Chapter 7
The Girl Behind the Smile
On the first Saturday of the new term, in a stiff wind, in front of two hundred screaming girls, Sarah Nankya intercepted a pass that nobody thought she could reach, and the whole of Lwanda Girls' Secondary School went mad.
It happened so fast that she did not afterward remember it as a thing she had done. She remembered it as a thing that had been done through her. She was playing goal defence, in a blue bib, at the end of the court, against St. Joseph's, with six minutes left and the score at twenty-one all. The sky was a hard pale blue, torn with cloud. The dust blew in her eyes. She saw the St. Joseph's centre, a big girl called Agnes, with legs like fence posts, take the ball at the half-line, and look left, and her whole body said right, and Sarah, who had been watching her feet for forty minutes, said, silently, no.
She was already moving.
She did not feel the ground. She went up, with her arm flung out, fingers spread, and the ball slapped into her palm with a sound like a gunshot, and she came down, spinning, with her heart going like a drum, and she heard, from the whole of the touchline, at once, a noise like a wave breaking.
"SARAH!"
"NANKYA!"
"Run!" screamed Miriam, from the sideline, with her plaits flying. "Run, you donkey!"
She ran.
She would not remember the rest. She remembered passing, and the blue blur of a team-mate, and the ball going up in a long high arc into the sun. She remembered the whistle. She remembered finding herself on her back on the dry red grass with six girls on top of her, shrieking, and a great hot dizzy laugh coming up out of her own chest, from a place she had not known was still there.
She was laughing.
She was lying in the dust, with her bib twisted round her neck and somebody's elbow in her stomach, and she was laughing so hard that the tears ran into her ears. And above her, looking down, upside down, with her round shining face split by the biggest grin in the district, was Miriam.
"You did it!" she yelled. "You did it! Twenty-two to twenty-one! You hero! I am going to put you in the newspaper!"
"You do not have a newspaper."
"I have a notice board."
"It is one sheet of paper."
"It is very influential," said Miriam, with dignity, and fell on her.
It was the best day she had had in a year.
She knew it even while it was happening. She sat on the grass, afterwards, in the long gold afternoon, with a bottle of warm Fanta between her knees, in the middle of a ring of sweating, exhausted, shrieking girls, and watched the whole thing as from a little distance, with a stunned and greedy attention, as one watches a fire from the window of a cold house. The sun was in her eyes. Somebody had a radio. Somebody was singing. A boy from the boys' school, leaning on the fence, was pretending not to look. And she was happy.
It was extraordinary. She had thought that she had lost the knack of it. She had thought that happiness, like a language, was something that could be forgotten, if one did not speak it for long enough. But it came back, at once, whole, as a tune comes back. It was in her hands and her feet and the muscles of her legs. It was in the taste of the Fanta, orange and sweet. It was a thing that had nothing at all to do with what was in her room, or her head, or her mother's face. It was simply hers.
I am sixteen, she thought.
She had been sixteen for a month. She had barely noticed. There had been a cake, a small one, from the shop, with a candle, and her mother had made a speech, rather shakily, and Peter had given her a gold chain in a box. For my daughter. She had put it on. She had worn it for two days. And then she had taken it off, and put it at the bottom of her bag, under her books, and had not looked at it since.
But here, in the grass, in the afternoon, she was just a girl.
She was a goal defence, with a bruise on her knee and a cut on her lip, who had won a match. She was a person with a best friend. She was somebody who laughed. She was all the things that she had been before, and had put away, as one puts away the good china. And she sat in the sun and felt them come back, one by one, and was astonished to find that they were still there.
This is who I am, she thought.
This is who I am meant to be.
"What are you thinking?" said Miriam.
"Nothing."
"You have a face."
"I'm happy."
"Is that what it is?" Miriam stretched out on the grass, with her hands behind her head, and looked at the sky. "It suits you. You should do it more."
"I'll try."
"Do. It's disturbing when you don't." A pause. A bee droned. "I have missed you, you know."
"I've been here."
