Chapter 1
The Man Who Called Me Daughter
Her father hummed when he was happy and whistled when he was worried, and for the first fifteen years of Sarah's life she could tell what kind of day it had been by which one she heard coming up the path.
On the evening of her fifteenth birthday, he was humming.
She heard him before she saw him. She was sitting on the step of the kitchen block in Kasaana, in the yellow light of the paraffin lamp, with a basin of beans in her lap, picking out the stones and the shrivelled ones and dropping them into a tin, and the sound came up the slope from the road, low and tuneless and cheerful, a hymn with the words worn off it. It was Tukutendereza. It was always Tukutendereza, when he was well pleased with the world. It wandered up and down the scale, hunting for a note it had lost.
"Your father is early," said Grace, from inside.
"He is humming."
"Then he has done something stupid."
"He's bought a cake."
"He has not bought a cake. He has no money. We agreed." But her mother had come to the door, drying her hands on her wrapper, with her head tilted, and a small, wary, hopeful smile pulling at the corner of her mouth.
Joseph Nankya came round the side of the house in his office shoes, with his jacket over his arm and his tie pulled crooked and a flat pink cardboard box balanced in both hands, held out in front of him with the extreme care of a man carrying something alive.
"Do not look," he said.
"I am looking."
"Close your eyes."
"We can see the box, Joseph."
"Then pretend." He stopped in front of the step. He was a long, thin, stooping man of forty-six, with large ears and a gap between his front teeth and a bald patch on the back of his head that he believed nobody had noticed. He had worked for twenty-two years as a clerk in the district land office, behind a counter, with a rubber stamp, and it had given him the permanently apologetic posture of a person bending over to hear. His eyes behind his glasses were tired and bright. "Counsel Nankya," he said gravely. "I have a matter to bring before the court."
"Taata."
"It concerns a minor."
"I am not a minor. I'm fifteen."
"You are not yet. You are fifteen for three more hours, by the law of this household. I looked it up." He bowed, and held out the box. "Exhibit A."
She took it. It was surprisingly heavy. She opened the lid with her thumbs, and inside, on a square of waxed paper, squashed slightly at one corner by the journey, was a small round cake with white icing and a single crooked pink rose. Along the edge, in blue sugar, was written HAPPY BIRTHDAY SARAH. The R had run into the A.
"It cost seven thousand," said her mother.
"Six."
"You said we had no money."
"I said we had no spare money. This is not spare. It is a legal necessity." Joseph sat down on the step beside Sarah, with a grunt, and began to loosen his shoes. "A girl is only fifteen once. And a girl who is going to be a lawyer should have a cake with her name on it. How else will she remember who she is?"
She did not answer. She sat with the box on her knees and looked at the crooked rose, and her throat was tight.
Counsel.
It had started when she was nine. She had come home from school one afternoon in a rage, because a girl called Dorothy had been blamed for a stolen pencil case that she had not stolen, and the teacher had shouted at her in front of the whole class, and nobody had said anything. Sarah had said something. She had stood up, shaking, and said, It's not fair. You didn't ask her. You didn't ask anyone. She had been sent to stand outside. Her father, hearing the story at supper, had put down his spoon and looked at her for a long time over his glasses.
Who taught you to say that? he had asked.
Nobody.
Nobody. Hmm. He had picked up the spoon again. Do you know what a person is called who stands up for someone who cannot speak for herself?
A fool.
A lawyer. He had smiled. Well, a fool and a lawyer are close relatives. But we'll aim for the second.
He had called her Counsel ever since. Good morning, Counsel. What does the court say about breakfast? Counsel will please stop singing at the table. It was a private joke. It was the kind of joke that, between two people, grows slowly over years until it is worth more than money. She would have died rather than let anybody at school hear it. And she would have died, she thought, if he stopped.
"Make a wish," said her mother, bringing the candle.
"I'm too old."
"Nobody is too old."
"I wish..." She looked at the three of them in the lamplight, the cake, the quiet hens settling on their perch, her father's wide tired face. She was not given to wishing out loud. "I wish nothing. I already have it."
"That is a cheat," said Joseph. "That is an invalid wish."
"I withdraw it."
"Good." He lit the candle with a match from his shirt pocket. "Now blow, before the rose melts."
She blew.
They lived in a rented house at the edge of Kasaana, a village twenty minutes by taxi from Lwanda, in the middle of a patch of banana and coffee that belonged to a landlord called Mzee Lukwago, who came on the first of every month in a white shirt and was paid with great ceremony and no pleasure on either side. It was a plain house, three rooms and a veranda, with an iron roof the colour of old blood and a kitchen block at the back, a cement floor, a latrine behind a bush, and a hen house that Joseph had built himself and which leaned, very slightly, to the left. It was not much. There was no electricity, only a solar lamp, and the paraffin one, and a radio that ran on batteries. In the rainy season the path became a river. In the dry season it became a cloud of red dust.
