Chapter 8
Three Years of Fear
It did not happen all at once, and it did not happen in a straight line. That was what nobody understood, afterward, who had not been inside it. They imagined a long dark tunnel, a single unbroken horror, every night the same. It was not like that. It was a house with many rooms. There were rooms with the lights on. There were weeks, even months, when the days went by with a dull smooth grey regularity, like beads on a string, and there was nothing to be afraid of but the thing itself, the dread, which had become, by then, as ordinary as a tooth that aches.
And then there would be a night.
The first thing she learned was how to listen with her whole body.
She learned it in the second year, the year she was seventeen. By then she had a method. She lay on her left side, with her face to the door, and her knees up. She kept her breathing slow, through the nose, so that she could hear. She had stopped sleeping in the middle of the bed. She slept at the very edge of it, against the wall, with her back covered, and one hand under the pillow, holding the key of nothing, a small smooth stone.
She had stopped using the chair. It was useless. The first time he had pushed against it, he had laughed. You think that will stop me? he had said, in a pleasant voice, through the wood. She had lain with her eyes wide, listening to him laugh, and then she had heard him go away. He had left it. He had wanted her to know that he could.
So she had made another way.
She had a tin. It was an old tin of baked beans, which she had saved, and washed, and filled with a handful of gravel from the yard. She had tied a piece of string round it, and fastened the string to the inside handle of the door, and set the tin on the floor, behind it. When the handle turned, the tin fell. It made a small hard clatter, like a dropped plate.
It did not stop him. It never stopped him. But it woke her.
That was all it was for. It gave her three seconds. Three seconds in which she could be sitting up, with her back to the wall, and her face in order, with her hands at her sides. It gave her a chance to be looking at him when he came in. She had decided, early on, that she would not be asleep. She would not be curled, and small, with her eyes shut. If it was going to happen, she would be awake.
It did not make it better.
She did not tell herself that it did. She was not a person who told herself comfortable lies. It only made it hers. It was a small hard piece of ground, in the middle of an ocean, the size of a single decision, and she stood on it, and held on.
Her mother stopped working in the October of that year.
It was not sudden. It was done, as everything was done, with a smile. It was a Sunday, after church, at the table, over a plate of chicken and rice. Peter laid down his fork, and wiped his mouth with a napkin, and said, in a voice of warm concern, "Grace, I have been thinking."
"Yes?"
"About the nursery."
"What about it?"
"It is too much for you." He looked at her tenderly. "You leave at six. You come back at five. You come in exhausted. You have bags under your eyes. And for what? A hundred and eighty thousand shillings." He gave a gentle laugh. "It is hardly worth the bus fare. I would rather you stayed at home."
"But..."
"I can provide."
"I know. It is only..."
"You have been so kind to me, my dear. You have given me a home. I would like to give you the freedom to enjoy it." He took her hand. "No more rushing. No more children screaming. You can do the garden, which you love. You can rest. You can be here when Sarah comes home."
Her mother was silent.
She looked down at her plate. She looked at the large brown hand covering hers, with its square nails and gold ring. And Sarah, across the table, saw something cross her face, so quickly that she might have imagined it. It was a flicker of dismay. It was the look of a woman who has heard a very small door shut, somewhere behind her, in a distant part of the house.
"I like my work," said Grace.
"Of course you do."
"The children. I'm good at it. It was..." She hesitated. "It is the only thing that I have that is mine."
"Everything is yours. Everything I have is yours." He lifted her hand and kissed it. "My dear. I'm not saying you must. I only suggest. Think about it."
She thought about it for a week.
On the Saturday she handed in her notice. She came home at noon, with a plain brown envelope, and a cardboard box of small things from her desk, a pencil case, a mug, a bundle of children's drawings, and she sat down in the kitchen without a word and stared at the wall.
"Mama?"
"It is done."
"What is?"
"I've left." She did not turn her head. "It will be good. I'll have time. I'll make bread."
