Chapter 4
After Work
The first time they ate together, Nadia lied about being hungry.
It was a Wednesday in the second week of September, a bright hard day with a sky as blue as a school uniform, and Mr. Kiggundu had sent her to Nakasero to collect a cheque. The client was an accountant who kept an office above a pharmacy and who did not believe in bank transfers. He had kept her waiting forty minutes on a wooden bench, in a room that smelled of floor polish, and then given her an envelope with a long speech about the youth of today. She came out onto the pavement at five past one, with the cheque in her bag and her stomach making a noise like a small animal.
She had eaten a biscuit at seven. She had a ten-thousand-shilling note for the taxi home and eleven hundred shillings in coins in her purse. Her mother had called the night before to ask for money for Racheal's school trip.
"Just a hundred thousand," her mother had said. "They are going to Entebbe. To see the lake. It is educational. Racheal has been crying for three days."
"A hundred thousand?"
"You can manage. You are earning."
"Yes, Mama."
She had sent it that morning, from a mobile money agent beside the stage, with the withdrawal fee, and watched the balance on her phone drop to a figure she did not look at again. She had then eaten nothing and told herself she was not hungry. By noon, she had almost believed it.
She was standing on the pavement, outside the pharmacy, wondering whether she could make it to four o'clock on a glass of tap water, when a voice behind her said, "You look like a person who has been waiting for an accountant."
She turned.
He was leaning against the wall of the pharmacy with his rucksack at his feet and a paper bag in his hand. In the strong light, away from the Matatu, he looked different. Taller. Less tidy. There was dust on his canvas shoes, and a smudge of something grey on his jaw, and his eyes, in the sun, were a lighter brown than she had thought.
"Eli?"
"The same."
"What are you doing here?"
"Eating." He held up the bag. "I have a meeting in forty minutes on the next road, and I came early to buy lunch, and I bought too much. It is a medical condition. Whenever I am nervous I order for three."
"What are you nervous about?"
"The meeting."
"What meeting?"
"A man who may give me money, or may give me a lecture. It is difficult to tell." He pushed himself off the wall. "Do you eat fish?"
"Of course I eat fish."
"Then I am saved. Come. There is a place around the corner with a tree. I am not asking you to dinner, I am asking you to help me with an emergency."
She should have said no. There was a clear, quiet, practical voice inside her saying so, the voice that counted shillings. You have eleven hundred in your purse. You cannot pay. He will insist on paying, and then you will owe him.
"I'm not hungry," she said.
Her stomach growled so loudly that a passing woman looked round.
Eli did not smile. He studied her with great gravity, for about one second, and then turned and began walking along the pavement with his bag swinging from his hand.
"It is a very large fish," he said, to the street. "It is the size of a baby. I will not be able to finish it. It would be a terrible waste. In my family we were taught never to waste fish."
She followed. She told herself it was only to be polite.
The place with the tree was a roadside restaurant in a yard behind a tailor's shop, with a few plastic tables under the spreading arms of a mango. A woman in a white apron stood over a charcoal grill, turning whole tilapia with a pair of tongs. The smoke rose in a blue column and tangled in the leaves. At every table office workers sat in twos and threes with their jackets off, tearing at flat rounds of chapati and dipping them in sauce, talking with their mouths full.
Eli had already ordered, it seemed, for there was a fish waiting, the size of a baby, on a battered tin plate, and a heap of chips, and a bowl of salad that had a tomato cut in the shape of a flower. A plastic jug of water stood beside it. A second plate had been set opposite his.
"You planned this," Nadia said.
"I did not."
"There are two plates."
"The woman is optimistic." He sat down and pulled out a chair for her with his foot. "She has a theory that I should be married. She sets two plates every time. I have given up arguing."
"Does she know you?"
"I come here every Wednesday."
"On Wednesdays you are just Eli."
"You remember." He looked pleased. "Please. Before it goes cold."
