Chapter Thirteen
The Lie
A lie is like a loan. The first payment is small and you hardly notice it. But interest runs, and one morning you wake to find that you owe more than you ever borrowed, and that you are spending every day just keeping up the repayments.
I knew all this by Christmas. I had known it, in the abstract, for years. But there is knowing a thing, and there is waking up at ten to six on the twenty-fifth of December to the smell of ginger and charcoal and the sound of your mother humming in the yard, and lying very still with your eyes on the ceiling, understanding that you are about to eat her food with her money in your pocket.
Not her money. I corrected myself, lying there. Her money was gone. It was in a room above a pharmacy on Bombo Road, being counted by a boy with trembling hands.
I got up.
That Christmas, Naomi came to us.
It was her idea, and my mother's, and for once I was not consulted. They had met three times by then, at church, in the yard, once in the market where Naomi had been buying a plastic basin for a neighbour. My mother had said, on the third occasion, in her offhand voice, "That girl has very good manners. Is she coming for Christmas?" And I had said that I did not know, and she had said, "Then I will ask her," and she had.
She arrived at nine in a green dress, with her glasses polished, carrying a tin of shortbread and a bunch of marigolds wrapped in newspaper. She stood at the gate, quite pale, holding the flowers in front of her like a shield. I came out to meet her. She looked past me at the house, with its rusty iron roof and its red polished verandah and the bulb still burning faintly above the door in the daylight, and whispered, "I'm so nervous I might be sick."
"She doesn't bite."
"That's what Joseph said about my father."
"What happened?"
"He bit." But she was laughing. I took the flowers from her, and she straightened her shoulders, and we walked up the path together, and my mother came out onto the verandah in her good gomesi and said, in her most formal, queenly voice, "Welcome, my daughter. You have found us."
I do not know what I had feared. That they would not like each other, perhaps. That Naomi would be too blunt, or my mother too reserved, or that the two halves of my life would meet and make a noise. But within ten minutes they were in the kitchen together, my mother stirring a pot and Naomi sitting on an upturned bucket with a potato in one hand and a knife in the other, peeling at a speed that made Patience shriek with laughter. They talked. They talked about the market. They talked about tomatoes and the price of charcoal and the dreadful state of the roads, and my mother, who in my hearing had spoken to no one but Pastor Lubega at such length for six years, was telling a long and elaborate story about the day Taata had tried to mend the neighbour's radio.
"And he put it back together," said my mother, "and there was one screw left over. He said, it's a spare. He turned it on. It played a sermon. In Chinese." She was wiping her eyes. "We never knew how. He said it was a gift."
Naomi was bent double over her potato. "Maama," she said, "I'm going to cut off a finger."
"Please don't. We need the potatoes."
I stood in the doorway and watched, unseen. Patience, beside me, nudged my ribs. "She's good," she whispered.
"I know."
"Are you going to marry her?"
"Pati."
"Because if you don't, I will." She grinned. "I'll sell you for a goat."
We had tea on the verandah at six the following morning.
Naomi had stayed. It was my mother's insistence: there had been no taxis after dark, she said, and it was unthinkable that a guest should travel to Ntinda at night, so Patience had given up her bed and slept on the floor in my mother's room, and Naomi had spent the night in a narrow bed under a patchwork quilt, in a room with posters of a singer and a faded map of Africa. I had not slept either. I had lain in my own bed on the other side of a thin wall, listening to the small sounds of a stranger in the house, and thinking, with a kind of dread tenderness, she is here. She is here, and none of it is true.
At ten to six the match scratched. I heard it from my room. The hiss of charcoal catching; the clink of the enamel cups, four of them now, set out on the shelf.
I came out in my dressing gown. Naomi was already there, on the jerrycan, in a borrowed cardigan, with her glasses crooked from sleep and a look of such complete and enchanted wakefulness that I almost laughed. Patience sat beside her, on the step, hugging her knees. My mother was crouched at the stove, her back to us, stirring the pot of milk and ginger as it climbed toward the boil.
"Sit, Eliya," she said, without turning. "You are late."
I sat on the step. The sky was the colour of milk. Over our heads, in the corner above the door, the bulb was still on, pale against the dawn, with a few drowsy moths turning in its light.
"Naomi," my mother said, "do you know the custom?"
"Patience told me." Naomi cupped her hands round the enamel mug. "One verse, one prayer, one cup."
"That's right." My mother settled herself on the step with her own cup, and picked up the Bible. It lay there, as it always did, on the concrete beside the stove, its cover worn to felt at the corner. "My husband made the rule. When I came to this house, I thought, who has time? Everyone is busy. But he said, Margaret, it is only one verse. If you cannot find five minutes for God before breakfast, you have a bigger problem than time."
