Chapter 9
The Father I Needed
The memory came to her on a day when she was not looking for it, which was how all the real ones came.
It was in the middle of a Chemistry lesson, in April, on a hot grey afternoon when the whole of S5 was drowsing in rows, and Mr. Okello was explaining the structure of an organic molecule on the blackboard with great patience and no success. A girl at the front had dropped her pencil. A fan creaked. Sarah sat at the back, by the window, with her chin on her fist, watching a lizard on the wall, a small green one, perfectly still, with its throat pulsing, and she found that she was looking at the lizard and seeing, clearly, the veranda of the house in Kasaana, and the light on the red floor, and her father's hands.
She was eleven.
It was the year she had been accused of cheating.
It had happened in the last week of Primary Six, in an examination hall at Kasaana Primary, on a morning of heavy rain. She had been sitting at a wooden desk, with a pencil and a sheet of paper, doing the mathematics paper. She had finished early. She had checked it twice. She had put her pencil down and folded her hands, and looked out of the window at the rain, and the teacher, Mrs. Nabukalu, who was thin and short-tempered and had never liked her, had come down the row, and stopped.
"What is that?"
"What?"
"On your desk. Under your hand."
She had looked. There was nothing there. There was a small crumpled slip of paper, a torn corner, that must have been left by the previous girl. It had a few numbers on it, in a different hand. She had not seen it. She had not touched it.
"I don't know."
"You don't know." Mrs. Nabukalu had picked it up between two fingers, as one picks up a dead mouse. "This is a formula. It is for question seven. You wrote it down before the exam, and put it under your desk."
"I didn't."
"Do not lie to me."
"I did not! I never saw it! It was already there!"
"Silence!" It was a crack like a whip. "I will not have it. I have seen you. You are always the first to finish. You are always so clever. Well, now we know how." She had held the slip up, and turned, so that the whole hall could see. "Sarah Nankya has been cheating."
The room had gone dead.
She remembered it with perfect clarity. She remembered the rain, which had increased, on the iron roof, with a roar. She remembered thirty heads turning, thirty round astonished eyes. She remembered the heat coming up into her face, and the sick hot shame, and the dreadful sinking helplessness of a child who has done nothing and cannot prove it. She remembered standing up. She remembered opening her mouth. And she remembered that, in the roaring silence, with the paper held aloft like a flag, nobody had said a word.
They had taken the paper. They had marked it zero. The headmaster, a vague kindly man in a cardigan, had said that it was a very serious matter, and that she would have to be suspended from the leavers' ceremony, and that her parents would be informed.
She had walked home in the rain.
She had walked the whole way, three kilometres, without an umbrella, in her wet uniform, with her fists clenched, and the rain running into her mouth. She had not cried. She had decided that she would not. She had decided it very firmly, between the school gate and the first bend. And when she came up the path, at four o'clock, soaked to the skin, with her bag on her back and her chin up, her father had been sitting on the veranda.
He had been mending a chair.
He looked up. He took off his glasses. And he looked at her for a long moment, at the wet plaits, the white face, the clenched jaw, and put down the hammer.
"Counsel," he said.
"Don't."
"What has happened?"
"Nothing."
"You are wet."
"It's raining."
"I can see that." He rose. He was a long thin stooping man, in his shirtsleeves, with sawdust on his trousers, and he did not hurry. He came to the edge of the step and stood looking down at her. "Do you want to tell me, or shall I guess?"
She had not meant to tell him. She had meant to go straight to her room. But it came up, out of her, all at once, in a hot uncontrollable rush, and she heard herself saying it, in a raw high voice, in the rain, with her fists at her sides. She said I cheated. She said I wrote it down. I didn't. I didn't, Taata. It was just there. And nobody said anything. Nobody. They all looked. They all just looked.
She had stopped. She had been shaking.
He had not said a word.
He had stood still, on the step, with his arms by his sides. His face had gone very still. She had seen the muscles in his jaw move. Then he had stepped down, into the rain, and put one arm round her shoulders, and the other under her knees, and picked her up, as he had not done since she was five, and carried her up onto the veranda, and sat her down on the step, in the dry, and gone inside for a towel.
He had wrapped her in it.
"Now," he said. He had sat beside her, with his hands on his knees. "Tell me from the start. Slowly. Leave nothing out."
She had told him.
He had listened. He had listened as no one ever had, with his whole attention, with his head bent, and his eyes on her face, and she had seen that he was not only hearing, he was collecting. He had asked questions. Where exactly was the slip? Which hand had Mrs. Nabukalu picked it up with? Was it creased? What colour was the ink? Who had sat at that desk before? Had anyone else been in the room? She had answered every one. And when she had finished, he had been quiet for a long time, looking at the rain.