She sat. She looked at the fish, with its crisp brown skin and its small clear eye, and her mouth filled with water so abruptly that she had to swallow. She picked up a piece of chapati. She tore the fish gently along the spine, as her father had taught her, so the flesh came off in clean white flakes, and put one in her mouth.
It was extraordinary. It was salty and smoky and sweet, and she had to close her eyes.
"Good?" said Eli.
"It's all right."
"You are crying."
"I'm not. It's the smoke."
"The smoke is on the other side."
"It's a very persistent smoke."
He said nothing. He tore off the second half of the fish and put it on her plate, with the head, which he knew she would prefer. And then he began to eat his own chips with the tentative air of a man who is not at all hungry, who has been merely keeping her company, and who does not intend to look at her again until she has finished.
She ate everything.
She ate the fish and the chips and the tomato flower, and at the end she ate the rim of the chapati that he had left, and wiped the plate with it. He watched the tree. When she put down her fingers he said, without turning round, "There is more. If you like."
"No. Thank you. That was enough."
"You are sure?"
"It was perfect." She wiped her hands on a paper napkin. She said, "How much was it?"
"Don't be silly."
"I'll pay my half."
"It was one fish."
"Then I'll pay for the fish."
"Nadia." He turned. For the first time since she had known him, his face was serious, and there was something in it she could not read, a flicker of alarm, or care. "Please. Let me. It is only lunch. If it makes you feel better you can buy me one next week."
"Fine."
"Fine?"
"Fine. I will."
She said it lightly, and meant it, and did not know where she would find the money.
The meeting went badly, it seemed, because by evening he was quieter than she had ever seen him.
He got on the Matatu at the Old Taxi Park, at a quarter past six, and sat in the fourth row with his notebook shut on his knee and his eyes fixed on the window. When she climbed in beside him, he moved up without speaking. When Tosh called "Move in, move in!" he did not even flinch. The taxi started, and rolled out into the long red river of the evening traffic, and the rumba began, and the whole city went by in the smeared amber light: shuttered shops, a man on a bicycle with a stack of plastic chairs on his head, a mural of a smiling woman selling cooking oil.
"How was it?" she said at last.
"Fine."
"That is my word."
"What?"
"Fine. That's what I say." She heard herself say it, and was startled. "When it isn't."
He looked at her. His mouth moved, a very small, grim movement. "You caught me."
"What happened?"
"He said it was an interesting idea." He turned the notebook over on his knee. "He said that people like me, young, enthusiastic, with a prototype, come into his office every week. He said that the problem is not the idea. The problem is that nobody believes I can do it without help."
"Whose help?"
"Anyone's. Someone with a name." He shrugged, an impatient, bony shrug. "He said, Who is behind you? I said, nobody. He said, Then who will I call if it goes wrong?"
"That's absurd."
"It's how it works." He looked out at the road. "People do not give money to a project. They give it to a person who is attached to a person. It is how it has always been. I knew that. I just..." He broke off. "It is stupid. I wanted to be the exception."
She did not know what to say. She wanted to say that he would be, that it was a good idea, whatever it was, that anyone who had drawn so long in a book on a minibus must be making something worth making. But she had never seen it, and he had never shown her, and it would have sounded like the kind of thing people say.
So she said nothing. She only moved her shoulder, a few centimetres, until it rested against his arm.
He did not move away.
They sat like that, not speaking, through the crawl of Jinja Road, past the long wall of the railway yard and the blue neon of the pharmacies, with the sun going down in a smear of orange and grey behind them. The air was full of dust and woodsmoke. Somewhere ahead of them a siren was whooping, and the Matatu slowed, and a man in the aisle shouted, "Jam, jam!"
"You know," Eli said, at length, "I was going to tell you the whole thing today."
"What thing?"
"What I'm making." He did not look at her. "I had it all planned. I was going to say it on the way home, if the meeting went well. I was going to say, I make crates."
