Chapter 13
The Journey Home
"Do not say anything clever," said Nadia.
"I wasn't going to."
"And do not make jokes."
"I will make no jokes."
"You will make one. I know you. You will make a small dry one, in the first ten minutes, and my mother will not know what to do with it."
"Then I will make it very quietly."
"Eli."
"I'm only saying," said Eli, from the other side of the aisle of the bus, with a paper bag of oranges on his knee and an expression of such terrified composure that she wanted to laugh, "that I have been rehearsing for four days. I have a plan. I have a speech. I have a list of what to eat and in what order. I have been told by Moses, who has met a lot of mothers, that I must on no account refuse a second plate."
"Who is Moses?"
"He is a boda man. He is married to a woman who runs a bar. He knows everything."
"You asked a boda man about my mother?"
"I asked Tosh. Tosh said ask Moses."
She put her head back on the seat and laughed until the woman in front turned round.
It was the first Saturday in July, and the bus to Jinja was packed. It was a big blue Link coach, with curtains and a television that did not work, and it smelled of oranges and diesel and warm people. They had left the old taxi park at nine. The road wound east through the green hills, past tea estates and long lines of sugar cane and roadside stalls selling pineapples in pyramids, and the sun was high and white, and the rain of the last weeks had washed the whole country clean.
She sat by the window. She had thought she would be afraid. She had been, for a week. She had lain on her bed in Banda and imagined every possible catastrophe, the silence at the table, her mother's questions, the way her father would look at the floor. But somewhere around Mukono, with the long fields opening out beneath a huge blue sky, a calm had settled on her, a quiet, flat, spacious calm.
It was the calm of a thing already said.
I am coming home, she thought. And I am going to tell them the truth, and I will not know what happens next.
It was oddly peaceful. She watched the cane go by.
It had been a month since the Friday on the last matatu, and a great deal had happened, though none of it was dramatic.
Brightside had closed on the thirtieth, as promised, with a small party in the open office. There had been a cake, a very bad one, made by Sandra, shaped like a printer. Mr. Kiggundu had made a speech, and wept, and shaken everyone's hand. He had given each of them a reference, three pages long, in capitals, and a small framed photograph of the staff on the day of the Mugerwa job, in which Hassan was pulling a face and Nadia, on the end, was laughing at something outside the frame. On the back, in his heavy ink-stained hand, he had written: The best of us were always the ones who said what was true.
She had hung it on the nail in Banda, beside the postcard with the crayon sun.
Then she had gone home and slept for twelve hours.
She had woken, on the first of July, to a silence she did not know. It was seven o'clock. There was no taxi to catch, no desk, no hymn sheets. The sun came through the window in a bright square on the cracked red floor. Mama Sauda's radio was playing a hymn. And she had lain in her bed, in the absurd borrowed sweatshirt, and thought, with a rising and entirely unfamiliar sensation, I have nowhere to be.
It was terrifying. It was also, she discovered, a kind of space.
She had spent the first week doing nothing. Then she had spent the second week doing everything. She had sat at Mama Sauda's table, with a plate of fish, and made a list. She had written to eleven women's groups. She had visited Mama Joyce, in Mpigi, on a Sunday, with a bag of oranges, and sat in the shed among the steel drums and told her what had happened with the supermarket. Mama Joyce had listened without a word. At the end she had said, "So. We will find another door."
"That's what I said."
"You are a good girl." She had poured tea. "It is not the first door that has closed on me. When I was nineteen my husband sold my cow. I found another cow."
"What did you do?"
"I milked it," said Mama Joyce.
It had taken three weeks. In the end the other door had come from the least expected place, a woman in Kisenyi with a fish stall, whose cousin kept cows in Wakiso, and who had been using one of Eli's boxes for three months. If it keeps fish cold, she had said, it keeps milk cold. She had taken twenty bottles of Maama Wa on a Friday, and sold them in three hours, at double the price, from the box, on the corner by the market. By the following Friday she had sold forty. By the third she had brought four friends.
Nadia had stood at the corner, in the sun, watching the women line up with their plastic bags, and felt something that she had no word for. It was something close to the opposite of fine.
She had a name for the firm, in the end. She had thought of a dozen, all grand, with Associates on the end. Then, on a Sunday night, lying in the dark with the phone on her chest, she had remembered a line on a till receipt.
Early.
