Chapter 1
The City
The suitcase would not close, and everybody in the house had an opinion about it.
"Take out the blue shoes," said Nadia's mother.
"I need the blue shoes for interviews."
"You can wear the black ones for interviews."
"The black ones are for interviews. The blue ones are for the second interview."
"What second interview?" Her brother Ivan, seventeen and lying across the sofa with his phone on his chest, did not look up. "You have not even had the first one."
"Thank you, Ivan. Very supportive."
"I'm just saying. Plan ahead. Don't pack for a life you haven't got yet."
"Sit on it," said their father, from the doorway.
They all turned. Francis Kisakye stood with a cup of tea in one hand and a folded newspaper under his arm, a long, mild, stooping man in a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of trousers that had been ironed so many times they shone at the knees. He did not usually give instructions. He gave suggestions, quietly, to the air, and waited to see if anyone took them.
"Sit on it," he said again. "Nadia, you sit on it, and Ivan closes the zip. That is how I travelled to Kampala in 1986. With a cardboard box and a good attitude."
"You had a cardboard box?"
"A strong one."
Racheal, who was twelve and had been told to stay out of the way, giggled from under the table.
So Nadia sat on the suitcase, with her knees up and her elbows on them, and Ivan knelt on the floor and dragged at the zip with his tongue between his teeth, and the old brown thing groaned, and shifted, and finally gave in with a long metal sound like a sigh.
"There," said her father.
"Thank you, Taata."
"A good attitude," he said, and went back to his tea.
It was six o'clock on a Monday morning in March, in the house in Walukuba, and the sun was only just getting over the roof of the neighbour's shed. The kitchen smelled of boiled milk and charcoal. On the table was a plate of cold sweet potatoes, wrapped in a cloth, that her mother had decided she must eat on the bus, though the bus did not leave for another hour and a half and Nadia was not hungry.
She was never hungry on the day of anything. She was too busy being afraid.
She was twenty-four. She had a bachelor's degree in Mass Communication from Kyambogo University, with a second class upper, which in her family was spoken of in the way other families spoke of a successful harvest. It was in a frame on the sitting-room wall, between the photograph of her grandfather in his Sunday suit and a calendar from a local hardware shop. Visitors were shown it. Her mother had once taken it to the shop and had it laminated, and had not told her until it was done.
It had taken seven months to get that certificate released. The rest of the family did not know that, because Nadia had not told them. There had been a balance on her fees, a small one, only four hundred thousand shillings, and she had been told to wait. So she had waited, at home, helping in the shop, answering the same question from every aunt and neighbour who came in for sugar. And now? What are you going to do with the paper?
I'm applying, she had said, over and over. I'm sending out letters.
She had. She had sent out sixty-one. She had kept a list in an exercise book with columns for the company, the date, and the reply, and the column for the reply was almost entirely empty. Two had said, politely, that they would keep her details on file. One had said she was overqualified, which she had decided to take as a compliment.
In February, a cousin in Kampala had mentioned that a room was free in Banda, in a compound owned by an old man called Mr. Bbosa. Two hundred and fifty thousand a month, one month deposit, no cooking in the room after nine. Nadia had said yes before the cousin had finished the sentence.
"You'll stay with Auntie Prossy until you find something," her mother had said.
"Auntie Prossy has six people in two rooms."
"Then you will be the seventh."
"Mama, I'll find my own place. I'll be fine."
Her mother had put down the exercise book she was marking, and looked at her over the top of her glasses. Janet Kisakye was a small, round, quick woman of fifty-two, who ran a shop selling pens, exercise books, school uniforms and airtime to half of Walukuba, and who had never in her life been told that anything was impossible and believed it. "Fine," she had said. "Fine. You are always fine. I am only a mother. Tell me one thing. When do you start earning?"
"Soon."
"How soon?"
"Soon, Mama."
