Chapter 11
The Friend Who Noticed
It was the rain that did it, in the end. Rain, and a bicycle bell, and a man with an umbrella.
It was the second Tuesday of August, in the long wet middle of the second term, and the whole of Lwanda was grey. The rain had been coming down since dawn. It fell straight, thick and steady, out of a low sky, on the iron roofs and the red roads and the waiting jacaranda, with a drumming that never changed. The gutters ran. The yard of the school was a lake. The girls, in their blue uniforms, stood in doorways with their bags held over their heads, shrieking, and a teacher with a megaphone was shouting something about the assembly being cancelled.
Sarah was at the gate at four, in the shelter of the flame tree.
She was early. It was the only time in the day that she could be. She had slipped out of Debating, with a murmured excuse, and stood under the dripping branches with her bag clutched to her chest and her hood up, watching the road. She was waiting for a lull. She was going to run. She had a plan, a long one, through the market and round the back of the church, which would take her to Mama Betty's kiosk without passing anyone she knew.
"Sarah!"
She turned.
Miriam was coming across the yard at a gallop, with her satchel on her head, and her plaits flying, splashing through the puddles in her school shoes. She arrived under the tree in a spray of water, and bent double, gasping, with her hands on her knees.
"I... have been... looking... for you."
"Why?"
"I forgot to... give you this." She groped in the satchel. She held out a small damp brown paper bag. "It's a bun. My mother says you looked thin. On Saturday. She says it is a crime."
"I don't..."
"Take it."
She took it.
It was warm. It smelled of cinnamon and sugar. She held it in both hands, as one holds a small bird. She had not been given anything, by anyone, for a week, that did not carry some cost. She stood in the rain-smelling shade, among the drips, and looked at the soft, brown, creased paper, and felt her eyes sting, absurdly, and looked away.
"Thank you."
"You do not have to eat it now."
"I will."
"Good." Miriam straightened. She pushed her hair out of her eyes. "I'll walk with you. I am going that way."
"You aren't."
"I am today."
"Miriam..."
"I'll walk with you," said Miriam, firmly, and took her arm.
It was a small, ordinary, friendly gesture. She had done it a thousand times. She had done it in the corridors, in the dining hall, on the way to the netball court, linking her arm through Sarah's, tucking it close. It was a thing that nobody noticed. It was the most natural thing in the world.
And Sarah, at the touch, went rigid from head to foot.
She did not mean to. She had not even seen it coming. It was her body, that did it, with no help from her mind, as a hand snatches from a flame. Every muscle locked. She felt her breath stop. She felt her skin, from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, go cold, and tight, and crawling, and the whole bright wet afternoon swung out of true. The yard went white at the edges. She heard a roaring, in her ears, as of a train in a tunnel.
Not here.
Not now.
Not Miriam.
She wrenched her arm free.
"Don't!" It came out sharp, ugly, high. "Do not touch me!"
The rain went on.
There was a moment of dreadful quiet. She was standing with her back against the trunk of the tree, with her fists clenched, and her mouth open, and her whole body shaking. Her bag had fallen. The bun lay in a puddle, a small brown ruined thing, in the water. A girl at the gate looked round, startled. Somebody laughed.
Miriam was looking at her.
She had stepped back. She was standing in the rain, in the open, with her hands held a little away from her sides, and her round face white. She was not offended. She was not hurt. She looked, Sarah thought, in a flash of dreadful lucidity, like a woman who has been told the result of a test, and finds that it is the one she was afraid of.
"Okay," said Miriam, very quietly.
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm so..."
"It's all right."
"I did not mean..."
"I know." She did not move. "Sarah. Look at me."
She looked.
"I'm not going to touch you. I will stand right here, and I won't come any closer. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Nobody's here. It's only me." Her voice was low, and steady, and slow. "You are at school. It's Tuesday. It is raining. Say it."
"What?"
"Say where you are."
"I'm at school."
"Good. And it's..."
"Tuesday." She was trembling so hard that her teeth clicked. "Tuesday. It's... it is raining."