That was all. Early Studio. A small thing, in a rented desk in a shared room in Nakasero, four days a week, at fifteen thousand a day. It had no clients, except the dairy and a church and one man who wanted a leaflet. She did not know if it would last a year.
But on the first of July, she had written her name at the top of an invoice, in her own hand, and sent it to Mama Joyce, and Mama Joyce had paid it in six hours, by mobile money, with a message that said God is good, and so are you.
She had looked at it for a long time.
It was forty thousand shillings. It was the most money she had ever earned.
Jinja was exactly as she had left it, and completely different.
The bus set them down at the old stage, at ten past one, in the white noon heat. The market was busy. A woman was selling avocados from a basin on her head. A boy on a bicycle with a loudspeaker was announcing a funeral. The air smelled of dust and charcoal and distant water, the long green breath of the Nile, which lay just beyond the town, wide and slow and bright. She stood on the pavement with her small bag and felt her whole body, from her scalp to her heels, go slack with a kind of ancient recognition.
"It's very pretty," said Eli, looking round.
"It's a stage."
"It has a river."
"Everything here has a river." She took his hand. It was damp. "You are nervous."
"I am dying."
"It's a house."
"It is your house."
"It has a blue door and a goat."
"That is the part that frightens me," said Eli.
They walked. It was fifteen minutes, along a dirt road, between low houses with tin roofs and gardens of beans and banana. She said hello to everyone. Everyone said hello back, and looked at Eli, and said hello again, in a different voice. A group of schoolgirls in pink, coming home, went by in a gaggle, shrieking, and one of them shouted, "Nadia! You have a man!"
"Hello, Prossy!"
"Is he rich?"
"No!"
"Is he tall?"
"He is very tall!"
"Then he is fine!" cried Prossy, and was dragged away.
"Does everyone know?" said Eli faintly.
"It's Walukuba."
"They know my height."
"They've known since March," said Nadia. "My mother has been telling people. She does not do it on purpose. It just comes out of her."
The house stood at the end of the road, behind a low wall, with a flat green yard in front and a mango tree. It was a plain cement house with a tin roof and a blue front door, and a shop built onto the side, with a hand-lettered sign over the window. JANET'S GENERAL STORE. Pens. Books. Uniforms. Airtime. Everything. A goat stood in the yard, tethered to a post, and regarded them with flat contempt.
"That is the Bishop," said Nadia.
"Is that his name?"
"It is a long story."
"I'm sure it is."
"Don't look at her. She bites."
The front door opened.
She stood there, in her best blue dress, with a hand on her chest.
For a second nobody moved. Then, with a high, cracked cry that carried the whole length of the road, Janet Kisakye came down the steps like a ship under full sail.
"Nadia!"
"Mama..."
"You are thin! You are so thin! Francis! Francis, come! The child has come, and she is nothing but bones!" She seized Nadia, and crushed her against her chest, and began to kiss her, loudly, on both cheeks and the top of her head. She smelled of soap and cooking oil and the sweet, dusty smell of exercise books. "Why did nobody feed you? Where is the food? I have made seven dishes. I have been up since four. I have killed a chicken."
"Mama, this is Eli."
"Who?"
"Eli. My..."
"Oh." Her mother let go. She stood back, with her hands on Nadia's shoulders, and turned her head, very slowly, until her eyes found the tall young man standing at the gate with a paper bag of oranges.
There was a pause.
It was a long one. Janet Kisakye looked him up and down, from his canvas shoes to his patched jacket, and the bag of oranges, and his hair, which he had tried to flatten, and his face, which was perfectly white. She looked at him the way a doctor looks at an X-ray. It lasted perhaps ten seconds. Then she put her head on one side.
"You brought oranges," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"They are not from the market."
"They are from a stall in Banda."
"Hmm. Not bad." She took them. She weighed one in her palm. "You are very tall."
"I'm told."
"And thin."
"Yes."
"Do you eat?"
"Every day," said Eli. "Sometimes more than once. I had a boda man who warned me."
"A boda man."
"He said that if I refused a second plate, I would not be forgiven."
Janet stared at him.
Then, slowly, from somewhere deep in her chest, a sound rose. It was a sort of explosive bark, and it burst out of her all at once, and she put her hand over her mouth and doubled over, shrieking with laughter. She laughed until the tears ran. She pointed at him. She leaned against the gate. "A boda man!" she said. "He has been told by a boda man! Francis! Come and see! He has a joke!"
"Mama," said Nadia, helplessly.