"I will tell your father to put aside some money," her mother had said, with the air of a woman announcing a minor war, "so that you are not hungry in the first month. But after that, Nadia, after that I need you to understand. Ivan has his fees in May. Racheal needs uniforms. Your father's pension is not what it was. We are not poor. But we are carrying a lot."
"I know, Mama."
"You are the first. Everything is waiting on you."
It was not said unkindly. It was said as a fact, in the way you tell somebody the weather. But it fell on Nadia's chest like a stone, and she had carried it up to her bedroom and lain down with it, and looked at the ceiling.
Everything is waiting on you.
She had thought: Then I will not let anything fall.
The goodbye took longer than the packing.
They walked her to the bus stage at seven, all of them, in a straggling line, as if it were a funeral. Ivan carried the suitcase on his head, which he said was good training for a future in logistics. Racheal held her hand and swung it and asked a long list of questions. Would there be a lift in the building? Would there be a swimming pool? Would Nadia be on television? Her mother walked a step ahead, in her good blue dress and her church shoes, with Nadia's lunch in a bag.
At the stage, among the vendors and the touts and the old women on low stools, her father stopped, and cleared his throat. He took something out of his shirt pocket. It was an envelope, small, brown, folded in half and soft at the corners from being handled.
"For the first week," he said. "Transport. Food. Whatever you need."
"Taata, no."
"It is not much."
"Keep it. I have money."
"Nadia." He rarely said her name like that. "It is a hundred thousand shillings. I have saved it from the allowance for the electricity. Your mother does not know."
"I know," said her mother, without turning round. "I am not blind."
Her father looked at the ground. He smiled, a little embarrassed, and held out the envelope again.
She took it. It weighed almost nothing. She thought, with a pang so sharp it made her breath catch: he went without light for this.
"Thank you," she said.
"You are going to do very well." He said it quietly, looking at a point somewhere over her shoulder. "I have never been afraid for you. It is only that I would like you to know, there is a place here. If it is difficult. If the city is..." He searched for the word. "If it is bigger than you thought. You can always come back. There is no shame in a road that turns."
"I won't need to."
"Of course not."
"I'll be fine."
"Of course," said her father again, and patted her arm, twice, and stepped away.
She boarded the bus with a lump in her throat the size of an orange. She found a window seat, and put the suitcase between her feet. Through the glass she could see them standing in a row on the red earth, the four of them, small and bright in the early light. Ivan was pretending to be bored. Racheal was waving with both arms. Her father held up one hand, the palm open. And her mother, at the end, did not wave at all, but pressed both hands to her chest and stood perfectly still.
The bus pulled out. Nadia watched them until the road bent, and then she took out her phone, and opened her messages, and typed to her mother, I'm fine.
She had not even left Jinja.
Kampala came up at her in pieces.
First the traffic, which began at the edge of the city, long before the buildings, a slow dragging crawl of lorries and minibuses and boda bodas on the old Jinja road. The bus crept through Lugazi and Seeta and Mukono, and the heat built up inside it, and a baby behind her cried for forty minutes without stopping. Then came the hills. They rose out of a haze of smoke and dust, covered in tin roofs, red and silver and brown, one stacked on another like a hand of cards spilled across the land. Then the first tall buildings, glass and concrete, with cranes standing over them. Then the noise.
She had visited Kampala before. She had come for a school trip, and a cousin's wedding, and an interview that did not work out. But she had always come as a guest. She had always been going back. This time her suitcase was on the roof of the bus, and there was no ticket in her bag.
The old taxi park was a world of its own. Hundreds of white minibuses were crowded into a space the size of a football pitch, packed so close together that their mirrors touched. Conductors hung out of the sliding doors shouting destinations. Kireka, Kireka! Nakawa, Bweyogerere! Entebbe, Entebbe, Entebbe, fill up! Vendors threaded between the vehicles with trays of boiled eggs and bottled water and phone chargers on their heads. A man was selling pink plastic combs. A woman was frying chapati on a slab of iron over a charcoal tin. Overhead a loudspeaker was announcing something in a distorted voice that nobody was listening to.
