Chapter 19
A Life After Silence
The first good morning came in June, and it was so small that she almost missed it.
She woke in the boarding house at Lwanda Girls', in a narrow iron bed, under a grey blanket, in a long dormitory with twenty beds, and lay for a moment, as she had every morning for ten weeks, waiting for the fear. She waited for the clench in the stomach, the quick cold scan of the room, the listening. It was quiet. A girl in the next bed was snoring, lightly, with her mouth open. A pale light was coming through the high windows, and somewhere on the lawn a bird was making a small flat repeated sound, like a person testing a pen.
She lay there, and listened, and nothing came.
Oh, she thought.
It was the strangest sensation. It was like putting a foot down for a stair that is not there, and finding the floor. She lay with her eyes open, looking at the ceiling, which was plain and white and without a crack, and did a slow inventory of her body. Her shoulders were down. Her hands were open on the blanket. Her breath went in and out, slow and even, all the way to the bottom. She was a girl in a bed, in a morning, with a bird.
I slept.
She had slept for six hours. She had not woken at three. She turned it over, carefully, as one turns a coin that one is afraid is false, and it was true. It lay on her chest, warm and small and extraordinary, like a cat.
"Why are you smiling?" said Miriam, from the next bed.
She had transferred in May. It had been a minor miracle of diplomacy, involving Mama Miriam, a headmistress, and a long and furious interview with a clerk in a ministry. She had arrived with a trunk, and a pillow, and a determined expression, and had said, to the matron, "I'm her cousin." The matron, who had been in the room on the night that the Old Girls' Fund committee had voted, and had cried, had looked at the two of them for a long moment, and said, "Bed twelve is free."
"I'm not smiling."
"You are. You've got a face like a goat that has found the key to a granary."
"I slept."
"I know. I watched." Miriam rolled over. She was lying on her stomach, with her chin on her fists and her plaits in a tangle, looking at her with enormous solemn eyes. "You didn't move. I thought you were dead. I leaned over and listened."
"You didn't."
"I held a mirror."
"Miriam."
"I'm joking. I held a compact." She grinned. It lit up her whole round face. "It steamed. Congratulations. You're alive, and you've had a good night, and it is Saturday, and there's pawpaw for breakfast."
"I'll have two."
"That's the spirit."
She lay back. She looked at the plain white ceiling. The bird was still testing its pen. And Sarah, in a narrow iron bed in a dormitory, with a friend on either side of her, in the thin gold light of a June morning, felt something happen in her chest that she could not at first recognise. It was a loosening. It was a tiny, warm, unsteady widening, as of a door opening on a dark house, and a little light getting in.
That's what it was, she thought. That's what it feels like.
It's only a morning.
It's only that nothing is wrong.
It did not last. She had not expected it to.
It would come and go for months, like weather. She would have a good week, a clear bright week of work and laughter and ordinary sleep, and then, on a Tuesday, in the middle of a lesson, a man would walk past the window in a pale blue shirt, whistling, and the whole floor would drop out. She would sit with her pencil in her hand and her heart going like a hammer, and the walls would lean in, and the voice of the teacher would recede to a drone. She would hear her own breathing. She would think, calmly, I am going to die. And then, after three minutes, or ten, it would pass, and she would find herself in a classroom, with a worksheet, and a girl beside her saying, Are you all right?
"I am fine," she would say.
And then, with an effort, "No. I am not. But I will be."
It was a new sentence. She had learned it from Sister Dorothy. I am not, but I will be. It was an honest one. It had two halves, and she had found that if she said both, the first did not feel so much like a trapdoor.
She learned a great many things, that term, that nobody had warned her about.
She learned that it was possible to be happy and afraid in the same moment. She was playing netball, one afternoon, in the sun, in her blue bib, with the dust flying, and found herself laughing, with a hard glorious fierce delight, as the ball slapped into her hands. And in the middle of the laugh, suddenly, a whistle blew, three short notes, very like a hymn tune, and she stopped dead, and stood, with the ball in her fists, and her mouth open, and the blood gone from her face. It was only the referee. She stood there, shaking, in the glare, while the whole court looked at her. And then she began to laugh again.
It is the same body, she thought. It holds both.
She learned that grief did not arrive on schedule.