"He has a joke. In the first minute." She wiped her eyes. "Come inside, young man. Come, come, come. I have been waiting a very long time to see who this is."
They ate for three hours.
There were seven dishes, and each of them arrived in a covered pot. There was chicken stew with groundnut sauce, and matooke, and rice, and beans, and cassava, and a bowl of greens, and a plate of sweet potato. There was a jug of passion fruit juice, and a pot of tea, and a cake that Racheal had made that morning and that tilted slightly to the left. They sat round the table in the front room, under the framed photograph of the grandfather in his Sunday suit, between the television and the calendar from the hardware shop, and Eli sat in the place of honour, on the big chair, with a plate the size of a hubcap.
He had a second plate. He had a third. He did it with the grave absorption of a man defusing a bomb, and at the end of each, her mother asked, "Will you have more?" and he said, "If it's no trouble," in a faint voice, and her mother looked at Nadia, with a small, brilliant, triumphant glow.
"He is a very good eater," she said, in Luganda, to nobody.
"He's being polite," said Ivan.
"Politeness is a form of eating."
"He is going to be sick."
"Then he will be sick in a very good cause." Her mother turned. "Ivan. Go and see to the goat."
Ivan, who was eighteen now, and enormous, with a thin beard and a gap-toothed grin, got up with great reluctance. At the door he turned, and looked at Eli with narrowed, speculative eyes.
"Are you rich?"
"Ivan!"
"I'm only asking. Nadia said no. But she said it too quickly."
"Ivan, go and see to the goat."
"It's all right," said Eli.
The room went quiet.
He put down his fork. He was very pale, but his voice was steady. "It's a fair question. I would rather answer it. I think I should."
"Eli," said Nadia, under her breath.
"No. It's all right." He folded his hands on the cloth. "My father is rich. I'm not. I want to say that clearly, and then explain, if you'll let me. My father is Gerald Mugerwa. He owns Fresh Basket."
Nobody said anything.
Racheal's eyes were enormous. Ivan, in the doorway, had his mouth open. Her father, at the far end of the table, with his napkin tucked into his collar, had stopped chewing.
"I did not tell Nadia," said Eli. "For a long time. She found out in January. At a party. It was a very bad way for her to learn, and it was my fault. I was afraid. I thought she would see me differently." He swallowed. "She did. For a while. And she was right to. But I would like you to know it from me. Not from a newspaper."
"Mugerwa," said her mother.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Fresh Basket."
"Yes."
"I buy my sugar from Fresh Basket."
"Do you?"
"Every Tuesday. They have a branch at the market." She was staring at him. "Do they pay their suppliers on time?"
"I..." He blinked. "I believe so. I'm not in the business."
"You are not in the business?"
"I left it. I make crates."
"Crates?"
"For fish. And milk. Cold boxes. Cheap ones."
"And your father?"
"He wants me to join him. I said no."
"Hmm." Her mother put her chin on her fist. She considered him for a long, long moment, with a face of such intense maternal calculation that Nadia thought she might faint. "He is very rich."
"Yes."
"And you do not take his money."
"No."
"Why?"
"Because I wanted to find out what I was without it." He said it very simply. "I'm still finding out."
"And your father is angry."
"He was. I think he is less now. We do not speak much."
"Hmm." She was silent. Then she reached out, slowly, and took the dish of chicken, and put another piece on his plate. "A rich father is not a sin, young man. What matters is what the son does with himself. I have seen many rich sons in this town. They drive. They drink. They are no use." She sniffed. "You make a crate."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Is it a good one?"
"It's a very good one. It is not a good business. Yet."
"We shall see." She nodded, as if she had come to a decision. "I will buy twenty."
Eli put down his fork.
"I'm sorry?"
"For the shop. I have a freezer in the back, but it is not enough. I sell sodas, and milk, and I would like to sell fish on Fridays. Twenty. At twenty-five thousand each."
"That's five hundred thousand shillings."
"I can count."
"Mama," said Nadia, "you don't have to..."
"I am a businesswoman. I am not being kind. I am buying a product." She raised her chin. "If it is as good as he says."
There was a short silence. Then her father, from the end of the table, cleared his throat. He took the napkin from his collar, and folded it, with great care, in four.
"Mr. Mugerwa," he said.
"Sir."
"I would like to show you something."
It was in the attic.