Nadia stood in the middle of it with her suitcase and thought, calmly, I am going to be killed by a minibus.
"Banda?" a conductor called at her. "Sister, Banda? Kireka? Come, come!"
"Which one is Banda?"
"This one, sister! Hop in! We are leaving!"
"Is it full?"
"It's not full! There's space!"
There was no space. It was packed so tightly that a man in the doorway had to hold his own elbow in. But the conductor grabbed her suitcase before she could argue and passed it up to a boy on the roof, and somebody's hand pulled her in by the sleeve, and she found herself sitting on half a seat, with a stranger's basket of tomatoes on her left knee and the door sliding shut on the roar of the park.
"Welcome to Kampala," said the woman beside her, without looking up from her phone.
The room in Banda was exactly as small as she had been told.
It was at the back of a compound behind a gate painted green, in a row of six rooms with a shared tap and a shared latrine and a shared clothesline, along which the washing of a dozen strangers hung in the afternoon sun. The room had one window, one door, one bed, one chair, and a shelf. A single bulb hung from a wire in the ceiling. The floor was cement, painted red and cracked in a long diagonal line, as if somebody had once tried to split the room in two.
Mr. Bbosa, a thin old man with a walking stick and a cough, counted her deposit twice, wrote her a receipt in a school exercise book, and said, "No cooking after nine. No visitors after ten. No loud music. No men."
"I don't have men."
"Good. Don't get them." He coughed. "If there is a problem, tell Mama Sauda. She knows everything."
Mama Sauda, from the next room, was already standing in her doorway, in a flowered dress and a headscarf, with her arms folded. She was a very wide woman with bright eyes and no teeth on the left. She looked Nadia up and down, from her laminated certificate case to her blue shoes.
"University?"
"Yes."
"Which one?"
"Kyambogo."
"Ah, a good one." She nodded, satisfied. "Single?"
"Yes."
"Job?"
"Not yet."
"Eh." The nod became slower. "You will find. Everybody finds, in the end. The question is how long you eat air." She stepped back into her room, and came out with a plate holding a piece of cold roasted fish and a heap of rice. "Here. You look like you walked all the way."
"I couldn't."
"It's already cooked. If you refuse, I will be offended and I will tell everyone."
Nadia ate the fish sitting on the edge of the bed. It was salty and a little tough and she thought it was the best thing she had ever tasted. When she had finished she sat for a long time looking at the cracked line in the floor, and at her suitcase with its mouth open, and at the single bulb.
This is my room, she thought.
She had expected to feel something large. She waited for it. What came was something small and odd, a quiet pressure behind her ribs, like a hand pressing on a door. It was not happiness exactly. It was not fear. It was closer to the feeling you get when you reach the top of a very long staircase and discover there is another one.
She unpacked. She hung her three work dresses on a nail. She put the laminated certificate on the shelf, and her mother's list on top of it, and the exercise book with sixty-one names beside it. She sat on the bed. She took out her phone and sent another message. Reached. The room is nice. The neighbour gave me fish.
Praise God, her mother wrote, a minute later. Did you eat?
Yes.
Good. Tell the neighbour thank you. Call me tomorrow. Remember what we said.
She did not need to ask what they had said. There was only one thing, in every conversation, whatever else they discussed. She sat looking at the phone in the dim light, and typed, I'll find something soon.
It took eleven weeks.
She would look back on them afterward as a kind of long, hot, grey corridor, with many doors and no handles. She woke each morning at six, washed at the tap in the yard with a basin, put on one of her three work dresses, and took the taxi into the city with her folder of CVs. She walked from office to office in a thin stream of other graduates, all in their best clothes, all carrying the same folders, all with the same expression, a kind of tight, optimistic hunger. They sat in waiting rooms together. They compared notes. A boy with a degree in Economics told her he had been to forty-seven interviews. A girl in a yellow suit said she was working part-time as a cashier at a supermarket and would take anything.