"Crates?"
"For fish. For milk. Vegetables, mostly. For the people who sit at the side of the road and sell their goods in the sun." He took a breath. "I think a great deal about those people. The women with the tomatoes. The boys with the fish. They carry everything on their heads in a basin, all day, and by noon half of it is spoiled. It costs a fortune to buy a cold box. So they don't. They sell it hot, or they throw it away. And I thought..."
"You thought you would make them one."
"A cheap one." He turned the notebook round, finally, and held it out. "Look. If you want."
She took it.
It was a black book, soft at the edges, smelling of pencil and sweat and something a little like cedar. She slid off the rubber band. She opened it.
She was not sure what she had expected. Landscapes, maybe. Faces. What she found was page after page of boxes. Boxes seen from the front, from the side, from above, from underneath. Boxes with handles, boxes with lids, boxes with a sloping base so the water ran away. Boxes with notes in the margin, in a quick, cramped hand: foam too thick, 3 cm max. Hinges? Rope?? Wholesaler says 12k, must be under 25k retail. Test with fish Saturday. Here and there, in the corner of a page, a tiny sketch of a woman with a basin on her head, or a boy holding up a tilapia, drawn with so much quick tenderness that she felt it in her throat.
"This is yours?"
"All of it."
"It's..." She turned a page. A page of numbers. A page of the same crate, a dozen times, each slightly different, each crossed out. "It's beautiful."
"It's a box."
"It's a very good box."
"It does not work yet."
"It will." She said it before she thought. She handed it back, with care, as one hands back something alive. "You have drawn it a hundred times. It will work."
He took the notebook. He held it for a while without speaking.
"Thank you," he said, quietly.
"You don't have to thank me. It's only true."
"You say that a lot." He snapped the rubber band over the pages. "I like it."
She did not answer. She looked out at the dusk with her pulse going oddly, and watched the lights of Nakawa come up out of the haze. She felt that something had shifted, a small thing, inside the vehicle, as the Matatu rolled over the dip and the whole row swayed together, and her shoulder pressed against his, and neither of them moved apart.
It became a habit, after that, to eat.
Not every day. Not even every week. But on Wednesdays, when she could find an excuse to be in Nakasero, she would come out of an office or a bank or a client's shop and find him leaning against a wall. He never said he was waiting. He said he was passing. He said the fish was too big.
She learned the shape of his week by degrees, as much as he allowed her. Tuesdays and Thursdays he worked "out in Kireka," in a place he called the shed, where he made things that did not work. Mondays and Fridays he went to town, to meetings with people who said, Interesting. Saturdays he spent in markets, with a measuring tape and a camera, talking to women who sold fish. Sundays he disappeared, and when she asked, he said, "Family," in a voice that closed like a door.
"What are they like?" she said, once.
"Who?"
"Your family."
"Oh." He looked at his plate. "My father is a busy man. My mother is very kind. They do not understand what I do, but they are not unkind about it. We do not speak very often."
"Do you have brothers and sisters?"
"One brother. In Canada."
"Do you miss him?"
"Every day, in the way that you miss a thing that you were never sure you liked." He smiled, wryly, at his hands. "What about yours?"
So she told him.
She told him about the house in Walukuba, with its blue door and its tin roof and the shop at the front that smelled of rubber and new paper. She told him about her father, who had worked in the municipal council for thirty-four years and had never once been late, and who read the newspaper from the back to the front, because he said bad news was best taken in the evening. She told him about Ivan, who would one day be famous for something, and Racheal, who was at present convinced she was a dolphin. She told him about her mother.
"She is... a force," Nadia said. "She calls every day at eight. Every day. If I don't pick up, she calls my aunt, and my aunt calls Mama Sauda, who knocks on my door."
"Mama Sauda?"
"My neighbour. You'd like her. She has no teeth on the left side and she knows everything." She was laughing now, remembering. "My mother wants a report. How is the job, how is the weather, what did I eat, is there a man. She says it is because she cares. She is right. But it feels like being the only student in the class, with the teacher watching."
