Chapter 1
The Boy Who Stopped Believing
The phone lit up at 6:12 on a Saturday morning with a photograph of a plate of chapati.
I lay there with one arm over my face and let it glow against the ceiling. It was one of those memory notifications that the phone decides to offer you without asking, like a waiter presenting a dish you sent back years ago. Two years ago today, it said. Below it, the photo: two chapatis on a chipped white plate, torn in halves, a rolex half unrolled, a thumb in the corner of the frame that was not mine. A slice of the table. A slice of a wrist with a green plastic bangle.
I knew the bangle. I knew the plate. I knew, without any effort at all, that it was the stall behind the Main Library, that it was a Tuesday, that it had rained an hour earlier so the ground smelled of wet dust and frying onions, and that she had taken the bigger half of the chapati and told me I was too skinny to argue.
I swiped the notification away with my thumb. Then I lay very still and waited for my body to catch up with the fact that I had done it.
It is a strange thing, the discipline of not feeling something. Nobody warns you that it takes work, that it has muscles, that you can strain them. I had gotten quite good. By that spring I could see a green bangle on a stranger's wrist at a bus stop and feel nothing more than a small, professional flinch, the kind a boxer makes when he is hit in a place he had already braced for.
The woman beside me was not the woman in the photograph. She was asleep on her stomach with her braids gathered over one shoulder and the sheet somewhere below her waist, and I looked at the back of her neck, and I tried to remember her name.
It began with a T. I was fairly sure of the T.
I eased out of the bed, found my trousers on the chair, and went to stand in the kitchen with a glass of water, looking out of the window at the wall of the compound next door where somebody's bougainvillea was doing what it always did in that season, which was to bleed magenta over the top of the bricks like an argument it refused to finish.
Ntinda, Saturday, a little after six. A cockerel somewhere, out of tune. The first boda of the day coughing awake at the bottom of the lane. Down the road the women who sold vegetables would be setting up their basins and their scales, and in a couple of hours the Mukwano Road traffic would begin its long, ugly Saturday shuffle, but for now the city held its breath in that strange grey cool before the heat arrived.
I liked that hour. I want to say that plainly, because there are things about that period of my life I would like to blame on someone else, and this is not one of them. I loved being awake when nothing was demanded of me. I had always loved it. Long before the year I am going to tell you about, I used to wake up before Naomi and lie there listening to her breathe, planning what I would make for breakfast, which was always the same thing, which was always wrong.
I finished the water and put the glass in the sink.
Tessa. It was Tessa. She had told me at Guvnor at about one in the morning, over the music, leaning in so I could feel her lips near my ear, and I had said it back to her twice so it would sink in, and it had sunk in for roughly as long as it took to walk to the car.
That is the kind of man I was by then. I would like to say it sounded worse from the inside.
At half past eight I was in Timo's garage in Kansanga with a sausage roll I had not paid for and a mug of black tea that had been made, as far as I could tell, by boiling a tea bag in engine oil.
"You look like a man who has been in a fight with a cupboard," said Timo.
"I slept well."
"You slept somewhere."
Timothy Wasswa was thirty years old, six-foot-two, and built along the general lines of a refrigerator. He owned Wasswa Motors, which was a garage, a car wash, a small tyre shop, and a space in the yard where a fundi named Kato slept in the afternoons under a Corolla that no one had ever seen move. Timo had known me since the first week of Senior One at Kiira College, when I had cried at a dormitory bed in the dark and he had been the only boy in the room decent enough to pretend not to hear it. We had never mentioned it since. It was the foundation of the entire friendship.
He wiped his hands on a rag and leaned against the bonnet of a silver Premio. Around us, the garage did its usual Saturday orchestra: a radio playing Luganda gospel at a volume no God would need, an impact wrench shrieking, two boys arguing over a bucket.
"Sarah says you didn't reply to the invitation," he said.
"What invitation?"
"The naming ceremony. Next Saturday. Baby Josephine. Sarah made you a card."
"Sarah made me a card?"
"Sarah made everyone a card. She's postpartum. She has a glue gun and no boundaries." He looked at me with the flat patience of a husband who had learned to deliver messages like a man defusing something. "You're coming."
"Of course I'm coming."
"You'll bring someone?"
"Why would I bring someone?"
"Because a naming ceremony is a family event, and Sarah's cousins are going to be there, and you've got the look of a man who has been hoarding his last few unattached weeks and would like to spend them spread out over as many different people as possible."
I ate the sausage roll. It was cold in the middle.
"That is a very specific look."