It was a narrow, hot, dusty space under the tin roof, reached by a ladder from the back bedroom, and it smelled of old paper and mice and the sun on iron. Her father went up first, in his short-sleeved shirt, slowly, one hand on each rung. Eli followed. Nadia, who had not been up in ten years, came last, and sat on the top step with her feet dangling through the hatch, and watched.
The light came through gaps in the roof in long gold bars. There were boxes everywhere. Stacks of exercise books. A broken chair. A rolled mat, a bicycle with no wheels, three cases of her mother's old textbooks. In the far corner, under the slope of the roof, on a kind of low platform of bricks, sat a battered brown cardboard box.
It was not large. It was about the size of a small suitcase. It was tied with string. The corners were soft with age and one side had been mended with brown tape, and on the top, in faded black marker, in a careful clerk's hand, were the words F. KISAKYE — KAMPALA.
Her father stood in front of it with his hands behind his back.
"This," he said, "is my box."
Eli said nothing.
"I came to Kampala in nineteen eighty-six. I was twenty-one. I had a certificate in bookkeeping and a pair of shoes. I carried everything I owned in this." He put out a finger and touched the string. "My mother made it. She cut it from a carton that had held soap. She stitched the corners with sisal. I asked her why, and she said, A good box is the beginning of a good journey."
"It's well made," said Eli, after a moment, very quietly.
"It is. It has lasted nearly forty years." Her father smiled. "I thought you would want to see it. A man who makes boxes."
Eli crouched. He did it slowly, with great respect, as if before an altar. He put out his hand, and ran his thumb along the mended side, along the fold, the neat small stitches in the corner. He turned it a little, in the light. He bent close, and sniffed it, and a strange, soft, helpless look came over his face.
"There's a lid," he said.
"Of course."
"It's a double fold. The cardboard is doubled here, and here." He pointed. "It is a very good joint. I've been trying to get that on my crate. For two years. It keeps the corners from..."
"Splitting."
"Yes."
"My mother knew everything about corners," said her father.
They were silent. Nadia, on the top step, felt her eyes sting.
"Nadia tells me," said her father, in his mild, level voice, "that you are afraid of becoming your father."
Eli started.
"I'm sorry. That was clumsy. She did not say it unkindly." He turned, and looked at him, a long, gentle, stooping man in a short-sleeved shirt, with his hands folded. "I am only going to say one thing. May I?"
"Please, sir."
"I have worked in the same office for thirty-four years. I was passed over eleven times. I never complained. I decided, early, that it was better to be safe. I thought that if I asked for nothing, nothing could be refused." His voice was calm. "My daughter has been braver in one year than I was in thirty. She came to a city she did not know. She lied to us, and starved, and fainted in a taxi park. I did not know. I should have. It will be a sorrow to me for the rest of my life."
"Taata," said Nadia, thickly.
"I am not finished." He did not turn. "But she also won a dairy. And lost it. And stood up on a telephone and told her mother the truth. I have never been so proud." He drew breath. "I tell you this, Mr. Mugerwa, because you are afraid of the wrong thing. You are afraid of becoming your father. I think it is the other way round. I think your father is afraid of being left behind. And that is a different fear."
Eli looked up.
"I do not know your father. I have only seen him on a screen. But I know something about being afraid of the people you love. It makes you very still." Her father smiled. "It makes you hold on. Not because you wish to control. Because you do not know how else to stay."
For a time nobody spoke. A bar of sunlight moved slowly across the dust.
"Thank you," said Eli.
"For what?"
"For telling me."
"I have not told you anything. I am a clerk." He put his hands in his pockets. "I thought you should see the box. That is all. And I would like to say, if it is not too much, that I hope you will sit on it."
"Sir?"
"On the box. It is very strong. I sat on it for six years, on the bus." The old man's eyes were bright. "It does not belong in an attic."
Eli looked at the box. He looked at her father. And then, slowly, with an expression of enormous, delicate care, he lowered himself, until he was sitting on the lid, on the very centre of it, a long thin man in a grey jacket with his knees at his chest.
It held.
"There," said her father, softly. "That is how it is done."
Nadia put her hand over her mouth.
She told them at the end.
It was nearly six, and the light had gone gold. They were on the veranda, at the back, where the mango tree threw a wide shadow over the yard, and her mother had brought out a tray of tea. Racheal was lying on her stomach on the cement with a book. Ivan was washing a bicycle. Eli had been sent to inspect the goat, and was standing at the post, looking down at it, with the intense and puzzled air of a man who has been asked to judge a competition.