Naomi smiled. I felt, for no reason I could name, the first tremor of something cold.
"I will read," said my mother. "Eliya has stopped. I think he feels shy."
I said nothing. I looked at my tea.
She found the place without searching. I noticed that. She did not riffle through the pages; she opened the book at a spot where the paper had gone soft and a little dark, as it does where a finger has rested a great many times.
"Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed," she read, "for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning." She paused. "Great is Your faithfulness."
It was the line from the hymn. It was the line Patience had sung, in yellow, on the morning of the party. I heard it as one hears a bell in another room. New every morning.
"Lamentations three," said my mother. "It is a strange place to find joy. The whole book is crying. A city has been burned. The people are in exile. And in the middle of it, in the very middle, a man sits down in the ashes and says this." She closed the book on her finger. "I read it every day for a year after my husband died. I could not make myself believe it. But I read it. I thought, if it is true, then it is true on the days I do not feel it."
Nobody spoke. A cockerel crowed somewhere beyond the fence.
"What did you hear?" she asked.
She was not looking at me. She was looking at the steam rising from her cup. But I knew, with the certainty one has of one's own name, that she had asked it of the whole verandah, and that the question was intended, as it had always been, for the person sitting nearest to the lie.
Naomi said, softly, "That mercy doesn't depend on how I feel."
"Good," said my mother. "And you, Patience?"
"That it doesn't run out."
"Good."
They looked at me. Three faces in the milky light. My mother's, calm and expectant. Patience's, with its small open challenge. Naomi's, tender and a little anxious, in the way of someone who has been told something about a house and is now standing in it.
"New every morning," I said. My voice came out dry. "I think... I think it means that you don't have to carry yesterday."
I heard how it sounded. I heard it go out into the air, sweet and hollow and slightly too well-made, a thing a person says in church.
My mother nodded slowly. "Yes," she said. "That is very good, Eliya."
She bowed her head. She prayed, a short plain prayer, thanking God for the new day and the new guest and for the food on the table. She asked Him to watch over us. She asked Him to watch, she said, over the money. And over the money Eliya has put in the cooperative, said my mother, because it is all we have, and we are trusting Him with it.
I did not move. I felt Naomi's head turn.
"Amen," said my mother.
"Amen," said Patience.
"What cooperative?" said Naomi.
It was said lightly, over the rim of her cup. She did not mean anything by it. She had not stiffened, or frowned. It was only a question, the sort one asks in the warm slow ease of a holiday morning, a stray end of thread. But the silence that followed was enough to hang a coat on.
"A university one," I said. "Maama's been... she asked me about it. About saving. I put in a small sum. A hundred thousand. For her."
"Oh!" Naomi smiled. "That's kind."
"It's only a small thing."
"It was four million," said my mother, mildly, with her eyes on the Bible. "He is very modest."
Patience's head came up like a startled bird.
I felt my heart do something it had never done before, a sort of slow roll, like a stone turning over on a riverbed. I looked at Naomi. She was looking at my mother, with her tea halfway to her lips, and her glasses had slipped, and for a long moment she did not push them back.
"Four million," she said. "Wow."
"For three weeks," said my mother. "Then it comes back with the profit. It is a short placement." She turned a page, serenely. "I don't understand it. But he says it is safe."
I said, "It is."
Naomi said nothing. She put down her cup, very carefully, on the concrete beside her foot. Then she looked at me.
It was a long look. It lasted perhaps two seconds. I have never forgotten it. There was no accusation in it. That was the cruelty. There was only a kind of slow, quiet recalculation, the way a person's face changes when she has been doing a sum in her head and has just noticed a digit that does not fit.
"I'm sure it is," she said.
She picked up the cup again. She finished her tea. She said something about the weather, and my mother replied, and the conversation moved on. And the sun came up, red and enormous, over the roofs of Kawempe, and the bulb above our heads went on burning faintly in the daylight, as it did every morning, because nobody had remembered to turn it off.
"Four million," said Naomi.
We were walking. It was the afternoon, and the others were asleep, my mother in her chair with her mouth open, Patience curled on the sofa with a book on her face. We had slipped out by the back gate and taken the footpath that runs along the drain behind the church, a trampled strip of earth between the iron fences and the water, shaded by pawpaw trees and strung with other people's washing. It was hot. Dragonflies went over the drain in bright stiff zigzags.
"Naomi."
"No, let me say it." She did not look at me. She walked with her hands in the pockets of the borrowed cardigan and her eyes on the path. "I've been thinking about it all day. I've been trying to be reasonable. I told myself you said it was a hundred thousand and your mother said four million and one of you was joking."
"My mother misunderstood."
"Did she?"