"I've known you since you were eleven, Ethan."
"Then you know I look like this regardless."
"No," said Timo. "I know you used to look different."
He said it lightly. I have thought about that since. He said it lightly and turned away to shout something at the boys, so that I would not have to answer, and I understood even then that it was a gift and a warning packed into the same small gesture. Timo was like that. He could hit you with the truth and hold the door for you at the same time.
I left the garage at nine-thirty. Before I did, Timo tucked a paper bag into my hand, and inside it was a second sausage roll, still warm, and a folded printout of an invitation, in Sarah's terrible handwriting: ETHAN. YOU ARE COMING. BRING A HAPPY FACE. NOT A SAD ONE. — S.
I folded it into my pocket. I did not think about the last line for the rest of the day, which was, I now see, a very deliberate way of thinking about it.
I want to tell you who I was before, because otherwise none of this makes sense.
I was a boy who kept things.
I kept ticket stubs. I kept the paper wrapper off the first samosa Naomi ever bought me. I kept the bus receipt from the day we went to Jinja for her twenty-second birthday and got rained out and spent four hours eating chips under a tarpaulin while she made up stories about the couple at the next table. I kept a dead hibiscus, pressed between two pages of my structures textbook, and I would find it years later and feel briefly, absurdly, alive.
I drew houses. This is the thing about architects that nobody tells you: we cannot help it. We stand in other people's living rooms and mentally move the walls. I drew houses on the backs of lecture handouts and on napkins and, once, on Naomi's forearm with a marker pen, a small two-bedroom bungalow with a wide veranda and a window on the east side, and she had walked around all day with it on her skin and refused to wash it off.
"That's our house," she had said, when her roommate asked.
"That's not a real house," I told her, embarrassed.
"It will be."
That was the person I was. A boy who believed you could draw a thing on a woman's arm and it would become true. I believed in the one, unironically, in the way you believe in a thing you have never had to question. I believed love was something you did with your whole body, in public, without hedging, and that the worst thing you could do was hold anything back. I wrote her letters. Bad ones. I wrote her a poem in broken Luganda that made her laugh so hard she got hiccups. I told her I loved her the first time on a Kampala Road pavement outside a shop that sold plastic basins, with the traffic in full throat, because I could not wait for a better location.
I was, in short, a fool, and happy, and I did not know that those two conditions can be the same thing.
The man who woke up in Ntinda that Saturday morning, with a woman whose name began with T, did not keep things. That was the first rule, though I did not have rules then, as such. I had tendencies, and I told myself they were merely the natural shape of a man who had come to understand something the rest of the world was too sentimental to admit. But if you had asked me to write the rules down, this is what I would have said, and I would have said it with a small, sharp smile:
Don't stay the night. Don't keep the number. Don't say the word.
Three rules. They are so short. That is what made them beautiful to me. A man who could hold to three rules could not be hurt. It was a matter of engineering.
The office on Saturday was quiet, just Mr. Lwanga's old Toyota in the yard and the security guard, Mzee Kizza, asleep upright in his chair with his cap over his eyes like a man being shot in a film.
Lwanga Associates occupied the second floor of a low block in Bugolobi, above a shop that sold wedding dresses and a pharmacy that sold everything else. Six of us worked there. I was the junior architect, which meant I drew what other people had imagined, and on good days was permitted to correct a stair.
I had come in because I was behind on the Naguru drawings, which was the story I told, and because I did not want to be in my flat when Tessa woke up, which was the truth. Before I left, I had put a note on the kitchen table: Had to go to work. There is bread. Door locks by itself. — E. I had made the note friendly. I had drawn nothing on it. I did not leave a number. The point of that note was that a woman could read it and understand everything and nothing. It was a real craft.
I sat at my desk, under the poster of the Aga Khan Award winners that I had pinned up in my first week and never taken down, and I worked. That was the other thing. I worked well, that year. Wounded men often do. There is a certain clean, narrow energy that comes from shutting the rest of the house and living in one room.
Mr. Lwanga, who was sixty-one and moved through the office in a permanent cloud of cologne and disapproval, had called me in the week before and told me the firm was pleased. "You have a hand," he said. "You always had a hand. But before, you had something else." He tapped his own chest with two fingers. "Now it's very precise. Very clean. Good drawings. But it's a bit like a well-kept cemetery."
"I'll take that as a compliment, sir."
"Take it as data," said Mr. Lwanga.
I was working on the section of a staircase when my sister called.
"Where are you?" said Eva.
"Work."
"On Saturday? That's very sad. Are you at work or are you hiding?"
