Chapter 6
Something More
Neither of them mentioned the taxi park again, and for three weeks it sat between them like a third passenger.
It did not make them quiet. If anything, it made them careful, in the way people are careful with a cracked cup. Eli stopped appearing outside buildings on Wednesdays with a paper bag. Nadia stopped saying I'm fine when he asked how she was. She said Okay, and Tired, and once, Not great, and each time he nodded as though she had handed him something delicate and said nothing, and the Matatu rolled on.
It was a good silence, in the end. It was the kind that grows out of having said something true and survived it. By the middle of November, she found she could look at him across the aisle and not feel the old tightening behind her ribs. She found she could say, "I'm broke till the first," and he could say, "Same," and they could both laugh. She did not know whether he meant it. She did not ask.
And something else had changed. It was very small, and she would not have been able to point to the day. It was only that the mornings had become the best part of her life.
She no longer thought of them as a route. They were a place. She woke up with it already in her mind, the third row, the fourth row, the window that did not close, the cassette starting its first long guitar run, Tosh bellowing, "Move in, move in!" She found that she knew, by the sound of the engine on the hill at Kyambogo, exactly how long they had to talk before the roundabout. Eleven minutes. Seven if it rained. She had begun to save things up. A thing she had read, a thing a client had said, a funny misprint on a funeral programme. She would carry it through the day like a small warm coin in a pocket, and take it out on the Matatu and put it into his hand.
"Listen to this," she would say. "A man ordered fifty posters for his daughter's wedding and wrote Bride and Gloom."
"He is an honest man."
"It's a spelling mistake!"
"It is an honest spelling mistake." He would lean back, with the pencil tucked behind his ear and a look of vast, thoughtful pleasure. "Tell me what you did."
"I corrected it."
"No."
"I did!"
"You made a very big mistake," said Eli. "That was the best thing anyone has ever written on a poster. You should have printed it."
She began to look forward to him telling her things, too. A man had come to the shed that week selling second-hand drills, and it had turned out that the drills were stolen from the shed next door. A woman at the market in Kisenyi had looked at his prototype for a full minute and then said, in Luganda, "My son, that is a basin with a hat." A pigeon had flown into the workshop and stayed for three days and eaten all his foam. He told these stories with a straight face, in a low voice, with his eyes on the road, and Nadia had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing so loudly that other people turned.
She had never known a person who could make an ordinary morning sound like a play.
It was Sandra who said it.
It was a Thursday, and they were at their desks, and a thin warm rain was tapping at the windows of Brightside. The printers were quiet for once. Hassan had gone out for lunch. Mr. Kiggundu was in his glass office with the door shut, shouting softly at a supplier on the phone.
"Who is he?" said Sandra.
"Who?"
"The man you smile at your phone for."
"I don't smile at my phone."
"You smiled at your phone four times in the last ten minutes. I counted." Sandra, who had a pen in her hair and a half-eaten mango in her hand, swung round on her chair with a look of enormous satisfaction. "It is a man. Tell me."
"It's not a man. It's a friend."
"A male friend."
"He sits near me. On the taxi."
"Ah!" Sandra slapped the desk. "The window man!"
"How do you know about the window man?"
"You told me in August. You said, there is a man who draws. You said it twice. You thought I wasn't listening." She bit into the mango, and juice ran down her wrist. "I am always listening. It is the only way to run an office. Is he handsome?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know?"
"I mean..." She felt herself colouring. "I've never thought."
"Nadia."
"I haven't."
"You have never once looked at him and thought, he has a nice face?"
She said nothing. She looked at her keyboard, at the small worn letters, the e and the a and the n. She thought of a long dry hand with a pencil callus on the middle finger. She thought of a mouth that twitched, always on one side, when he was about to be rude. She thought of a Wednesday in the smoky yard with a mango tree, and a tilapia, and the way he had put the head on her plate without a word.
"He has a very nice face," she said, in a small voice.
"I knew it!"