It came at odd times. It came in the shower, or at supper, or on the path to chapel, ambushing her, without cause. It came when she saw a small girl in a pink nightdress on a poster. It came when a woman at the market called her daughter, in a rough warm scolding voice, Come here, you rascal. It came when Mr. Kato, passing her in the corridor, with a stack of papers, said Good morning, Counsel, by mistake, and stopped, and went scarlet, and said, I'm so sorry, and she had stood there, in front of the notice board, with her hand over her mouth, and been unable to say that it was all right, because it was, and it was not.
And she learned, most of all, that she was not the only one.
She did not go looking. It simply came out, by degrees, in the way a thing does when a door has been opened. A girl in the dormitory, a thin silent quiet girl called Rose, who had said nothing in two months, came to her one evening, in the washroom, and stood beside her at the basin for a very long time, without looking up. I saw you in the paper, she had said. And then, in a whisper: It was my uncle. They had stood there, side by side, in the sound of the tap, and neither of them had said another word. But in the morning, Rose had sat down next to her at breakfast, and put a bun on her plate.
There were three of them, in the end.
She never made a list. She never asked. They came to her, in ones and twos, in the dark, in the lull between prep and supper, at the end of a corridor, in the shadow of a stair. A tall girl from S5. A small one from S3, with a gap in her teeth. They did not say, Me too. They said, You were very brave. They said, I wish I had. They said, with their eyes on the floor, and their hands twisting in their skirts, Do you think anyone would believe me?
And Sarah, who was eighteen, and had no authority, and no answers, and a nightmare that came most Thursdays, said, each time, the only thing that she knew.
I believe you.
And it's not your fault.
It was the oldest thing in the world. It was a thing that had been said to her, once, in a damp chapel, by a girl in her socks. She said it as she had been given it, plainly, without ornament, and watched it go in. She watched a small hard shoulder drop. She watched a mouth begin to tremble. And she thought, with a kind of slow wonder, This is how it is passed. It's a thing you carry, and give, and carry. And it grows.
The decision came on the nineteenth of August, in a brown envelope.
It was a Tuesday. It was raining, a thin steady grey drizzle on the corrugated roof of the boarding house, and the whole school was shut up indoors, with the lamps on, in the middle of the afternoon. She was in the common room, with a Literature text, trying to understand a poem about a bird. Miriam was beside her, eating groundnuts. The matron put her head round the door.
"Sarah. A visitor. In the office."
She knew.
She did not know how. It was only that the matron's face, round the edge of the door, was so very carefully neutral. It was the face of a woman who has been told not to say anything. Sarah put down the book. She stood. She smoothed her skirt. And Miriam, without a word, rose, and took her hand, and went with her.
Ms. Nalwoga was waiting in the office.
She was sitting on the edge of the matron's wooden chair, in her grey suit, with her briefcase on her knees. She had a damp umbrella propped against the desk. Her hair was wet. She looked, as always, like a very small bird that had been out in the weather. And she looked up, when the door opened, with a face that was so entirely without expression that Sarah's heart gave a great slow knock.
"Sit," said Ms. Nalwoga.
She sat.
"I have had a letter."
She did not say anything else. She took it from the case, a long brown envelope, with a stamp, and a crest, and laid it on the desk. She did not open it. She held it between two fingers, with the edge towards Sarah, and looked at it, and her mouth twitched.
"It is from the office of the Resident State Attorney. At Masaka. Dated yesterday." She swallowed. "I have read it three times. I have read it in the car, and in the corridor, and again in the car. I do not want to tell you what it says. I should like you to read it yourself. But I think..." Her voice shook. "I think that I may not be able to stop myself."
"Please."
"They are not going to charge you."
The room was absolutely still.
It was like the moment after a bell has stopped. Sarah sat in the matron's guest chair, with her hands on her knees, and her eyes on the face across the desk, and heard it, and did not move. She heard the rain on the roof. She heard Miriam's breath, behind her, catch.
"The file has been reviewed," said Ms. Nalwoga, quickly, as though the words would run out. "The whole of it. The statements, the medical, the scene examination. The prior disclosures to the school and the Probation Officer. Your journal. The... the padlock. The gate was locked from the outside, with a key that was found in his trouser pocket. The bolt was on the inside. The wall..." She drew a breath. "He had made it impossible for you to leave. The Attorney says, and I am quoting, the accused, having locked the complainant into the premises, cannot be heard to say that she had a safe avenue of retreat."
Sarah did not speak.