"And I'm Miriam."
"You're Miriam."
"And I would never in a million years hurt you."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Yes." It came out as a sob. "Yes. I know you wouldn't. I know. It's not... it's not you. It is never you."
"I know," said Miriam.
She said it gently.
She stood in the rain, in the empty yard, with her hands open, and her eyes full of tears, and for a long time, neither of them spoke. The water drummed. A gutter overflowed. And in the quiet, Sarah slid down the trunk of the flame tree until she was crouching on the wet ground, in her uniform, with her arms wrapped round her knees and her face pressed into them, and shook.
They went to the chapel.
It was Miriam's idea. It was an old stone building at the far end of the school grounds, a small plain one, with a tin roof and no windows, where the girls went to pray and the boys from St. Joseph's, on feast days, to flirt. It was empty. It smelled of damp and candle wax and old hymn books. It had four rows of wooden benches, a cross, and a picture of the Virgin with a chipped nose. Rain roared on the roof. It was dark, and dry, and utterly private, and when they went in, and pulled the heavy door shut, the noise of the world went away.
They sat in the back row.
They sat a foot apart, not touching. Miriam had taken off her shoes and set them neatly under the bench, and sat with her feet drawn up and her skirt tucked round them, like a person on a train. She had given Sarah a handkerchief. It was clean, and large, and slightly ironed. She had said nothing at all. She sat looking at the cross, with her hands in her lap, and her face turned a little away, giving her, as one gives an animal in a trap, as much room as possible.
It was the kindest thing that anyone had ever done.
"I do not want to tell you," said Sarah, at last.
"Okay."
"I do not know if I can."
"Okay."
"It's..." She stopped. She wiped her face with the handkerchief. It was shaking so hard that she had to hold it with both hands. "If I tell you, you will be different. You'll look at me different. Everyone does. It's... I can't stand it."
"I will not."
"You can't promise that."
"I can." Miriam turned her head. In the dim grey light, her face was very still. "I'm going to tell you what I think. I've been thinking about it for two years. And I think I know. I think I've known for some time." A pause. "I do not think I want to be right."
The rain beat down.
Sarah looked at the floor. She looked at a small crack in the stone, running between two flags, filled with dust. She looked at it for a long time. She thought of a book under a mattress, in a small neat hand. She thought of a line in her father's writing, in a margin. Read this twice. In case.
Speak.
For yourself. First.
"It's Peter," said Sarah.
She said it in a voice so small that she could hardly hear it.
"I know."
"He..." Her throat closed. She pressed her fist against it. She tried again. She did it as she had been taught, in the courtroom of a dead man's imagination, in a clear plain voice, with the facts in order. "He has been doing something to me. Since I was fifteen. Since the August after my father. He comes in at night. He does... what a man does. He does it to me. I told him no. He does not stop."
It was a very short paragraph.
It was the second time she had said it. It was shorter than the first. It had no softening, and no explanation, and no defence. It lay between them, on the bench, in the cold stone air, like a small hard object that had been put down.
Miriam did not move.
She sat still, with her hands in her lap. She did not gasp. She did not cry out. She did not say anything at all. Her face, in the grey light, went through no change that Sarah could see. It was the face of a person who has been struck so hard that she has not yet felt it.
Then, very slowly, she began to shake.
It started in her hands. It went up her arms, into her shoulders, into her throat. She put them over her mouth, both of them, pressed tight, and her whole round body began to rock, forward and back, in short hard jerks. A sound came out between her fingers. It was a thin high wail, like a kettle. It was the sound that a child makes, who has dropped something that she can never pick up.
"Miriam..."
"Don't." She was sobbing. "Don't. Don't, I can't. Give me a minute."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't you dare say sorry!" It came out in a shriek. She had turned, with her face wet, and distorted, and fierce, and stared at Sarah with huge red eyes. "Don't you dare! Not you! Not you! You've got nothing... You've nothing to be..." She choked. She struck the bench with her fist, once, hard. "That pig."
"Miriam."
