Chapter Ten
The Things I Never Told Her
If you had asked me, that November, to list what I had not told Naomi, I could have done it in under a minute. I knew the list the way a man knows the contents of his own pockets.
I had not told her about the Club. Not its name, not its returns, not the three million two hundred thousand shillings that now sat inside it, in my name and in Ronnie's and in Denis's, and in the names of eleven other people I had brought to the door.
I had not told her about the fees. The envelope. The six hundred thousand I had taken off the top, and the way I had stood in a bathroom with the tap running.
I had not told her about the betting, the yellow shops, the long evenings in front of the screens. I had not told her about Brenda. I had not told her about the nights that came before the Sundays when I sat beside her on the steps with a cup of tea and said, in a quiet clear voice, that I was glad to be there.
And I had not told her that on the ninth night in a hospital bed in Mulago, my father had looked at me, and I had known what he wanted to say, and had refused to hear it.
That last thing was not true, strictly speaking. But I felt it was. It sat with the others in the drawer.
That is what I want you to understand about the weeks after Ggaba. I was happy. I was happier than I had been in years. And at the same time, every day, I added something to the list.
Her interviews were on Thursdays.
She did not ask me to come. I offered. I do not entirely know why, except that I had begun to feel, with a kind of dread, that I was standing at the edge of something, and wanted to see it. I told her I could carry the recorder. I told her I could take notes. She looked at me for a moment, and said, "Are you sure? It's not nice, Eli. It's not like story hour."
"I'd like to see what you do."
"All right." She did not smile. "Wear something that doesn't have opinions."
We took a boda to Bwaise, to a lane so narrow and so crowded with washing that we walked the last two hundred metres. The houses were low and packed together, iron-roofed, their walls streaked with rust and green. Open drains ran down the sides of the path, and children played beside them in the dirt with a ball of rolled-up plastic bags. The air smelled of smoke and wet earth and something sour. A radio blared a sermon from somewhere. A man was selling second-hand shoes from a blanket, in neat paired rows, and I looked at them as we passed, and I thought of my father, in a pair of rubber sandals with one strap broken.
The woman's name was Mama Peace.
She lived in one room, at the end of a short passage, behind a curtain printed with faded flowers. She was perhaps fifty-five, large and slow, with a wide, tired face and a head-wrap the colour of old wine. When we came in she was sitting on a low stool beside a charcoal stove, shelling beans into an enamel basin, and she looked up and said, in a warm, courteous voice, "Naomi, my daughter. You came back."
"I told you I would, Mama."
"Many people say. Not many come." She wiped her hands on her wrapper. "And who is this?"
"My friend Eliya. He's helping me today. He's studying commerce."
"Commerce." She looked at me with grave interest. "That is very good. Sit, sit."
There was only one chair. Naomi gestured me towards it, and she herself sat down on the floor, cross-legged, on a worn mat, as though it were the most natural place in the world, and I realised that I had seen her do this before, that she always chose the floor. The room was dim. A single window let in a narrow shaft of light, in which the smoke from the stove turned and turned. A bed with a tin trunk beneath it. A shelf with a cracked radio, a Bible, a framed photograph of a thin man in a suit. A schoolgirl's uniform hung on a nail, ironed flat.
For an hour, Naomi did what she did.
I had not known what it would be like. She did not ask many questions. She asked one, very quietly, at the start, Mama, would you like to tell me again what happened? and then she was silent. She sat with her hands in her lap and her head tilted, and her whole body said: I have nowhere to be. I have all the time there is. It was astonishing. It was like watching a person lower herself into cold water and stay there.
And Mama Peace talked.
She told us that she sold tomatoes at Nakawa market and had done since she was twelve. She told us that her husband had died four years ago of a short illness, and that she had paid for the burial herself. She told us about her daughter, who was fourteen and in her second year at secondary school, and who wanted to be a nurse. She told us that she had been saving for the girl's fees in a tin under the bed, a little each day, for six years.
"Then my pastor's friend came," she said. "A man from the church. He sat in the front. He is a brother. He held my hand at my husband's burial. He said Mama, I am sorry for your trouble. He had a very kind face."
Her voice was steady. Her hands were still. She was shelling beans again, without looking down, her thick fingers splitting the pods with a small dry click.
