Prologue
The Last Ride
The last matatu of the night left the Old Taxi Park at a quarter to ten, and it never left on time.
Nadia sat in the third row, on the left, by the window, because that was where she always sat. The glass was fogged. Somebody's wet umbrella was dripping on her shoe. In front of her a woman in a church hat was asleep with her mouth open, and in front of the woman a schoolboy in a cheap suit was eating groundnuts from a paper cone, one at a time, with great seriousness, as if he were being paid to do it.
It had been raining since four. The city outside was smeared and gold. Headlights pulled long white streaks across the wet road. Boda bodas weaved between the cars with their riders hunched under plastic sheets, and on the pavement a woman was packing up a stall of second-hand shoes while the rain ran off the edge of her tarpaulin in a thin silver curtain. A traffic light turned red, then green, then red, and nothing moved.
"Move in, move in!" the conductor shouted, from the door. "There is space!"
There was no space. There never was. Two more people squeezed in anyway, and the whole row shifted, and Nadia felt a shoulder settle against hers, warm through a damp sleeve.
She did not turn her head.
She was looking at her own reflection in the glass. It was a pale, tired face with her hair tied back anyway and her eyes too wide. On her lap she held a cardboard box with the lid pressed down, as carefully as you hold something that might spill. Her hands were not quite steady. She noticed it and put them flat on the lid.
Two seats ahead, on the other side of the aisle, a man was sitting very still.
She knew the back of his head. She knew the line of his shoulders, and the collar of the grey jacket that had been washed too many times, and the way he held a notebook closed on his knee with one thumb keeping the place. She knew that he had seen her get on. He had not turned around. Neither of them had said a word since the park.
Say something, she thought.
You say something.
The matatu lurched forward. The wipers dragged across the windscreen with a long, rubbery complaint. Somewhere at the back a phone began to play a rumba song, tinny and cheerful, and an old man shouted at it to be quiet.
A year ago she had not known this road. Not the stage names, or the potholes, or which seat caught the breeze. She had come off a bus from Jinja with a suitcase that would not close and a list in her pocket in her mother's handwriting, and she had believed that if she was clever enough, and quiet enough, and fine enough, then everything would be fine.
She had been so sure. She remembered the exact feeling. It was like standing at the bottom of a hill with a heavy bag and thinking the top was only a little way up.
The man in front shifted. His head turned, a few degrees, as if toward the window. She saw the edge of his cheek, and the corner of his eye, and she looked down at the box on her knees.
Why were they here? What had happened between them, on this road, in this seat? She could not have said it all in one breath, even to herself. There was too much of it. There were two hundred mornings. There was a joke about a goat. There was a night in a garage, and a lie that was not really a lie, and a lunch in a house with white pillars. There was a long wet season of not speaking.
The rain came down harder. It drummed on the roof like a thousand small fingers. Mzee Kasozi turned up his rumba cassette, as he did every night when the weather got bad, to keep the passengers calm, and the old vehicle shuddered over a hole in the road, the big one at Nakawa, the one they all called the Canyon. Everybody swayed together. The schoolboy dropped a groundnut. The woman in the church hat did not wake up.
And the man by the window lifted his hand, and without looking back, held it palm-up beside his shoulder, on the back of his seat.
It was a small gesture. It could have meant nothing. A man stretching his fingers. A man waiting for change.
Nadia looked at the hand for a long time.
Then she took a breath, and put the box down on the floor between her feet, and leaned forward until she was close enough to speak.
"Is this seat taken?" she said.
It was the oldest joke they had. It was the first thing he had ever said to her, in a different year, on a different morning, to a girl he had never seen before. She felt her voice shake on it.
His shoulders moved. He did not turn, but she heard him let out a breath, long and uneven, almost a laugh.
"Not yet," he said.
Outside the rain went on falling over the whole wide lights of Kampala, and the last matatu rolled on toward the edge of the city.
But it did not begin there. Everything begins somewhere ordinary. It began on a Monday in March, in a crowded taxi park, with a list in her mother's handwriting and a suitcase that would not close.