Chapter 7
The Thing I Wasn't Supposed to Feel
The first thing I did, after the kiss, was nothing at all.
For six days I did nothing. I want to describe this properly, because it was an achievement in its way, an act of engineering as careful as any I have carried out at a drawing board. I answered Maya's messages within an hour, never sooner. I put a full stop at the end of every text. I did not send photographs. When she called on the second night, I let it ring out and sent a message saying, In a meeting, call you tomorrow, though it was eleven at night and the only thing in front of me was a plate of cold rice. I called her tomorrow. I kept it short. I said the site was demanding.
I told myself this was maturity. I said: You are being careful. You are not leading her on. I said: A good man would slow things down.
That was the vocabulary I had, that week, for fear. It sounded so reasonable. It sounded like someone else's voice, a sensible older brother, a man who had thought carefully about the consequences of things. It took me a long time to notice that it was the same voice that had told me to leave a note for Tessa on a kitchen table.
Christmas came and went. I went home to Mukono and stood in the yard in a borrowed apron helping Eva turn a goat over a fire. My mother watched me across the smoke with her head tilted, and said, at some point in the afternoon, "You keep looking at your phone."
"It's work."
"On Christmas Day?"
"There's a client."
"Ah," said my mother. She said it in that voice that I have heard all my life and never learnt to argue with. It sounded like a door being closed gently by someone who has already seen what is behind it.
I looked at my phone eleven times that day. I counted. There were two messages from Maya, one a photograph of a plate of pilau with a paper hat balanced on it, captioned Mama insists, and one, at four in the afternoon, that said only: Thinking of you. Merry Christmas, godfather. x
I looked at the x for a long time. It was a small thing, a single lowercase letter, a piece of punctuation that people put at the end of a line without thinking. I stood there with a greasy knife in one hand and the phone in the other, and felt my chest close, slowly, like a fist.
That's how it starts, said the cold voice. One letter. One tiny thing. Then a name. Then a Sunday. Then a lunch with her mother. Then a photograph on a wall. Then one morning you find out that the whole edifice is resting on her, and she leaves.
I typed back: Merry Christmas. And then, because it looked too bare, I added a small red heart, the kind you would send to your grandmother. I put the phone in my pocket and turned the goat.
I should tell you what I was afraid of, since I could not have told you then.
It was not that she would hurt me. That is what I said, if I was asked, in the rare private conversations with myself. I don't want to get hurt. I would have sworn to it. I thought I was afraid of pain, and I had, in the meantime, arranged my whole life so that I felt very little of it.
What I was afraid of was the hope.
I had felt something on the veranda that I had not felt in two years. It was not desire; I have said so, and I stand by it. It was the sense of a room in the future with the light on. I had sat in a plastic chair at five in the morning holding a woman's hand and had glimpsed, through a doorway, a version of my life in which I was not alone and not performing and not waiting for the ache to arrive. And it had felt so good, so unspeakably, cleanly good, that I had understood in my body what the price would be. Because the more you can imagine, the more there is to lose. You cannot fall from a floor you have not built.
I had been safe for twenty-two months because I had not let myself build one.
On the twenty-ninth of December I went to a party at a rooftop in Kololo, thrown by Denis from the office to celebrate the end of what he called "a year of professional excellence and moral collapse." It was hot and crowded and loud, and there was a DJ who seemed to be playing every song at once. I stood at the edge of the roof with a drink and looked over the city, at the long glittering slope of Nakasero, at the red lights winking on the tops of the towers, and I felt exactly as I had felt on the roof where all this began: numb, and hungry, and very clear.
Do it, said the voice. You know how. You're good at it. It's just a matter of being warm to somebody for a few hours. Then the whole thing goes quiet.
I put down my drink.
Her name was Brenda. I do want to tell you that, since I have not always told you the names. I owe it to her. She was twenty-seven, worked in an investment bank on Kampala Road, and had a low, unhurried voice and a pair of very good earrings. She was funny in a dry, self-contained way. She had recently left a man who had, she said, turned out to be a subscription: he took a little every month and gave nothing back. We laughed. I bought her a drink. She looked at me across the rim of it with frank assessment and said, "You're the architect."
"How do you know?"
