Chapter 3
Same Route
"The goat," said the man by the window, the next morning, before she had even sat down. "Did it survive?"
It was a quarter to seven and the Matatu was still half empty. The light was thin and gold. A cock was crowing somewhere behind the Banda stage, and the woman in the green apron was turning maize on her charcoal stove, and the smell came in through the open door, sweet and smoky and a little burnt.
Nadia stood in the aisle with her bag against her chest. She had spent ten minutes at the stage deciding which row to sit in. She had decided on the third. She had planned it. She had told herself it would be perfectly polite to nod, as before, and sit, and look out of the window.
"Which goat?" she said.
"The political one. On the T-shirts."
"Ah." She felt her face begin to heat. "It survived. It was printed in yellow, in the end. The candidate wanted it to look more hopeful."
"A hopeful goat."
"Very."
"And your call?"
"I got through." She sat. She had not meant to sit in the fourth row, on the left, but her legs did it for her, and then she was there, across the aisle from him, on a seat that smelled of old vinyl and petrol. "I think I talked for forty minutes without breathing. The client said I was very professional. Then I went to the toilet and was sick."
"Ah," said the man. "That is the real sign of professionalism."
"Is it?"
"In my line of work, yes."
"What is your line of work?"
"I told you. I make mistakes."
"That's not a job."
"It is, if you are good at it." He closed the notebook, with its rubber band round, and set it on his knee. "I'm Eli."
"Nadia."
"Like the singer?"
"Like my father's favourite aunt, who was fierce and had one eye."
"I like her already."
"You would be afraid of her."
"I'm afraid of most people. It's why I sit by the window." He held out a hand, across the aisle, with great formality, and she took it. It was long, dry and warm, with a callus on the side of the middle finger where a pencil had worn it, and a smear of grey graphite on the knuckle. He shook hers once, gravely, and let go.
"Eli what?" she said.
"Just Eli."
"Nobody is just Eli."
"I am, on Wednesdays." He smiled, with half his mouth. "Tell me. Is it Banda for you every day?"
"Every day."
"And town?"
"Kampala Road. You?"
"All over." He waved a hand toward the front of the vehicle. "Different places. It depends where the day sends me."
It was an answer that told her nothing, and she let it be. She was not in the habit of pressing. She turned and looked out at the road, at the dust and the vendors and a line of schoolchildren in red uniforms walking in single file along the verge, and the Matatu rolled out from the stage, and Mzee Kasozi turned on his first tape of the morning.
They did not sit together that day, or the next. It happened by degrees, as everything on that road did.
On Friday, when she climbed aboard, he had put his rucksack on the seat beside him, and then, when he saw her, he took it off and put it on his knees. He said nothing. He only looked at the seat. She sat in it.
On Monday it was the same, and on Tuesday, and it became a thing that she was no longer able to pretend she had not noticed. The seat was kept. It was not announced. He never said, I saved this for you. He only put his bag on his lap before she arrived, and kept his eyes on the notebook, and when she sat down, slid a few centimetres toward the window and made himself thinner.
She did not mention it either. She was not sure what she would say. Thank you for the seat? It would sound ridiculous. They were two people sharing a bench in a minibus, in the mornings, for forty minutes, at a price of two thousand shillings.
But she found that she started the day differently. She woke at a quarter past six with her mind already on the stage. She chose her dress with care, not for any reason, only because it was good to look tidy. She ate her biscuit standing up, looking out through the cracked window at the sky going pale over the compound wall, and thought, Is it a Wednesday?
They talked.
It began with small things. The weather, the road, the number of people Tosh could fit into a space the size of a wardrobe. The state of the Canyon, which was what Eli called the great hole in the road at Nakawa, where the tarmac had fallen away years ago and nobody had come to fix it. "It has a name," he said. "It must. Anything that has hurt you that many times has a name." She said it ought to be named after the driver. He said that was an honour Mzee Kasozi would not understand. They agreed, on the spot, to call it Kasozi's Canyon, and when the Matatu went over it the next morning with a bang that shook every bone in her body, they both said "Kasozi's Canyon" at the same moment, in the same hollow voice, and the whole row looked round.
They talked about the vehicle. She told him what Sandra had said, about Mombasa. He said he had known that for a year.
"You knew?"
"I'm the one who told Sandra."
"You don't know Sandra."
"I know everyone's Sandra." He shrugged. "Every route has a Sandra. A person who knows everything about a vehicle she has never been in. It's an essential part of the system."
"Why did you never tell me?"
"You never asked." He opened the notebook, without looking at it, and ran his thumb along the rubber band. "I used to live in Nairobi. A year. I worked in a studio there. We took matatus every day, and they are much better than these. They have names. They have art on the sides, whole murals, and screens inside playing music videos, and loud music so you can feel it in your teeth. This one," he nodded at the dashboard, with its half-peeled sign, "is a very old, very tired matatu that has been to the coast and back and does not understand why it is in Uganda."
