Chapter 11
The Last Matatu
It was a Friday, the last one in May, and everything that could end ended on the same afternoon.
It started with a phone call at ten past three. Nadia was at her desk with the headphones on, going through the proofs for a church conference, a long, tedious job with eleven different sizes of hymn sheet, when her screen lit up with a name she knew. Hilda, Entebbe Supermarkets. The buyer. The woman with the glass office who had tasted the yoghurt and asked three questions.
"Nadia! Good afternoon. I have some news."
"Good news, I hope."
"I wish it were." A pause. The sound of paper being turned over. "It is the head office. They have decided to centralise the dairy. There is a new supplier. A large one, in Mbarara. They are offering a price we cannot refuse, and a guaranteed volume, and the board has approved it." Her voice was kind and quick and sorry. "I fought for your women. I want you to know. I said the label was the best on the shelf. But I am only a buyer."
Nadia sat very still. The hymn sheets lay in front of her, a blur of small black type.
"What happens to the order?"
"It is cancelled at the end of June."
"Cancelled."
"I'm so sorry. I will write to Mama Joyce. I will say it was not about quality." A breath. "I am very sorry. It was the nicest thing I have done all year."
She said thank you. She said, "I understand." She put the phone down. She sat looking at it, as one looks at an animal that has bitten one, with a kind of faint puzzled respect, and then she took off the headphones and laid them on the desk.
Two thousand a week. For a year. With an option.
She had told her mother. She had told Mama Joyce. She had written it, in her head, into the budget, into the next six months, the repayments, the room, the small clean future that had been taking shape for two months. And it was gone, in four minutes, on the phone, from a woman who was sorry.
It's fine, said an old, familiar voice, very low, at the back of her skull. It's fine. It's fine.
She did not say it aloud.
It was Mr. Kiggundu who told them the rest.
He did it at five, in the open office, standing in the middle of the floor with his hands in his pockets. He had put on his good tie again, the one from the Mugerwa job, and it hung round his neck like a rope. He asked them to stop what they were doing. Sandra put down her pawpaw. Hassan took the pencils from his ears. The printers, one by one, ground to a halt, and in the sudden silence the sound of the rain, which had begun at four, was very loud against the glass.
"I have to tell you something," he said.
Nobody moved.
"I have spoken to the bank today. And to the landlord. And to my brother." He looked at the floor, and then at each of them in turn, with his heavy, tired, honest eyes. "I have fought it for a long time. I want you to know that. I have not been hiding. I told you in January that the Mugerwa job would not save us. It paid the salaries. It paid the bonus. But it did not pay what we owe."
"Mr. Kiggundu," said Sandra.
"Please, let me." He held up a hand. It trembled. "Brightside will close on the thirtieth of June. I am sorry. I have no other way to say it. The machines will be sold, and the debts will be paid, and there will be a little left. I will pay you all the salary for June, and two months in lieu. It is all I have. I am not a rich man. I wish..."
He could not finish. He stood in the middle of the floor, a stout, stooped man of sixty with ink on his thumbs and a wet, red face, and Sandra, who had never in her life been silent for more than ten seconds, got up and walked across the room and put both arms round him.
"It is not your fault," she said. "It is the world."
"It's my fault."
"It is the world, boss."
Hassan had turned away to the window. His shoulders were shaking. Nadia sat at her desk with her hands in her lap, and the sound of the rain, and the long grey twilight pressing against the glass, and thought, clearly: Twenty-two years.
Forty-one people.
He believed in good work.
She did not cry. She sat there for a time with her eyes dry and her throat tight and something enormous settling over her, like a heavy cloth. It was not despair. She knew despair. It had a shape, and a weight, and a small, soft sound. This was only a very large silence, in which she could hear each separate drop of rain.
When it was over, and the others had gone to the toilet, or the stairwell, or the pavement, she opened her bottom drawer and took out her things. A mug. A calendar. The postcard from Racheal with the crayon sun, which she had pinned to the partition. A cardigan. A stapler that was her own. A box of tissues, half empty. A pencil stub, worn down to an inch, chewed at the end.
She put them in a cardboard box. It was the box the toner had come in. It still smelled of ink.
She sat for a moment with it on her knees.
"Take it," said Mr. Kiggundu, at her shoulder.
She jumped. He was standing by her desk with his coat over his arm. His face was wet and grey, but his eyes were steady.
"I'll write you the reference tonight. It will be a very long one." He tried to smile. "I will say that you are the best client manager I have had in twenty-two years, and that anyone who does not hire you is a fool. I will put it in capitals."