"Mama," said Nadia. "Taata."
They looked at her.
"I've got something to say. It is not bad. I want to say it before I go."
"Another one," said her mother. "God, give me strength."
"I lost my job."
Her mother put down the teapot.
"Last month. The firm closed. It wasn't me. It was the bank. Mr. Kiggundu wrote me a very good letter." She drew a breath. "I have started something. A small business. Labels, and writing, for women's groups and cooperatives. I have three clients. I am earning, not much. A hundred and forty thousand last month. I'm not going to earn what I did at Brightside. Not for a year. Maybe two."
There was a short silence.
"Then you come home," said her mother.
"No."
"There is room. There is Racheal's bed. You can help in the shop."
"I can't."
"It is the sensible thing."
"I know it is."
"Then why not?"
"Because I want to find out." She said it quietly, looking at her hands. "Mama, I did everything for you. For all of you. I'm not saying it as a complaint. I would do it again. But I have never done anything for me. I do not know if I will be good at it. I don't know if it will work. But I would like to try."
"And if it fails?"
"Then it fails. And I come home, and you say, I told you, and I sit in the shop."
"I will not say I told you."
"You will."
"I will say it with love," said her mother, with dignity.
Her father laughed. It was a short, startled, wheezing laugh, and he put his hand over his mouth. Her mother glared at him. Then, very slowly, her face began to work. Her chin trembled. Her eyes filled. She picked up her teacup with both hands and put it down again.
"You are going to starve," she said.
"I'll eat."
"You will say you eat, and you won't."
"Mama."
"I know you." Her mother's voice cracked. "I know what you do. I have not forgotten the telephone. I would like you to promise me. Not the fine. The real thing. Every Sunday. You will call, and tell me what it is. If it's bad, you say bad. And I will not make a speech. I will say, I am here."
"I promise."
"And if you are lying, I will know."
"How?"
"I am your mother. I have ears." She wiped her face with her sleeve, roughly. "I'll hear the fine in your throat."
"I'll say poa," said Nadia.
"What is that?"
"It's a word. It's a kind of... it means it's well." She smiled. "But I'll only say it if it's true."
Her mother looked at her for a long time.
Then, without speaking, she got up. She went into the house. She was gone for about a minute, and when she came back she was holding something flat, wrapped in a cloth. She sat down, and unwrapped it on her knee.
It was the certificate. The laminated one. The Kyambogo degree, second class upper, in its plastic sleeve, that had hung for a year on the sitting-room wall between the grandfather and the hardware calendar.
"I took it down this morning," said her mother, gruffly. "I thought, she will want it. For the office. For the new place."
"Mama, it's yours."
"It is not mine. It is the girl's." She pushed it across. "It was always the girl's. I only hung it up because I was proud. Take it. Put it on a wall where you can see it."
Nadia took it. It was warm, from the cloth, and a little sticky, and the plastic had a long crease in one corner where somebody had tried to peel it. She held it in both hands.
"Thank you."
"You are welcome." Her mother blew her nose. "Now eat something. You have not touched the cake."
They left on the evening bus, at half past seven.
It was a dark blue evening with a rising moon. The whole family came to the stage. Her mother pressed a plastic bag of food into each of their hands, and a second one into Eli's, and a third, with a stern look, into Nadia's. Racheal hugged them both round the waist. Ivan shook Eli's hand with gravity and said, "You are all right," and then, "I want a job," and Eli said, "Come and see the shed," and Ivan, for the first time that day, was silent. Her father stood back, under a streetlight, in his short-sleeved shirt, with his arms at his sides. When Nadia kissed him, he held her for a very long time.
"There is no shame in a road that turns," he said, into her hair.
"I know, Taata."
"But I would not mind if it went on a while."
"I'll write."
"Write on a Sunday." He stood back, and straightened his shirt. "I like to read it with my tea."
They sat on the bus, side by side, near the back. The coach pulled out, with a blare of horns, and Nadia watched through the window as the little group on the red earth grew small, and smaller. Her mother had both hands pressed to her chest. Racheal was waving a tea towel. Her father held up one hand, the palm open.
She held up hers.
It was dark by the time they reached Kampala. The old taxi park was almost empty, a vast wet lot of parked white vehicles in the glare of a few yellow lamps, with the dust still rising from the day. A rain had passed through earlier, and the ground was dark and shining. They climbed down from the Link bus into a warm breeze, carrying their bags of food, and stood together, for a moment, in the quiet.
