Chapter 4
The First Secret
She would never be able to tell it in order.
She tried, later, many times. She tried for the police, and for a woman with a notebook, and for a quiet man in a black gown. She tried for herself, alone, at night, on the edge of a bed, with her eyes shut. And every time, she found that it would not go into a line. It would not begin and then continue and then end, as a story does. It lived in her in another way, in pieces, each one separate and bright, like the shards of a plate: a sound, a smell, the colour of a wall, the exact weight of a blanket. Between the pieces there was nothing. There was a long white space, like a field of snow.
She did not think of it as a gap. She thought of it as a mercy.
It was a Thursday, in the last week of September.
Her mother was not at home. That was how it was arranged. A message had come the evening before, from Masaka, by a boy on a bicycle, to say that Aunt Specioza had been taken ill, a fever, a bad one, and could Grace come. For a night. Two at the most. Her mother had packed a bag in ten minutes. She had stood in the passage in her good grey coat, with the strap on her shoulder, and had said, to Peter, with an anxious frown, "I do not like to leave. The girl is not used..."
"She will be perfectly all right."
"I know. But the house..."
"Grace." He had laid a hand on her arm. "Go. Your sister needs you. I will look after Sarah. We shall manage very well." A smile. "Won't we, Sarah?"
She had said, "Yes."
She had said it in the hall, in her school uniform, with her bag in her hand. It had seemed such a small thing, such an ordinary thing, to say.
The pieces began at about eleven.
She was asleep, and then she was not. It was the slippers that woke her. She heard them before she was properly awake, the soft slow flat sound of rubber on tile, coming along the passage, and she lay in the dark with her eyes open and her whole body listening, and thought, It is the toilet. It was what the slippers always did, at night. They went to the toilet, and came back.
They did not come back.
They stopped outside her door.
She heard the handle.
It was a very small sound. It was a metallic dry click, and the faint gasp of the hinges, and then a bar of yellow light fell across her bed from the passage, and she sat up. She sat up so fast that the room swam.
"Who is it?"
"It's me."
"What do you want?"
"Shh."
He had come in. She could see the shape of him against the light, large and soft-edged, in his vest. He closed the door behind him. He did it gently, so that it made no noise. And the room, which had been dim and grey, with the moon in the window, went entirely dark, and in the dark she heard him breathing.
"Peter?"
"Be quiet."
"I want... I want to go to the toilet."
"In a minute."
"Please."
"I said, be quiet." His voice was very low. It was not the voice that he used at church. It had no warmth in it, and no kindness, and no anger either. It was level, and close, and calm, like the voice of a man giving an instruction to a labourer. "You will not make a noise. Do you understand? There is nobody to hear. The neighbours are asleep. Your mother is in Masaka. And if you scream, you will only make a fool of yourself."
She could not speak.
It was the strangest thing. She had thought that if it ever came, she would fight. She had pictured it, on the walk to school, with a hard clear satisfaction, as one imagines a speech: I will scream. I will bite. I will run. She had been a goal defence on the netball team for two years. She was fast. She was tall. She had never been afraid of a boy in her life.
But there was no air in the room. There was nothing in her chest at all. She sat in the bed with the cover held up to her chin, with both fists, and her mouth open, and could not make a single sound. It was as if somebody had put a hand over it.
Say no.
Say no. Say it. Say it.
"No," she whispered.
It was a tiny cracked sound. It was not even a word. It went out into the dark like a moth, and was gone.
"Shh," said Peter. "It is all right."
A crack in the ceiling.
It ran from the corner by the window to the lamp, in a long, thin, wavering line, with a branch near the end. She had never noticed it. She had looked at that ceiling for four weeks, every night, in the moonlight, and it had been smooth. Now she saw the crack. She saw it with enormous clarity. It was shaped like a river, on a map, with a small delta at the mouth. It was very beautiful.
She looked at the river.