"He told me about the group. Golden Link. He said that the money in the tin was sleeping. He said, God does not want His children's money to sleep." She smiled slightly, an odd empty smile. "I thought, that is true. My husband worked all his life and the money slept. I put in one million eight hundred thousand. They paid me the first month. They paid me the second. I put in more." The click of the beans. "And then the office was shut."
Naomi did not speak.
"I went to the church," said Mama Peace. "I went to find him. They told me he had left. A transfer, they said. To another branch. In the north." She laid a hand flat against her chest. "I think of him sometimes. I wonder if he is hungry. I pray that he is not hungry."
My throat closed.
"He took your money," said Naomi, gently. It was the one thing she said that morning that was not a question.
"He did."
"And you pray for him?"
"What else must I do?" said Mama Peace. She looked straight at Naomi, with a kind of weary, startled simplicity, as one might look at a child who had asked why the sun rose. "If I carry it, it makes me heavy. I have a daughter to carry. I put it down."
I looked at the floor. A line of ants was crossing the concrete beneath my chair, bearing grains of something white.
Then she turned to me.
"You are the one who studies commerce," she said.
"Yes, Mama."
"Then explain to me." She said it without anger, almost shyly, as if requesting a small favour. "I have asked many people, and no one can tell me. The man said thirty. He said, thirty in every hundred, every month. I was a tomato seller. I understood. I said, if I put in a hundred, in a month I have a hundred and thirty. And he said yes. And it was so. For two months, it was so." She leaned forward. "How can it be, my son, that thirty is not thirty?"
I could not speak.
I had a diploma's worth of answers. I had the arithmetic of compound interest, the structure of a pooled fund, the whole lecture on why no legitimate venture on earth can sustain such a return. I could have drawn the diagram on the wall. I could have explained, in four minutes, precisely how the man in the church had done it, and why the money in the tin had never been invested in anything at all, but merely moved from one pocket to another.
"It was never thirty," I said. My voice cracked. "He was paying you with other people's money. The ones who came after. It only works while more people keep joining. When they stop..." I made a small helpless gesture with my hands. "When they stop, it falls."
She nodded slowly. "That is what Naomi says."
"I'm sorry."
"Why are you sorry?" She smiled at me, and it was a smile of such gentle, bewildered kindness that I felt it like a blow. "It was not you."
I felt Naomi look at me. I felt her gaze rest on the side of my face, quiet and curious and warm. And in my pocket, against my thigh, I felt the small hard shape of my phone, and the message I had not yet answered, which began Brother Kasozi, the Gold package.
It was not you.
She cried on the way out.
She did not make a sound. We were walking back down the passage, between the washing and the open drains, and she was a little ahead of me, with the folder pressed against her chest, and I saw her shoulders begin to shake. She did not stop. She kept walking, steadily, her head down. When we came out at the end of the lane, onto the main road, where the taxis were nosing through the dust and a boy was selling mangoes from a bucket, she stopped, quite suddenly, and put her back against a wall and her face in her hands.
I did not know what to do. I stood in front of her. A man went past and looked at us and looked away.
"I'm sorry," she said, through her fingers. "I'm fine. I'm always like this. After."
"You don't have to be fine."
"It's just that I sit there and I listen, and they're so good. They're so good, Eli. She's praying for him. She's praying for the man who took her daughter's school fees." She lifted her head, and her glasses were crooked and fogged, her face blotched. "And I can't. I can't do it. I think about him and I want to..." She stopped, and made a small furious movement with her fist. "I want to find him. I want to find all of them. I want to stand in front of them and say, look at what you did. Look at her. And I know that's not what I'm supposed to feel, and I feel it anyway."
"You're allowed."
"Am I?"
"Yes."
"Even in church?"
"Especially in church," I said. "It's where everyone's lying."
She gave a wet, startled laugh. I put my arms around her, clumsily, and she let me. Her forehead came down against my collarbone. I could feel her breathing, ragged at first, then slower, and the damp spreading across my shirt. I stood there, in the dust, with the mango-seller shouting and a minibus blaring its horn, and I held her.
And in that moment, I could not have said which of two things was more unbearable: that she was crying for a woman I had never met, or that I was holding her with a lie in my mouth.
