Prologue
The Sound of Silence
The house made its own noises at night, and Sarah knew every one of them.
She knew the tick of the iron roof as it cooled after a hot day. She knew the long groan of the water pipe in the wall behind the kitchen, and the dry rustle of the mango tree against the gate, and the small sharp crack that the wardrobe made, in her room, when the damp got into it. She had learned them the way a person learns a language she did not want to speak. Over almost three years, she had sorted them into the ones that meant nothing and the ones that meant wake up.
Tonight there was one sound that mattered, and it was coming from the sitting room.
He was whistling.
It was a hymn tune, slow and flat, with a note missing in the middle of it where he always forgot the words. He whistled it when he was pleased. He whistled it on Sundays, in a clean white shirt, at the door of St. Luke's, while he shook hands with the people coming in. He whistled it now, softly, in the dark, two rooms away from her, in a house where there was nobody else.
Sarah sat on the edge of her bed with her back against the wall.
It was a quarter to eleven on a Friday in March. The rain had stopped an hour ago. A moth was beating itself against the bulb. On the small table beside her lay a Chemistry past paper, open at question six, and a pencil with the end chewed flat, and the green exercise book that she kept under the mattress. She had not written in it tonight. She had not been able to hold the pencil. Her hand was shaking, a fine quick tremor, like the skin of a drum.
Mama will be back tomorrow.
She said it in her head, over and over, like a child saying a prayer. Her mother had gone to her sister's village that afternoon for a funeral, the mother-in-law of Aunt Specioza, three hours away, with a bag and a sack of beans for the mourners. I'll sleep there, she had said, at the gate. They have the vigil tonight. It would look bad to leave. She had not looked at Sarah when she said it. She had looked at the road.
And Peter, at the gate, with his hand lifted in a small wave, had said, in his warm, grave, kindly voice, Don't worry, Grace. I'll look after her.
Sarah had felt it go through her like cold water.
She had put a chair under the handle of her door at six. She had checked it, and checked it again. She had gone into the kitchen at seven, quickly, in her socks, and eaten a piece of bread standing up, and come out again with a glass of water and a feeling at the back of her neck as if she were being watched through a wall. She had not been watched. He had been in the garden, with the lamp, talking on the phone to somebody about cement.
At eight, he had gone out. At nine, she had heard the gate, and then the bolt on the front door, drawn across from the inside, heavily, and a key put away. At a quarter past ten, the whistling had begun.
Think, she told herself.
She was eighteen years old. She had been eighteen for two months. She was a tall thin girl with her father's long forehead and her mother's quick eyes, in a faded blue school T-shirt and a wrapper tied over her knees, and she had a plan. She had it written down. It was in the green book, under the mattress, in a page of small careful handwriting. A bag packed and hidden behind the water tank. A phone number. The name of a teacher. She was going to leave. She was going to leave in a month, when the term had a break, with her certificates and her father's photograph. She had thought she only had to last a month.
I did not think it would be tonight.
The whistling stopped.
She held her breath.
It was the stopping that was the sound. A man who whistles for an hour, and then does not, is a man who has put down whatever he was holding and is listening. She heard, through the wall, a creak. A floorboard. Then the soft flat slap of rubber sandals on the tiles of the passage, one, and then another, coming nearer, taking their time.
She stood up.
She did it without a sound. She stood in the middle of the little room, with the paper on the bed and the moth tapping the bulb, and thought very clearly, The window. It was barred. It had been barred since the burglary two years ago. She looked at it anyway. A small square of black, with four iron lines across it.
The slippers stopped outside her door.
"Sarah."
His voice was gentle. It was always gentle. It was the voice he used at the front of the church, to the old ladies, and at the hardware shop, to the customers who owed him money. It said her name as if it were a kindness he was doing her.
"Sarah. I know you are awake. I can see the light."
She did not answer.
"Open the door, my daughter. I only want to talk."
Do not say anything.
"I am not angry about the other day. About your... the way you spoke to me." The handle turned, very slowly, and stopped against the chair. A small pause. "Ah. You have put a chair. That is not necessary. We are family."
"Go away," said Sarah.
Her voice came out thin and cracked, and she hated it.
"There is no need to be rude."
"Please go away."
"It is late. You are tired. You are tense. That is all it is." Another pause. And then, lower, and no longer gentle at all, and flat, like a man reading from a list: "Your mother is not here, Sarah. You know that. And I have given you three years of food and school fees and a roof. I do not think I am asking for very much."
The door shook.
It was not a loud blow. It was a single, patient, heavy push from the shoulder, and the chair slid an inch on the floor, and stopped. She stared at it. She heard her own breath, quick and shallow, and her heart, which had been going for hours, like a fist on a table.
She did not decide to run.