"You hate making bread."
"I will learn."
She did not look at Sarah. She sat, with the box on her knee, still, in her good grey dress, and Sarah saw her hand move, in the folds of her skirt, closing and opening, as though it wished to grasp at something and could find nothing there.
She knows, thought Sarah. She knows what he's doing.
She can see it. She can see the walls going up.
She is letting him.
It was a new kind of grief. It was not sharp. It was a heavy, dull, settling thing, like a stone slowly sinking into mud. She had thought that her mother's choice, in the garden, had been the end. She had not understood that it was a beginning. It was the first of a hundred small doors, each of which would be closed, quietly, one after another, with a smile, by a woman who told herself that she was only being sensible.
The wages stopped.
The key to the money went into his pocket.
And when she wanted a new pair of shoes, she had to ask.
Sometimes she nearly escaped.
She had a hundred ways. She was cunning. She had learned that a girl with a purpose is difficult to catch. She stayed at school until six, in the library, with a book, and the librarian, a small cross woman with a moustache, who grumbled and let her. She took up every club that met in the evenings, Debating, Drama, the Christian Union, Choir. She walked home the long way, through the market, by a path that brought her out at the back of the compound, so that she could listen at the gate before she went in.
She had found, in the second year, a friend.
It was Mama Betty. She was the woman who kept the kiosk at the bottom of Kitende Close. She was about sixty, enormous, wrapped in a faded gomesi, with a headscarf, and a pair of dark wise eyes, and a stall that sold sugar, matches, soap, airtime, and small packets of salt. She sat all day on a wooden stool in the shade of an umbrella, with a radio, a fan, and a flask of tea, and she knew everything. She knew who was ill, and who was dying, and whose son had come back from Kampala with a girl. She had a daughter in Dubai, and a son who was a boda rider, and an opinion on every subject in the world.
"Come," she had said, the first time. "Sit. You look like a ghost."
"I'm all right."
"I did not say you weren't. I said you looked like a ghost." She had pushed a stool toward her with her foot. "Sit. I have a cup. It is not a good cup, but it holds."
She sat.
She did it again the next day, and the one after. It became a habit. She would come down the hill at five, instead of going straight home, and sit on the stool behind the counter, with her school bag on her knee, and drink a cup of Mama Betty's sweet hot milky tea. She did not say much. Mama Betty did not ask. She talked, in a slow comfortable rumble, about the price of beans and the Pope and a cousin who had been bitten by a snake, and Sarah listened, with her eyes half shut, and felt, in the shade, in the hum of the radio, her heart gradually go down.
It was twelve minutes. It was only twelve minutes, between the school and the house. But it was a kind of border country. It was a place where nobody was watching. And she sat in it, every afternoon, like a traveller at a well, and drank.
"You do not want to go home," said Mama Betty, one evening.
She had not been looking at her. She had been counting coins, into a tin, with her glasses on the end of her nose. She said it in the same voice as the price of sugar.
"I do."
"No. You don't." The coins clinked. "I'm not asking why. I only say. I have watched you for a year and a half. You come down this hill like a person walking to the gallows, and you go up it like one who has not been told when." She snapped the tin. "That is not a thing a girl of seventeen should have."
"It's only... he is strict."
"Mm."
"He doesn't like me being late."
"I know that man." Mama Betty took off her glasses. She looked at them, and polished them, slowly, on the corner of her gomesi. "I have known him since he was a boy. His mother had a stall at the market. She was a hard woman. She beat him. He was a quiet child. Very polite." She put them back on. "He was always very polite."
Sarah did not move.
"I'm saying nothing," said Mama Betty.
"No."
"I'm only an old woman with a kiosk."
"Yes."
"But the door of this house is open." She jerked her head, at the shuttered back room behind the counter. "There is a mat. It is not comfortable. But it is clean. And nobody will come in without knocking."
It was the second time that someone had said it. It was the same sentence, in a different mouth. It had a particular shape, a particular weight, as of something that is held out and not pressed. You only have to knock.