"They are satisfied that you acted in defence of your person. That you were in imminent danger. That the force was reasonable. That you stopped, as soon as the threat was removed. And that you rendered aid." She was smiling. She did not seem to know that she was. "You held a cloth on him. The paramedic said so. He said it was the only reason that the bleeding was controlled."
"I did not think."
"I know."
"I just... I couldn't let him..."
"I know." The smile broke. It dissolved into something much more fragile. "The decision is that no charge will be brought. The matter is closed. As far as the State is concerned, Sarah, you did nothing wrong."
Nothing wrong.
She sat very still.
She had thought that it would be a flood. She had thought that, when it came, if it came, she would cry out, or leap up, or fall on her knees. She had pictured it a hundred times, in the dark. She had practised it. She had thought that it would be like the last bar of a symphony.
But it was not like that.
It was like setting down a basket.
It was a very quiet, very particular sensation. It was the feeling of a muscle that has been held tight for five months, and is let go. It began somewhere behind her ribs, and spread, slowly, outward, to her fingers, her scalp, the soles of her feet. It was not joy. It was relief, so deep and so physical that it was close to pain. She sat there, with her hands open on her knees, and her eyes shut, and the rain pouring down on the roof, and felt every part of her body, one by one, quietly, come back into her possession.
"Sarah?" said Miriam.
"I'm all right."
"You've gone grey."
"I think I'm going to be sick."
"Put your head down."
"No." She opened her eyes. "No. I am all right. It's only... I did not know I was holding it."
"Holding what?"
"All of it."
Miriam knelt. She put her arms round her, fiercely, from the side, with her cheek against Sarah's hair, and held on, and Sarah did not flinch. She sat in the chair, and let herself be held. She looked over her friend's shoulder at the small bright tearful face of her advocate, and the brown envelope on the desk, and the grey window, and the rain.
"What about him?" she said.
"Ah." Ms. Nalwoga's face changed. It sharpened. It took on the clear hard bright expression, like a blade turned to the light, that she wore when she walked into a courtroom. "That's the second thing."
"Tell me."
"He was discharged on the twelfth of April. The Detective Inspector arrested him at the gate of the hospital. He has been in remand at Masaka since. Bail was refused, twice." She leaned forward. "The charges were settled last week. There are three. The first is attempted rape, in respect of the night of the twentieth of March. The second and third are defilement, in respect of two particular dates that you were able to identify, with the entries in the book, and the corroboration of the medical, and the evidence of Mr. Kato. There'll be more, I think. They are reviewing the others."
"Defilement."
"Because you were under eighteen."
"I was fifteen."
"Yes."
"It's the law." She said it very softly. "The section that my father marked."
"The one with the pencil."
"Yes."
"He'll face it." The advocate's voice was very steady. "He will go to the High Court. At Masaka. There'll be a trial. It's expected in the first quarter of next year. You will be required to give evidence." She paused. "I want to be honest. It is going to be very hard. A good deal harder than anything that you have done. You'll stand in a box, in front of him, and a man in a wig will ask you questions for two days. He'll suggest that you are lying. He may suggest that you wanted it. He will ask why you did not scream."
"I know."
"You can say no."
"I won't."
"You could ask for a screen. Or a video link."
"I would rather see him," said Sarah.
She said it before she knew that she had. It came up from somewhere deep and still, simply, like a stone coming up through water. She heard it, and thought, Is that true?
Yes.
I think it is.
"I want to be in the room," she said. "I want to say it, to his face. I have said it to everybody else. I've said it to a policeman, and a doctor, and a woman with a notebook. I said it to a wall." She looked at her hands. "I think I should like to say it to him."
Ms. Nalwoga said nothing for a moment.
"Your father would have been proud," she said.
"He'd have been terrified."
"Both."
"Probably." She smiled. It was a small shaky one. "He would have said that he was shaking. He would have said that it was no reason."
"No."
"You do it afraid."
"Yes." The little advocate's eyes were bright. "That's the only way it is ever done."
She went to see her father on the first Sunday of September.
It was Aunt Harriet who drove her. She had borrowed a car from a neighbour, a small blue Toyota with a cracked windscreen and a smell of old cigarettes, and she drove it with extreme care, at thirty kilometres an hour, with her hands at ten and two, and a look of grim, absolute, unwavering concentration. They did not speak much. The road wound north, through hills of banana and coffee, and the sky, which had been clear all morning, filled slowly with high, white, slow-moving clouds. Sarah sat in the passenger seat, with her hands in her lap, and watched it go by.