She looked at it so hard that she could see each tiny fork. She followed it from the source to the sea. She told herself that she was in a boat, on the river, going down. She told herself the names of the towns. Jinja. Kamuli. Namasagali. She had learned them for Geography. She said them over, in her head, in order, like a child saying her tables.
Jinja. Kamuli. Namasagali.
There was a sound in the room. It was not important.
Jinja. Kamuli.
There was the smell of beer, and soap.
Namasagali.
She went very far away.
She did not know how far. She did not know for how long. There was a place, she discovered, a kind of high cold room, a long way back inside her own head, where nothing could reach. She had never been there before. It was very quiet. It had white walls. She stood in it, still, with her hands at her sides, and looked down through a small round window at a girl in a bed, a long way below, and thought, with perfect calm, That is somebody else.
That is not me.
I will wait here until it is over.
It was over.
She did not know when. She came back into herself slowly, as one comes up from under water, in stages, with a roaring in her ears. The ceiling was still there. The crack was still there. But she was lying on her side, with her knees drawn up, and her face turned to the wall, and she could not feel her hands.
The bed creaked.
Somebody was sitting on the edge of it. She could feel the weight, the slow sag of the mattress, and the warmth, and the smell. She did not turn her head. She lay with her eyes fixed on the plaster, a few inches from her face, a patch of white with a single tiny hole in it, where a nail had been.
"Sarah."
She did not answer.
"Look at me."
"No."
"Sarah." The voice was almost gentle. It was the voice of a man speaking to a child who has had a bad dream. "Listen to me. I'm only going to say this once. And I want you to hear it properly."
She stared at the hole in the wall.
"You are going to be tired in the morning. You will wash. You'll go to school. You will eat your breakfast, and say good morning to your mother when she comes, and be polite." A pause. "And you will not tell anyone."
She said nothing.
"Do you know why?"
"No."
"Because nobody will believe you."
It was said simply, without malice. It was a fact, like the weather. She heard it go into her, very slowly, like a long thin pin.
"You are a young girl," said Peter. "You are in a new house. You have been upset, since your father. Everyone knows. Everyone has said how difficult it has been for you. They say you are unsettled. They say you are stubborn. Your Aunt Specioza has told me that herself." The mattress shifted. "And I am a respectable man. I'm an usher in the church. I'm known to the pastor, to the chairman, to the police commander's wife. I pay my taxes. I have never so much as been late with a bill."
Don't listen.
"Who do you think they will believe?"
Jinja. Kamuli.
"And there is something else." He had lowered his voice. It came, soft and close, at her ear. "You've seen this house. You have seen what it costs. The food. The fees. The roof." A small pause. "Do you know who is paying for all that?"
She knew.
"Your mother knows too. She knows exactly. She's said so, to me, a great many times. She says she doesn't know how she would have survived." He sighed. "I'm not boasting. I only say it. If I were to be... disappointed. If there were to be a misunderstanding in this house, something that made me feel I could not stay. I would have to take it back. All of it. The fees would stop. The rent. The food. She'd have to go back to a hundred and eighty thousand shillings." A silence. "And then what?"
She did not breathe.
"It would be so sad," said Peter. "For a woman like that, to lose everything twice."
She heard the bed creak. She felt the weight go. He stood. She heard the soft dry slither of cloth. She heard his feet on the floor, and the faint scrape of a chair, and then his voice, from the door, very bright, very kind, ordinary.
"Goodnight, my daughter. Sleep well."
The door opened.
A flat yellow bar of light fell across the floor, and went out.
She lay for a long time without moving.
She could not have said how long. The moon had gone from the window. The room was black. A cock crowed, far off, and was silent, and another answered. She was lying on her side, in the dark, with her knees against her chest, and she was still, so still that she could hear the tick of the clock in the passage and the steady slow pulse of her own blood in her ear.
I am not going to move.
If I do not move, it will not have happened.