"No, you haven't." Miriam did not say it unkindly. She said it to the clouds, in a thoughtful voice. "You've been in the room. But you were somewhere else. I kept thinking, Where has she gone? And I didn't know where to look."
Sarah said nothing.
"I'm not asking," said Miriam. "I want to be clear. I'm not going to ask. I'm only saying that I noticed. And if you want to come back, there's a seat." She rolled her head, and grinned. "I've kept it warm."
Sarah turned her face away.
She looked at the hills, at the long blue line of them, hazy in the heat, with a hawk turning above them. Her throat was tight. She did not trust herself to speak. She sat with the bottle in her hand and her heart beating, and felt, very close to the surface, the thing that was waiting.
Tell her.
She did not.
But she put out her hand, without looking, on the grass, and found Miriam's, and held it. Miriam did not say anything. She only squeezed, once, hard, and let her keep it.
She was good at it. That was the dreadful part.
She would think, afterward, with a sort of bitter wonder, that she should have been a spy. She had a talent for the double life. She had discovered it at fifteen, in a week, as a person discovers she can swim, and she had refined it, over a year, until it was as natural as a second skin. At school, she was Sarah. She was the girl who could do the Chemistry, and who got into trouble for singing in the corridors. She was the one who did the voices, who had a gift for mimicry, so that the whole of S4 could be reduced to helpless tears by a ten-minute impression of the headmistress eating a mango. She was the captain of the debating team, the girl who had once, in the first round of the inter-school championship, knocked out a boy from Kampala who had called her rural.
"Madam Chair," she had said, "I would like to point out that the honourable member has been wearing the same expression since he arrived, which I can only describe as that of a man who has swallowed a dictionary and is waiting to see if it will agree with him."
They had had to stop the debate for four minutes.
She was funny. She had always been funny. It had been her father's gift to her, the dry, quiet, sideways humour of a man who spent his days behind a counter, and she had never lost it. It was one of the things that had survived. And she used it, now, as a shield, a thin bright metal thing, held up between herself and the world, that glittered, and dazzled, and made people laugh, so that they did not see what was behind.
She's so lively, the teachers said.
She is such good company.
Nothing gets her down.
She heard it. She heard it, in the corridors, at the notice board, in the staff-room doorway, with a small cold satisfaction. It was very easy. It was only a matter of keeping the face still, and the voice light, and the eyes on the right spot. She had learned to hold her breath, and speak on the out-breath, so that no one could hear the shake. She had learned to sit with her back to the wall. She had learned to say, Sorry, I was thinking, when her attention went, and to laugh, when somebody said her name twice. And at four o'clock, when the bell rang, and the girls poured out into the yard, in their blue, shrieking, she had learned to stand for a moment, at the school gate, with her bag on her shoulder, and put on the other face.
She did not know how to describe it.
It was a kind of lowering. It was like pulling down a blind. She felt it happen, every afternoon, in the same place, at the same gate, under the same flame tree. The warmth went out of her features. The light went out of her eyes. She felt her shoulders curl, her chin drop, her steps shorten. She became a girl who walked close to walls. She became a girl who looked at the ground.
She went home.
"You are late," said Peter.
"I'm sorry. Netball practice."
"You did not tell me."
"I did. On Tuesday."
"Did you?" He was in the sitting room, in his vest, with a cup of tea, and a ledger open on his knee. He did not look up. "I must have forgotten. It is the pressure of the shop." He turned a page. "You'll tell me in future."
"Yes."
"Who were you with?"
"The team."
"Only the team?"
"Yes."
"Not boys."
"No."
"I wouldn't like you to be with boys." He wrote something in the ledger, with his fine small neat hand. "A girl who goes with boys is a girl who comes to a bad end. I have seen it. I say it for your protection."
She stood in the doorway.
"Is there anything else?" she said.
"No. Go and wash." A pause. "Your friend Miriam. The baker's daughter."
She went very still.
"I met her mother in the market today. A pleasant woman. She was saying how fond Miriam is of you." He looked up, finally, with a smile. It was a warm, easy, interested smile. "She wants you to come to supper. On Saturday. At the bakery."