"It doesn't mean anything."
"It means everything." Sandra dropped the mango stone into the bin with a flourish. "You are in love."
"I am not."
"You are halfway. You are standing on the step. Be careful. It is a very long drop and you have no money." She said it so cheerfully that it took Nadia a moment to realise it was not a joke. "But it is good. You have a light on. It has been dark in your face since March."
"Sandra..."
"I'm not saying marry him. I'm saying, go and eat some rice." She wheeled back to her computer. "And bring him on Friday. We have the office party. Mr. Kiggundu is making his goat stew."
"I can't bring him."
"Why not?"
"Because it's not..." She did not finish. She looked down at her phone, which had lit up on the desk. Did the Bride and Gloom man ever collect his posters? She was smiling again. She put the phone in a drawer.
It was Hassan's offer of a lift that started it.
He made it on a wet Friday evening, the last Friday of November, in the doorway of the office, with a crash helmet under one arm and the pencil, for once, only behind one ear. He was twenty-six, a slim, quick, good-looking young man in a leather jacket, with a gap between his front teeth that he had decided, early in life, to treat as an asset.
"It is pouring," he said. "I have a bike. I'll take you to Banda."
"I can take the taxi."
"You will be an hour at the park. It is chaos. The roads are flooded at Nakawa." He did not look at her too long, only the usual half-second more. "It's no trouble. I live in Bugolobi, it's almost on the way. Come on, Nadia. You look like a person who has been waiting in a bus queue since birth."
She hesitated. It was true. Every night that week, the old taxi park had been a lake. She was tired. Her feet hurt. The thought of the dry back seat of a motorbike, and the speed, and the wind, was so appealing that she nearly said yes without thinking.
I told him I would take the Matatu, she thought. I always take the Matatu.
She had never said it aloud. She had never promised. He did not own the seat. He did not own anything. He had not asked for her to be there, and she was not, in any sense that mattered, responsible for a man in a grey jacket with a notebook.
"I can't," she said. "Thank you. I'm meeting a friend."
"Okay." Hassan shrugged, and put on his helmet. "Another time."
She went. She walked in the rain through the evening, to the taxi park, and found the Matatu at the front of its queue with a small, drenched crowd round it, and the water running off its roof in long silver ropes. She climbed on. The fourth row was half empty. She sat down, and the cheap vinyl squeaked, and a few seats away, by the window, the notebook closed with a snap.
"You're late," Eli said.
"There was a lift. I turned it down."
"Why?"
"I wanted to sit here." She said it lightly, to the window, and it hung there.
Beside her, he said nothing for a long time.
Then, in a casual voice: "A lift from who?"
"Hassan. From work."
"The designer."
"Yes."
"The one with the helmet."
"You know about Hassan?"
"You mentioned him." He was looking out of the window at the line of wet lights. "You said he was talented."
"He is."
"You said he drew a very good goat."
"He did."
"You said he was a little too interested in your lunch."
She looked at him. He was perfectly calm. He was holding the notebook with one thumb in the place and his face was turned away, and the line of his jaw was very straight and a little too still.
"Are you jealous?" she said.
"Of what?"
"Of Hassan."
"No." He said it quickly. Then he said, more slowly, "No. That would be absurd."
"Okay."
"I only think that it is a rainy night. And you did not take the bike. And I was..." He stopped. He started again. "I was glad. That is all. I would have been sad to lose my seat."
"It's not your seat."
"It is a little my seat."
"It's a public vehicle."
"Even so."
She was smiling, helplessly, at her own reflection, and she let it grow. She did not say anything else. She only reached across, as the Matatu swung out of the park, and took the notebook out of his hand, and opened it at random, and began to read his handwriting.
He said nothing. He let her.
It was not the only time that month.
The next Tuesday, she came out of the Old Taxi Park at six, tired and damp, and saw him standing at the stage with a woman.