"That filthy... that dirty, hypocritical... in the front pew! With his hymn book! And my mother buys flour from him! She says what a good man! She sends him a cake at Christmas!" She was on her feet. She was pacing, barefoot, up and down the aisle, with her fists clenched and her plaits swinging, and her voice rising, high, cracked, out of control. "I am going to burn his shop down. I am. I will get a tin of paraffin. I'll get Joel. I will go round there at night, and I'll..."
"Miriam."
"And then I'll kill him."
"Miriam."
"What?"
"You haven't got a tin."
"I'll buy one!"
"You're in your socks."
There was a pause.
Miriam looked down. She was standing in the middle of the aisle in a pair of grey school socks, with a hole in one toe. She looked at them. She looked up. A small, hiccuping, appalled sound came out of her, and then another, and then she had sat down, abruptly, on the floor, among the hymn books, and put her face in her skirt, and was laughing and crying at once, in great jerking gulps.
And Sarah, who had not laughed in three weeks, who had not laughed, truly, from the stomach, since a day on a netball court, in the sun, among a heap of girls, felt something go loose in her chest. It was thin, and painful, like a splinter being drawn. It came up in her throat. It was not a laugh. It was a gasp. It was the sound of a person coming up for air.
She put a hand over her mouth.
She laughed.
It was a terrible sound. It was cracked and wet and tinged with hysteria. She sat in the back pew of a damp chapel, with a handkerchief in her fist, and rocked, and laughed, while her best friend sat on the floor in her socks, crying, and the rain thundered on the roof. It went on for a long time. It was neither funny nor sad. It was only enormous, and it had to come out.
When it was over, they were both limp.
They sat there. Miriam had crawled across the floor and propped herself against the end of the bench, with her head on her knees. She was breathing hard. Her eyes were swollen. There was a streak of dust down her cheek. And she lifted her head, slowly, and looked at Sarah, and said, in a hoarse voice, quietly, not at all like her own:
"I'm so sorry."
"You said that was not allowed."
"It's not for you." She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. "It's for me. I'm sorry that I did not see. I'm sorry I was so... stupid. I thought it was your father. I thought you were just sad. I was so sure." She gulped. "I should have known."
"You could not have."
"I might have."
"You couldn't." She heard her own voice, fierce. "I made sure. I made sure, Miriam. I did it on purpose. I was so good at it, I could have been a... a magician." She hit her knee with her fist. "That was the one thing I was good at."
"Okay."
"That's the horrible part. That I was so good."
"Sarah."
"What?"
"Come here."
She looked at the arm held out. It was a small round brown arm, in a creased blue sleeve, with a scab on the elbow. It was held very still, a little way off, palm up, like a hand held out to a dog. It did not reach. It did not press. It only lay there, in the air, steady, and waited.
She could have said no. She knew it. Miriam would have lowered it, at once, and said Okay, and sat there, as she had been, with her face turned away. But she looked at it, in the grey light, and felt the old terrible clenching begin, in her ribs, in her stomach, in her throat, and under it, very small and very bright, as a coal under ash, something else.
It's only Miriam.
She moved.
It took everything she had. She slid along the bench, an inch at a time, with her hands gripped between her knees. She put her head against her friend's shoulder. It was warm, and solid, and smelt of bread and chalk and rain. For one dreadful second every muscle in her body screamed. And Miriam did not move. She did not squeeze. She did not do anything. She sat there, like a post, while Sarah's whole length trembled against her, and then, as the shaking slowly eased, she put up one hand, very lightly, and laid it on the back of Sarah's head, like a person touching a very old and very fragile thing.
"It's not your fault," said Miriam.
She said it slowly.
"You hear me? It is not. Not any of it. You were fifteen. You were a child. You hadn't done anything. You were just a girl in a house, in your bed." She drew a shuddering breath. "He's a grown man. He knew what he was doing. He chose it. And you did not do one single thing to make it happen. Not your clothes. Not your face. Not how you walked. Not that you were alone. Not that you did not scream." Her hand pressed, gently. "He did it. Not you. He did."