"We call them taxis."
"I know."
"Here. We call them taxis."
"I have noticed." He smiled. "But I am very bad at it. I have tried. It comes out wrong. In my head it is always a matatu."
"Why?"
"It sounds better. Taxi is a vehicle. Matatu is..." He searched for the word, and moved his hand in a rolling circle, as if turning a wheel. "A situation. Something with ambition. A bit of a gamble."
She laughed. "I'm not calling it that."
"You will."
"I won't."
"We'll see."
They talked about university. He had studied at Makerere, Industrial Art and Design, and he spoke about it with a mixture of fondness and exasperation, as one speaks of an elderly relative. He had spent four years being told he was wasting his time. She had spent three at Kyambogo, under the same sort of cloud. They compared lecturers. They compared hostels. They discovered that they had both eaten the same awful boiled beans, in the same unfinished cafeteria, on the same terrible Tuesday in different years, and that they had both, separately, sworn a vow never to touch beans again. They held up their right hands in the swaying aisle, solemnly, like two people taking an oath.
They talked about work. Hers was easy to describe. It was a printing company, a small one, in a narrow building, with a kind boss and a noisy colleague. His was harder.
"I'm building something," he said.
"What?"
"It's not ready to explain."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that if I say it out loud it will sound stupid." He looked at his hands. "And if it sounds stupid, I might believe it. I'd rather finish it first."
"Is it a secret?"
"It's a... work in progress." He glanced up, with that tilt of the head. "You have a face that is very good at waiting. You do not ask a second question."
"That's not a compliment."
"It is. Most people would have asked three."
"I'm thinking of five."
"You see? Disciplined."
She laughed again. She had not laughed so often in months. It was a strange feeling, like a muscle she had forgotten she had. She noticed that she did not mind the vehicle any more. She did not mind the heat, or the crowding, or the elbow in her ribs. She had stopped looking at her watch.
It was Eli who asked for her number, and he did it in the most roundabout way imaginable.
It was a Thursday in the second week of August, and the Matatu was running late. At Kyambogo a woman had got on with a live chicken in a basket, and the chicken had objected, and there had been a long argument in two languages that ended with the chicken on the roof and the woman in tears. Nadia's phone had died somewhere near the water tower. She had forgotten to charge it, because the socket in her room had stopped working and she had not wanted to bother Mr. Bbosa.
"Dead?" Eli said, looking at the black screen in her hand.
"Dead."
"Here." He dug into his rucksack, and held out a small battered black power bank, with a cable wound round it in a loop. "Use mine."
"I couldn't."
"Please. It has been in my bag for two years and has never had a purpose. I think it is lonely."
She took it. She plugged in her phone, and it flickered, and the little battery sign came up red, and she held it in her lap like a small sick bird. They sat for a minute in silence, listening to the rumba. Outside, the sun was coming over the edge of the hill, a clean hard gold.
"Thank you."
"It is nothing."
"How do I return it?"
"You don't. You keep it until tomorrow." He said it without emphasis, looking at his notebook. "And then tomorrow you return it. And then the day after, if you have forgotten to charge, you borrow it again. I am a practical man. I think we should formalise the system."
"We should formalise it."
"What I mean is..." He cleared his throat, and tapped the pencil against his knee. "It would be easier if I had your number. In case I was late. Or you were. So that if the Matatu is resting, and you are in a ditch, and I know a man who knows a man, I can... pass on the information."
She looked at him. He was staring very hard at the back of the seat in front, with the faintest colour at the edge of his ear.
"That is the worst request I have ever heard," Nadia said.
"I know."
"Do you do that for all your passengers?"
"I have never done it before." He gave her a swift sidelong look, half rueful, half alarmed. "I have spent four days practising. It was meant to be smoother."
She laughed so hard she had to put her hand on the seat in front. A man turned round and glared. She gave him her broadest smile, and he turned back, bewildered.
"Give me your phone," she said.
"What?"
"Your phone. I'll put in the number."
"I have it." He fumbled in his jacket. It was a small, plain Android, with a chipped screen and a rubber case in dull green, the sort of phone a student might have. He handed it to her, and she saw, as she typed, a lock screen with a photograph of a crate. Only a crate. A white plastic box on a table, with a hand-drawn arrow pointing at the lid.
She saved it as Nadia (Matatu). She handed it back. He read the contact, and his mouth did something complicated.
"Matatu," he said.
"Don't."
"You wrote it."
"It was for identification. There are a lot of Nadias."
"Not on this route."
"Eli."