But it was hers.
She would think of it afterward the way one thinks of a place in a dream, in pieces, with every detail unnaturally bright. The smell of woodsmoke and boiled maize in the early morning. The enamel basin, with a chip in the rim, in which she washed her face. Her father's boots, by the door, in a state of permanent collapse. The calendar from a hardware shop with a picture of a waterfall, on which he crossed off each day in blue pen, and the same date circled in red every month, the day he got paid. A shelf of old law books he had bought at a market in Kampala, a stack of bound volumes with cracked spines, The Penal Code, Laws of Uganda, a thick one with no cover, which he did not read but liked to have. In case, he would say. A man should own the rules.
Her bed was in the second room, behind a curtain of printed cloth, next to her parents'. On the wall above it she had pinned a drawing of a courtroom, which she had made at twelve, with a judge in a wig and a very large lawyer, a woman, pointing a finger. Under it, in the careful capitals of a child: SARAH NANKYA, ADVOCATE.
She had not taken it down. She was too old for it. She would not have admitted that she looked at it every night.
"What are you going to do, when you finish?" Miriam had asked her once. They had been lying on the grass behind the netball court at school, with their shoes off, in the afternoon sun, eating sugarcane.
"Study law."
"Where?"
"Makerere."
"They will not take a village girl."
"They'll take a girl with fifty-two points."
"And how will you get fifty-two points?"
"By working."
"Everybody works."
"No," said Sarah. "Everybody says they work." She spat out a piece of fibre. "I will do it so that when I stand up in a court, in a black gown, and someone says, Who are you to speak for this person?, I can say, I'm the one who studied."
"You sound like your father."
"He's right."
"He's a clerk."
"He is a clerk who has read the whole Penal Code," said Sarah, "twice, with a pencil." She turned on her side and looked at her friend. Miriam Namubiru was a short, round, loud girl with plaits like ropes and a laugh that could be heard from the next village. Her mother ran the biggest bakery in Lwanda. She wanted to be a journalist, and a famous one, and she had already started a newspaper, which was one sheet of paper, posted every Monday on the notice board, called The Truth. "You'll be the one writing about my cases," said Sarah.
"And you'll tell me everything, in secret."
"I will tell you nothing."
"Then I'll make it up."
"That," said Sarah, "is called defamation."
"Is it?" Miriam brightened. "Teach me."
February came in hot, dry and bright, with a high white sky, and in the second week of it her father began to complain of his head.
It was not much. He mentioned it at supper on a Monday, a thick dull ache behind the eyes, which he put down to the long hours and the heat and a new supervisor who talked too fast. Her mother put a damp cloth on it. He took two tablets from a strip and went to bed early, humming. On Tuesday it was better. On Wednesday it was worse. On Thursday he came home from the office at three in the afternoon, which he had never done in his life, and sat down on the step with his shoes still on, with a grey, strange, sagging look about the mouth.
"Joseph?" said Grace. "What is it?"
"Nothing. I'm tired."
"You're grey."
"It's the light."
"You should see a doctor."
"On Saturday. I'll go on Saturday." He tried to smile. It went crooked. "Tell Counsel... tell her I'll check her homework."
"Taata?" Sarah had come out of the house with a book in her hand. She stopped. She did not know why. There was nothing wrong, nothing she could have named, only a wrongness in the air round him, like the stillness before rain. "Are you sick?"
"I'm well."
"You don't look well."
"I am a very old man," said her father. "We are allowed to look it." He lifted a hand. It trembled. She saw him see it, and put it down on his knee, and hold it there with the other, still, like a man hiding a bird.
He got up to go inside.
He did not reach the door.
She would remember the next minutes in a very odd way, like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. It was very small, very sharp, and a great way off. She saw him put a hand against the doorframe. She saw him turn his head, slowly, toward her, with an expression of mild, polite surprise, as though he had forgotten a word. His mouth opened to say something, and the right side of it did not move. A long thin sound came out. And then his knees folded, gently, and he sat down on the floor of the veranda, and leaned against the wall, and slid sideways, with his glasses still on.
"Taata!"
She did not know she had screamed. She was on her knees in the dust, with her hands on his shoulders, and he was looking at her with one eye, wide and frightened and wet, and the other, the right one, half shut. "Taata. Taata. Say something. Say my name."
"Counsel," he said.
It came out as a slur. It was not a word. But it was her name. He had said it. She held on to it, like a rope, as her mother ran out screaming for the neighbours, and the neighbours came running, and somebody shouted for a boda boda, and the whole world went to pieces round her in a roar of voices and dust.
He lived for two days.