She had not been there since the funeral.
It was a small village, on a red hill, six hours from Lwanda, by the old road, and she had forgotten how steep it was. They left the car at the bottom, under a mango tree, and climbed, on foot, up a narrow path between banana trunks, in the dust. The air was warm and thick and smelled of leaf-mould and woodsmoke. Hens ran across the path. A child, on a doorstep, with a baby on her hip, looked at them with grave round eyes. An old man, sitting in the sun with a pipe, raised a hand.
"That is your cousin Charles's father," said Aunt Harriet. "He's deaf. Do not shout."
"I wasn't going to."
"I'm only telling you."
At the top of the hill, in the shade of a big jackfruit tree, behind a low fence of sticks, was a patch of ground.
It was not large. It was perhaps ten paces by ten. It was overgrown, with long dry grass and a few late yellow flowers. There were eight graves, in two rows, each a long low mound, with a cross at the head. Some were old, and leaning. Some were new. At the end of the second row, on its own, was a plain white cross, made of cement, a little crooked, with a small brass plate, and a jam jar, half full of water, in which stood a few wilting stems.
JOSEPH NANKYA. Beloved husband and father.
A good man.
She stood at the fence.
It was very quiet. A breeze moved in the jackfruit, with a soft dry rustle. Somewhere below, in the valley, a cow was lowing. The sun came and went, behind the high clouds, and every time that it went, the whole hill darkened, and every time it came back, the grass flared green and gold.
"I'll wait in the car," said Aunt Harriet.
"You don't have to."
"I know." She laid a hand on Sarah's shoulder, very briefly. It was big, and warm, and rough. "Take as long as you like."
She went away down the path.
Sarah stood alone.
She stood for a very long time. She did not know what she had expected. She had thought that there would be a feeling. She had thought that she would be overwhelmed. But the cross was only a cross. The mound was only earth. It was an ordinary bit of ground, on an ordinary hillside, with grass on it, and a jam jar. She felt a little foolish. She felt like a person who has come a great distance to see a famous building, and found it smaller than the picture.
He is not here, she thought.
He's not in there. He is somewhere else. He is in the way that I stand. In the way I say a word. In a pencil with the end chewed flat.
She opened the gate.
It was a gate of sticks, tied with banana fibre. It swung, with a faint creak. She walked in, between the mounds, and stopped at the end of the second row. She did not kneel. She stood, with her hands at her sides, in her plain blue dress, with her head bowed, and looked at the small brass plate.
"Hello, Taata," she said.
Her voice sounded strange. It was too loud. It went out into the hot still air, and nobody answered.
She took a breath.
"It's me. Counsel." She gave a small cracked laugh. "I know. It has been a long time. I'm sorry. I've been busy. There was a lot going on."
A bird sang in the jackfruit.
"I do not know where to begin." She was looking at the cross. "I think that I should just say it. I should do it as you taught me. Clear, in order, no adjectives." She swallowed. "Facts."
She told him.
She told him the whole of it. She stood on a red hill, in the sun, among the dead, and said it, aloud, in a low steady voice. She did not weep. She told him about a man who came with a sack of rice, and a house with no bolt. She told him about a conversation in a garden. She told him about a green book, and a tin of gravel, and a list of crosses. She told him about the law, and the pencil in the binding. She told him about a night in March.
She told him about the knife.
It was easier than she had thought. It was like reading a statement. It came out in short flat sentences, in the order that it had happened, and the grass went on moving, and the bird went on singing, and nobody interrupted. And when she came to the end, she stopped, and stood with her mouth open, and her throat aching, and said, in a voice that had gone small:
"I did not know how to do it any other way."
The breeze moved.
"I'm not sorry that I did it. I want you to know that. I have tried to be. I thought I ought to be. I've sat in a room with a woman, and said, I'm sorry that he was hurt. And I am. I am sorry that a man was hurt. But I am not sorry that I stopped him." She was shaking. "I think that is allowed. I think you would say it was."
You are allowed to leave any room in which you are not safe.
And you may never be required to apologise.
"I read your list," she said. "The one that you wrote. For when I was eighteen."
She felt the tears begin. They were quiet. They ran down her face, in the heat, and she did not wipe them.
"Number six. You said that you'd like it on the record. That nobody has the right. Not an uncle. Not a priest. Not your own father." Her voice cracked. "I heard it. I've heard it. I wish that I'd heard it when you said it. I wish that you'd said it again, when I was older. I wish that you were here, so that you could."