"Good," he said.
"Good?"
"You have told it well. It is a clear account. It has no contradictions. That is a very important thing." He had turned his head. "Sarah. I need you to listen. I am going to say something, and I want you to remember it all your life."
"Yes."
"A person who has done nothing wrong," said Joseph Nankya, "does not need to be loud. She only needs to be clear. And she only needs to be believed. And if she is not believed, it is not because she is lying. It is because the people she told were not listening." He took off his glasses, and wiped them on his shirt. "That is not your fault. It is a failure of the court. And a court can be corrected."
"What court?"
"Tomorrow, we'll find out."
He went to the school at eight the next morning, in his one good jacket.
She went with him. She walked at his side, down the red road, in her clean uniform, with her hand in his, while he talked, easily, about the weather. He did not look angry. He looked mild, and a little absent, like a man on his way to pay a bill. But she could feel through his palm, a tiny steady tremor, like a wire in the wind.
The headmaster received them in his office. It was a small stuffy room, with a desk, and a picture of the President, and a smell of chalk. He was embarrassed. He fluttered. He said that it was a regrettable misunderstanding, but that Mrs. Nabukalu was a very experienced teacher, and a matter of discipline, and the rules, and that he really could not.
"I understand," said Joseph.
He sat. He crossed one thin leg over the other, and folded his hands, and smiled.
"I have no wish to question Mrs. Nabukalu's integrity. I'm only a clerk. But I work in the land office, you see, and in my profession, when two parties are in dispute over a boundary, we do not say who is lying. We say, Show me the document." He took a pen from his pocket. "I wonder if I might see the slip of paper."
"It's... it is being held."
"Of course. And the examination script."
"I do not see..."
"It's a very simple request." The smile did not change. "I merely wish to compare the handwriting."
There was a silence.
The headmaster looked at him. He looked at Sarah, who was sitting very straight on a hard chair, with her hands in her lap. He looked, rather helplessly, at the door.
"Fetch it," he said.
It came, in a brown envelope, in the hands of Mrs. Nabukalu, who stood in the doorway with her arms folded and her mouth in a thin line. She laid the slip on the desk. Joseph picked it up, gently, with the tips of two fingers. He held it to the light. He turned it over. He took the exam script, and laid it beside it, and looked, for a long time, with his head on one side and his lips moving, from one to the other.
"Mrs. Nabukalu."
"Yes?"
"Would you be so kind as to look at the number seven?"
"I do not see what..."
"On the slip. The way it's written." He pointed. "There is a bar across the stem. A small horizontal stroke, as one finds in the continental style. Do you see it?"
"I... yes."
"And in my daughter's script." He turned the page. "There are fourteen sevens, in all. In not one of them is there a bar."
The teacher said nothing.
"A child does not change her handwriting in the middle of an examination," said Joseph Nankya, "in order to disguise a note that she then fails to use. I would say that is a very sophisticated crime." A small sigh. "I'll say also that the slip, as far as I can tell, is written in a different ink. A blue ballpoint. My daughter writes with a pencil." He laid the two papers down side by side, squared the edges, and sat back. "I make no accusation. I only observe. If there is a person in the room who wrote the numbers, she is not the child in the third row."
It was the quietest room she had ever been in.
She sat on the hard chair, with her heart going like a bird's, and watched her father's face. It was calm. It was kind. It had not changed at all. He was looking at the headmaster with a pleasant, interested, patient expression, as at a man who has just been shown a flaw in his accounts. And she saw something go through the headmaster's face, slowly, like water through sand, and settle.
"I... see," said the headmaster.
"I thought you might."
"It appears..." A cough. "It appears that there has been an error."
"These things happen."
"Mrs. Nabukalu?"
The thin woman in the doorway had gone grey. She looked at the paper. She looked at Joseph, and then, for the first time, at the child on the chair, and Sarah saw her mouth work, and her eyes, which were small and sharp, fill, to her own astonishment, with tears.
"I may have been hasty," she said.
"I'm sure that you were very tired," said Joseph, gently.
"I..." She put a hand to her throat. "Sarah. I am sorry."
Sarah did not answer.
She could not. She sat there, in the stuffy room, under the picture of the President, and the whole of her body was shaking, from head to foot, in a long slow wave. She felt it going through her like a fever. She felt, in her chest, the huge hot swelling of something that was too big for her mouth. It was not triumph. It was not even relief. It was a thing she had no name for. It was the plain bright astonished knowledge that somebody had come.
He came.
He did not ask if it would be difficult.
He just came.
When they were outside, in the dust, in the white sun, with the school gate behind them, her father stopped. He stood still, in the road, with his hands in his pockets. He looked at the hills. A long breath went out of him.