"Are you close?"
"Very."
"Then why are you smiling like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like you're holding something very heavy and pretending it's a handbag."
She looked at him. He was not smiling. He was watching her with that steady, listening, two-things-at-once look, as if he could hear the thing under what she was saying.
She laughed again, a little too brightly. "I'm not."
"Okay."
"It's just... she is proud. Of me. Everyone is. That is a lot to... it's lovely. It's just that..."
"What?"
"I have to keep being the thing they are proud of." It came out before she had decided to say it. She heard it hang in the air over the plastic table, between the tilapia and the jug of water, small and naked and foolish. "That's all. It's nothing. It's a stupid thing."
"It is not stupid."
"I'm fine. Really."
"I know you are," said Eli. He did not press her. He picked up his chapati and tore it in two. "I only wondered."
It rained, that Friday, in a great grey sheet.
She was late leaving the office. At seven the whole of Kampala Road was a river, with water running ankle-deep along the gutters and the taxis creeping through it with their wipers going like frightened animals. She stood in the doorway of the school-bag shop on the ground floor, in her thin coat, with her bag over her head, and watched the rain beat down.
Her phone buzzed. Where are you?
Doorway. Waiting. It's insane.
Stay there.
Where would I go?
She watched the street. The streetlights were coming on, one at a time, each in a halo of silver rain. A man ran by with a newspaper over his head. A boda drove through a puddle and sent up a wave. Then, from the far end, across the road, a tall figure came out of the dark with a black plastic bag held over his hair and a second one in his hand, running, long-legged and absurd, dodging the cars.
"Eli?"
"I have brought you a hat!" he shouted, over the roar of the rain.
"What?"
"A hat!" He arrived, soaked to the skin, breathing hard, with his shirt plastered to his chest and rain running off the end of his nose. He held out the second plastic bag. It was a black bin liner with a hole cut in the top, and it was dripping.
She stared at it. "That's a bin bag."
"It's a fashionable bin bag."
"You ran in the rain for this?"
"I did not have an umbrella. I looked for an umbrella. There was only one man selling them, and he wanted twenty thousand shillings, which is theft." He wiped his face with his hand. "So I made a hat."
"You're soaked."
"I'm aware."
"You'll get ill."
"I have a very strong immune system. I'm from a long line of people who were sprayed with insecticide." He waved the bag. "Put it on. You'll look wonderful."
She did not know whether to laugh or to cry. She took the bag. She tore a second hole in it, with her fingernail, and pulled it over her head like a poncho, so that the plastic hung down to her thighs, and stood there in the doorway of the school-bag shop with her arms out.
Eli looked at her for a long moment.
"You look," he said, "like a very expensive, very sad ghost."
"I look ridiculous."
"You look..." He did not finish. He turned his head and looked at the rain. A muscle moved in his jaw. "Shall we go?"
They walked. The rain thundered on the plastic over their heads, so loud they could not talk. They splashed through the flooded streets of the city with their shoes full of water, past shuttered shops and the doorways where people sheltered in rows, laughing at them, past a stall where a man was selling roasted corn under a tarpaulin and had given up and was eating it himself. At the taxi park the Matatu was waiting at the front of the queue with its lights on. Tosh was leaning out of the door, soaked, shouting, "Move in, move in! There is space!"
There was space. For once, there was a great deal of it, because half the passengers had gone home.
They climbed in. They sat in the fourth row, together, in a puddle of their own making, with the plastic bags crackling and the windows steamed white. The taxi pulled away. Rumba came on, a slow one, thick as honey. The rain drummed. She turned her head and looked at him, at the water dripping from his hair onto his collar, at the line of his throat, at the notebook he had carried through the storm inside his shirt, dry.
"Thank you for the hat," she said.
"It was nothing."