She was perhaps twenty-six. She was tall and brown and striking, with a head of short curls and a bright yellow overall tied round her waist, and she was laughing, with her head back, at something he had said. She held a roll of drawings under one arm. He was holding the other end of a long steel ruler, and they were measuring something on the pavement, and the woman put out a hand and touched his sleeve.
Nadia stopped.
She stood in the middle of the crowd with her bag clutched to her chest, and a small, hot, sour thing rose up in her throat. It was so sudden and so unfamiliar that she did not at first know what it was. It felt like indigestion. It felt like a very small animal biting her under the ribs.
She's pretty, she thought.
Of course she is. Why would he not have friends? He's a person. He is allowed to know people.
She touched his sleeve.
She made herself walk forward. She made herself smile.
"Eli!"
"Nadia!" He looked up, with such transparent pleasure that something in her loosened. "Come. Come, meet Tina. Tina, this is Nadia, the one with the goat."
"The goat!" The woman turned, and held out a hand, and shook hers hard. She had a grip like a carpenter's. "I have heard about the goat for three months. Every Friday he says, Nadia told me about a goat. I have been very jealous of that goat."
"Tina does the welding," said Eli.
"I weld. I cut. I bend." Tina grinned. "I make his prototype frames. He cannot do it himself. His hands are too delicate. He is an artist, you see. He has the soul of a poet and the hands of a man who has never held a hammer."
"That is a lie."
"It is a small lie."
"It is a very large lie."
"It is slightly exaggerated." She pulled a pencil out from behind her ear and made a note on her roll. "I'm going. I have a thing at seven. Nice to meet you, Nadia. Come to the shed. I will show you what a real woman can do with a blowtorch."
"I'd love to."
"Good." She slapped Eli on the shoulder. "Don't be late on Thursday, Mugerw..."
She stopped. Her eyes flicked to Nadia and back to Eli, and a silence landed on the pavement like a dropped plate.
"Mugerwa-ni," said Tina, easily, a fraction too quickly. "It is a joke. A thing I say. Mugerwa-ni, the old measuring man. It's a thing from school." She picked up her roll. "Bye!"
She walked off, very fast, into the evening.
"What was that?" said Nadia.
"What?"
"Mugerwa."
"A joke."
"She said it very strangely."
"She says everything strangely. She has been welding since she was twelve. I think the fumes got her." Eli laughed. It was a short laugh, a little forced, and his ear, she saw, had gone slightly red. "Shall we find the taxi?"
She looked at him for a long moment.
She did not ask. She wanted to. A small, cold, practical voice at the back of her mind said, That was not a joke. But the voice was too faint, and the evening was warm, and he was standing there with his rucksack in the golden dusk looking so unmistakably like a boy who has been caught doing something that was not wrong, only private, that she let it go.
"You didn't tell me she was pretty," she said instead.
"Did you want me to?"
"No."
"Then why are you asking?"
"I'm not."
"You are very obviously asking."
"I'm only saying, she is striking."
"She is married," said Eli. "To a pastor. They have three children and a goat of their own. I think she is more interested in the goat than in me."
Nadia felt the sour thing in her chest dissolve, all at once, with a weak, foolish, vast relief. She laughed. It was a high, silly, embarrassed laugh. She put her hand over her face.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Nadia."
"I was jealous."
It was out. She had not meant to say it. She stood on the pavement of the Old Taxi Park with her hand pressed against her cheek and the roar of the evening around her, and said it again, to the ground. "I was jealous. I'm sorry. It's ridiculous. It is none of my business who you..."
"Hassan," said Eli.
"What?"
"I was jealous of Hassan." He said it quietly, looking straight at her, with the odd steady listening look. "Last Friday. In the taxi. I said I wasn't. I was lying. I sat there for forty minutes wondering whether you wished you had gone. I was very unpleasant to myself."
They stood there.
Around them people were flowing, in long streams, toward the white vehicles. A boy with a tray of boiled eggs went by. A conductor yelled. Somewhere a speaker was playing a song with a bright, thudding drum. Neither of them moved. She had the strange feeling that the whole park had gone slightly further away, and that she and Eli were standing in the middle of it, in a small clear space, as in the quiet eye of a wind.