"It's nine thirty," said Eli.
"I know."
"The last one is at a quarter to."
"I know." She looked at him. "Do you want to run?"
"I am too full to run."
"We could walk."
"We'll make it." He took her hand. "It never leaves on time."
It did not. It was standing at the end of the last lane, under the one dim light, with its engine ticking and its cracked windscreen and its dented side and a faded red sign on the dashboard. Mzee Kasozi sat in the driver's seat with his flat cap on his knee, reading a small, thin newspaper. Tosh was leaning in the doorway with his arms folded and his cap on backwards, eating a bag of groundnuts.
"Banda!" he called, with mild interest. "Kireka! Last one, last one, move in, move in." He saw them. He stopped chewing. A grin of enormous, beatific, entirely unsurprised happiness spread across his face. "Ah!" he said. "The family!"
"We are not the family," said Eli.
"You are holding hands."
"For balance."
"Of course, sir. Of course." He slid back the door. "Mind the step."
There were only six other passengers. The woman in the church hat was asleep with her mouth open. The schoolboy in the cheap suit was eating groundnuts one by one from a paper cone. An old man with a Bible. A girl with a baby. They climbed in, and sat in the fourth row, on the right, by the window, and Tosh slid the door shut.
The Matatu lurched forward.
It rolled out of the park into the dark. The old cassette began, a long rippling guitar. Rain-washed lights went by in the window, gold and red. A man sold roasted corn on a pavement under an umbrella. A policeman on the corner nodded at the traffic. And the road unrolled in front of them, familiar and slow and unremarkable, the stages and the potholes and the long flat stretch by the railway line, as it had unrolled every day for a year.
She leaned her head on his shoulder.
He did not say anything. After a moment, his hand came up, and covered hers where it lay on the seat between them. His thumb moved along her knuckles, very slowly, back and forth.
"You were very good," she said.
"I sat on a box."
"You were very good on the box."
"I thought I would cry."
"You did."
"A little." He smiled. "It's an excellent box."
"You made a joke in the first minute."
"It was not a joke. It was a warning."
"You could not have done better."
"Your mother is going to buy twenty crates."
"She is going to buy forty. She'll say twenty and then phone."
"Then I will make them very well." He was silent for a moment. "Nadia."
"Mm."
"I have been thinking. About what your father said."
"Which part?"
"That my father is afraid of being left behind."
She lifted her head and looked at him.
"I think I have been so afraid of being his, that I never asked what he was afraid of." His voice was low and level and a little amazed. "I have been angry at a wall for twenty years. And it's a man. Standing very still. Holding on."
"What will you do?"
"Call him."
"When?"
"Tomorrow." He took a breath. "I'll ask him to come to the shed. To see the boxes. I will not ask for money. I'll say, Papa, would you like to see what I have made? And then I will wait."
"He will say yes."
"He might say no."
"He'll come," said Nadia. "I've met him."
"Yes." He laughed, softly. "You have."
The Matatu went over Kasozi's Canyon with a thump that shook every window. Everyone in the vehicle said, in the same flat voice, "Kasozi's Canyon," and the schoolboy dropped his groundnuts, and the woman in the church hat did not wake. Nadia and Eli looked at each other, and began to laugh. And in the front, Mzee Kasozi, without turning round, put out a hand, and turned the music up.
She settled against him again. The road went on, long and dark and gold, under the wheels. Somewhere out there in the night were the shed, and the tin with its castle lid, and a room in Banda with a cracked red floor. Somewhere were a house in Kololo with a gate that opened by itself, and a house in Walukuba with a goat. Somewhere were Mama Joyce and her fifty-three women, getting up before dawn. Somewhere a man in a study with a gold clock was sitting in the lamplight, looking at a photograph, not sleeping.
It would be all right. Not perfectly. Not in a straight line. It would be a good deal of hard, ordinary, uneven work, with money that was never enough, and fears that did not go away, and fights about the hinge. It would be a road that turned. But she sat in the fourth row of an old white minibus, with her head on a shoulder, and her hand in a hand, and for the first time in twenty-five years she was not holding anything up.
Poa, she thought.
And meant it.
"Eli," she said, into the dark.
"Yes?"
"Did you get home?"
He did not answer at once. The streetlights of Nakawa slid across his face, one by one, gold and shadow and gold. His arm came round her.
"Not yet," said Eli, and kissed the top of her head. "But I think we're nearly there."