She did not knock.
She would remember it, with a pang, years later. She would think of it as one of the doors she had walked past. She sat on a stool at a kiosk, with a cup in her hand, and looked at an old woman with kind eyes, and her whole heart went out to her. And she said, lightly, "Thank you, Mama. I'll remember."
"Hm," said Mama Betty. "See that you do."
In the second week of November, the O-level results came out, and she had done it.
She had not expected to. She had sat the exams in a state of dull, numb, mechanical concentration, like a person walking on a high wire in a dream. She had written four hours of Chemistry without once looking up. She had finished the History paper twenty minutes early and sat with her hands folded, staring at the wall. She had thought, It does not matter. She had thought, I have already lost. She had thought it, calmly, as she walked into the hall.
She had got eight distinctions.
It was a Division One. It was nineteen aggregate, which was good, and not outstanding, and which had, in a long grey year, cost her nearly everything. She stood in front of the notice board, with Miriam's arms round her neck, and looked at the typed line. Nankya, S. — Division 1. She read it again. She felt, for the first time in eighteen months, a thin bright tremor of something that was nearly joy.
"You did it!" screamed Miriam. "You did it, you did it, you did it! Division One! You genius! You wonderful horrible cheat!"
"I didn't cheat."
"Then how?"
"I don't know."
"You were shaking! I watched you! You went in like a corpse!"
"I think..." She stopped. She frowned. It was true. She did not know how. She had been somewhere else, in the high cold room, behind the glass. She had sat in the exam hall, and her hand had written. It had written fluently, in small round neat letters, a hundred pages, and she had watched from a distance, with a kind of puzzled awe, as one watches a clever animal. "I think it was the only place that was mine."
"What?"
"The exam." She smiled. It was a strange small private smile. "Nobody can come in."
Miriam looked at her, with her mouth open.
Then, with a violent, sudden, convulsive movement, she flung both arms round her, and held on so hard that it hurt, and said, into her hair, in a voice that was thick and cracked and full of tears:
"Don't you ever tell me you aren't brilliant."
She did not answer. She stood in the crowd, among the shrieking girls, with her face against her friend's hot shoulder, and let herself be held.
Her mother's hands shook when she held the certificate.
She did it in the kitchen, that evening, in the soft yellow light, with a pot of beans bubbling behind her. She had read it three times. She read it again. She held it at arm's length, as if it might be a trick, and then she brought it close, and pressed it to her chest, and began, very quietly, to weep.
"I am so proud of you," she said.
"Thank you."
"So proud. Your father..." Her voice failed. She wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist. "He would have... he'd have gone round the whole village. He'd have told the whole land office. He would have whistled."
"I know."
"Come here."
She came.
Her mother took her face between her hands. They were wet, and warm, and slightly sticky with onion. She looked at her, with her head on one side, in the half-light, and for the first time in over a year there was no flinch in the look, no sidelong shift, no polite evasion. It was open. It was naked. It was the look of the woman who had stood in a doorway in Kasaana, in her old green dress, saying, Go and do your homework. It was the look of her mother.
"You are going to be a lawyer," said Grace. "I know it. Nothing will stop you."
"Mama..."
"I mean it. I'll see that you do it. I'll do whatever it costs."
Whatever it costs.
She heard it. She heard it go in, and settle, among the other things, like a coin dropped into a well. Whatever it costs. She knew exactly what it cost. She had counted it, in crosses, in pencil, in a green book under a mattress. She looked into her mother's eyes, and saw, plainly, shining in them, a love so enormous and so entire that it seemed to fill the room.
And behind it, small and grey and perfectly distinct, like a stone at the bottom of a pool, she saw the other thing.
She knows what it costs.
She is choosing to pay it with me.
"Thank you, Mama," said Sarah.