"So," she said.
"So."
"We are two idiots."
"I'd say so."
"On a pavement."
"Yes."
"In the evening."
"I think," said Eli, "that is where the best conversations take place."
She laughed. He laughed. Then he stopped, and shifted his rucksack, and said, in a slightly different voice, "Nadia. I want to ask you something."
"Okay."
"On Sunday."
"What about Sunday?"
"Would you..." He cleared his throat. He looked, abruptly, young, like a schoolboy about to recite. "Would you like to do something? Not on the Matatu. Not near it. A thing that is not a thing for work."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. Walking. Eating. I have an idea, but it is not a good one. It's very cheap." He stopped. "I mean, it's free. You wouldn't have to pay for anything. I would not let you. I mean... no. I would let you. If you wanted. But I am saying, it does not cost."
"Eli."
"Yes."
"Are you asking me on a date?"
He looked at her. For a moment his face was entirely naked. All the dry humour, all the practised calm, had gone out of it, and what was left was open and wary and hopeful and young.
"Yes," he said. "I think I am."
"Then yes."
"Yes?"
"Yes. I'd like that."
He let out a breath. "Good," he said. "That is good. I will tell you what time."
"Fine."
"Not fine. Excellent."
"Excellent."
"I'll text you."
"I know."
"I know you know." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I'm going to stop talking now."
"That would be best."
They walked to the Matatu together, in silence, shoulder to shoulder, not touching. And the whole way home, in the fourth row, with the rumba playing and the city sliding past in the dusk, neither of them said a word, and neither of them looked out of the window.
The date was not expensive, and it was not clever, and it was the best day of her year.
They met at the Nakawa roundabout at ten on Sunday morning. It was bright and breezy, one of those clear, washed days after rain when the whole of Kampala seems to have been polished. The police officer was on duty, but he was not eating anything. He nodded at them. Eli, in a clean white shirt and the grey jacket with a newly patched elbow, said, "Good morning, officer," with great dignity, and the officer said, "Good morning, sir," and Nadia had to turn away to hide her face.
"What's the plan?" she said.
"We are going to walk."
"Where?"
"The whole route." He swept an arm along the length of Jinja Road. "Back to Banda. On foot. Slowly. I have always wanted to know what it looks like when it's not moving."
"That's the date?"
"I told you it was not a good idea."
"It's the best idea I've ever heard."
"Really?"
"I'm a person who sits in a vehicle with a cracked windscreen," said Nadia. "I have never once seen this road. I have only seen the back of Mzee Kasozi's head."
It took them four hours.
They walked along the edge of the road in the sun, past the petrol station and the roadside carpenters and a long line of women selling charcoal in sacks. They stopped at a stall where a woman sold roasted plantain on a charcoal tin, with a dish of groundnuts and a pot of chilli sauce, and Eli bought two, and they ate them standing on the kerb, burning their fingers. "This is Mama Gonja," he said, with his mouth full. "She has been here for eleven years. She says she is going to retire, every week."
"What does she do on Sundays?"
"Sells plantain."
"That is not retirement."
"It is a very Ugandan form of it."
They looked at things. They looked at a mural of a woman holding a baby, painted on the wall of a primary school, with a crack through her face that someone had filled with yellow paint. They looked at the Canyon, in daylight, from above, and decided it was bigger than they had thought. A boy was fishing in it with a stick and a string. "What's he catching?" said Nadia. "Optimism," said Eli. They stood on the railway bridge and watched a goods train go beneath them, long and slow and rusty, and she leaned on the rail and he stood close, a hand's breadth away, and neither of them said that their shoulders were touching.