It was an absurd thought. She knew it was absurd. She was a girl who read the newspaper and had won a debate on the motion This house believes that evidence matters. She was not stupid. She knew exactly what had occurred. She had the word for it. It came to her out of the dark, a dry cold clinical word, from a poster on a wall at school, from an assembly, from a lesson in Guidance and Counselling that she had sat through, a year ago, with her chin on her hand, bored.
Defilement.
She had thought it was a thing that happened to other girls.
She had thought it happened in other places, in the dark, in the bush, to girls who had walked home alone. She had thought that she would know. She had thought, in the quiet, serious, rather pleased way of a clever child, that it would come with a sign, and that she would be ready.
It had come in her own house, with the door shut, from a man who had brought rice.
It is not true.
It did not happen.
She sat up.
It took a great effort. Her whole body was stiff and cold. She sat on the side of the bed, with her feet on the floor, and put her hands on her knees, and looked at them. They were shaking. They were small and thin, ordinary, with a scab on one knuckle from netball. They did not look like the hands of a person to whom something had been done.
She stood up.
She walked, in the dark, across the room, carefully, as one walks on ice, to the door. She turned the handle. She went out, along the passage, past the kitchen block, in her bare feet, to the bathroom. She did not turn on the light. She stood in the black, with her back against the wall, and found the tap, and ran it.
The water was cold. She put her hands under it, and then her face. She washed her face for a very long time. She washed it until her skin stung, and her teeth chattered, and then, because it was not enough, she took off her nightdress and stood under the shower, in the dark, and ran it as hot as it would go.
She did not cry.
She would have liked to. She stood with her forehead against the cold wet tile, and the water drumming on her back, and waited for it, as one waits for a sneeze. She felt it there, at the back of her eyes. She felt the great hot swollen shape of it, pushing. But it would not come. It was stuck, like a stone in a pipe. It was as if the place in her where the tears were kept had been sealed off, from the inside, by a very small, very quiet, very efficient hand.
Make no sound.
She stood there until the hot water ran out.
She went to school the next morning, and it was the strangest day of her life.
She did not know how she did it. She put on her uniform. She plaited her hair, in the dark, by feel, because she could not bear to look at the mirror. She ate a slice of bread and drank a cup of tea in the kitchen, standing up, with Peter's newspaper rustling in the other room, and the sound of the radio, a man reading the news. Everything was as usual. Everything was exactly the same. The kettle sang. A crow was calling on the roof. At seven o'clock she picked up her bag, and put it on her shoulder, and said, clearly, in the doorway, in a voice that she had not known she possessed:
"I'm going."
"Have a good day," said Peter, from behind the paper.
"Thank you."
She walked.
It was twenty-five minutes, from Kitende Close to the school, down a long red hill, and across the market, and along a road lined with jacaranda. She had done it thirty times. She knew every step. But that morning it was a country she had never seen. The road was too bright. The colours were too sharp, the red of the dust, the green of the leaves, the great blue bowl of the sky. A woman was selling mandazi, by the roadside, from a basin, and the smell of frying came up to her in a thick warm wave, and she nearly vomited. A boy on a bicycle went past, ringing his bell, and she flinched so violently that she dropped her bag.
"Sorry," said the boy, over his shoulder.
She picked it up. She stood with it in her arms, in the road, and found that she was shaking.
Walk.
Just walk.
Nobody was looking. That was what astonished her. A hundred people passed her on that road, in the first hour of the morning, and not one of them turned her head. They were going to work. They were arguing, and laughing, and carrying baskets. A man in a suit was shouting into a phone. Two small girls in blue uniforms were skipping, hand in hand, singing a rhyme. The whole town, the whole bright noisy morning, went round her like water round a stone, and nobody knew. It seemed impossible. It seemed to her that there must be something visible about her, some mark, some change in the way she walked, that anyone with eyes would see.
But there was nothing. There was only a tall thin girl in a school uniform, with her bag, in the dust.
So that is how it works, she thought.
That is how it hides.
"You look awful," said Miriam.