"She doesn't... she gets numbers wrong. She thinks I put it all in. I only put in a share. It's a... a pooled fund. The whole family's contribution is four million, and I administered it. That's all." The words came out fast, glib, glossy. I could hear every joint and rivet. "I should have explained. I didn't want to worry you."
"Worry me?"
"I know your research. I knew you'd think..."
"Think what?"
"That it was one of those." I said it with a brave, rueful laugh. "And it isn't. It's a registered cooperative. It has an office. A board. It's affiliated with the university."
"Which cooperative?"
"Naomi..."
"What's it called?"
I opened my mouth. For one wild second I thought of giving her a false name. I had one ready, a plausible, dull-sounding thing, Makerere Staff and Students Savings Cooperative. It sat on the tip of my tongue, smooth as a coin.
I could not say it. I do not know why. Perhaps it was that I had reached, without noticing, the bottom of something; the place where a man runs out of lies, not from conscience, but from fatigue. Perhaps it was the dragonflies. I stood on the path, in the heat, and felt the silence lengthen.
"I'd rather not say," I said.
"Why?"
"Because you'll take it the wrong way."
She stopped walking. She turned to face me. She had taken off her glasses and was holding them in her hand, and without them her face looked younger, more naked, with the faint pink marks they had left on either side of her nose.
"Eli," she said. "I'm going to ask you a question. I want you to look at me. I want you to think before you answer. And I want you to know that whatever you say, I will believe you."
I could not breathe.
"Is it Bridge Capital?"
The heat pressed down. The water in the drain moved sluggishly, with a faint sweet rot. Somewhere in the distance a radio was playing a Christmas song, tinny and tender and very far away.
"No," I said.
It was the simplest word in the language. It was one syllable. I felt it leave me, cold and round and perfectly shaped, like a stone dropped into a well, and I heard no splash at all.
She looked at me for a long moment.
"Okay," said Naomi.
"It's not."
"Okay." She put her glasses back on. "I believe you."
She said it very quietly. And then, to my terror and my shame, she reached up and touched my face, with the same flat of her palm that had touched it on the beach at Ggaba, and rested it there, light and dry. "I believe you," she said again. "I only needed to hear it."
She smiled. She took my hand and we walked on along the drain, through the sunlit stripes of pawpaw shade, and she talked about her brother, and the roast chicken, and a hat her mother had knitted for her father that he had been too proud to wear. And I listened and nodded and laughed in the right places, and in my pocket my phone began to vibrate, steadily, insistently, and I did not take it out.
I have often thought about that walk. It was the best day of that Christmas. It was also the day I told the lie I would pay for longest, the one that had no shadow of excuse, that came from no need but the wish not to be seen. I want to say that I felt it, then, in my chest, as a blow. I did not. I felt nothing at all. That is how deeply I had learned to be absent from myself.
I felt it later. I will tell you when.
The money did not come back in three weeks.
I had expected that. I had told myself so. The January cycle would close on the thirty-first; Mr. Walusimbi had said so, and in the meantime my own monthly payout arrived on the thirtieth as it always did, a hundred and fifty thousand shillings, then a second payment, a larger one, from the Gold Circle account, which I read with a sort of detached incredulity: UGX 1,680,000. Forty percent of four million two hundred thousand. In three weeks. To the shilling.
It's working, I thought. You see. It works.
It lasted a day. The next morning, a message came through the Gold Circle group, from Mr. Walusimbi himself, in his smooth, warm, reassuring prose. Dearest members. Our Dubai partners have requested a short extension to complete their end-of-year audit. Principal repayments will therefore be processed on the 14th of February. Please be patient. All is well. Come and see.
I read it twice. I sat on the edge of my bed and read it a third time.
All is well.
It was a Wednesday. In the next room, my mother was singing. In the yard, Patience was washing her school shoes, scrubbing at the heels with a toothbrush. I sat there in the half-light, with the phone in my hand, and the fear I had been holding off for a month finally closed its fingers round the back of my neck.
I did not tell my mother. I told her the cycle had been extended. I told her it was normal. She said, "Mm," and went on stirring, and I saw her small back stiffen very slightly, the way an animal's does when it hears a branch break far away.
It was another week before the other thing happened. It was the fifteenth of January, the day the new term began, and Patience came home from school at ten in the morning, three hours early, in her uniform, with her bag clutched against her chest and a face as white as a sheet.
"They sent me out," she said.
I was in the kitchen. My mother was at the stall. Patience stood in the doorway, quite still, with her mouth working, and I saw that she was making a great effort not to cry.
"They said I couldn't sit the entry test," she said. "Because of fees. They said the bursar had a list. He read it out in assembly." Her voice shook. "He read names, Eli. In front of everyone. Mine was the fourth."
I put down the knife I had been holding.