"Both."
"Mum says you didn't come home last weekend."
"I had a deadline."
"Mum says you always have a deadline." I could hear her chewing something, and behind her the muffled chaos of a Kyambogo hostel corridor, a bass line thumping through a wall, somebody shouting my charger! in the tone of a person wronged by the universe. Eva was twenty-two and in her final year of Social Work and had, since our father died, adopted the posture of a small sharp bird guarding a large sleeping animal. The animal was me. I had not asked to be guarded.
"How is she?" I said.
"She's fine. She's Mum. She asked if you were eating. I said you were eating a lot of women, but I said it in my head."
"Eva."
"I'm joking. Don't be so sensitive. Anyway." A pause. A different, quieter voice. "Ethan. There's a church thing next month. The anniversary Mass for Dad. She wants you there, and she doesn't want to be the one to ask, so I'm asking, which is her plan, which is why I'm annoyed."
I looked at the staircase on my screen. Thirteen risers, one landing. A person could climb it easily and never think about it.
"I'll be there," I said.
"Promise?"
"I said I'll be there."
"That's not the same as a promise, but I'll write it down." She was quiet. "She asked about Naomi again, you know."
I did not say anything.
"I told her you two were done. She said, the girl from Gulu, like she'd forgotten. But she didn't forget. She keeps asking. She had a whole plan with the wedding. She'd already picked a hat."
"I have to go, Eva."
"Ethan—"
"I have to go."
I ended the call. I sat with the phone in my hand and watched the screen dim, then dark, my own reflection appearing in it, a young man with a tidy jaw and a worried mouth who looked, to my eye, like someone I would not have trusted with a secret.
The truth is that my mother had picked a hat.
She had shown it to me, once, on a Sunday, in a shop window on Mukono Road, and said nothing, and I had felt something warm and enormous open in my chest and I had thought: yes. That is what a life is for. That was three years before. I had not told her that the wedding would never happen. Eva told her. I had let my sister carry that news to my mother because I could not have said it in my own mouth without something breaking that I was fairly sure would not be repaired.
I put the phone face-down and went back to the stairs.
Here is what you should know about the first six months after Naomi.
I did not cry. I would like to tell you I did; it would make me a better man in this story. But I did not. There was, instead, a long grey stretch in which I got up and went to work and came home and cooked eggs and ate them standing at the sink, and every object in my flat seemed to have been moved two centimetres to the left of where it belonged. I had the persistent sensation of having misplaced something. I would put my hand in my pocket to check that I had my keys, and I would have them, and the feeling would not go away.
I stopped answering my mother's calls for three weeks. I lost about eight kilos. Timo drove over one night with a jerrycan of local waragi and a pot of katogo his wife had made and sat with me on my kitchen floor and did not ask me anything. At about two in the morning, he said: "You know I'll fight her." I laughed. It was the first time I had laughed in days. He said, "I'm serious. I'll go to Leeds. I'll queue up in the rain. I'll be very British about it," and I laughed until I was crying, or almost crying, and then pulled it back.
Almost crying is a very particular skill. I had it down to about ninety-five percent.
At the end of that period I started going out.
I do not remember deciding to. That is what I would tell you if you asked, and it is the kind of answer that sounds like innocence and is, in fact, its opposite. There was a Friday when a colleague named Denis dragged me to a rooftop in Kololo for somebody's birthday, and I stood at the edge with a drink I did not want, and a woman in a yellow dress said something to me about the view. I said something back. She laughed. And I felt, for the first time in almost half a year, a clean, hot flush of being seen, a warmth that started at the base of my neck and went all the way down, and I understood, standing on that rooftop, that this was a thing I could do.
It was not the woman. It is important that you understand that. I don't remember her face. It was the feeling: that quick electric lift of someone looking at me as if I were the most interesting object in the room. For a full minute I was not a man who had been left. I was simply a man. Wanted. Admired. Useful in the oldest and simplest way.
It was the first time in months that the pain had gone quiet, and I would have paid any price for it.
I went home with her, in the end. I will not tell you about that night, only that when I woke up the next morning, I had that same strange lightness, and it lasted about forty minutes, and then, in the taxi, with her phone number in my pocket and the sun coming in wrong through the dirty window, the ache returned. It arrived not like a wave but like a tenant, quietly, with its own key.
And I thought: well, then. I only need to do it again.
That was all. That was the whole discovery. Not a philosophy yet. Not a religion. Just a pattern. Pain, then the warm light of somebody wanting me, then a brief interval of nothing, then the pain again, and somewhere in the middle of it a small stupid hope that if I could just string enough of those intervals together, they would add up to something that looked like being fine.