They talked about everything. They talked about his sister-in-law in Canada, who was apparently terrifying. They talked about her brother, Ivan, who had been caught in S3 selling revision notes to junior students at a markup. They talked about the first thing they had each wanted to be. He had wanted to be a bus driver. She had wanted to be the person on the radio who reads the traffic. She did the voice. Good afternoon, listeners, and a warm welcome from the roundabout at Nakawa, where nothing is moving at all. He laughed until he had to sit down on a wall.
At one o'clock they reached the stage at Banda, and the woman in the green apron was packing up her maize, and the green gate of Mr. Bbosa's compound was a hundred metres away.
"That's it," Nadia said. "We walked it."
"We did."
"My feet are dead."
"Mine too." He was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking at the stage, at the bench, at the little crooked sign that said BANDA — Taxi Stage — No Parking. He turned and looked at her. His face was brown from the sun, with a smear of chilli on his lip, and his shirt was dusty to the knee. "I do not want it to be over."
"It isn't. It's one o'clock."
"I know." He swallowed. "I did not plan the second half."
"What about lunch?"
"I have eleven thousand shillings."
"I have nine."
"That is twenty." He took a breath, as if about to leap off a diving board. "We could buy rice. And beans. At the stage. And sit on the bench, and eat it with our hands, and look at the road, like two old people."
"That sounds terrible."
"It does."
"I'd love it."
They bought rice and beans for two thousand shillings from the woman who had sold her rice to Nadia since March, who looked at Eli with great interest and gave him an extra spoonful, and they sat side by side on the bench at the stage with the plates on their knees and the traffic going past, and ate with their fingers, not speaking much. The sun climbed. A hen walked past, with the air of a person on an errand. A boda man waved and shouted something rude, in a friendly way. And Nadia, sitting in the afternoon light with beans on her thumb and her feet throbbing and a man beside her whose elbow was pressed against hers, thought, clearly and without alarm: I would like this to be my life.
It was a calm thought. It did not frighten her. It simply arrived, and sat down, and was there.
"What are you thinking?" Eli said.
"Nothing."
"You are smiling."
"I'm just happy."
"Yes," he said, very softly. "I am too."
They did not kiss that day, or the next.
It took a month, in the end, which she thought, afterward, was very reasonable. It was not that they were shy, or afraid, although both of them were. It was only that neither of them wanted to hurry. They had the kind of patience that comes from having found something rare. They went on taking the Matatu. They went on eating on Wednesdays. They went on messaging each other at night, longer now, and later, and with fewer jokes and more of whatever lay under the jokes. In the evenings, in the fourth row, as the taxi swayed through the dark, their hands would find each other's on the seat between them, and rest there, with the fingers loosely laced, for the whole of the ride. Neither of them looked down at it. Neither of them said anything.
It was on the last Saturday before Christmas that it happened, and it was almost an accident.
They had gone into the city for a film. It was the cheapest one at the little cinema near the old park, a loud, bad, wonderful comedy about a man trying to marry off his goat, and they had laughed so hard that an usher came and asked them to leave. They came out into the warm dark with their sides aching. It was after nine. The street was full of lights and music and the smell of frying, and a man on a corner was selling Christmas hats with flashing red bulbs.
"The last matatu," said Eli, looking at his watch. "It leaves at quarter to ten."
"The what?"
"The last one. The final run of the night to Banda. It's the Matatu. Mzee Kasozi does it on Saturdays. After that there is nothing till morning."
"I didn't know it had a last one."
"It has. It is the best one." He took her hand. "Come on. Run."
They ran. They ran down the middle of the street, through the crowd, past the men with the hats and the women with the roasted corn and a boy with a trolley of phones, laughing, holding hands, dodging the boda bodas. At the old taxi park the lights were dim, and the lanes were almost empty, with only a few white vehicles left, parked in rows with their doors open. The Matatu stood at the front with its engine running, and Tosh, hanging out of the door, was calling, in a bored sing-song, "Banda, Banda, last one, last one, move in, move in."