"Taata?"
"Mm?"
"You were shaking."
"Was I?"
"Your hand. All the time."
"Ah." He smiled. It was a crooked, shy, unhappy smile. "Yes. I am terrified of headmasters. I have been since I was nine." He looked down at her. "But it is not a good reason. If a thing is right, and a person you love is on the other side of it, you do it afraid. That is the only way that it is ever done."
She took his hand.
It was dry and warm and slightly rough. It fitted round hers, exactly, as it had on every road she could remember. She did not say anything. She walked beside him, in the dust, the whole way home, and he hummed, under his breath, a hymn with the words worn off, and found, at the second bend, the note that he had lost.
"Sarah Nankya."
She jerked.
The classroom came back. The fan, the lizard, the smell of chalk. Forty girls were staring at her, and Mr. Okello, at the blackboard, with a stick of chalk in his hand, was looking at her over the top of his glasses with an expression of gentle concern.
"I asked," he said, "whether you could tell us the name of the compound on the board."
She looked.
It was a long chain of letters and lines. She could not read it. It was blurred. Her eyes were swimming. She put up a hand and found that her face was wet.
"I'm sorry, sir."
"Are you unwell?"
"No."
"You are crying."
"It's nothing. It is dust."
"Hmm." He looked at her a moment longer. Then, with an unaccustomed delicacy, he turned back to the board. "Murungi. Can you assist?"
She bent her head over the desk, so that her plaits fell forward. She pressed her fists against her eyes. She did not make a sound. It was a trick, by now, an easy one. But under the desk, in the dimness, where nobody could see, she was shaking, hard, and she felt Miriam's hand come across from the next seat, and close, warm and firm and without a word, round her wrist.
I am going to write it down. All of it. Properly this time.
My father is dead. It's been two years and two months. I am seventeen. I have thought, many times, that if I could say it to anyone, it would be him. I can't. So I'll say it here.
Date: Friday, 11th April.
It is not that I did not tell Mama. I told her. You know that. I told her once, in a garden. I said it clearly. I said it so that nobody could misunderstand. And she said, we depend on him.
I have thought about that sentence for two and a half years. I have turned it over so many times that it has gone smooth. I do not know what to do with it. I cannot hate her. I have tried. I have lain in bed and said, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. And then I think of her hands. How they shook, when she held my certificate. How she cried over the sewing machine. How she makes me tea on a Sunday, with the sugar already in, because she remembers I do not like to stir.
I love her. That is the whole of it. I love her, and she chose, and I do not know how to be both.
I used to think that love meant protecting. I thought it was the same thing. I thought that if somebody loved you, they would not let you be hurt. It was how I knew you loved me, Taata. You came to the school, in the rain. You stood up for me, afraid. I thought everyone did that.
They don't.
I'm not angry at the people who do not. It's only that I do not understand them. I look at them, in the street, in the church, with their kind faces. And I think, which of you would have come? Which of you, if it was your child, would have said, get out of my house?
Do you think she was always like this? Or did you, when you were alive, carry the part of her that wasn't brave?
Because I have been thinking. Maybe it was you who made her feel safe. Maybe she had never needed to be the strong one. Maybe you were so good, so steady, so quiet, so unshakeable, that she did not know what she was missing. And when you died, she had to find it. And she looked inside herself and there was nothing there.
That's a terrible thing to say. I am sorry. I do not mean it as an accusation.
I only mean that I think she was drowning. And when a person is drowning, she grabs at whatever is there. She does not look to see if it is a rope.
It does not make it right. I want that to be very clear.
I know that it does not make it right.
Date: Saturday, 3rd May.
Miriam said something today.
We were at the bakery, on the roof, with the tea. She was doing her newspaper. It is a real one now, in four pages, with a title, and a masthead, and a circulation of eighty. She was typing it on her father's old computer. She had her tongue between her teeth. And she said, without looking up:
"You know you deserve to feel safe."
I did not answer.
"I'm not asking. I am only saying it. I read it in a book." She typed a line. She deleted it. "Everyone has a right to feel safe in their own house. It is in the Constitution. I looked it up."
"Which article?"
"I don't remember. But it is there."
I put down my cup. I said, "Miriam."
"Mm?"
"Why are you saying this?"
"Because you do not feel it." She turned round. She had her round honest face turned toward me, in the afternoon sun, and the little crease between her eyebrows was very deep. "You flinch when your name is called. You count the steps to the door. You never sit with your back to a room. You look at the clock at four, every day, as though it is a person who's about to hit you." She breathed. "I'm not stupid, Sarah. I know when something is wrong."
"It is nothing."
"You said that last year."
"Then it is still nothing."
"That isn't true."
"What do you want me to say?"