"Thank you, sir."
"Do not call me sir. I have not been sir since four o'clock." He put out a hand, and she took it. It was warm and heavy and damp. "You will be all right, Nadia. I know that. You are one of those people who is always all right. It's an irritating quality."
"I'm not," she said.
He paused.
"I'm not all right," said Nadia. "I'd like to say it. I don't want to say it's fine."
He looked at her for a long moment.
"Good," said Mr. Kiggundu, gently. "Then you are further along than I was at your age."
She walked for a long time.
She did not mean to. She went down the narrow stairs, past the school-bag shop, with the box in her arms, and stood on the pavement of Kampala Road in the rain. It was coming down in sheets. The street was a river. Taxis nosed through it with their lights smeared, and boda men crouched under plastic, and the stalls on the pavement had been hastily covered with sheets of tarpaulin, under which women huddled, watching the sky.
She had no umbrella. She did not want one. She stood, for a minute or two, with the water running down her face and into the collar of her dress, and felt, with a kind of faint relief, that at least it was something she could feel.
Where do I go?
She could not go home. It was too early. It was too small. She thought of the room in Banda with its single bulb, and the cracked red floor, and the shelf with the laminated certificate, and the unpaid arrears, and she could not bear it. She could not sit in that room and look at the wall.
So she walked. She walked up Kampala Road, and down Jinja Road, past the Constitutional Square and the dripping jacarandas and the lit windows of the banks. She walked past a church where a service was being held, and the sound of a choir came out through the open doors, high and sweet and sad. She walked past a stall where a woman was selling roasted corn under a sheet, and the smell of it caught her by the throat, and she went on. Her shoes filled with water. Her dress clung to her. The box in her arms had gone soft.
She walked until the lights began to come on, and the traffic thickened, and the whole of the city had turned the colour of an old penny. It was nearly nine when she reached the old taxi park.
It was almost empty. The lanes were dark. Puddles lay between the parked vehicles, deep and still, with a thousand tiny rings spreading on their surfaces. A few conductors were sitting in doorways, smoking. A man was sweeping rainwater out of a taxi with a broom.
At the very end of the last lane, under a single dim light, one white minibus stood with its engine running, and a dented side, and a cracked windscreen. A faint red sign on the dashboard said, in half-peeled letters, MATATU EXPRESS.
She stopped.
The last one. It would leave at a quarter to ten. There would be nothing after. She had not meant to come here. She had only walked, and the road, as it does, had brought her.
"Banda!" a voice called, lazily, from the door. "Banda, Kireka, last one, last one. Move in, move in."
She got on.
It was half empty.
There was a woman in a church hat, asleep with her mouth open. There was a schoolboy in a cheap suit eating groundnuts from a paper cone, one at a time, with great seriousness. There was an old man with a Bible, and a girl with a baby, and a young man with a guitar case, and near the front, a woman with a basket of oranges on her knee. Rain drummed on the roof. The windows were fogged white. The old cassette player, taped to the dashboard, was playing something slow and rolling, a long guitar that sounded like water.
She found a seat in the third row, on the left. She sat down. She put the box on her knee. She laid her hands flat on the lid, and noticed that they were shaking.
It's only cold, she told herself.
Mzee Kasozi did not turn round. Tosh, at the door, had his cap pulled down, and his enormous grin was gone, and he looked at her for a second, only a second, and said nothing at all. He slid the door shut.
The Matatu lurched forward.
It moved slowly, out of the park, into the wet. The wipers dragged across the windscreen with a long, rubbery complaint. The city outside was smeared and gold. Headlights pulled white streaks across the road. Boda bodas weaved between the cars with their riders hunched under plastic, and on the pavement a woman was packing up a stall of second-hand shoes while the rain ran off the edge of her tarpaulin in a thin silver curtain.
She did not look at the window. She looked at her own reflection in it. It was a pale, tired face, with her hair tied back anyway and her eyes too wide.
And that was when she saw him.
He was two seats ahead, on the other side of the aisle. She had not noticed him get on. He must have been there already. He was sitting very still, in the grey jacket, wet at the shoulders, with a notebook closed on his knee and one thumb keeping the place. He had his back to her. He was looking out of the window at the rain.
She knew the back of his head.
She knew the line of his shoulders. She knew the collar, washed too many times, and the short dark brush of hair, and the way he held himself, a little bent, as if listening. She sat with her whole body gone cold, and a strange hot thing in her chest, and her hands on the lid of a cardboard box.
Why is he here?