There were only five other passengers. A woman in a church hat was asleep with her mouth open. A schoolboy in a cheap suit was eating groundnuts from a paper cone, one at a time, with great seriousness. Nadia and Eli collapsed into the fourth row, gasping, still holding hands, and Tosh grinned and said, "Ah! The loving ones! Nearly missed it!"
"We are not the loving ones," said Eli.
"You are holding hands."
"For balance."
"Of course," said Tosh, and winked at Nadia, and slid the door shut.
The Matatu pulled out of the park into the night. Rumba came on, a slow one, with a long, rippling guitar. The city went by in the window in streaks of gold and red. They sat side by side, breathing hard, and then not hard, and then calmly, in the near-empty vehicle, with the whole road dark in front of them.
Neither spoke for a long time.
At Nakawa the Matatu went over the Canyon with a thump that rattled every window, and Nadia was thrown against his shoulder, and did not move away. His arm came round her. It was a light movement, a question, not a claim. She leaned into it.
"Nadia."
"Mm."
"I have been wanting to say something. For a long time."
"I know."
"You don't know what it is."
"I think I do."
He was quiet. She felt him breathe. She felt the slow rise and fall of his chest under her cheek, and the warmth of him through the thin shirt, and she lifted her head.
His face was very close. In the dark of the taxi, with the occasional white sweep of a headlight from the road, she could see the line of his mouth, and the crease at the corner of his eye, and the look in it. It was not the look he had when he was being funny. It was the other look, the steady one, the one that listened to two things at once. It was asking.
She nodded.
He kissed her.
It was light. It was brief and careful and unsure, a mouth that tasted of salt and groundnuts, with a faint smell of woodsmoke in his collar. It lasted perhaps three seconds. When he drew back they stared at each other, in the rattling dark, as if each of them had said something in a language neither had known they spoke.
"Oh," said Eli.
"Yes."
"I was not sure it would be... I thought it might be..."
"It was," said Nadia, "very good."
"Good."
"Do it again."
He did. This time it was longer. This time her hand came up, without her asking it, and found his collar, and held it, and the whole of the rest of the world went small and quiet and far away. She heard the engine. She heard the rumba. She heard, very faintly, in the front of the vehicle, the schoolboy stop crunching.
Then, from the open door, in a hushed and joyful voice, Tosh said, "Banda, Banda, last stop. I did not see anything."
They broke apart. They stared. Tosh was standing very erect in the door with his cap pulled down over his eyes and his face, under the brim, split by an enormous grin.
"I did not see anything," he repeated. "I'm an honest man."
"Tosh," said Eli.
"Move in, move in! There is space!"
Nadia put her face in her hands and laughed until she cried.
They got down at the stage. The Matatu rattled away into the dark, with the schoolboy and the sleeping woman and Tosh waving from the back, and the red tail lights shrank down the road and vanished. It was very still. A dog barked. A cool wind came off the fields, smelling of earth and smoke and distant rain. The whole sky was thick with stars.
They stood at the stage with their hands joined, and looked at each other.
"So that was," said Nadia.
"The last matatu."
"The last one."
"I did not plan it."
"I know."
"I would like it noted," said Eli, solemnly, "that I did not plan the last bit. It was an accident. I'd like to say I was clever. I was only lucky."
"I think those are the same."
"Are they?"
"In my experience." She stepped closer and put her forehead against his chest, and felt his arms close round her, long and thin and warm, and she thought: There. This is it. This is the place. Aloud she said, into his shirt, "Walk me home."
"It is a hundred metres."
"I know."
"I'll make it a very slow hundred metres," said Eli.
He did. They walked it in eleven minutes. At the green gate, with the single bulb burning over the latch and every light in the compound dark, he kissed her goodnight once more, softly, on the forehead, and let go. And as he turned away down the lane, with his hands in his pockets, whistling something tuneless, there was a small, dry cough from the nearest window. A curtain moved.
"Goodnight, Mama Sauda," Nadia called, without turning her head.
"I did not see anything," said Mama Sauda, from the dark, with great dignity, and shut the shutter.