"That you will let me help."
I almost said it.
That is what I want to write. I almost said it. I had my mouth open. I could feel it, in my chest, like a fist closing. I could have said, Miriam, last year, a man in my house. I could have said it in six words. And I looked at her, with her face so serious, and her fingers on the keys, and the whole sky behind her, pink, going down to gold. And I thought, she will believe me.
I knew she would.
But then I thought, what happens next? I thought of her father, who owes seventy thousand shillings to a man who sits in the front row of church. I thought of her mother, with her hand on my shoulder. I thought of the little boy, under the table, with the bun. I thought, if I say it, they will have to do something. And whatever they do will cost them. And I'll have to watch.
So I said, "I'm fine."
And she looked at me, for a very long time.
And she said, "Okay. But the seat is still there."
I wanted to put my head on her shoulder. I did not.
Date: Sunday, 18th May.
I have been asking myself a question.
I have asked it for weeks, and I am afraid of the answer. It is this.
Why do we say that it is good to keep a family together?
Everyone says it. The pastor. Aunt Specioza. The women at church. They say, a family must stay together, whatever happens. They say, don't break up a home. They say it as if a family were a plate, which can be cracked, and must be mended at any cost, with glue, with wire, with whatever comes to hand. And I used to believe it. I believed that the thing that made a family was staying. I thought that if you stayed, and endured, and kept your mouth shut, and let the sun go down on it, then it would go on, and be good.
But what is a family, if one of the people in it is afraid?
What does it mean to keep it together, if it is only held by someone not saying a word?
I look at this house. I look at the table, the plates, the nice cups. I look at my mother, in her good grey dress, pouring tea. I look at him. I look at the three of us, in the lamplight, at supper, in our places. It looks like a family. It is exactly what a family looks like, in a picture.
But it is held together by me.
I am the glue. I'm the thing that is not said. I am the wire. And every day I hold it, and every day it asks a little more, and everyone says, thank you, what a good girl, what a help.
It is not a family. It is a thing that is eating me.
It's the first time that I have written that.
I'm going to look at it a little longer.
She wrote it all in the green exercise book, which she kept under the mattress, in a small neat hand, in pencil, in the dim yellow light, sitting on the daisy cover with her back against the wall. It took her a long time. She wrote for most of three weeks, a little each night, in the quiet hour before the house went to sleep. She wrote as fast as she could. She wrote as one writes a confession. And when she had finished, on the last night of May, she sat for a long time with the book open on her knees, and the pencil in her fist, and read it over, from the beginning.
It was very strange.
It was like looking at a stranger's handwriting. The girl who had written it was angry, and clear, and afraid, and extraordinarily articulate. She said what she thought. She did not soften. She did not apologise. She was somebody who had a great deal to say and had been silent for a very long time, and when she began to speak, she found she had a voice.
I did not know she was there, thought Sarah.
She turned back, to the last page. There was a space at the bottom. A few lines, white, ruled in blue. She looked at it. She looked at her father's photograph, on the shelf, smiling at somebody outside the frame. The lamp hissed. A moth went round it.
She picked up the pencil.
She did not think about what she wrote. It came out of her, in a quick small steady hand, as a thing comes that has been waiting a long time.
I promise myself.
One day I'll live in a house where I am not afraid.
It will have a door that locks. It will be a small house. It will have a table, and a lamp, and a shelf for my father's books. It will not be anybody's but mine. Nobody will say, who pays. Nobody will say, be grateful. I'll make my own tea, with the sugar already in.
I do not know when. I do not know how. But I'll do it.
I will be a lawyer. I will stand in a court in a black gown. And when someone says, who are you to speak, I'll say, I am the one who was not listened to.
I promise.
Sarah Nankya.
She signed it. She dated it. And then, after a moment, in a smaller hand, below, with a sort of shy defiance, she added the other word. The one he had given her. The one she had never written.
Counsel.
She looked at it.
It seemed to her that it glowed, a little, in the lamplight, like a coal. She sat very still, with her hand pressed flat on the page, and felt, spreading outward from it through her whole cold body, a thin, faint, extraordinary warmth, like the first touch of sun after a long rain.
She slid the book under the mattress.
She lay down in the dark, on her side, with her knees drawn up and the key of nothing in her fist, and listened to the house. She heard a tap drip. She heard a board settle. She heard, at the far end of the passage, a long slow yawn, and the flat soft slap of slippers, on the tiles, going away.
She did not sleep. But she lay there with her eyes open, in the dark, and said it again, very quietly, to the ceiling, to the crack in the plaster shaped like a river, to the small flat stone on the shelf.
I promise.
It was only a sentence. It was an old one. But it was the first time in nearly two years that she had said a thing that was not about surviving the night.