"I have to tell you something," I said.
The words came out of me by themselves, as a breath does after you have held it too long. I felt her go still.
"Okay."
"It's not... it's not the whole thing. I'm not saying it's the whole thing." I heard myself stumbling. "But you said, at Ggaba, that I was holding something. And I am. And I want to tell you some of it. Now."
She drew back, and looked up at me. Her eyes were red-rimmed and very clear.
"All right," she said.
I told her about the betting.
I told her it plainly: the shops, the screens, the first twenty thousand, the first sixty. I told her about the night I had put in six hundred thousand shillings on a Spanish match, and I did not tell her whose six hundred thousand it was. I said savings, and let her think they were mine. I told her I had won, and gone on winning, and then lost. I told her that it had been, for a while, the only thing that made me feel alive, and that I was ashamed of it. I told her I still went, sometimes. Not often.
Then I told her, in a low voice, with my eyes on the road, that there had been a girl.
I told her it had been one night, a year before, and that it had meant nothing, and that I had been drunk, and that I had woken the next morning with a feeling I could not describe. I did not say her name. I did not say that there had been messages since, from time to time, light and friendly, and that I had answered them.
It was all true. Every word. I want you to understand that. There was not a single lie in what I said.
And at the end of it, Naomi did something I have never forgotten. She did not step back. She did not go white, or cold, or say anything cutting. She stood against the wall in the dust, her hands pressed together, looking at me with her mouth slightly open. And I watched, with a kind of horror, as her whole face softened.
"Thank you," she said.
"What?"
"For telling me." She shook her head, and a slow incredulous smile came over her face. "I was so afraid. I thought it was something awful. I thought you were married. Or in prison. I thought..." She laughed, and wiped her eyes. "Eli. It's a bet. It's a girl, a year ago, before you knew me. It's... I'm not going to say it's nothing. It isn't nothing. But it's human. It's the kind of thing people can come back from."
"You're not angry?"
"Of course I'm a little angry. I'm allowed." She took my hand. "I want you to stop. The betting. Not because I say. Because I think it's eating you." She squeezed. "But thank you. Thank you for saying it. It was the hardest thing, wasn't it? I could see."
I could not look at her.
"I'd like to," said Naomi. She said it softly, with a catch in her voice. "Now. If it's still all right."
"What?"
"The thing I stopped. At the lake."
I understood her a moment later. And I will say what I have never said to anyone, not to my mother, not to the pastor: that I could have stopped it. There was a second, a long clear second, in which I saw exactly what was happening. I had told her a true thing in order to hide a bigger one. I had spent a little coin to buy her trust, and she was about to hand over the whole of it. I saw the Club behind my teeth. I saw the envelope. I saw Mama Peace, shelling beans, saying it was not you.
I kissed her.
It was a very gentle kiss. Her mouth tasted faintly of tea. I felt her hand come up and cradle the back of my head, and the road disappeared, and the noise, and the dust, and for a little while there was only warmth and the small catch of her breath. When we drew apart she was crying again, and laughing, her glasses askew.
"Sorry," she said. "I'm a mess. I'm so sorry. This is the worst-timed kiss in history."
"It's the best one," I said.
It was a lie too. It was only a kind one. I had a long list of those by then.
I went to the dinner that night.
I had said I would. It was in Kololo, at a restaurant with white tablecloths and a view over the lights of the city, the kind of place I had once walked past with my hands in my pockets, thinking it was not for people like me. I had put on the jacket. I had taken a boda to the bottom of the hill and walked up, as I had been told, and when I came through the glass doors, a waiter in a black waistcoat took my coat, and I felt, for a moment, absurdly proud.
Mr. Walusimbi had the long table at the back. There were twelve of us. Men in good suits, a woman with heavy gold bracelets, two young men I recognised from the Pearl Executive Suite. Candles in glass bowls. A bottle of something French, that no one drank. At the head of the table, Mr. Walusimbi was speaking in his low, warm, unhurried voice, and every head was turned toward him as plants turn towards a window.
"Brothers and sisters," he said. "This is a night to give thanks. The Club has grown beyond what any of us imagined. We began with twenty-five. Tonight, we are four hundred and twelve."
A ripple of applause.