"What do they want?" Nadia asked, in a lobby on Kampala Road, to a man in a security uniform who had been watching them come and go for a year.
"Experience," he said.
"But how do we get it?"
He shrugged, with sympathy, as a man shrugs at a question that has no answer. "You must get a job first."
It was a joke. She laughed. It was one of the few times she laughed that spring.
The money from her father went in the first three weeks. Ten thousand a day for transport, five for lunch, though most days she bought only a packet of biscuits and a bottle of water. She learned that the cheapest meal in Kampala was a plate of chips and kachumbari from a roadside stall, three thousand five hundred shillings, and that the second cheapest was nothing. She learned how to stand at the edge of a restaurant window and read the menu without looking as if she were reading it. She learned which supermarkets had the free samples on Saturday.
Her mother phoned every evening at eight. "How are things?"
"Fine."
"Any news?"
"I have two interviews this week."
"Which?"
"A bank and an insurance company."
"Which bank?"
"Mama, it's an internship, I'm not sure yet."
"Hmm." The line would hum. In the background she could hear the radio in the shop, and customers asking for airtime, and Racheal reciting something under her breath. "Ivan wants to know if you have found a rich boyfriend."
"Tell Ivan he is a child."
"I will tell him." Her mother would pause. "Nadia. If it is hard, you must say."
"It isn't hard."
"You would tell me."
"Of course I would."
She would hang up and sit on the bed with the phone in her lap, looking at the bulb. She did not say that she had borrowed two hundred thousand from Mama Sauda to cover the second month's rent. She did not say that she had stopped using the taxi on some days and walked, an hour each way, from Banda to the Nakawa roundabout, to save two thousand shillings. She did not say that she had cried in a public toilet on William Street, quietly, for about four minutes, and then washed her face and gone to her next appointment.
She was not lying, exactly. She was only keeping it from falling. If she said it aloud, she thought, it would become true. It would arrive in Jinja, in her mother's kitchen, and sit down at the table with the rest of them. And her father would look at the floor. And Ivan would stop making jokes.
So she said, Fine, and Soon, and I'll let you know.
It was, she told herself, a kindness.
The job, when it came, did not look like a miracle.
It came in the eleventh week, on a wet Thursday, through a notice on a pillar outside a stationery shop in Nakasero. WANTED. Client Services Assistant. Brightside Printing & Branding. Mass Comm or related. Apply with CV. There was a phone number in blue marker, and a smudge where the rain had got to it.
She went at once, in her blue shoes, without calling first.
Brightside was on the third floor of a narrow building on Kampala Road, above a shop that sold school bags. There was no lift. The stairs smelled of ink and old dust. Behind a glass door was one big room filled with printers, humming and clacking, and tables piled with paper, and three people in aprons, and a fourth, a young man with round glasses, bent over a computer with a pencil behind each ear.
A woman in a green dress looked up from a desk by the door. "Yes?"
"I'm here about the notice."
"Ah! That one." The woman, who turned out to be called Sandra, jumped up and shook her hand with great energy. "Come in. Don't mind the mess. We are always like this. Mr. Kiggundu! There is a girl for the job!"
Mr. Kiggundu came out of a glass office at the back. He was a heavy, tired man of about sixty in a wrinkled shirt, with ink on his thumbs and the stoop of someone who had spent forty years leaning over a machine. He read her CV standing up. He asked three questions. What was her first language? Could she write? Was she afraid of customers?
"Not very," said Nadia.
"Good. They bite less than you'd think." He took off his glasses, and folded them. "I'll tell you what this is. It is not glamorous. You will answer the phone. You will take orders, quote prices, chase payments, deal with people who want a thousand brochures by Friday and have not decided what to put in them. You will make tea. You will sometimes carry boxes." He paused. "It pays four hundred and fifty thousand a month. I can't pay more. I wish I could."