They had him at Lwanda hospital, on a ward at the end of a long corridor, in a high iron bed beside a window with a view of a mango tree and a wall. It was a government hospital. It was crowded, and hot, and smelled of bleach and old food and the sweet heavy smell of illness. There was one doctor for the whole floor, a harassed young man in a creased coat, who came and went at intervals and said very little. There were nurses, who were kind, and tired. There was no scanner. There were no drugs, except what could be bought at the pharmacy across the road, and the list the nurse gave her mother on the first night cost a hundred and eighty thousand shillings.
"We do not have it," said Grace.
"There is the shop. You could ask..."
"I'll ask. I will ask everyone." She was standing in the corridor, in her old green dress, with her bag clutched against her stomach. She looked very small. She looked like a girl. Sarah, standing beside her, saw for the first time that her mother's hands were shaking, as her father's had. "Go and sit with him," she said. "Talk to him."
"What do I say?"
"Anything. He likes your voice."
So she sat.
She sat for two days. She sat on a plastic chair at the head of the bed, with her school bag on her knees, and held his hand, which was cool and dry and curled, and talked. She talked about school. She talked about a girl who had been caught copying in a Physics test, and the headmistress, who had a moustache. She talked about the courtroom drawing. She told him the whole of a debate she had won, last term, on the motion This house believes that a child should be heard, and how she had spoken for eleven minutes without notes and sat down to a silence so deep that she had thought she had failed. And he lay with his face turned toward the window, with one eye open, breathing slowly, and she did not know if he could hear.
On the second night, at about three, he squeezed her hand.
She sat up. It was dark. A single bulb was burning at the end of the ward, and a woman in the next bed was groaning in her sleep. His face on the pillow was grey and still. But his eyes were open, both of them, and they were on her, clear and steady, and he was trying to say something.
"Taata?"
His mouth worked. His lips, on the right side, drew back, with a great effort. A thread of spit ran down his chin. She leaned close, until her ear was almost on his mouth, and smelled the sour medicinal smell of his breath.
"Counsel," he said.
"I'm here."
"Speak."
"What?"
"Speak," said her father. His voice was a whisper. It was thick and slow and as clear as a bell. "Whatever. Happens. You speak. For... yourself. First."
"Taata, don't. Rest."
"Promise."
"I promise."
"Good... girl." The ghost of a smile. "Good... Counsel."
His eyes closed.
She sat holding his hand. She did not cry. She did not understand, then, what he had said. She thought it was the confusion of the stroke, a muddle of old phrases, a hymn with the words worn off. She sat still in the dim light, counting the slow ragged breaths, and at about half past five, as the first grey came into the window, and the cocks began outside, he stopped.
It was so quiet that she did not at first notice.
She went on holding his hand. She went on listening, as one listens for the next note of a song. The woman in the next bed had stopped groaning. The bulb at the end of the ward flickered. A nurse came, in a blue apron, on soft shoes, and looked, and put a hand over her mouth.
Oh, thought Sarah.
Oh, so that is what it is.
They buried him on a Sunday, in his father's village, six hours away, on a red hill covered in coffee, in a grave dug by his brothers.
She would remember very little of it. She remembered the heat, and the dust, and a sky of an extraordinary hard blue. She remembered the crowd. There were hundreds of them. They came on foot and in taxis and the backs of lorries, uncles and cousins and neighbours and men from the land office in dark suits, who stood in a line with their hats in their hands and did not seem to know what to do with their arms. She remembered the singing, low, deep and slow, in harmony, from a choir of old women. She remembered a coffin of plain pale wood, which was carried out of the house by six men on their shoulders, and which looked impossibly small.
She remembered her mother.
Grace Nankya did not cry at the funeral. She sat on a mat, in a plain black dress, with a scarf over her head, among the women, and did not make a sound. She was thirty-nine. She was a short, slim, upright woman with a long neck and a stern pretty face, and a way of holding her mouth that made people think she disapproved of them. She taught at a nursery school. She had the habit of always looking a little tired. But that day, on the mat, in the white sun, she looked like a stone. She looked like something that had been left out in the rain for a long time, and had stopped feeling.
"You must eat," said Aunt Harriet, Joseph's sister, bending over her with a plate.
"I am not hungry."
"You have not eaten in three days."
"Leave her," said Sarah.
She had not meant to speak. She was sitting on the ground beside her mother, with her knees up, in a borrowed dress that was too long. It came out of her in a small hard voice that surprised her. Aunt Harriet, a tall, strong, sensible woman of fifty with a face like her brother's, looked down at her. Something in the look softened.
"Come, my child," she said. "Eat something. For me."
"I can't."
"Just a little."
"Taata is in a box," said Sarah. "I do not want to eat."