"I'll say nothing." He raised both hands. He was grinning openly now. "It is a victory. I will treasure it. I will keep it in a small box."
She took out her own phone, now at six percent. She typed Eli, and then, after a moment, in brackets, (Window). She did not show him. She dropped the phone into her bag and looked out at the road, and the lanes of the city sliding by, and the white morning, and said nothing at all.
The first message came that night, at nine twenty-two.
She was sitting on her bed in Banda with her feet drawn up and a plate of rice and beans balanced on her knee, listening to Mama Sauda singing in the next room. The bulb was swinging slightly in the draught. Her phone buzzed on the blanket beside her. She picked it up with her fork still in her other hand.
Did you get home?
She stared at it. It was so plain. There was no name on it but the little green icon and the number she had saved that morning. No greeting. No joke. Just four words, in lower case, like a person talking to himself in a corridor.
She put down the fork. She typed.
Yes. Two hours ago. The Matatu behaved.
That is a relief. I was worried about him.
About me or the vehicle?
The vehicle. You can look after yourself.
She snorted. She sat for a moment with the phone in both hands.
How do you know that?
You jumped on a boda in a dress in the rain and went off to defend a goat. That is a woman who can manage.
It was very difficult.
I'm sure.
What are you doing?
Drawing.
What?
Not ready to explain.
That's your answer for everything.
I'm consistent.
She laughed out loud, alone, in the small room, and clapped a hand over her mouth, and heard Mama Sauda's singing stop next door and then, after a pause, start again, a little more loudly, with great tact.
Goodnight, Nadia (Matatu), the screen said.
Goodnight, Eli (Window).
She had not meant to tell him. It was out before she thought. She stared at it, mortified. The little ticks went from grey to blue.
There was a long pause. The three dots appeared, and went, and came again.
I wondered what you called me, he wrote.
She put the phone face down on the bed and pressed both hands over her face. She felt her cheeks burning. She did not know why she was embarrassed, and why she was so happy, and why the two things seemed to be the same.
When she looked again, there was a last message.
Window is better than the other thing I was afraid it was.
What were you afraid it was?
Stalker.
That would have been an upgrade, she typed. You never talk.
Goodnight, Nadia.
She put the plate on the floor, and turned off the bulb, and lay in the dark with the phone on her chest, and listened to the night. A radio was playing in the lane, low, with a love song. A motorbike went by. The wind moved the washing on the line outside, and it made a soft slapping sound like a hand on cloth. She lay for a long time with her eyes open.
She thought: It's nothing. It's a person on a taxi.
She thought: I am twenty-four. I have a job that does not pay and a mother who thinks it does. I have no time.
She thought: I wonder what he is drawing.
By the end of August there was a rhythm to it.
Did you get home? every night, from either of them, though neither ever said who would ask. Are you taking the usual matatu tomorrow? was how it began, from her, a week later, though she knew the answer, and he sent back a picture of a small paper boat on a table, which she did not understand and did not ask about. After that it was longer. A joke about the chicken. A photograph of a sign on a roadside shop that said We Sell Everything Except Sadness. A message at eleven at night, from him, with no preamble, that said I think it is a good idea but I'm afraid of it, and then nothing, and then, at midnight, Sorry. Ignore that. Work.
She did not ignore it. She did not reply, either, because she did not know what it meant. But she turned it over and over in her mind in the dark, and she liked him for having sent it.
They never spoke of it in the morning. The morning was a different country. In the morning he said, "Good day to be a goat," and she said, "Every day is a good day to be a goat," and Mzee Kasozi put on his third tape. They sat side by side with their shoulders touching, as the seat required, and looked at the road, and he drew in his book, and she did not ask what.
She did not think of it as a friendship. It did not occur to her to give it a name. It was not important enough. It was only the place where, for forty minutes each morning, she did not have to be fine.
She would remember that later, with a kind of wonder. She would remember how it began, so small, so unpromising: two people on a bench in a minibus, borrowing a power bank. Neither of them had said anything remarkable. Neither of them had seen what it was.
But on the last Friday in August, getting down at the Old Taxi Park, with the usual swarm of conductors and vendors and the roar of a thousand engines in her ears, she heard a voice behind her, calling.
"Nadia!"
She turned. He was standing on the step of the Matatu with his rucksack over one shoulder. Tosh was shouting at him to move. He did not.
"Same time Monday?" he said.
"It's always the same time."
"I know." He hesitated, with an odd, boyish, serious expression. "I just wanted to say it."
"Okay," said Nadia.
"Okay."
He got down, and was swallowed by the crowd. She stood where she was, in the middle of the park, with people pushing past her on both sides, and a boy trying to sell her a phone case, and found that she was smiling again, and that this time, she did not put a hand over her mouth.