"I... I don't..."
"I said yes."
"You did?"
"Of course. Why would I refuse?" He laughed. "It is good for you to have friends. I'm not an ogre. I only wish to be sure they're respectable." He turned back to the ledger. "I'll drop you off myself. And fetch you at eight."
He is in her house.
He knows where they live.
It came to her in a cold stab. She stood with her hand on the doorframe and her stomach turning over. She had thought, for a year, that school was the one place. It was walled. It had a gate, and a teacher, and a bell. It was a kind of island, in the middle of the sea. And now, in a casual sentence, in a warm voice, in a vest, he had waded across.
He is telling me he can.
He is showing me.
"Thank you," said Sarah.
"It's nothing."
"I would like to... to walk. I can walk there."
"It's dark by eight. I would not like you on the road." The pen scratched. "I'll bring you. It's no trouble. I'm a man who looks after his family."
She went out.
The bakery was on the main street, between a pharmacy and a hardware shop, behind a blue shutter, and from half a block away it announced itself with a smell that made her knees go weak.
It was the smell of bread. Not the pale dry slices that Peter bought, in plastic, from the supermarket, but real bread, hot, brown, yeasty, with a crust that crackled, and under it the sweet heavy smell of butter and cinnamon and caramelised sugar. It came out into the street in a warm cloud. It had a sound, almost, a low contented hum, like a cat. She stood on the pavement in her best skirt, with her hands folded, and breathed it in, and thought, This is what a house should smell like.
Peter's car had gone. He had dropped her at the corner, with a wave. Eight o'clock, he had said, from the window. I'll be here. She had watched the tail-lights go, a small red pair, down the hill. She had counted to ten.
"Sarah! Sarah! You came!"
Miriam was in the doorway, in a floury apron, with her arms out.
She was dragged inside. It was a long low room, with a counter, and glass shelves, and trays of golden things, buns, rolls, doughnuts, small iced cakes, in rows. A huge oven, set into the back wall, breathed out heat and light. Two men in white caps were working at a long table, kneading, with their sleeves rolled, and singing something in Luganda that sounded like a political slogan. A radio was playing. A small boy of about six, under the table, was eating a bun with an expression of mystic transport.
"This is my father," said Miriam. "Papa. This is Sarah."
"Ah!" The bigger of the two men straightened. He was a short round florid man of about fifty, with a belly like a barrel and a face the colour of a good loaf, and arms dusted to the elbow with flour. He wiped his hands on a cloth. "The famous Sarah! The goal defence! The Debate Queen!" He pronounced it with relish. "You are the girl who put the boy from Kampala in his place!"
"It was only..."
"Do not be modest. It's not a trait that we encourage in this house." He seized her hand, in a grip like a vice, and shook it. "I am Mr. Namubiru. This is my son Joel. That is my brother, who is simple, but a good worker. My wife is upstairs. She's been cooking for three days. You will eat, or she'll be insulted, and you will regret it for the rest of your life."
"Thank you."
"You are too thin." He peered at her. "She's too thin, Miriam."
"I said that."
"I'll say it to your mother."
"Papa."
"I'm only saying." He gave her a gentle shove toward the stairs. "Go. Go. Up! Before it's cold!"
It was a plain flat above the shop. There was a table, a long one, set for eight, with a white cloth, and in the middle a vast dish of steaming food. There was chicken, in a spicy red sauce. There was a mound of rice, and another of matooke, and a bowl of greens, and a plate of fried plantain. At the head of the table, in a wide yellow gomesi, directing operations with a wooden spoon, stood a very large and very beautiful woman with a laugh like a trumpet.
"There she is!" said Mama Miriam. "At last! Sit! Sit! I've been waiting two hours!"
She sat.
She did not remember much of the meal. She remembered the noise. It was a loud house. Everybody talked at once, the father about the price of flour, the brother about a football match, the uncle about a cow he had once owned, and the small boy, from under the table, about a dog. Plates were passed. Spoons clattered. A joke was made, and a huge guffaw rose, and a plate fell, and nobody said a word. Miriam's mother put another piece of chicken on Sarah's plate, and then another, and a spoonful of rice, and a ladle of sauce, and said, "Eat. Eat. You are a growing girl," in a voice that did not permit discussion. And Sarah, who had not sat at a table of more than three people for a year and a half, sat in the lamplight in the middle of the noise and ate.