She did not know. She had not seen him since the market. He had said he would not come. Not till you say. And yet here he was, on the last matatu, at a quarter to ten on a wet Friday night, in a seat that was not his seat, as if the road itself had arranged it.
He did not turn.
He has seen me get on, she thought. He must have. He saw me come down the aisle.
He did not move. It was not a stiff stillness. It was a patient one, the stillness of a man who has decided to wait, and who is prepared to wait all night.
The Matatu rolled out of the park.
Say something, she thought.
You say something.
The rain came down harder. It drummed on the roof like a thousand small fingers. Somewhere at the back a phone began to play a rumba song, tinny and cheerful, and the old man with the Bible told it, in a mild voice, to hush. At a crossing, the lights turned red, and then green, and then red, and nothing moved. A man in the aisle shouted something about the jam. Tosh called, from the door, "Move in, move in," out of habit, in a low voice, though there was nobody to move.
She was looking at his hand.
It had come up, slowly, without his turning his head. It lay on the back of the seat in front of him, palm open, the fingers a little curled. It was a long dry hand with a pencil callus on the middle finger. It was not reaching. It was only there. It was the old gesture, the one he had made in the dark on the Matatu in December, when he had not yet dared to say what it meant.
It meant: I'm here. You can take it or leave it. I won't ask.
She looked at it for a long time.
Then she took a breath, and put the box down on the floor between her feet, and leaned forward until she was close enough to speak.
"Is this seat taken?" she said.
She felt her voice shake on it. It was a stupid thing to say. It was the oldest joke they had.
His shoulders moved. He did not turn, but she heard him let out a breath, a long, ragged, uneven breath, almost a laugh.
"Not yet," he said.
The Matatu died at Nakawa.
It was not a surprise. It was, if anything, an inevitability, as the rain intensified and the road at the roundabout began to flood. They had been creeping through the water for ten minutes. A sheet of brown, swirling, ankle-deep current ran across the tarmac from the ditch, carrying leaves and paper cups and an odd flip-flop. The old vehicle went into it with a kind of gallant resignation. It reached the great hole at the edge of the roundabout, the one they all called the Canyon, which had filled to the brim and was now a small, swollen, innocent-looking lake, and there it stopped.
There was a cough. Another. A shudder. A thin white column of steam rose from under the bonnet.
"Ah," said Mzee Kasozi.
Nobody spoke. The rumba played on, absurdly, in the dark. The engine gave a last gentle sigh, and the whole vehicle settled a few centimetres into the water, like a very old man lowering himself into a chair.
"Everybody out!" said Tosh. "Out, out! The Matatu is resting!"
It was very nearly funny. A groan went round, and a laugh from the schoolboy, and the old man with the Bible said, "Lord, have mercy on us all." People began to gather their bags. The woman in the church hat woke, and looked round, and demanded in a loud voice to be told what had happened to the Lord's road.
"We have to push," said Mzee Kasozi.
He had turned round at last. He sat in the driver's seat with his cap in his hand, an old man with white stubble and a face like a creased map, and looked at them all, with absolute dignity.
"Push?" said the schoolboy.
"It is on the slope. If we get it past the roundabout, the engine will catch. It has done it before. Eleven times." He put his cap on. "I am too old. You are young. Please."
There was a brief, appalled silence, and then, one by one, with a good deal of grumbling, they began to climb out.
It was raining so hard that nobody could see.
It came down in great black ropes, in the headlights of the passing cars, which slowed, and honked, and did not stop. The road was a swamp. The water was cold, and thick, and up to their shins. Nadia stepped into it in her work shoes and felt it fill them at once, a cold surge, and stood with her hands out, gasping, in the dark.
"Behind!" someone shouted. "Push from behind!"
She waded round to the back. The vehicle loomed over her, white and wet, with its flaking paint and its stuck back door. A dozen people were already there, shoulder to shoulder, braced against the metal. She put her hands on the cold wet bumper. She felt a shape at her side, and then another, and a hand, long and warm, pressed flat against the metal next to hers.
She did not look.
"On three!" yelled Tosh, from the front. "One. Two. Three!"
They pushed.
It did not move. They pushed again, with a collective grunt, feet slipping in the mud. A woman fell. Somebody laughed. "Again!" shouted Tosh. "Again!" They pushed, and the Matatu groaned, and shifted a centimetre, and settled back. Rain ran down Nadia's face and into her mouth. It was warm. She was not sure that it was all rain.
"Nadia," said the voice beside her, very low, almost lost in the roar.
"Don't."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't talk. Push."
"I am pushing."
"You're talking."
"I'm doing both." He sounded, in the dark, as if he were trying not to smile. "It's a skill."