Nadia did the sum before she could stop herself. Two hundred and fifty for rent. Eighty for transport, if she was careful. A hundred and twenty left, for everything. For food. For airtime. For her mother.
It was not enough. It was so far from enough that for a moment she felt as if she were looking at a bridge with half the planks missing.
"When can I start?" she said.
"Monday."
"Thank you." She meant it with her whole body. "Thank you very much, sir. I will work hard."
"I'm sure you will." He smiled, a short, dry, kind smile. "Everybody does, at first."
She called her mother from the stairwell, with her forehead against the cool plaster of the wall.
"I have a job."
There was a silence, and then a noise like a kettle boiling over. Her mother was shrieking. She was shrieking so loudly that Nadia had to hold the phone away from her ear, and behind it she could hear the shop, the customers, Racheal screaming, "What? What? What?" and Ivan saying something about a party. "Francis!" her mother was shouting. "Francis, come! She has a job! My child has a job!"
"Mama."
"Praise God! Praise Him! Where?"
"A company. On Kampala Road. A printing company, it's called Brightside. It's a good one. I'm in client services."
"Client services!" Her mother rolled the words round her mouth as if tasting them. "What does that mean?"
"I talk to customers."
"Your degree!"
"It's a start."
"It is a start of something." She was weeping now, noisily, happily, the way she did at weddings. "I told your father. I said, she is not like those ones sitting at home. She will get something. How much?"
Nadia looked at a stain on the wall.
"It's a good salary," she said.
"How good?"
"It's... enough. To start."
"Praise God." Her mother blew her nose. "Then Ivan's fees are not a problem. We were so worried. Your father did not sleep. Eh, Nadia, you do not know what this means. You have lifted a weight."
She was crying too, by then. She did not know whether it was joy or something else. She held the phone against her ear and let her mother's voice wash over her, the jubilation, the sobbing, the prayers, and she thought, I should say it now. I should say it's four hundred and fifty. I should say I can barely eat.
"I love you, Mama," she said.
"I love you too. My daughter. My first. You have made us so proud."
She hung up. She stood in the stairwell, with the sound of the printers through the door, and the smell of ink, and a window open to the roar of Kampala Road.
I will make it enough, she thought.
It was a decision, and she made it deliberately, as one signs a form. I will make it enough. She did not know yet what it would cost.
On the first Monday, she took the taxi from Banda at ten past seven.
It was a white minibus with a green stripe, older than most on the road, with a dented side and a crack across the windscreen. The paint on the door was flaking. On the dashboard, behind the driver's head, was a faded plastic sign in red letters, half peeled away, that said MATATU EXPRESS. She noticed it as she climbed in, and wondered about it, briefly, and then forgot.
It was full. She stood a while in the aisle, holding the bar, and then a woman got off at the next stage, and she dropped gratefully into a seat in the third row, on the left, by a window that did not close.
Outside, the city was waking. Boda men were drinking tea at the roadside in the pale light. Women were opening their stalls. A boy was sweeping the front of a shop with a bundle of twigs. The air smelled of woodsmoke and diesel and warm bread. The minibus lurched onto the big road, and the conductor, a skinny young man with a cap and an enormous grin, leaned out of the door and called, "Move in, move in! There is space!"
The taxi rolled on toward town. Nadia sat with her bag on her knees and her laminated certificate case inside it, and her new ID badge, which said CLIENT SERVICES in letters too big for the card. The window let in a breath of cool air. A song started on the radio, an old rumba, bright and rolling. Somebody behind her laughed.
For the first time in eleven weeks, she was going somewhere.
She did not notice the man at the other end of the row, or the notebook on his knee, or the way he looked up from it when she sat down, and then looked back at the page, and then, after a moment, slowly, did not.