It was her legs. They moved by themselves, as they had once on a netball court, when a ball came toward her face. She dragged the chair away from the door and wrenched the handle and went through the gap as it opened, ducking under his arm, and he said "Sarah!" in a voice of enormous, wounded surprise, and she was in the passage, in the dark, running, with her bare feet slapping the cold tiles.
The front door was bolted. He had bolted it.
She turned. She went the only way left. She ran down the short passage to the kitchen, and through the arch, into the narrow tiled room with the paraffin stove and the sink and the table where she had eaten her bread, and she stood with her back to the cupboard and her hands behind her, spread flat on the wood.
He came in after her, without hurrying.
He stood in the arch, a broad man in a vest and a pair of old trousers, with his arms hanging loose. He was breathing through his nose. He was not smiling. He had the look he got at the hardware shop when a delivery was late, a kind of heavy, sullen, injured patience. In the light from the passage his face was damp.
"I said I only wanted to talk," said Peter.
"I do not want to talk."
"You never do."
"I'm telling you no. I am telling you no."
"Ah." He came forward. "That again."
"Do not touch me."
"Be quiet. The neighbours."
"I want them to hear!"
"Do you?" He was very close now. He smelled of beer, and soap, and the sharp sour smell of his own sweat. "Who will they believe, Sarah? Eh? Who will they believe, a man who sits in the front row of church, or a girl who cannot even keep her marks up?"
"Stop."
"Come here."
His hand closed on her wrist.
She would not remember afterward what she said. She knew she screamed, once, a cracked animal sound that went out into the dark of the compound and was swallowed by the mango tree. She knew she twisted, and that her back struck the edge of the table, and that something fell, a cup, a tin, with a clatter. She knew that his other hand came up over her mouth, hard and wet and tasting of salt, and that she could not breathe, and that the whole room had narrowed to a small bright circle, with his face in the middle of it, very large, very calm.
I am going to die in my mother's kitchen.
It was not fear. It was something much quieter. It was the plain, flat knowledge of a person who looks at a road and sees where it ends.
And her fingers, which were flung out, behind her, across the wood of the table, touched the handle of something.
It was small, and smooth, and black. It lay where she had left it at supper, beside a heap of matooke peelings, the short knife with the worn blade that her mother used for peeling. She had washed it a hundred times. She had not once, in her life, thought of it as anything but a thing for fruit.
She did not think of it now.
There was no thought in it at all. There was only a hand, closing, and an arm, and the smallest movement she had ever made, a push, with her whole weight, toward the one thing in the room that was pressing her down.
He made a sound.
It was not a loud one. It was a short, astonished grunt, like a man who has stepped on a stair that is not there. His hand fell from her mouth. His weight came off her, all at once, and she felt the air go in, huge and cold and tearing, and she heard, from a great way off, the knife hit the tiles and spin.
Then it was quiet.
She had not known that a room could be so quiet. It was the quiet of a held breath. The paraffin stove ticked. The tap, which had not been tightened, let fall a single drop into the sink. Peter was on his knees on the tiles, with one hand pressed against his side, looking at it with a face of dull, baffled wonder, and a dark wet line was creeping between his fingers.
Sarah stood with her back against the table.
She looked at her hands. They were open in front of her, held out, as if to someone. They were shaking so badly that she could not tell where one ended and the other began. They did not look like hers. They were thin and brown and very clean, except for a smear on the left that shone black in the passage light.
What have I done?
What have I done?
She looked at the arch. She looked at the dark of the passage, and the doorway beyond it, the open door of her room, the lit bulb and the moth. She was waiting for someone to come. She did not know who. Her father, perhaps, with his hymn-humming, in his long coat, saying, Counsel, what is all this noise? Or her mother, with a lantern, in her good blue wrapper. Or anyone. Anyone at all, to stand in that doorway and tell her what to do.
Nobody came.
She tried to scream. She opened her mouth, and her whole chest filled, and the sound would not come. It stuck, in the base of her throat, like a stone in a well. She stood there, with her mouth open, in the kitchen, in the silence, in the noise of a man breathing on a floor.
Her knees gave way.
She did not fall. She slid, slowly, down the leg of the table, with her back against the wood, until she was sitting on the cold tiles with her knees drawn up and her bare feet in a small cold puddle of water from the sink. She put her hands over her face. They smelled of onions and salt and iron.
For a moment, she felt nothing at all.
And then, from somewhere very deep, from a long way under her ribs, from the place where she had put it all, three years of it, every night, every morning, every sentence she had swallowed, something began to rise.
It was not a sob. It was smaller than that. It was a single hot drop, that ran out between her fingers and down the side of her wrist.
Then another.
Sarah sat on her mother's kitchen floor, and the tears began to fall.