"Denis talked about you. He said you were the office's greatest mystery. He said you go quiet and produce beautiful stairs and never talk about your feelings."
"Denis has a lot of opinions."
"He said you'd be here. He said watch him leave with someone." She smiled a little. "I didn't think I'd take the bet."
"Which side did you take?"
"That you wouldn't." She put down her glass. "I'm not sure yet."
It went as it always went. I don't have to tell you the steps. It has a rhythm, like a dance you have done so often you have stopped hearing the music. The talk, the drift toward the edge of the roof, the moment when the city goes soft and blurred behind a woman's shoulder. I noticed myself doing it. I noticed the lean, the voice, and I heard Maya's dry, amused observation drop into my head like a stone in water: You dropped it about a half-octave.
I did it anyway. That's the thing I would like you to see. I did not stumble into it. I stood in the noise and the heat and made a conscious, cold, deliberate decision, knowing exactly what I was doing, and did it with my eyes open, because the alternative was to go home and lie in the dark and think about a x.
We left at half past twelve. Brenda's flat was in Bugolobi, on the third floor of a block near the swimming pool. It was very tidy, with a large rug and a lot of framed photographs. I remember noticing the photographs. There were dozens, of nieces, a mother at a graduation, an old man in a hat. She had a whole wall of them. It was the exact opposite of Ritah's apartment, and I remember thinking, absurdly, She keeps things.
I did not stay long on that thought.
I will not tell you what happened. I have said I would not make a catalogue of it, and I do not want it to seem like a triumph. It was what it was: two adults, a warm room, a night. It was kind. Brenda was generous and easy, and she asked me nothing, and I gave her nothing, and it went on until the pale grey light of the first of January came into the room.
I woke at ten to five.
I lay for a moment with my eyes closed and my heart hammering, and did not know where I was. Then the room assembled itself around me: the strange ceiling, the smell of someone else's soap, a faint sound of a tap dripping in the kitchen. Brenda was asleep with her back to me. Her shoulder rose and fell.
The thing I had expected did not arrive. I lay and waited for it, the warm light, the brief glow, the sweet numbness. I waited for the ache to be quiet. It was not quiet. It was louder than it had been in two years.
I got out of bed. I found my clothes on the floor and dressed in the dark, quietly, the way I had done a hundred times. In the kitchen, a small square room with yellow curtains, I stood at the counter and looked at my phone.
There was a message, timestamped 4:31. It was from Maya.
Happy New Year, godfather. Watch-night service was three hours long and Mama cried through all of it. Joel sat in the front row in a tie like a man at his own trial. I thought of you at midnight, don't know why. Just wanted to say. No need to reply x
I read it again. I read it with my back against a stranger's fridge and the grey light coming in through yellow curtains. I read the phrase don't know why. I read the x.
I put the phone down on the counter, quite gently, and then I put both hands flat on the surface, and stood with my head bowed. My chest hurt. It was not a metaphor. It was a plain, physical pain, like a hand pressed against the sternum, and I stood breathing carefully in and out, and thought with total, terrible clarity: what have I done?
I had done nothing. That was what I told myself. I had committed no crime. She and I were not together. She had said herself, on that veranda, it doesn't mean anything. There was no promise, no claim, no line I had crossed. I was a free man who had spent a night with a consenting adult.
And I stood in the kitchen with my hands on the counter and knew that I had just done the most disloyal thing I had ever done in my life. Not to Maya. Not exactly. To the boy in the queue. To the small, stubborn, hopeful part of me who had sat in a plastic chair and held a hand and thought: I would like to know what she'll be like at sixty.
I had betrayed him. I had held him, for a night, in my hands like a bird, and then, very calmly, closed my fist.
There was a note pad by the kettle. I looked at it. I could feel my old hand wanting to write the note: Had to go. There is bread. I did not. I did not write anything. I left the flat without a sound, and closed the door behind me, and walked down three flights of stairs in the smell of stale cooking oil and the first cold light.
I sat in my car in the car park of a block of flats in Bugolobi with the engine off.
I did not cry. I would like to tell you that the tears came, that the whole thing broke and let me out. They did not. I sat with my hands on the wheel and my forehead against them, in a silent, dry, grinding grief that had no outlet, while the sky turned from grey to white. Somewhere a cockerel crowed. A security guard passed and peered in at me and passed on.