They were in the classroom. It was the first lesson, History, and Mr. Mugisha was droning about the Berlin Conference, and the whole of S3 was slumped at its desks in the thick warm air with its chins on its hands. Miriam had slid into the seat beside her. She was eating a bun from a paper bag under the desk. She had sugar on her chin.
"I didn't sleep."
"Why?"
"I had a headache."
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
"I said, I had a headache."
"Okay." Miriam took a bite. She chewed, thoughtfully, with her eyes on Sarah's face. "Do you want half?"
"No."
"It's cinnamon."
"No, thank you."
"You always want half." She held it out, and Sarah, looking at the soft brown crumbling thing in her friend's fat damp hand, felt her stomach turn. She shook her head, quickly. "Okay. Okay. Sorry. I will eat it myself."
"I'm sorry. I'm just..."
"It's fine." Miriam patted her arm. It was a quick, light, comfortable pat, the touch of somebody who had touched her a hundred times, and Sarah, who had not flinched at it once in three years, found that she was pressed flat against the back of her chair, with her fists clenched on the desk, and her heart thundering.
Miriam stopped.
She did not say anything. She took her hand away, slowly, and put it in her lap. She looked at Sarah, with her round face serious, and a small crease between her eyes.
"Sorry," she said again.
"It's not you."
"Okay."
"I just don't like being touched. Today."
"Okay." A pause. "Is something wrong?"
Tell her.
It was a quick, wild, shocking thought. It rose in her chest like a bird. Tell her. Tell her now. Say, Miriam, last night. She could see the words. She could see them, one after another, ranged in a row, like stones, on the desk between them. She had only to pick them up. And Miriam, who was loud and silly and kind, who had once punched a boy for calling her a name, would put down the bun, and look at her, and say, What? and her face would change.
And then what?
And then everyone will know.
Nobody will believe you.
She heard it in his voice. She heard it in the clear quiet reasonable tone of a man reading a list. I am a respectable man. I am an usher. She saw the whole of it, with an appalling clarity, like a map: her mother's face, grey and still; the car of the policeman, drawing up at the gate; the white envelope with the school's stamp, and a man in a suit saying, We regret to inform you that, owing to circumstances.
"No," said Sarah. "Nothing is wrong."
"You'd tell me."
"Yes."
"Promise?"
"I promise."
It was the first lie.
She said it so easily. She was astonished at how easily it came, how smooth it was, how well it fitted in her mouth. She looked her friend in the eye and smiled, a small tired smile, the kind one gives to a person who has asked after one's health. And Miriam, after a moment, smiled back, uncertainly, and shrugged, and went on with her bun.
Mr. Mugisha droned.
Sarah sat with her hands flat on the desk. She looked at the blackboard, at a map of Africa, drawn in coloured chalk, divided into the neat pastel provinces of an old empire. She looked at it for forty minutes, and could not have told anyone what was written there. And she thought, So this is what it is to carry a secret.
It is very heavy.
It is much heavier than I thought.
Her mother came home at six.
She came up the path from the taxi, in her grey coat, with her bag on her shoulder, looking tired and relieved. Aunt Specioza was better. It had only been a fever. She had sat up in bed on the second day and asked for a bowl of porridge. Grace stood in the hall, and kissed Peter on the cheek, and put down the bag, and said, "Oh, it is so good to be home." And then she turned, and saw Sarah in the doorway of the kitchen, and her whole face lit.
"There she is. My girl. Come here."
She went.
She did not know how. She walked across the hall, with her arms at her sides, and let herself be held. Her mother was warm and smelled of soap and bus and the sweet dust of Masaka. She held her very hard. "I missed you," she said. "I thought of you all night. Were you good? Did you eat?"
"Yes."
"I brought you something." She felt in her coat. "Look. A pencil case. With a unicorn. Specioza chose it. She says you're not too old."
"Thank you, Mama."
"Is everything all right?"
Over her mother's shoulder, in the doorway of the sitting room, in a clean white shirt, with a glass of juice in his hand, stood Peter.
