Epilogue
The Sound of My Own Voice
The trial began in the second week of March, in the High Court at Masaka, on a morning of thin cloud.
Sarah went in by the side door with Ms. Nalwoga. She wore a plain navy dress that had been Aunt Harriet's idea, and her father's watch, which was too large and which she had worn on the inside of her wrist since the day it was given back to her. Miriam was in the public benches with a notebook she had been told, twice, not to take out. Mr. Kato sat at the end of the row in the brown cardigan, with his glasses in his hand, polishing them, which he did when he was nervous. Sister Dorothy was beside him. Aunt Harriet sat very upright in the front row in navy, like a pillar.
Peter was brought up from the cells in a grey prison shirt. He was smaller than she remembered. He did not look at her at first. When he did, she waited for the old drop in her stomach, and it did not come. There was a man in a dock. He had a scar on his forearm. That was all he was.
She was in the witness box for two days.
She had been told it would be hard, and it was. The defence advocate was a smooth man with a soft voice who asked why she had waited, why she had smiled, why she had gone to school the next day. She answered each question as it came. She said, "I was fifteen." She said, "I told three people, and two of them did not help me." She said, "I did not stay silent. I was not heard." Twice she asked him to repeat the question, because she wanted to be exact, and the judge, an older woman with tired kind eyes, nodded each time.
On the second afternoon her mother gave her evidence.
Sarah was allowed to stay in the room. She had asked to. Grace stood in the box in her grey dress and said what she had said to the Detective Inspector, in a low steady voice that did not once try to excuse itself. When the advocate asked her why she had not acted, she said, "Because I was afraid, and because I was weak, and neither of those is a reason." Then she looked across the court, once, at her daughter, and looked away again. Sarah did not look away. She did not smile either. She sat with her hands in her lap, and let her mother be seen.
The judgment was given in April. It is public, and it is not in these pages. What matters here is that it was long, and read aloud, and that the judge said at one point, to the court and not to anyone in particular, This complainant has been consistent, credible, and brave, and nothing in her conduct needs any explanation. Aunt Harriet made a small noise like a cough. Miriam wrote it down.
That is the part that belongs to the court.
This is the part that belongs to Sarah.
It is a Saturday in the dry season, some months later. She is in a rented room in Kampala with a window onto a rooftop of water tanks and washing. There is a bed with a blue cover, and a desk with a lamp, and a shelf of books, the green Penal Code at one end, and a tin-framed photograph at the other. A law student's timetable is pinned above the desk. Her bursary letter is in the drawer, under a flat river stone.
It is eight in the morning, and she has just woken up.
That is the whole event. She has slept for nine hours, through the night, without waking once, and without the chair, or the string, or the tin of gravel. She lies on her back looking at a ceiling that has no crack in it. For a while she does not think anything. She listens to a woman downstairs calling a child, and a boda passing, and somebody's radio.
Then she gets up and makes tea.
She has a small kettle and one good cup. She sits on the edge of the bed with the cup between her palms, and her phone buzzes on the desk. It is Miriam, from the newspaper office she now works in on weekends: Did you eat. Do not lie. Sarah types, I am eating. She is not, yet. She goes and finds a banana, and sends a picture of it.
At ten she has a class group. At one she has a call with Sister Dorothy, which she will keep for another year, and which has gone from weekly to when needed. In the evening there is a talk she has agreed to give to a group of senior girls at a school across the city, about what to do when you are afraid to tell. She has written it three times. The last version is short. It begins: You will be told it is your fault. It is not. You will be told it is better to be quiet. It is not. She does not use her own story. She only says that she knows what it is to be afraid, and that she has found there are people who will open the door.
On Sunday she will go to Masaka. There is a bakery near the market with a woman at the counter who has burned fewer loaves this year. They have tea there now, every second month, in the front where there are people. They talk about small things. Her mother has never once asked to be forgiven again, and Sarah has noticed, and it has counted for something. It has not counted for everything. She does not know what she will feel in ten years. She has decided she does not have to know.
She finishes the tea.
She takes down the photograph and looks at the man with the crooked tie and the laugh he was too shy to finish.
"Taata," she says. "I'm eighteen. I'm going to be a lawyer."
The man in the photograph goes on not laughing.
"I know I said it already. I just like saying it."
She says it again, louder, to the room.
"I'm going to be a lawyer."
Her voice does not shake. It does not drop to a whisper to see if anyone is listening. It goes out across the little room, and over the tanks and the washing, and the whole bright untidy noise of the morning, and nobody tells it to be quiet.
It is hers.
She puts the photograph back, and goes to get dressed, and sings under her breath as she does, badly, a hymn tune she has not been afraid of for months.
The End