At six I picked up my phone. I typed: Happy New Year. Sorry, I was asleep. Hope the service wasn't too long.
It was a lie. It was such a small one. It had a full stop at the end.
I did not add an x.
The thing about avoidance is that it is a full-time occupation.
For two weeks I was busy. I was in meetings. I was on site. I was drowning in a rush job for Mr. Lwanga, a hotel extension in Entebbe that had to be tendered by the fifteenth. All of which was true. I had never been so productive. I drew thirty sheets in eleven days. I went into the office at seven and left at ten, and ate rice from a plastic box at my desk, and did not answer the phone after nine.
Maya called four times. I answered twice. She said hello, stranger, in a light voice, and I said sorry, sorry, crazy week, and she said of course, of course, no worries. I could hear her choosing every word. I could hear the small precise tenderness of it, the care not to press. It was unbearable. I would rather she had shouted.
On the tenth day, I saw her. That is, I saw her without her seeing me. I had driven to the Sentinel to drop off a set of prints for Mr. Okumu, who had asked, with dry courtesy, whether I might look at a crack in his office wall. I came up the stairs, the yellow stripes bright on each edge, and stopped on the landing.
She was at the far end of the newsroom, standing by a filing cabinet. She was laughing.
She was laughing at something a man beside her had said, a tall young man in a checked shirt named Peter, a sports reporter I had met once. Her head was thrown back and her hand rested on his arm, lightly, as one rests it on a friend's, and the light from the window lay along her jaw. She looked so young, and so easy, and so entirely unguarded, that for a moment I could not breathe.
And then something hot and sour and ugly rose in me from a place I had thought long dead.
It was not simply jealousy. I want to be accurate. It was jealousy with a taste, a taste I knew. It was the taste of the year before Naomi left, the tight, sick, narrow feeling of watching someone I loved be happy in a way that did not need me. It rose to my throat and my hands closed on the tube of prints, hard enough to crush it, and I heard myself think, in a low, clear, awful voice: She's mine.
I stood on the landing for maybe four seconds. Then I turned and went back down the stairs, quickly, with my face burning, and left the prints with the security guard.
You have no right, I told myself, in the car. You have no claim. You left her hanging for two weeks and slept with a stranger, and now you're going to be jealous of a man in a checked shirt?
But it was not the checked shirt. It was the old, terrible reflex. It was the thing I had told myself I had shed, together with the poems and the ticket stubs. I had thought it was a symptom of loving Naomi. It was not. It was something in me, something that had been waiting, and it had recognised her the way a dog recognises a gate.
I sat in the car and gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles went pale, and was more frightened than I had ever been.
I came to understand, that January, that I had been wrong about one thing. I had thought I was avoiding love because I did not believe in it. It was not that. I was avoiding it because I did. Because I believed in it so completely, with such a childish and total faith, that the idea of loving again and losing again felt like something that would not merely hurt but end me. I had built a perfect little philosophy on top of a terror, and called it freedom.
I did not put it into words. That would have been too honest, too soon. But I felt it in the shape of the days, in the strange emptiness of a room after I had left it. I felt it when I turned on the radio and turned it off. I felt it when I woke in the night and lay staring at the dark and thought about a small bead of wax, and a woman's thumb on my jaw.
Timo called on the fourteenth.
"You're avoiding her."
"Who?"
"Don't be an idiot. Sarah's been getting messages. Maya says you've gone quiet." His voice was flat and level. He was, I could tell, standing in the yard of the garage, with the sound of an impact wrench behind him. "She won't say she's upset. She's not upset. She's puzzled. She asked Sarah if she'd done something wrong."
"She hasn't."
"I know she hasn't. That's what Sarah told her. She said, He does this."
"Does what?"
"He does this," said Timo. He let out a long breath. "It's like watching someone back into a wall in slow motion. Ethan. I've known you fifteen years. I've watched you turn into a man who leaves before the sun's up. I didn't say anything. I thought, he'll come out of it. But this is different. You don't look at anyone the way you look at that woman."
"I don't look at her in any way."
"You looked at her in the photograph."
"Timo."