"No. I mean it. Thank you." She stopped. It was a stupid thing to say. It was only a bin bag.
"Anything," said Eli, in a low voice, to the window. "Any time."
Mama Sauda was waiting at the green gate when they reached Banda.
It was gone ten, and the lane was black, but she had a torch, and a wrapper tied tight round her waist, and the expression of a general who has been told that the enemy is approaching. The Matatu had dropped them at the stage, and Eli had insisted, in the face of all argument, on walking her home. "It's only five minutes," Nadia had said. "I know," said Eli. "I'm going the same way." "You are not." "I am now."
So there they were, at ten o'clock, dripping and silly, under a single tree, in front of a woman with a torch.
"Ah," said Mama Sauda.
She raised the light, slowly, and ran it over him from his shoes to his head. He stood still under it, hands at his sides, with the hole-ridden bin bag draped over one shoulder like a sash. She looked at the notebook under his arm. She looked at his face. She lowered the torch.
"Is this the one from the taxi?"
"Mama Sauda!" said Nadia.
"I am only asking."
"It's a friend."
"A friend." Mama Sauda rolled the word round her mouth. "He is very tall."
"Good evening, madam," said Eli, with a slight bow. "I am Eli. I am very sorry to bring her home so late. There was a rain."
"There was a rain," Mama Sauda agreed.
"I wanted to be sure she arrived."
"She has arrived."
"I see that."
"Do you eat?"
He looked taken aback. "I'm sorry?"
"Do you eat? Have you eaten? You look like a man who has been feeding his notebook." She turned and walked into her room, and came out again with a plastic container. "Here. Sauda made too much. It is cassava and beans. Do not stand in the rain and tell me you are not hungry. Everyone says they are not hungry. It is a national lie."
"Madam, I couldn't..."
"Take it."
He took it. There was a short silence, in which the rain drummed on the gate and a goat, somewhere, bleated its disapproval.
"He is not bad," Mama Sauda said to Nadia, in Luganda, in a loud whisper that carried to the end of the lane. "A bit thin. A bit too polite. But he carried a plastic bag in a storm. That shows character."
"Mama Sauda!"
"I'm going. I'm going." She gave Eli a last look, long and searching, and then, remarkably, a gap-toothed smile. "Goodnight, young man. Come again. Come in the day, so that I can see you properly."
She went inside. The door shut. Nadia stood with her face burning, in the dark, and could not look at him.
"I am so sorry."
"Don't be."
"She is..."
"She is wonderful." He was grinning broadly now, in the dark, holding the plastic container to his chest like a prize. "She is the only person in the city who has ever fed me without asking whether I was a good investment."
Nadia's laugh cracked in the middle.
"I should go," he said.
"Yes."
"Goodnight, Nadia."
"Goodnight."
He turned. He took three steps down the lane, and then stopped, and turned back, and said in a low voice, "Nadia."
"Yes?"
"I wanted to ask. For the next time." He seemed to be searching for the right way. "If you're ever not hungry. If there's a Wednesday, and you can't pay for the fish. You could just say so. I wouldn't mind."
She went very still.
"I don't know what you mean," she said.
"No." He was looking at her steadily through the rain. "Of course not."
"I always pay."
"You do."
"I'm fine."
"I know," said Eli. "I know you are."
He nodded, once, as one nods at a closed door, and walked away up the lane with the plastic container in his hand and his hair plastered to his head. She watched him go. She watched until he reached the corner, and was swallowed by the dark and the rain.
She stood there a long time.
Then she let herself into her room, and sat on the bed in her wet coat, and took out her phone. Eleven hundred shillings in her purse. A balance on her mobile money that she did not look at. A message from her mother, from four hours earlier, that she had not yet read.
Ivan's fees are due on Monday. The school is asking. How are things? Did you eat? M.
She looked at it.
Then, very slowly, she typed, Things are good. I will send it tomorrow, and pressed send before she could change her mind.