He was smiling.
It was a small, warm, perfectly kind smile. It said, Well done. It said, You have been good. He lifted the glass, in a tiny salute, and drank.
"Yes," said Sarah. "Everything is fine."
She waited three days.
She did not know why three. It was only that she needed time to be certain. She told herself that she was gathering her thoughts. She lay in her small white room, at night, on the daisies, in the dark, with the chair that she had jammed under the handle, and went over it in her head. She wrote it in the green exercise book, in short sentences, in pencil, in a hand she did not recognise. Thursday. Night. Mama away. He came in. She looked at it. She rubbed it out. She wrote it again.
On the Sunday she went to church.
She sat in the third row of St. Luke's, in her yellow dress, beside her mother, and heard the pastor read about the lost sheep. She heard the choir. She heard, from the back, as he came up the aisle with the collection plate, a soft slow hymn tune, whistled under the breath. She did not turn. She sat with her eyes fixed on the cross above the altar, a plain wooden one, with a crown of thorns, and her fingers locked so hard together that the nails went white.
He came to the end of the pew. He held out the plate. He smiled at her mother, and her mother put in a note. He smiled at Sarah.
"God bless you, my daughter," said Peter.
She did not look at him.
After the service there was tea on the lawn. Women in bright gomesis stood in circles, with cups and saucers, talking. A woman in purple took her mother's hand, and said, with feeling, "You are so fortunate, Grace. Such a good man. We were all praying for you." Her mother, flushed with happiness, said, "I know. I know." An old man in a hat shook Peter's hand and said, loudly, "A pillar of this church!" And Peter, bowing his head, said, with great modesty, that he did only what any Christian would do.
Who will they believe?
She stood on the lawn, with a cup of tea going cold in her hand, and looked at them. She saw them in the sun, in their bright dresses, nodding and smiling. She saw her mother's face. She thought, very clearly, They will believe him.
They already do.
She put down the cup, on the grass, and walked away.
It was the following Tuesday that she stood outside her mother's door.
It was ten o'clock at night. The house was quiet. Peter had gone out, to a meeting, at the church hall, a vestry meeting, to do with a roof. He would not be back until eleven. Sarah had waited for the gate. She had waited, in her room, with her hands on her knees, listening for the bolt, the crunch of tyres on the gravel, the hum of the engine dying away down the hill. And when it had gone, she had stood up, slowly, and picked up the green book, and walked out into the passage.
The house was very dark. There was only a thin line of yellow light under her mother's door, at the end, where the master bedroom was. She walked toward it. She walked on the very edges of her feet, as she had learned, so that the boards did not creak. The passage was long. It seemed to her to be growing longer, with every step, like a corridor in a dream.
She stopped at the door.
She could hear her mother moving inside. It was a small, familiar, domestic sound. The scrape of a drawer. The clink of a glass. The faint rustle of a blanket being shaken out. She could hear her humming. It was very low, and tuneless, a hymn with the words worn off. Tukutendereza. It was the one her father used to hum.
Mama, she thought.
She lifted her hand to knock.
It hung there, in the dark, a few inches from the wood. She looked at it. It was shaking so much that it seemed to be blurred. She could not make it move. She stood with her knuckles raised to the door, in the thin cold line of light, and the green book pressed against her chest, and her whole body locked, like an animal on a road.
If you say it, you cannot unsay it.
If you say it, everything will change.
She will look at you. She will say, What? And you will say, Mama, last Thursday.
And she will protect you.
Of course she will.
She is your mother.
She heard it, distinctly, in a clear, small, childish, hopeful voice, which was her own. It was the voice of a girl of nine, standing up in a classroom, with her fists clenched, saying, It is not fair. It was the voice of a girl who knew that, if she stood up, and spoke the truth, in a clear loud voice, somebody would listen. Her father had told her. He had said it, in a hospital, with his last breath. Speak.
She drew a very long breath.
She closed her eyes.
And, on the other side of the door, her mother stopped humming.