She ate everything.
She had forgotten that food could taste of anything. She ate the chicken, and the greens, and the plantain. She ate a second helping of rice. She ate with her fingers, which was permitted, and licked them. She laughed, when the uncle did his cow story, which had no end, and which he had told, said Miriam, every Saturday for eleven years. And at one point, in the middle of the second course, she looked up and found that Mama Miriam was watching her, from the end of the table, across a pyramid of matooke, with her head on one side.
The look went on for rather a long time.
It was not a pitying look. It was not curious. It was simply attentive, and warm, and unhurried, the look of a woman who has cooked for a great many people, and is accustomed to reading, in the way a person eats, what has been done to them.
Sarah looked down.
"More?" said Mama Miriam.
"I couldn't, thank you."
"A little more."
"I'm full."
"Hmm." The big woman rose. She came round the table, with a plate, and put it down in front of her, and rested a hand, lightly, for a moment, on her shoulder. It was a large warm hand. It smelled of butter. "You are always welcome in this house," she said, very quietly, so that only Sarah could hear. "You know that. At any hour. For any reason. You only have to knock."
Sarah did not move.
She sat with the plate in front of her and her fork in her fist and every muscle in her back drawn tight. It was a hand on her shoulder. It was a mother's hand. It was the kind of hand that she had known all her life, and had flinched from for a year. She waited for the cold prickle, the crawl, the thing that would tell her to jump.
It did not come.
It was only a hand. It was only warmth. It pressed for a second, gently, and lifted, and went away, and she sat there, at the table, and understood, with a kind of dizzy astonishment, that her shoulder had not turned to wood.
I can be touched.
It is only him.
It's not all of them.
It was a small thing. It was the smallest thing in the world. But she sat with her fork in her hand, in the yellow light, and felt it open inside her, a tiny hard bright gap, like a crack in a frozen pond, with water showing underneath.
"Thank you," she whispered.
"For what?" said Mama Miriam, brightly. "I have done nothing. Eat."
They sat on the roof, afterward, she and Miriam, on a flat concrete patch above the shop, among the water tanks, with two mugs of sweet tea.
It was a clear night. The stars were out. Below them, the whole of Lwanda lay spread, a scatter of yellow lights on the dark, with the red tail-lamps of a lorry on the trunk road and a hum of voices from a bar. A dog barked. A radio played, somewhere, a slow Congolese tune. There was a breeze, that smelled of woodsmoke and bread.
"My mother likes you," said Miriam.
"She's lovely."
"She is a terror." Miriam hugged her knees. "She says you have the face of someone who has had to be grown up too soon."
Sarah did not answer.
"She does that. She's always saying things like that. About people." A small hesitation. "She was an orphan, you know. She grew up with an aunt. She says she can always tell." She turned her head. "I told her to stop. I said, You don't know her. But she said..."
"What did she say?"
"She said I should look after you."
The tea was very hot. Sarah wrapped her hands round the mug and held it, and stared into it. The surface trembled, a little, and was still.
"I'm okay," she said.
"I know."
"I'm just... things are difficult. At home. It is a lot of changes. My father..."
"I know." Miriam's voice was quiet. "I know it's your dad. You do not have to say. I won't push. I just want you to know that if there's something else, if it's not only that..." She did not finish.
The stars were very bright.
Sarah looked at them. She looked at the long dark sweep of the sky, and the Milky Way, thick and white, as in a picture, as in a thing a child draws. She thought of a night in a courtyard, years ago, lying on a mat, with her father's arm under her head, while he pointed out the Plough. There. And that is the Southern Cross. And that, Counsel, is the thing they call a light-year. It has taken a very long time to get here. It left before you were born.
Tell her, she thought. Tell her now. She is here. She has kept the seat warm.
She opened her mouth.