"They said I'm to come back when it's paid. They said it's a warning." She made a small, high, broken sound. "I told them Maama had it. I told them it was coming. I told them we had it in a, in a cooperative, and the girls were all looking. And Sister Beatrice said that was very interesting. She said that's what everyone's mother says."
I went across the kitchen and put my arms around her, and she let me. She was crying now, openly, noisily, into my shirt, a child's crying, hiccupping and shuddering, her whole thin body shaken. I held her. I stroked the back of her head, the hair that smelled of sun and coconut oil. And I did the only thing I could. I lied.
"It's all right," I said. "It's all right, Pati. It's a mistake. It's just the cooperative, it's a day late. I'll sort it."
"You will?"
"I'll pay it now."
"With what?"
"I've got some. From the tutoring."
She pulled back. Her eyes were swollen and red, and she was looking at me with an intentness that made my skin prickle. "Always the tutoring," she said.
"What do you mean?"
"You said it a year ago. You said it when you came home with the chicken." She wiped her nose on her wrist. "Eli, I've seen you. I've seen you put your phone face-down when I come in. I've seen the shoes, and the watch, and the jacket. I know what tutoring pays. I can count." Her voice was very low. "What is it?"
"Pati..."
"Is it something bad?"
I looked at her. She was sixteen years old, and she had stood in front of her whole school that morning and heard her name read out, and she had walked home in her uniform through the dust with her head high, I could see it on her, in the angle of her chin. She was my sister. She was the one who had said I thought it was supposed to keep us.
"No," I said. "It's nothing bad. It's just work. I'll tell you when it's finished."
She searched my face. I do not know what she saw. After a long moment, she let out her breath, and her shoulders dropped, and she said in a very small voice, "Okay. I believe you."
I believe you. It was the second time in a month. I was getting used to it.
I took her to the bank that afternoon. I paid one million four hundred thousand shillings in school fees, from the last of the cash I had put by, and the clerk stamped the slip, and Patience held it against her chest and did not say a word. At the school gate she hugged me, hard, in front of the other girls, and I stood on the pavement for some time afterwards watching her go in.
I had four hundred thousand shillings left in the world. I did not count the Club.
That night I knelt down.
I do not know what made me do it. It was after midnight. The house was dark and the road outside was silent, and I had been lying in bed for an hour with my eyes open, adding and re-adding the same figures, as a man pats his pockets for a key he knows he has lost. Four million two hundred thousand. Three million two hundred thousand. Fourteen people. The fourteenth of February.
At one o'clock I got out of bed, and in the dark I knelt on the cold concrete beside it, with my elbows on the mattress, and put my hands together. I had not done that since I was sixteen.
My heart was beating very hard. I did not know what to say. I thought: Our Father. And stopped. The words were enormous; they stood in front of me like a gate.
I said, aloud, very low, "God."
The house creaked. Somewhere in the lane a dog barked twice and was still.
"God, I know I haven't... I know it's been a long time." My voice shook. I closed my eyes. "I know You've no reason to listen. I know what I've done. I know about the money. I know about all of it. I know I should have stopped. I know I should've told her. I'm not asking You to forgive me. I'm not asking..."
I stopped. My eyes were wet.
"I'm only asking You for this one thing. Please. Let it come back. Let it come back on the fourteenth. Let my mother have it. Let Ronnie's father keep his savings. Let Denis go home. And I swear, I swear on my life, that I'll tell her. I'll tell Naomi. I'll tell my mother. I'll go to the pastor. I'll take it all to the light. If You'll only..."
If You'll only.
I heard it. I heard what I was saying, in the dark, on my knees, in the warm stale air of my own room. I heard the old arithmetic, the plastic chair, the stairwell. I'll give You whatever You ask. The deal.
It was the first prayer I had said in six years. And I was praying for the wrong thing.
I did not stop. I want that known. I knelt there for an hour, hands clasped, mouth moving, and I said it over and over, with the sweat starting on my back, please, please, let it come back, and the silence into which I said it did not answer, and did not rebuke me, and did not, so far as I could tell, even seem to be listening.
At last, shaking, I got back into bed.
I lay there, under the thin blanket. And it came to me, with no particular drama, that the God I had been talking to was the one I wanted, a banker, a guarantor, a kind of cosmic clerk who would stamp my slip and reverse the sum. I had not asked Him to change me. I had asked Him to change the numbers.
I turned over. I pulled the blanket up.
I did not know, as the dawn began to creep grey at the edge of the curtain, that He had heard every word. I did not know that He was not offended. I did not know that what I had said, awkward and self-serving and shot through with fear, was the first thing I had said to Him in six years that was even slightly true.
I only knew that I was frightened. And at ten to six, as always, the match scratched on the verandah, and I lay there, listening to the charcoal catch.