"And so it is time," he said, "to introduce what I call the Gold Circle. A smaller group. A deeper commitment. A minimum of three million shillings. And a return..." He paused, and smiled. "Of forty percent."
Forty.
I felt the number land in me and sit there, like a stone in a pond. There was a murmur of delight around the table. The woman with the bracelets put her hand to her throat. Beside me, Ronnie, who had come in late and slid into the chair at my side with a grin and a whiff of beer, nudged me sharply with his elbow.
"Forty," he whispered. "Forty! Eli, did you hear? I could buy my father a house."
I did not answer. I was looking at Mr. Walusimbi's hands, folded on the cloth in front of him. They were smooth and plump and quite still. At his wrist, there was a watch that was not new, and on his other hand a ring with a dark stone, and I thought, with an odd, cold clarity, a man who runs a gold fund wears no gold.
It was a stupid thought. I put it away.
But dinner went on, and the thought did not. It came back during the main course, as a waiter laid a plate of grilled fish before me, and again over the dessert, when a young man at the foot of the table, a nervous youth in an ill-fitting suit who I understood to be the Club's accountant, murmured something in Mr. Walusimbi's ear, and I saw the older man's face change for the barest instant, like a pond when a fish turns beneath it, before the smile closed over.
At ten o'clock, I went to find the toilet. The corridor beyond the dining room was dark and carpeted. There was a door ajar at the end, and a light, and as I passed it, I heard a voice I knew.
"No, no. No, ssebo. I told you. Friday." The voice was low and quick, and it was not at all the voice of the man at the head of the table. It had an edge in it, a flat, harried sound, like a rope under strain. "I'll have it Friday. Yes. New members come Thursday. Thursday. The Gold group. You will have it by noon. No, listen to me, listen. I said Friday."
I did not move. I stood in the corridor with my hand against the wall.
"I know what I said," said Mr. Walusimbi. "I know. It is a matter of cash flow. It's temporary." A pause. "Don't say that. Don't ever say that to me. I will not be spoken to..."
I turned. I walked back down the passage, soundlessly, on the thick carpet. I went into the toilet and locked the door and stood with my hands on the basin, looking at my face in the mirror.
It was calm. That was what I noticed. It was the face of a young man in a good jacket, with his hair neatly cut and a faint flush from the wine, and in the eyes there was nothing at all. No fear. No alarm. A sort of flat attention, as if I had been shown a sum that came out, as I had always known it would, wrong.
New members come Thursday.
I had been paid on the thirtieth. On the thirtieth of every month, without fail, for ten months. And I had known, as surely as I knew my own name, where the money came from. I had known it in the room above the pharmacy. I had known it in the lecture hall, when the message buzzed on my knee. Some part of me had known it since the first night, and had been busy, all year, keeping the knowledge out of the light.
Now it stood in the room with me, with its hands at its sides.
I turned on the tap. I washed my face. I dried it on a cloth towel embroidered with a small gold bridge, and I looked at my reflection again, and I made a decision.
I want to tell you that I decided to leave. That I walked out, in my good jacket, down the hill, into the lights, and rang Naomi, and told her everything. It is the decision a better man would have made. It is the one that I have imagined in my sleep a thousand times.
What I decided was this: I will take out what I can before it falls.
I would stay for the January payout. I would keep my head down. I would not bring in any more people, I told myself, I would only wait, and quietly, in the spring, I would withdraw my share and Ronnie's and Denis's, all of it, and if the thing collapsed afterwards, it would collapse around other people.
It was a plan. It had the shape of one. It had the virtue, which all such plans share, that it required nothing of me but the continuing of what I was already doing.
I went back to the table. Mr. Walusimbi was laughing at a joke. He lifted his glass towards me, with his warm round smile, and I raised mine.
"Brother Kasozi," he said. "We were just saying. Our best young mind."
"Thank you, sir."
"Come and see," said Mr. Walusimbi.
I smiled. I sat down. And in my pocket, my phone buzzed, once, softly: a message from Naomi, sent at 10:14, which said only, Thank you for today. I'm so glad you told me. Sleep well. x
I read it three times.
Then I turned the phone face-down on the white tablecloth, as I had learned to do, and picked up my fork, and went on smiling at a table full of people who trusted me.