She could feel it. It was just there, at the back of her tongue, a small hard word, like a pip. All she had to do was say it. She turned her head. Miriam was watching her, in the starlight, with her round face serious, and her eyes steady and enormous, and her fingers, on her knees, locked tight. She was waiting. She did not look like a girl who would scream. She looked like somebody who had been preparing, for a very long time, to be told.
She'll be afraid.
She'll tell her mother.
Her mother will tell the police. And Peter will come to the bakery. He will look at them, in his white shirt, with his kind eyes. He'll say, I'm so sorry, I do not know what Sarah has been saying. She has been very troubled. And Mr. Namubiru, who buys flour from his shop, who owes him seventy thousand shillings, will not know where to look.
I will have taken it into their house.
I'll have put them in the way.
She closed her mouth.
"Sarah?"
"Yes?"
"You were about to say."
"I was going to say..." She swallowed. She felt her face compose itself, smoothly, into a small bright smile. "Thank you. For tonight. I had a lovely time."
Miriam did not speak for a moment.
Then she let out a long, slow, careful breath, and nodded, and looked away at the lights.
"Anytime," she said.
The car was at the corner at eight.
She saw it from a long way off, a pair of white lamps, steady, at the bottom of the hill, and her whole body went tight. She stood in the doorway of the bakery with a paper bag in her hand, a gift from Mama Miriam, six rolls, still warm, and watched it come up the street. It stopped. The passenger door opened.
"Get in," said Peter.
She got in.
"Did you have a nice time?"
"Yes. Thank you."
"Good. I'm glad." He pulled out. The street lights slid over his face, one by one, gold and shadow and gold. He drove very carefully, with both hands on the wheel, at exactly the speed limit. "Nice people. Simple, but good-hearted. I am glad you have friends."
"Yes."
"They gave you bread."
"Yes."
"I hope you thanked them."
"I did."
"Good girl."
They went up the hill. The houses got larger, and the gardens longer, and the street lamps, spaced wider apart. She sat with the paper bag on her knees, and watched the dark pass, and counted her breaths. She could smell the rolls, sweet and yeasty, from the bag. It seemed to her that it was the smell of a different life, a life that had been a few streets away all the time.
Miriam, she thought. Mama Miriam.
The light is on. The door is open.
And I am being driven away.
The car turned in at the gate. It was green, and iron, and it swung back with a long, slow, familiar groan. The headlights swept over the gravel, the roses, the mango tree, the dark bulk of the house. A single lamp was burning in the sitting-room window. Her mother's silhouette passed across it.
She sat still.
She had done it a hundred times. She had done it a thousand. She had come up that path, at five o'clock, in the dust, with her bag, and in the evening, in the rain, and at night. It was thirty-two paces from the gate to the door. She knew every one. But it seemed to her, that night, with her hand on the handle of the car and the warm paper bag in her lap, that it had never been so far.
Breathe.
Put on the face.
She felt it, at the bottom of her throat, the old familiar sinking. She felt the light go out of her features. She felt her shoulders curl. It was the blind coming down. It came down so smoothly, so easily, that she could not have said when it began, and she knew, as she got out, and stood on the gravel, and heard the car door slam, and the gate groan shut behind her, that the girl who had laughed on a roof among the stars had been left on the other side of it.
Peter was beside her.
He put a hand on her back, lightly, between the shoulder blades, as they walked up the path. It was a courteous, fatherly gesture. It was the touch of a man shepherding a child. It was warm, and steady, and it did not stray.
"Home," he said, softly.
The door opened.
Her mother was standing in it, in the yellow light, smiling. "There you are! Was it lovely? Did you eat? Oh, you've brought bread. How kind."
"Yes, Mama."
"Come in. Come in. It's late."
She went in.
Behind her, the door closed. She heard the bolt go home, one, two, with its solid iron click. And she stood in the passage, in the smell of paint and floor polish, with a bag of warm rolls in her arms, and the whole dark weight of the house settling round her like water, and thought, with a clearness that did not hurt:
So this is the dread.
It is not the moment. It is the door.