She wiped her face with the heel of her hand.
"I'm still frightened. Sometimes. I should tell you. I am not brave. I know that Mr. Kato says I am, and Miriam, and Ms. Nalwoga, and they're all very kind. But it is not like that. It's not a thing that you are. It's something that you do, in the middle of being afraid. And then you do it again." She laughed, unsteadily. "I wake at three o'clock. I check the door. I hear a man whistle and I forget my own name. I have to say it over. I'm at school. It is Tuesday. I'm Sarah."
She paused.
"But I'm trying to live. I wanted to tell you that. That's all. I'm trying. I am sitting my exams. In November. Mr. Kato thinks I'll get fifty-two points. He says that if I do, there is a bursary. For Law. He says it is a long shot. He says it with that face." She smiled. "I'm going to try for it. I've started to. I read the Evidence Act. It's the one with the green cover."
The sun came out.
It came all at once, from behind a cloud, and the whole hill lit. The grass blazed. The jackfruit shone. The brass plate flashed, a small hard point of light, and she shaded her eyes, and for a second the cross was a dazzle, a white blur, in the heart of which, if she wished it, she could have seen a long thin man in a crooked tie, turned a little to one side, laughing at something outside the picture.
She did not wish it.
She had learned that. She had learned that it was not a thing one could force. She stood there, with her hand over her eyes, in the blaze, and let the light be only light.
I do not need to see you, she thought.
I know where you are.
She lowered her hand. The sun slid back behind its cloud, and the hill went quiet.
"There is something else," said Sarah.
She hesitated. She looked at the jam jar, with its stems.
"I think that I have been, for a long time, a person that this happened to. I was fifteen, and it happened. And after that, I was only that. I was the girl. I was the thing in the house. I could not see myself as anything else." She drew a breath. "I think it was what he wanted. I think that it's what they all wanted. They wanted me to be small."
The bird in the jackfruit had stopped.
"But I'm not. Not only. I was a goal defence. I was the best debater in the district. I did voices. I could make Miriam laugh till she cried. I was funny. I had the sort of mind that argues with a headmistress about a pencil case." Her voice trembled. "And I think that it is still there. I think that it's been there the whole time. It was only waiting."
A dream does not die when it is forgotten.
She did not know where that came from. It was a line from a book, perhaps, or something that someone had said. But it fitted. She stood in the quiet, with her face wet, and felt it settle into place, like a key in a lock.
"I am more than the worst thing that happened to me," she said.
She said it aloud.
It was the plainest sentence in the world. It had seven words, and none of them was large. She said it to a cross, on a hill, in the afternoon, with a jam jar of dying flowers, and a breeze moving in a tree, and she heard it go out into the air. And it was not a prayer, or a slogan, or a thing from a poster. It was only the truth. It was a thing that she had found out, slowly, with great labour, like a coin at the bottom of a river.
More than the worst thing.
I am a person.
I'm a person who has had a terrible thing done to her, and has done a terrible thing, and is going to sit an exam.
She laughed.
It came up unexpectedly, wet and low, and she put her hand over her mouth. She stood among the graves, in her blue dress, in the heat, with the tears running down, and laughed, softly, helplessly, for a long time. It was the first time that she had laughed at her father's grave. It was not disrespectful. She knew that. She knew that he would have laughed too. He would have taken off his glasses, and wiped them, and said, in his mild dry voice, Counsel, you've made an excellent submission.
"Thank you, Taata," she said.
She bent, and took the jam jar, and carried it to the standpipe at the bottom of the plot, and rinsed it, and filled it with fresh clean water. She picked a handful of the yellow flowers from the long grass, and a spray of green, and arranged them, carefully, as she had seen her mother do. She set the jar down at the foot of the cross. She stood back.
It looked very small. It looked like the kind of thing that a child would do.
It's enough, she thought.
She turned.
At the gate, she stopped, with her hand on the sticks. She looked back. The sun had come out again, and lay in a long bar on the grass, and the little white cross, and the jar, in which the flowers, bright and small and very yellow, trembled in a wind that she could not feel.
"I'll come again," said Sarah.
"I will bring the results."
And she went down the hill, between the banana trunks, in the dust and the warmth, toward a blue Toyota, and a tall woman in navy at the wheel, who looked up as she approached, and saw her face, and did not ask a single question, but leaned across and opened the door.