile of such unfeigned and unresentful love that she looked away. "Tell your mother I said hello."
"I will."
"And Nabirye."
"What?"
"The number's the same."
He walked away across the forecourt, a thin boy in a white coat, with a rucksack on one shoulder, and she watched him go. He did not look back. At the road he stopped, and waited for a gap, and crossed, and was swallowed by a crowd of boda bodas.
She sat with her sunglasses in her lap.
The door opened. Sam got in, with a newspaper under his arm and a bottle of water in each hand. "Sorry. Terrible queue. Who was that?"
"No one."
"He looked at you as if you were a ghost."
"It's a boy from the village." She put the sunglasses back on. Her voice was perfectly level. "He thinks he's my brother."
"Ah." Sam laughed, and started the engine. "Well. Villages are like that." He pulled out onto the road. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
"You're crying."
"It's the sun."
He reached across, and put his hand over hers, warm and large and sure, and she let him. They drove on, between the rows of shops and the long red walls and the flame trees, in the October light, toward the house with the lawns. She sat very straight, with her eyes behind the dark glass, and her free hand pressed flat against her thigh.
She did not think of the white coat. She did not think of the three messages. She did not think of the small sealed bag in the corner of the desk, or a blue door in Kisenyi, or a girl on a bed with white patches on her tongue.
She thought, very clearly, over and over, as the car sped through the afternoon: I do not need him.
I do not need anyone.
It is a sentence that feels like strength. It has the ring of a bell. It was only a very long time later, in a small cold room, on a day with no rain, that she would hear what was inside it, and understand that it had been, all along, the sound of a door being locked from the inside.