By the time evening came I had finished the Naguru stairs and half of the roof plan, and I walked out of the office into a Bugolobi dusk that smelled of roasted maize and diesel and rain that had not yet decided to happen.
I took a boda to Ntinda because I did not want to be on my own with the sunset. The rider was a young man named Ronnie who drove like a person who had been promised a bonus for getting anyone anywhere in under ten minutes, and I held on to the back of the seat and watched the city slide past: the traffic jam on Jinja Road turning into a river of red brake-lights, the vendors with their trays of roasted gonja held up to the windows of stopped cars, a man selling phone chargers and one enormous stuffed teddy bear for reasons no one could explain, the billboards promising a better tomorrow to people stuck in a worse today. Kampala at dusk is a place where everything is being sold and everyone is going somewhere else.
I love this city. I want to say that too. I have not always said it in this story, and I want it on the record. Kampala is loud and unfinished and generous. It lets you be anonymous without leaving you alone. It gives you a thousand strangers to sit near. For a lonely man, there is no better place to be lonely.
At home I showered and stood for a moment in front of the mirror with the towel around my waist.
I have never been unhappy with my face. I am aware of that as a privilege, and I was aware, that year, of how much easier it made things. I am about 5'11", with a runner's build I had not earned lately, dark skin, a close-cut beard I kept sharp, a mother's cheekbones. I know that I can walk into a room and be looked at. I did not think of that as an accomplishment, exactly; more like a tool I had found in a drawer and learned to use. Nobody had ever taught me what it cost.
There was a scar on my left shoulder, a pale, crooked line from a fall in Mukono when I was eight. Naomi used to trace it with her fingernail when she thought I was sleeping. I had never told her I could feel it, every time.
I turned off the bathroom light.
In the bedroom, I looked at the bed. It was made. Tessa's shape had been cleaned out of it by the woman who came on Thursdays and Saturday mornings, and the sheet was pulled tight at the corners the way I had learned to like it, so that there was no evidence of anyone.
Under the bed, a little to the left, where it had been for more than a year, was the tin.
I did not look at it. I want you to notice that I did not look. I knew exactly where it was the way you know where a step is in the dark. I did not bend down, I did not slide it out, I did not lift the red lid. I stood beside my bed, very straight, and thought about nothing, with such dedication that it must have looked, from the outside, like prayer.
Then I went to the kitchen and made eggs.
At about nine, my phone buzzed with a WhatsApp message from a number I did not have saved.
Hi Ethan. It's Ritah. From Timo's car wash, remember? I hope this isn't weird. I got your number from Sarah. 🙂
I did remember. I remembered a woman in white sneakers and gold hoops who had been standing in the yard on Wednesday, waiting on a Rav4, and had watched me walk past and said, without heat, without even looking away from her phone: Do you always walk like you're late for something?
I had said, Do you always talk to strangers like they owe you an answer?
She had smiled. She had a small chip in her front tooth. She had not said anything more, and neither had I, and I had gone on across the yard with the odd, delicious sensation of having been measured.
I was standing at the counter, in the yellow kitchen light, with a plate of eggs going cold. I read her message twice. The cursor blinked under it.
I would like to be able to say that I felt nothing, that I typed something polite and neutral and put the phone away. But I felt it. That familiar low hum starting up under my ribs, a kind of hunger that was not exactly for her, that was not for anyone, that was for the part of me that would exist when she looked at me the way she had looked at me in the yard.
I don't do this, I thought. Not tonight. It's been a long week.
And behind that, quiet as a cat: You do, though.
I looked at the plate. I looked at the window, where the bougainvillea had gone black against a sky the colour of a bruise. I thought about Tessa's note on the table. I thought, with sudden clarity, of Timo's voice: I know you used to look different.
Then I typed:
Not weird. I remember. You said I walk like I'm late.
Three dots appeared and vanished and appeared again, and I stood there with my thumb hovering, and inside me a small, almost forgotten voice, a voice that had once written poems in bad Luganda on a busy pavement, said very softly, very clearly, Don't.
I put the phone down on the counter, and I let it buzz.
I had retired from believing in love the way an athlete retires with a bad knee: publicly, cheerfully, with a great deal of talk about how it was time. I had a small collection of rules and a long list of nights. I was not unhappy. I said this to myself often enough that it began to sound, in my own head, like something a person could say without being watched.
The phone buzzed again.
I picked it up.