It was the first time that the thing had been said in words. She heard it, in the thick air, in the singing, and it landed on her like a weight. In a box. She had not understood it. She had understood the hospital, and the nurse, and the wooden thing on the shoulders of six men. She had not understood that it meant him. It meant the long thin body, the tired shoulders, the bald patch he thought nobody had noticed, the voice that said Counsel. It meant that on Monday, and on Tuesday, and all the days after that, she would walk up the path from school and there would be no humming.
The singing stopped.
Men came forward with ropes. Somebody was reading from a book. Somebody was wailing, a high wild sound that rose and rose and fell away. She did not look. She looked at the ground, at her own feet in her black school shoes, in the red dust. She looked until the sound of the earth began, a soft, dry, steady pouring, a sound like rain on a roof, and then she looked up, and saw that her mother had stood up beside her.
Grace stood very straight, with her hands at her sides, and her face white and still. She watched the earth go into the grave. She watched until it was done. She did not say a word. And then, with the first handful, she bent, slowly, as though bending were an enormous labour, and took it up in her palm, and held it for a long time.
She did not let it fall.
She closed her hand on it, so hard that the knuckles went white.
"Mama?" said Sarah.
"Come," said Grace. Her voice was flat. "It is over. Let us go home."
It was not over.
It was only beginning, though she did not yet know it. In the days that followed, there was a great deal to be done, and nobody to do it. There were relatives, who came and ate for a week, and who talked in the evenings, in the main room, in low voices, with the door shut. There was the matter of the debts. There were small ones, a few hundred thousand, here and there, to a shopkeeper, to a man who had lent him money for a bicycle. There were the school fees, which were due on the first of March. There was the rent, which was due on the first of every month, in cash, to Mzee Lukwago, in a white shirt.
And there was Uncle Edward.
He was Joseph's elder brother, a heavy, loud, red-eyed man in a safari suit, who had arrived at the funeral in a pick-up truck and was now seen to be walking round the plot behind the house with a measuring tape. "I am only looking," he said, to Grace, when she asked. "It is the family land. It's a thing to consider. A woman alone cannot manage."
"The plot is not ours. We rent."
"There is the other plot. At the village. Your husband had a share." He rolled the tape up, and tapped it against his palm. "We will have to talk, Grace. When you've had time. These things are better decided early."
"My husband is not cold."
"No. No, of course. I only..." He smiled, with great sorrow. "I am looking after you. Somebody has to."
Sarah, from the doorway, watched her mother's face.
She had not seen it do that before. It had gone very still, very white, around the mouth. It was the face of someone who has been shown, in a single instant, the whole of a landscape, the whole long dry road that she must now walk, on her own, with a child and a handful of coins. It was fear. It was plain. She had been afraid of many things in her life, of snakes and of the dark and of the headmistress. But this was a different thing. It was an old, grey, patient, animal fear, like that of a woman standing in a river as the water rises.
And Sarah, standing in the door, understood nothing of it. She only knew that she wanted to go across the room and put her arms round her mother's waist, and could not, because her mother had turned her head, and looked at her, and said, in a voice of terrible gentleness, "Go and do your homework."
"Mama..."
"Go. You must keep up. We cannot afford for you to fail."
She went.
She stood in front of the empty place at the table that night.
It was nine o'clock. Her mother had gone to bed. The lamp burned low on the shelf, and a moth went round it, and the whole house, which on any other night had been loud with the sounds of him, the clink of a cup, the creak of the chair, the clearing of a throat, lay in a silence so complete that it had a texture. It was soft, and heavy, and a little damp, like a blanket.
His chair was by the window. It was a plain wooden one, with a cracked seat, mended with string. His glasses lay on the table in front of it, folded, where he had left them the evening before the stroke. A half-finished crossword puzzle from last Sunday's paper, with a blue-pen scribble in one corner. A tin cup. A small, flat, smooth, grey stone that he used as a paperweight and had found, he said, on the day she was born, in the stream at the bottom of the hill.
She picked up the stone.
It was warm. It had been in the lamplight. It lay in her palm, ordinary, a river pebble, flattened at one end. She turned it over. She put it against her cheek, and shut her eyes, and for the length of a breath she could smell him, ink and chalk dust and hen feed and the sweet, faint, smoky smell of his old jacket.
Counsel.
She did not cry. She was surprised at that. She stood there for a long time, in the lamplight, with the pebble against her face, and waited, and nothing came. It was as if the place where the crying should have been was a room that had been locked, and the key had gone into the ground with him.
She put the stone back, exactly where it had been.
She looked at the chair. It looked back at her, small and plain and empty, with its mended seat. And she thought, with a coldness that frightened her, calmly, as one reads a line in a book: Nobody is going to sit there again.
And nobody is going to say it.
Nobody is going to say, Speak.
She picked up the lamp, and went to bed.