Chapter Fourteen
Old Habits
The fourteenth of February fell on a Saturday that year, and I had planned a dinner.
I had planned it for weeks. It was the one thing in that long tangled winter that I had done wholly for the right reason, and I had guarded it as one guards a candle in a draught. A restaurant at Ggaba, on stilts above the water, with a table at the rail where you could watch the sun go down over the lake. I had booked it in January. I had even, in a fit of foolish extravagance, bought a small thing from a stall in Wandegeya, a pair of earrings in the shape of tiny silver keys, and had hidden them in the pocket of the jacket with the opinions.
The plan was simple. In the morning I would collect the principal. In the afternoon I would give four million two hundred thousand shillings and my own share to the people it belonged to. In the evening, I would take a girl to dinner and tell her everything. It was a good plan. In my mind it had a clean arc, like the bridge on the sign.
I was at the pharmacy by eight.
The tiled stairs were wet; somebody had mopped them. At the top, the glass door was locked. Through it I could see the reception desk, the framed skyline, the small television on the wall still looping its silent currency rates, but there was nobody at the desk, and the chairs were pushed in neatly, and the inner door was shut.
I knocked. I rang the bell, a small brass one on the glass. I stood with my forehead against the cold pane for some minutes. At ten past eight, a man came up the stairs behind me, a stout, sweating man in a short-sleeved shirt and a pair of cracked sandals, and stopped at the top, breathing hard.
"Is it open?" he said.
"No."
"They said ten o'clock." He pressed his face to the glass beside mine. "They said today. My wife's mother's operation is today. I've told the hospital." He turned to me with a hopeful look. "You are also here for the payment?"
"Yes."
"Good. Good. We'll wait."
We waited. By nine there were seven of us on the landing. By ten there were nineteen. They came up the stairs in twos and threes, in work clothes and church clothes, a woman with a baby on her back, a boy in a Makerere T-shirt, an old man leaning on a stick. They did not speak much. They stood, or sat on the steps, and watched the glass door, and every now and then somebody checked a phone, and the low murmur of their voices ran along the wall like water in a pipe.
I recognised some of them. A girl called Joan, the one who had stood up at the first meeting in her pressed blue blouse and paid her brother's fees. She looked at me, and I at her, and neither of us spoke.
At eleven, the accountant came.
He did not come up the main stairs. He came through a service door at the back of the landing, and he was alone, and he was not the nervous boy I remembered but something worse: a pale, shaking, hollowed-out young man in a crumpled shirt, with a plastic folder pressed against his chest like a breastplate. He stood in front of the glass door with his back to the crowd, fumbling a key into the lock, and I saw that his hands were shaking so badly that he missed the keyhole twice.
"Please," said the stout man. "Excuse me. Sir. We have been waiting."
The boy flinched.
"There's a delay," he said, without turning. "A small delay. The bank. The... the transfer. Mr. Walusimbi has asked me to inform you. All principals will be processed on the twenty-eighth."
There was a silence on the landing. It was a strange silence, thick, almost physical. Then someone said, quite gently, "The twenty-eighth of what?"
"February."
"But you said the fourteenth."
"There has been a..." He swallowed. "A technical issue with the Dubai side. I'm very sorry. It will be settled. Mr. Walusimbi sends his sincere apologies."
"Where is he?"
"He is travelling."
"Where?"
"I am not at liberty to..."
The old man with the stick said something low in Luganda, and I did not catch it. The woman with the baby began to cry, softly, steadily, like a tap left running. The stout man took a step forward. For a moment I thought there would be violence, but it was only a kind of slow, stunned collapse: shoulders dropping, hands loosening, a general settling-down, like a crowd leaving a stadium after a defeat.
The accountant slipped through the door, and shut it behind him, and I heard the lock click.
That was all. We stood and looked at one another on the landing. And then we went down the stairs one at a time, with our heads lowered, in silence, and emerged one by one into the glare of the street, blinking like people leaving a cinema.
I did not go to the restaurant.
I want to say that I rang her. I want to say that I had the decency to cancel. I did not. I walked up Bombo Road with my hands in my pockets, without any destination, past the car washes and the roadside tailors and the men frying chips, and at some point I found myself in a place I knew, and ordered a beer, and drank it. And then another. And somewhere around four o'clock, with the phone in my pocket vibrating against my thigh, steady as a heartbeat, I did what I had been doing for a year: I turned it face-down.
It was Ronnie who found me.
He came in around six, in a fresh white shirt and a cloud of aftershave, with his hair cut sharp and his eyes bright, and sat down beside me on the stool with a bang. "Mukwano!" he said. "You are here! I went to your house. Your mother says you went to the office. Did you get it? Did you get the money?"
I looked at him.
It must have been written on my face. I saw his smile falter, and hang, and then very slowly slide off like something wet. "Eli," he said.
"The twenty-eighth."
"What do you mean, the twenty-eighth?"
"They've moved it. To the twenty-eighth."
"Again?" He laughed, a short high sound. "That's the second time. That's... that's the second time, Eli."
"It's the audit. The Dubai partners."