She laughed. It came out of her all at once, in a great shaken gasp, and she pressed her forehead against the wet metal of the vehicle and laughed until her ribs hurt. She was soaked. She had lost her job. Her shoes were full of dirty water and her box was in a puddle. And beside her, with his shoulder against hers, a thin man in a grey jacket was pushing a minibus out of a flood, in the dark, in the rain, and making jokes.
"Again!" bellowed Tosh.
They pushed. The back of the Matatu rose, very slightly, over the lip of the Canyon, like a whale surfacing. Something gave. There was a slow, enormous, sucking sound. "It's moving!" someone screamed. "It's moving! Push, push!" And she shoved with her whole weight, both hands, her shoulder, her entire body, and felt Eli's strength beside her, the strong, long, lean line of him, and for a long wild second she thought, We could push anything.
The Matatu rolled forward, out of the hole, and onto the rise of the roundabout, and began to gather speed.
"Let go!" roared Tosh. "Let go, let go, it's gone, it's gone!"
They let go. The vehicle lurched on, down the slope, with Mzee Kasozi hunched over the wheel and the clutch popping, and then, with a belching, rattling, triumphant roar, the engine caught.
A cheer went up. A cheer, in the dark, in the rain, from a dozen soaked and mud-spattered strangers on a flooded roundabout at ten o'clock at night. The old man with the Bible waved his arms. The woman in the church hat shouted Hallelujah. The schoolboy, who had lost a shoe, danced a short round dance in the water. Tosh was howling with joy, hanging from the door like a flag.
And Nadia, standing in the middle of the road with the rain on her face and her arms hanging limp, began to cry.
It was not tidy. It came all at once, from somewhere deep, in the middle of the cheering. She stood with her mouth open and her hands hanging and the water running down, and felt it pour out of her in great ugly shuddering sobs. It was everything. It was the dairy, and the women in their best gomesis, and the toner box, and Mr. Kiggundu's wet red face. It was a year of I'm fine. It was a bench at a stage and a hundred and fifty thousand shillings and her father's voice on the phone. It was a very long road.
She felt an arm come round her shoulders.
It did not pull. It did not hold her tight. It rested there, a light careful weight, as one lays a coat over a sleeping person.
"I've got you," said Eli.
"I'm not fine."
"I know."
"I'm so not fine."
"I know. I know. Come on." His voice was shaking. "Come on. Let's go and sit down."
They sat in the fourth row, because there was no other seat.
It was not a decision. Somebody had put the box in it. Somebody had put a coat round her. Somebody, she thought afterward, it must have been Tosh, had thrust a plastic cup of something hot into her hands. The Matatu rolled on through the downpour with its wipers going and its windows steamed solid. The rumba had been turned very low. In the aisle, people were wringing out their clothes and murmuring, and somebody was telling the story of the push for the fifth time, with additions.
Nadia sat by the window with her wet hair stuck to her face and the cup between her palms. Eli sat beside her. He did not touch her. His shoulder was an inch from hers, and she could feel the warmth coming off it through the cloth.
For a long time neither of them said anything.
"I lost my job," she said at last.
"I heard."
"How?"
"Tosh." He smiled, wryly. "He knows everything. He says Brightside is closing."
"On the thirtieth."
"I'm sorry."
"And the dairy has been cancelled."
"What dairy?"
"The women. The yoghurt." She stared at the steam on the glass. "A supermarket was going to buy it, two thousand a week, and I had... they have gone to Mbarara. It's all gone. It all went at once. On the same afternoon."
"Nadia."
"I'm not asking you to fix it."
"I'm not going to."
"I mean it. I don't want an envelope."
"I know. I don't have one." He said it gently. "I have a flask of tea."
She turned her head.
He was holding up, between two fingers, a small battered tin flask, dented, with a plastic cup for a lid. It was the kind that old men carry on long journeys. He unscrewed the top. A thin curl of steam rose in the dark.
"It is for Mzee Kasozi," said Eli. "I take it on Mondays. But I thought... it is only a flask. It is not a rescue. I won't be offended if you say no."
She looked at it.
It was such a small thing. It was so entirely ordinary. A man had brought a flask of tea onto a bus. She could have laughed, or wept, or thrown it out of the window. Instead she sat there, with something in her chest slowly loosening, a knot that had been pulled tight for a year, and said, in a voice she barely recognised:
"Yes, please."
He poured. His hand was not steady. The tea went into the cup in a thin golden stream, and she took it, and drank. It was sweet and very hot, with ginger, and it tasted of every Wednesday that year.