"I'm not going to tell you what to do. I'm just going to say, don't be a coward. You're good at a lot of things. But you have a talent for finding a perfectly reasonable reason to run, and I don't want you to run this time, because I think it's the last one."
"I'm not running. I'm thinking."
"Then think faster," said Timo, and hung up.
Shamim was worse.
She came to the office on the sixteenth, unannounced, in a black coat and heels, at lunchtime, and asked the receptionist to fetch me. I found her sitting on the sagging couch in the lobby with her legs crossed and her handbag on her knee, reading a brochure about tile grout with an expression of undiluted contempt.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Thank you."
"I'm your friend. It's my job." She put down the brochure. "Come on. I've booked a table at the place round the corner. I'm buying. You look like a man who's been living on rice."
We sat in a small dark café on Bugolobi Road with two plates of chicken and chips and a large pot of tea. Shamim ate with steady efficiency. She did not speak for nearly ten minutes. It was an old trick. She would sit and let the silence do her work.
"Timo said something to you," I said at last.
"Timo says a lot of things. He's got the wisdom of a man who repairs Toyotas." She dipped a chip in ketchup. "I heard from Sarah, who heard from Maya, that you've gone to ground. I'm here as a professional courtesy."
"You're a paralegal."
"I'm a witness." She looked at me. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened."
"Something's happened."
"We kissed," I said. It came out flat. "Once. On her mother's veranda. She said it didn't mean anything."
"Did it?"
"I don't know."
"That's a lie."
"It's a hard one to say."
"Everything worth saying is hard to say. That's why we hire people to do it." She put down her chip. "Ethan. Do you like her?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"More than I want to."
Shamim was quiet for a moment. She turned her cup a quarter turn on the saucer. "Okay," she said. "That's more than I expected." She looked at me, and the sarcasm had gone out of her face, and in its place was something I had seen before only once, at my father's funeral, when she had held Eva's hand at the graveside. "Listen. I'm going to say something and I'd like you to hear it as an ordinary person who loves you, not a lawyer."
"Okay."
"I've watched you for two years. I've watched you try to build a life out of not needing anyone. And I've said nothing, because it was working, in a manner of speaking. You were functional. You were eating." She waved a hand. "But I've also sat in a room for seven years listening to people describe the exact moment a marriage ended. And do you know what it's almost never? It's almost never the big betrayal. It's not the affair. It's the thousand small moments when one person could have said the truth and chose not to."
"I haven't lied to her."
"Have you not?"
"I haven't said anything false."
"Ah," said Shamim, softly, with a little smile. "That's what you think honesty is. Not saying anything false." She shook her head. "Darling, that's not honesty. That's just good lawyering."
I sat there and could not speak.
"I'm not saying you did something wrong," she said. "I don't know what you did. But if you've done something, if there's something you're carrying, then the worst thing you can do is walk into her life with it in your pocket." She took a sip of tea. "Because sooner or later, it always falls out."
I did not tell her about Brenda. I want you to notice that. I had every opportunity. She had put the door wide open and stood back. I looked at my plate and said, "It's fine. I'll sort it out," and Shamim looked at me with a long, level, unreadable expression, and said, "Okay," in the tone of a woman entering something in a file.
I went to Maya's flat on the seventeenth, at nine at night, without calling.
I stood on the landing outside the door with my hands in my pockets for six minutes. It had begun to rain. I could hear a television inside, the murmur of a talk show, Doreen's laugh. I could hear my own heartbeat, which seemed to have installed itself in my ears.
The door opened before I knocked.
She stood in the doorway in a grey sweatshirt and leggings with her glasses on and a pencil stuck through her hair. She looked at me. She did not look surprised. She looked, if anything, faintly tired, the way one looks at a bill that has finally arrived.
"I heard you on the stairs," she said. "You've got a heavy step for a man who's trying to be quiet."
"Can I come in?"
"No." She stepped out onto the landing and pulled the door shut behind her. "Let's stay out here. Doreen's watching a programme about a man who marries a lion."
"A lion?"
"It's a very long story." She folded her arms. She looked up at me, in the yellow bulb of the landing, with an expression of terrible, courteous patience. "You want to tell me something."
"Yes."
"Then tell me. Please. I would rather you said it than made me guess."
"I've been avoiding you."
"I noticed." A faint, dry smile. "It's a very good technique. Fifteen out of ten. You even did the punctuation."