Sarah did not answer.
She could not. She had her face pressed into a creased blue shoulder, and her mouth was open, and no sound was coming out of it. It was as though something that had been bolted shut, in her, for a very long time, had been very quietly unlatched.
It's not your fault.
It was a sentence she had read. It was on a poster, in a corridor, in letters a foot high. It had been said to her in assemblies, and in counselling lessons, by a woman in a grey cardigan, in a bored, bright, rehearsed tone. She had heard it a hundred times, as one hears the weather forecast. It had gone into her one ear, and out of the other, like a thing meant for somebody else.
But nobody had ever said it.
Nobody had ever looked at her, from a foot away, with a wet face, in a damp chapel, and said it to her. Nobody had said, You. Nobody had said it as if it were not a slogan, but a fact, as simple and as hard as a stone. And she sat with her head on her friend's shoulder, in the dark, and felt it go into her, very slowly, a long way down, past all the places where she kept the other things, the shame, the arithmetic, the pencil crosses. It went down and down. It did not stop. It came to rest, at last, somewhere very deep, in a place that she had thought was empty, and lay there.
It did not make the pain go away.
It only made it, for a moment, a different shape.
They talked for a long time.
It was not what she had imagined. Miriam did not ask for the story. She did not ask for dates, or details, or what was said. She asked, once, plainly, whether Sarah was safe at this moment, and when Sarah said that she did not know, that it depended on the night, she nodded, and said, "Then we have to think about that." She asked whether anyone knew. Sarah said her mother. Miriam went quiet.
"She knows?"
"I told her."
"When?"
"The first week."
"What did she say?"
"That we depend on him."
There was a long, long silence.
"I see," said Miriam.
She said it in the dry, careful, level tone of a person who has decided, at all costs, not to say what she thinks. She said nothing else. She sat with her mouth pressed tight and her eyes fixed on the Virgin's chipped nose, and Sarah saw the muscle in her jaw move, and move, and move.
"You can say it."
"No."
"I'd like you to."
"It would not help."
"It would help me."
"Why?"
"Because I have never heard anyone say it out loud," said Sarah.
Miriam looked at her. Then she looked at the floor. She put her hand flat on the bench, between them, with the fingers spread, and said, very slowly, "I think your mother loves you. I think she is terrified. I think she has made a choice that she'll regret till she dies." Her voice dropped. "And I think she is wrong. I think she is wrong, and she's hurting you, and it is not all right just because she is afraid."
The rain was easing. It had gone from a roar to a steady patter, and a lighter place had come into the doorway, a thin grey bar.
"I can't tell anyone else," said Sarah.
"Why not?"
"Because of what it'll do."
"What will it do?"
"It will... everything." She spread her hands. "My mother. The house. The school fees. My whole... it will all go. He said. He told me that he would take it away. He would stop paying. We would have nothing." She swallowed. "She told me. She said, think how we'll survive."
"That is not your responsibility."
"Isn't it?"
"No." It was said with such ferocity that the Virgin seemed to shake. "No, it is not. You are seventeen years old. You're a child. It is not your job to keep a grown woman in a house. It's not your job to pay for the roof. You aren't a... a payment." She was shaking again. "If the only way a family can survive is that a girl lets a man... it is not a family. It is a kind of... a kind of..."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"I wrote it down." She gave a small cracked laugh. "In my book. The same thing. In nearly the same words."
"You have a book?"
"Under the mattress."
"Does he know?"
"No."
"Good." Miriam sat up. She took a long breath. Her face, in the thin grey light, had changed. It had gone very calm. It was set. It had the look of a girl on a netball court, with the ball in her hands, who has seen, very clearly, the shape of the move. "Then we have to find somebody. A grown-up. Somebody who knows what to do. It cannot be my parents. It can't be your aunts. We need..."
"A teacher."
"Yes."
"Which?"