She kissed her cheek. It was wet and salt. She held on, for a moment, with her eyes closed, and breathed in the smell of onions and soap and woodsmoke, and thought, with a pain so sharp that it was almost like pleasure: I love you.
I love you. I love you. How can I still...?
She did not finish.
In the third year, she talked to her father.
She did it in the dark, in the small white room, with the lamp turned low. She sat on the bed with her back to the wall, and her knees up, and the tin frame in her hands. She held it close to her face, so that she could see him. A thin tall man in a crooked tie. A bald patch. A gap between the teeth. A face turned a little to one side, as though he were laughing at somebody, just out of frame.
She told him everything.
Not all at once. She told it in pieces, a little each night, in a whisper. She told him about the netball match. She told him about the O-levels. She told him about Mama Betty's tea, and Miriam's mother, and a boy at the debate who had asked her to a dance. She told him about the report, and the number nineteen, and the long climb back to the top. She told him that she was still funny. She told him that she did the voices.
She did not tell him the other thing.
She could not. She sat for hours with her mouth open, and nothing came out. It was as though there were a stone in the way. She would draw breath, and lift her chin, and say, Taata, I have to... and the word would go. She would hear it, in her head, in a clear small voice: Counsel. She would see his face, in the hospital, grey and still, with a thread of spit running down his chin. Speak.
Whatever happens.
You speak for yourself. First.
"I tried," she said, one night, into the dark.
She had not meant to. It slipped out. It was the middle of the long rains, in the cold hour before dawn, and her voice came out cracked and small, as though it had not been used for a very long time.
"I did. I said it. I told her. I stood in front of her, and I said it, and I thought she would... I thought..." She swallowed. "I did what you said, Taata. I spoke. And it didn't work."
The photograph smiled at her.
"Was I wrong? Did I do it wrong? Should I have said it louder? Should I..." She pressed the frame against her mouth. It was cold. It smelled of dust. "I do not know what you meant. I've thought about it for two years. You said, Speak. You said it as though... as though it were a thing that would work."
Rain drummed on the roof.
What would you have done?
It was the question she asked most. She asked it so often that it had worn smooth. She sat with her eyes shut and her head against the wall, and tried to see him. She tried to see him in the room. A long thin figure in a tie, stooping a little, to be heard. She tried to hear what he would have said.
He would have been angry. That was the first thing she knew. She had never seen her father angry. He had been a mild man. He had shouted at hens. But she knew, with a flat, absolute, bone-deep certainty, that if he had stood in that doorway and seen it, he would have gone white. She saw it, as one sees a thing in a dream. She saw him stand up, with his glasses crooked and his hands shaking, and say, in a low, quiet, terrible, courteous voice, Get out of my house.
He would not have asked who paid.
He'd not have asked how we would eat.
He'd have taken me by the hand and walked me out.
She was crying. It was the old, quiet, practised crying, the kind that makes no sound, that runs down the face and into the collar and does not shake the shoulders. She pressed her lips together. She sat in the dark, with the rain and the photograph and the dead man's smile, and thought:
That is the difference.
That is the difference between him and her.
It is not love. She loves me. I know she does.
It is that he would have chosen me.
It was a hard, clear, cold thing to know. It sat in her chest like a pebble. She did not hate her mother for it. She could not. But she sat there, in the dawn, on the daisy cover, and understood, with a terrible lucidity, that the people who love you can fail you, and the failing does not make the love less true.
Both.
It is both.
She did not know what to do with that.
It was on a Sunday afternoon in March that she opened the box.
She had been avoiding it for two years. It sat at the bottom of the cupboard, in her room, behind her shoes, a tea chest with a lid, in which her mother had packed the last of her father's things when they left the house in Kasaana. She had not wanted it unpacked. She had said so. Not yet. She had said it in a small hard voice, and Peter had said, Of course, kindly, and had put it out of the way.
Nobody was at home.