"It's good."
"It's my mother's recipe."
"Is it?"
"She sent it with the rice. She says tea is a prayer."
"She's right."
He did not say anything. He turned the flask in his fingers. After a time he said, very low, to the seat in front of him, "I did not know you would be on the last one."
"I didn't either."
"I had a meeting. In town. I was going to take a boda, and the price was thirty thousand because of the flood, and I thought, no. I thought, I'll take the Matatu. And then I sat at the park for an hour, and I did not get on, and I thought..." He broke off. "I'm not telling this well."
"Tell it badly."
"I thought: If she comes, I'll stay. If she doesn't, I'll go. It was stupid. It was an arbitrary test." He winced. "I know, I know. I said I wouldn't test you. But it was only for me. And then the bus was nearly full, and I got on, and there was a long wait. And then you came."
"I almost didn't."
"I know."
"I walked all the way from Kampala Road."
"In this?"
"I didn't notice."
He turned his head, finally, and looked at her. His face in the dim light was thin and wet and open. There was nothing in it that she did not know. There was fear, and tenderness, and a kind of great steady attention. He looked at her as a man looks at a lit window, from outside, at night.
"I'm not going to ask you anything," said Eli. "I want to be very clear. I'm not going to say anything about what happened. Or the shed. Or what either of us said. I won't ask if you've forgiven me. I won't ask what you want." He swallowed. "I'll just sit here. Until Banda. If you want me to talk, I will talk. If you want me to be silent, I'll be silent. I'm very good at it."
"You're terrible at it."
"I'm improving."
She laughed. It was wet and small. She wiped her face. "What are you going to talk about?"
"Boxes."
"Boxes?"
"I have a great deal to say about boxes. I could do forty minutes. There is a new problem with the hinge."
"Tell me about the hinge."
"It is very boring."
"Please."
He did. He told her about the hinge, in a low, level, rambling voice, in the rattle and the rain. He told her about a woman in Kisenyi who had called him a scam and then ordered four. He told her about Tina's husband, who had come to the shed and prayed over the drill press. He told her about a man who had offered to buy all his stock for a quarter of its price and had gone away furious when he laughed. He did not look at her. He looked at the window, at the road, at his own hands, and the whole time he spoke in the same quiet, steady voice, like a man laying down, one at a time, a row of small smooth stones.
She listened. The tea warmed her. The rain drummed. The old rumba, very low, went on and on. And somewhere in the middle of the hinge, she felt something shift, a tiny, definite, interior click, like a key turning in a lock she had long forgotten was there.
She leaned her head against the window.
Then, without lifting it, without a word, she moved her hand across the seat, an inch, two inches, and laid it beside his.
He stopped talking.
He did not look down. He did not move. He only sat, very, very still, as one sits when a bird has landed on the arm, with his breath held, and after a while his fingers turned over, slowly, and closed round hers.
They stayed like that all the way up Jinja Road.
At Banda, Tosh called the stage.
"Banda, Banda!" he sang, from the door. "Banda stage!" He looked down the aisle. His eyes went to the fourth row, and to the two hands, and to Nadia's face. "Banda, sister."
She did not move.
Rain was falling in the dark outside, on the shelter and the bench and the woman's empty basin. A single bulb burned over the stage. Down the lane, at the end of it, behind a green gate, a small room waited with a cracked red floor and a shelf with a certificate.
"Banda!" said Tosh, a little louder. "Last stop for the lady!"
"Nadia," said Eli.
"I know."
"It's your stage."
"I know it is." She was looking at the window. Her breath had made a small round cloud on the glass, and in the cloud, with one finger, she had drawn, without noticing, a very small box. "I don't want to go home."
He was quiet.
"Not tonight. I can't. I will sit in that room and look at the wall." She took a long breath. "I would like to go to Kireka."
"To the shed?"
"If I may."
"Of course you may." His hand tightened on hers. "It's a mess. There is a camp bed. And a stove. And a great many boxes."
"I don't mind."
"Are you sure?"
"No," said Nadia. She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were red, and her hair was in wet strings, and she was shivering a little in the damp coat, and she was smiling, small and uncertain and entirely her own. "I'm not sure at all. That's why I want to go."
He looked at her.
And then he smiled too, the crooked half-smile, from one side, and she saw his whole face open.
"Tosh," said Eli.
"Yes, sir?"
"Kireka, please."
"Kireka!" cried Tosh, in a voice of enormous joy, and slammed the door. "Kireka, Kireka! Move in, move in! There is space!"
The Matatu rolled on past the stage, through the dark, into the rain.