"I don't know." She was frowning. "Not the headmistress. She's a fossil. She'd say a prayer and send you home." She bit her thumb. "Mr. Mugisha? No. He is nice, but he has a... he looks out of the window. Madam Rose is a gossip. And Mr. Okello is scared of everything."
"What about Mr. Kato?"
She said it before she had thought.
It came out of her like a pebble out of a pocket. She had not been aware of having considered it. But she saw, as she said it, a quiet face, a pair of rimless glasses, and a plain brown cardigan. A man in the third row of a class, with a book open on his knee, saying, in a dry, unhurried voice, I would like to know what you think. Not what the author thinks. What you. She had written an essay for him in S5. It was about a boy who did not speak. She had put in it, without meaning to, a good deal more than the assignment asked. He had returned it, with a mark, and a single line at the bottom, in neat green ink. This is true. Thank you.
"Mr. Kato," said Miriam, slowly.
"He's head of Guidance and Counselling."
"He gives out the pamphlets."
"He doesn't shout. And he does not... he never says anything he doesn't mean."
"He's the one with the cardigan."
"He has two."
"He's always in the library at lunch."
"He reads."
"Everyone says he is boring."
"Everyone is stupid." She had said it with an unexpected vehemence. She sat up. A thin flush had come into her face. "He read my essay. He wrote on it, This is true. He did not write, Well done, or Excellent, or Keep it up. He wrote that. As if..." She stopped. "As if it mattered."
Miriam looked at her.
"Then we ask him," she said.
"I do not know if I can."
"We will do it together."
"What if he tells?"
"Then he tells." She took Sarah's hand, firmly, and held it. This time Sarah's arm did not flinch. It lay in her friend's, small and cold and trembling. "But I think that is what he's for. I think that is what a good adult is. Someone who tells the right person." She squeezed. "I'll sit next to you. I won't say anything. I will just be there. And if you can't talk, I will talk for you."
"You'd get into trouble."
"I'm always in trouble."
"You'd be involved."
"I already am." Her voice shook. "You're my best friend. I'm not leaving. I told you, the seat is still there."
The rain had stopped.
A low, pale, watery light had come into the doorway. Somewhere, a bird was singing, a single high note, and a boda boda went by on the road, with its engine whining. The whole grey world was dripping. Sarah sat in the back of the chapel, in the dusk, with her hand in her friend's, and looked at the picture of the Virgin with the chipped nose, who looked back at her, over the pews, with a kind of mild, gentle, unsurprised attention, as at somebody who has, after a long journey, come in out of the rain.
I told someone.
I told someone, and she believed me.
And the world did not end.
It seemed an extraordinary thing. It seemed to her that she had been holding her breath for three years, and had let it out, and the air that came in was thin and sharp and strange, like the air on a hill. She sat very still, in the quiet, and felt it fill her. And a small, bright, tentative, trembling thing, that she had thought was dead, lifted its head, in the middle of her chest, and looked about.
Perhaps.
Perhaps there is someone.
"I'm still scared," she said.
"Of course you are."
"I'm so scared that I can hardly breathe."
"I know." Miriam's thumb moved on the back of her hand. "But you said it. You said it out loud. And you are still here." She smiled, wetly, crookedly. "That's two things you didn't think you could do."
"Two?"
"Telling me. And laughing."
Sarah almost laughed again. It stuck in her throat. She held on to the hand, and looked down, and found, on the floor at their feet, between two pairs of shoes, a small brown crumpled paper bag. It had been trodden on. A dark stain had spread on one side.
"Your mother's bun," she said.
"It's squashed."
"It's ruined."
"We'll share it," said Miriam, and bent, and picked it up, and broke it in two.
It was damp, and flat, and tasted of rain and cinnamon. They ate it in the dim chapel, side by side, in a silence that was not empty, with a bar of grey light on the floor and the water still dripping from the roof. It was the best thing that Sarah had ever eaten. She ate it slowly, with her eyes shut, and thought that she would remember it, all her life, as the taste of the first time that anybody had held out a hand and not asked for anything back.
It's a start, she thought.
It is only a start.
But it is more than I had this morning.