Her mother had gone to a funeral. Peter had gone to the shop. The house was quiet, in the early afternoon, with a bar of sun lying across the floor and the faint drone of a lawnmower, somewhere, over the wall. She had come in from the church, in her yellow dress, with a hymn book, and found herself standing in front of the cupboard with the door open and a feeling in her stomach as of a tooth about to be pulled.
She knelt. She pulled the box out, with both hands. It was heavy. She lifted the lid.
The smell came up at her like a hand.
It was ink and chalk dust and hen feed, and old paper, and under it, faint and sweet, the smell of a man's jacket that has been worn for twenty years. She sat back on her heels. She pressed her fist to her mouth. For a long moment she could not move.
Taata.
There was a jacket, folded. There was a pair of reading glasses, with a cracked lens. There was a stack of old newspapers, tied with string, and a mug that said WORLD'S BEST DAD, which she had given him at nine, and which he had never drunk from, because he was afraid of chipping it. There was a small flat grey stone, which she had taken out, and put on the shelf, and which, she saw, with a flicker, was lying here again, in a corner, as if it had returned.
And under it all, at the bottom, were the books.
She lifted them out, one at a time. There were seven. They were big, and dusty, and bound in dark cloth, with cracked spines and gold lettering worn nearly away. The Penal Code Act. The Constitution of the Republic of Uganda. The Evidence Act. The Children Act. There was a thick one with no cover. There was a smaller one, the smallest, in green, with a pencil still tucked into the binding. She took it out. It was her father's. She knew the handwriting. It was in the margin, on the first page, in a small, crabbed, careful hand.
Read this twice, said her father, from a long way off. In case.
She opened it.
It was The Penal Code Act. It fell open, as a well-used book does, in the middle, at a page that had been turned down. She looked at it. There was a heading in black capitals. There was a section number. There was a block of small, dense, grey, formal type, which she read, at first, without understanding, and then again, slowly, with her finger under each line.
Any person who performs a sexual act with another person who is below the age of eighteen years commits a felony termed defilement...
She stopped.
She read it again.
...and is, on conviction, liable to imprisonment, and in grave cases to imprisonment for life.
She did not move.
The sun lay on the floor. The lawnmower droned. She sat on her heels in front of a tea chest, with a small green book on her knee, and a finger on a line, and felt, very slowly, the whole of the room go quiet.
Below the age of eighteen.
Commits a felony.
Is liable to imprisonment.
It was only a paragraph. It was dry, and formal, in a dead man's book. But she read it, and it seemed to her that she had never in her life read anything so plainly. There was nothing in it about misunderstanding. There was nothing about provocation, or a bad night, or who pays for the roof. There was no clause for a man who had been generous. There was no exception for a husband. It said, in black and white, in a tone that did not invite discussion, that what had been done to her had a name. It was a crime. It was a very serious one. And the person who committed it was the person who had done it.
It is written down.
It's been written down all along.
She looked at the page for a long time.
She was not a fool. She knew that a line in a book was not a wall. It would not keep out a man in the passage. It would not buy her mother's shoes. It had been in a tea chest for two years, while the house went on, and the plates were passed, and a woman put down her work, and nobody read it. But she knelt there on the floor, in the sun, and laid her palm flat on the old cloth cover, and felt it, warm, under her skin, like the body of a living thing.
It was always true.
It was true before anyone said it.
It was true when he stood in the door.
She shut her eyes.
I cannot wait for someone to rescue me, she thought. Nobody is coming. Nobody has ever been coming.
If I'm going to get out of this house, it will have to be me.
She said it aloud. She did not know why. It came out of her in the empty room, in the sun, in a small steady voice, level, clear, and the sound of it was strange, as the sound of one's own name is strange when one hears it spoken for the first time in a foreign country.
"I will do it myself."
The book lay on her knee.
She opened her eyes. She looked at the pencil, in the binding, and the small crabbed hand in the margin. She slid the little green volume inside her dress, against her skin. And she put the lid back on the tea chest, gently, and pushed it into the cupboard, and shut the door, and went to find a place to hide it.