"I'm sorry."
"Okay." She took a breath. "Why?"
I had rehearsed. I want you to know I had rehearsed in the car, in the shower, in the lift. I had a speech, a small, tidy, plausible one, about work and stress and needing time. I opened my mouth to deliver it, and I looked at her face, at the pencil and the scar and the tired, clear eyes, and it went out of my head like water.
"Because I liked it too much," I said.
The corridor went still.
"On the veranda. I liked it too much. And I got frightened. I don't do this. I don't do..." I gestured helplessly at the space between us. "I haven't done this in a very long time. I've been out of it. I don't know how. And I thought, if I keep a distance, I won't hurt you. I thought I was being kind."
"That," said Maya, after a pause, "is the most idiotic sentence I've ever heard."
"I know."
"You thought disappearing was kind."
"I know."
"Do you know what it was like? Ethan. I sat in my office and wrote are you okay eleven times and deleted it eleven times. I thought, I've ruined it. I kissed him and he hates it. I went through every conversation. I thought, he thinks I'm desperate. I cried in the toilets at work, and I have not done that since a bad performance review in 2021." Her voice had begun to shake. "So don't tell me it was kindness."
"It wasn't. It was cowardice."
"Yes."
"It was fear."
"Yes."
"I'm sorry."
She looked at me for a long time. The rain drummed steadily on the roof above us. Somewhere below a door slammed.
"You're allowed to be afraid," she said at last. Her voice was lower. "I'm afraid. I've spent a year telling everyone I'm fine. I put a policy on it. Do you think I don't know what it looks like when a person builds a wall? But I'm not going to be the person waiting on the other side of it, checking my phone. It isn't fair to either of us."
"No."
"So here's my proposal." She unfolded her arms. She wiped her palms slowly on her leggings, a small, nervous gesture. "I don't do ambiguous. I've done it. Kevin did ambiguous for two years, and I learned that if you're nice enough to ambiguity, it eats you. So either we try, properly, honestly, with all the mess. Or we don't, and we stay friends, and you come to Josephine's birthday parties and I never mention this again. Both are fine. But you have to choose."
I looked at her.
I had, in my life, been offered a great deal. Doors, rooms, nights. But I had never in my life been offered an honest choice, with the price clearly marked. It was a strange feeling. It was like being handed the keys to a car and told to drive it yourself.
"I want to try," I said.
"You're sure?"
"No."
"Good." She almost smiled. "I'd be worried if you were."
"I'm going to be bad at it."
"I know."
"I'm going to get it wrong."
"So will I." She stepped forward and put her forehead against my chest, briefly, heavily, the way one leans on a wall at the end of a long day. I put my arms round her. She smelled of ginger and paper and rain. I felt her breathe in, slowly, and out. "One thing," she said, into my shirt.
"Anything."
"I need to ask you something. And I need you to be honest. I'm not asking you to be a monk. I know what people say about you. Sarah tells me, it's fine. But I need to know." She lifted her head. She looked me in the eyes. "Since the veranda. Since that morning. Has there been anyone else?"
The landing had gone very quiet.
I could hear the rain. I could hear my own pulse. I could feel, in my chest, a clean, precise, terrible moment, like the moment on a mountain when you know that the next step will decide whether you fall. I saw Brenda's kitchen. I saw the yellow curtains. I heard Shamim's voice: sooner or later, it always falls out.
She said it didn't mean anything, whispered the cold voice. You weren't together. It doesn't count. If you tell her, you'll lose this, and it isn't even a real thing to lose.
"No," I said.
She held my eyes a moment longer. Then she nodded, and laid her head back on my chest, and let out a long, slow, relieved breath.
"Thank you," she said. "I believe you."
I held her. I held her with both arms in the light of a bare bulb on a rainy landing, with the smell of her hair in my face and a television laughing on the other side of the door, and it was the happiest and most terrible moment of my life. Because I felt her believe me. I felt it like a weight settling down into my arms, a whole trusting warm weight, and I knew, standing there, precisely what it was that I had just picked up.
It was not a lie. It was a load. And I had just agreed to carry it, alone, up a flight of stairs with the wrong proportions, every day for as long as it took, and it would grow heavier with every step.