Prologue
The Last Rain
The rain came in the night, the way it had come on the night her father died.
Nabirye heard it before she opened her eyes. It began far off, on the hills, a soft hush like many people whispering at once, and then it drew nearer, and rolled over the roof of the ward, and she knew it for what it was. It was the first big rain of the season. It fell on the tin sheets with a sound like a thousand small drums, and under it she could hear the long sigh of the whole city drinking.
She lay still and listened.
It was dark in the ward, with only a yellow bulb burning at the far end, over the nurses' desk. A drip stand stood beside her bed with a bag of clear fluid hanging from it, swaying a little in the draught, and the thin tube ran down to the back of her hand, taped with a strip of white plaster that had gone grey at the edges. The sheet smelled of soap and bleach. Somewhere along the row a man was coughing, a slow, tired cough, and a woman was praying under her breath in a voice that had no hope in it and no anger either, only habit.
Her head hurt. It had hurt for weeks. It was not an ordinary headache. It was a pressure, as if someone had put a wet cloth over her skull and was slowly tightening it. Sometimes, when it was bad, the room tilted and the walls went away, and she did not know where she was, or what year, or who the people were who came and went in white coats and spoke over her head in careful voices. Tonight it was not bad. Tonight, for the first time in days, everything was clear and still.
She turned her head on the pillow.
On the floor beside the bed, on a straw mat that had been unrolled between the iron legs, a woman lay asleep.
She was curled on her side with her knees drawn up and her head on a rolled-up cloth. She wore a faded gomesi with a torn sash and a headscarf that had slipped to one side. Her feet were bare, and in the yellow light Nabirye could see them plainly, the hard cracked soles, the broken toenails, the deep dry lines like the bed of a stream in the dry season. They were the feet of a woman who had walked a great many miles on red earth. A sack of matooke stood against the wall by her head, tied with banana fibre, with a few leaves poking from the top.
Maama.
She did not say it aloud. She was afraid it would wake her. She only looked, with her whole heart in her eyes, as one looks at a lamp in a window after a long journey in the dark.
How long had she slept there? Four nights? Five? The nurses had said it was not allowed, and Maama had said, in her slow, firm Luganda, that she had come from Lwengo on three taxis and a boda boda and she was not going to sleep in a corridor like a stray dog while her child was lying in a bed. They had looked at her, a small broad woman in a torn gomesi with her chin up, and had gone away and come back with the mat.
Nabirye closed her eyes.
Two years ago, she would have been ashamed. That was the thing she could hardly bear. She would have lain in this bed and prayed that nobody she knew would walk in. She would have told the other patients that this woman was a cleaner, or a neighbour, or a relative of someone down the ward. She had done it before. She had done worse.
She had stood in a doorway in Kampala once, in a good dress, with a gold chain at her throat, and watched this same woman come up the street with a sack on her head, and had turned and walked the other way.
The rain fell harder. Water ran off the edge of the roof outside the window in a long bright rope. She could smell the red earth, even here, even in the middle of a city, the warm sweet smell of dust receiving water, which was the first smell she had ever known.
It was nearly gone, she thought. The strength that had come to her tonight. She could feel it, like the last of the light going off a hill. She did not know how long it would last, an hour, a day, but she knew it was a gift, and that she must use it.
I have to tell her.
She did not know where to begin. She had so much to say, and none of it was in order. She wanted to say she was sorry. She wanted to say that the dream had not gone, that she had not forgotten, not really, that it had only been buried, like a seed in a hard dry season. She wanted to say that she remembered the day she left, every minute of it, the taxi, the groundnuts in a cloth, the exact colour of the sky.
She wanted, more than anything, to say thank you.
Maama stirred.
She did not wake. She only turned in her sleep, with a small grunt, and put out one hand across the mat until her fingers touched the leg of the bed. They rested there, curled round the cold iron, as if even in sleep she were holding on to something.
Nabirye lay and watched that hand for a long time.
Outside, the rain went on. It would go on all night. It would fill the ditches and wash the red dust down the hill, and in the morning the whole city would shine. She would not see it. She knew that. Somewhere under the pain and the clarity, she had known it for days.
But there was a little time left. And so, in the dark, in the sound of the rain, with her mother's fingers on the bed and the drip counting its slow seconds beside her, she did what she had not done in three years.
She went back to the beginning.