"Right." He nodded. "Right. The audit." He picked up my bottle, and drank from it, and put it down. His hand was shaking. "My father asked me this morning. He asked when it would be ready. He said, Ronald, the man from the bank has been asking. He wants to get a loan, you know, to put in a... he had an idea, he was going to buy a small plot in Mpererwe..."
"Ronnie..."
"I told him it would be ready today."
"I know."
"I said, Baba, I promise."
I had never, in the whole length of our friendship, seen him look the way he looked then. It was not anger. It was a kind of terrible bright hunger, like a man who has seen a door open at the end of a long corridor and watched it close.
"Eli," he said. "Are you lying to me?"
"No."
"You'd tell me. If it was bad."
"I'd tell you."
He looked at me for a long moment. Then his whole face crumpled with relief, and he laughed, and threw an arm around my neck, and pressed his forehead to my temple. "Good," he said. "Good. Because you're the only one who doesn't. Everyone else lies, mukwano. Everyone. My father. Mr. Walusimbi. The accountant. But you don't." He squeezed my neck. "I always know where I am with you."
I did not say anything. I sat there with his arm around me, with the beer going warm in my hand, and his smell of soap and aftershave, and I thought: this is the worst moment of my life.
I was wrong. It was only the first of several.
I will tell you about the next two weeks quickly, because I am not proud of them, and because they have a sameness that is hard to render. They were a grey blur of the same few things.
I did not go to church. I told my mother I had a project; I told Pastor Lubega, who called twice, that I was unwell. I told Patience that I was busy with exams, though exams were three months away. I told them all in the same pleasant voice, and they all, for a time, believed me, or pretended to, which in the end comes to much the same thing.
I drank. I had always drunk, but now I drank differently, not for the laughter but for the dimming. Ronnie and I would sit in the corner of the same cramped bar, under the same flickering sign, and drink steadily, without speaking much, with our eyes on the television. There was always a match on. And sooner or later, one of us would say, shall we?
The last of my cash went in nine days. Four hundred thousand shillings, which was all I had in the world apart from what I had sunk in the Club, and it was not even a hard thing to lose; it simply drained away, a little at a time, through a series of small clear decisions, each of which seemed to make sense. I told myself I was getting back what I'd put in. I told myself that if I could only make a few hundred thousand, I could repay Patience's fees, and my mother need never know that the principal was late. I put it all in. I did not once, in those nine days, feel the old lift. I felt only a kind of dull mechanical obligation, as if I were paying off a debt to a creditor I could not see.
On the twenty-first, I lost the last of it on a late goal.
I walked out of the shop into the evening. It had rained. The streetlights were coming on, one by one, in long amber ribbons down the wet road, and the air smelled of mud and hot tarmac. I stood on the pavement, with my hands at my sides, and I felt a thing I can describe only by saying that it was like standing on the very bottom of a well and looking up and seeing the circle of the sky grow small.
I had no money. I had no honesty. In four days, the Club would either pay or it would not, and if it did not, I would have taken from my mother everything that she owned, and I had not even left myself the means to explain.
My phone rang. It was Naomi. It was the eleventh time that week.
I watched it ring until it stopped.
I saw Brenda by accident.
I say by accident. It would be truer to say that I went where I might. It was the twenty-third, a Monday, and I had spent the afternoon in a lecture theatre staring at a slide, and afterwards I had walked down to Wandegeya and found myself, at nine at night, on the pavement outside a bar I knew. There was music. There was a smell of grilling meat. And at a table near the door, alone, with a plastic cup in front of her and her gold earrings catching the light, sat Brenda Nantale, watching the street.
She saw me. She did not look surprised.
"Kasozi," she said. "I wondered."
"You wondered what?"
"When you'd turn up. Sit."
I sat. A waiter came and put down a bottle. Brenda poured for both of us, with the sure unhurried grace of a woman who had poured a great many drinks, and slid mine across the table. She was wearing a plain black dress and no make-up, and she looked tired, and thinner than I remembered, and there were two small lines at the corners of her mouth that had not been there a year ago.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Thank you."
"I mean it kindly." She sipped. "Do you want to know what I heard?"
"No."
"I heard a woman in Kikoni say that the office on Bombo Road is empty."
I did not move.
"I heard that the girl at the front desk hasn't been paid since January. I heard that the accountant tried to leave the country on Friday and was turned back at Entebbe." She said all of it quietly, without malice, in a level, factual tone, looking at the cup in her hand. "I heard that nobody has seen Mr. Walusimbi since the fourth."
"It's rumour."
"Probably." She nodded. "Probably it is. People love to say things. But I thought you ought to know it's being said." She raised her eyes. "My cousin put in one million two hundred thousand. You remember her. The one you brought in. Gladys."
"I remember."
"She's not sleeping. She sits on her bed all day looking at her phone." Brenda's voice did not change. "She said to me, Brenda, Eli said it was safe. She said, he looked me in the face."
It was as though someone had put a hand around my heart and squeezed.
"I did think it was safe," I said.
"Did you?"
I could not answer. I took a drink. It was strong and cold and burned all the way down.
"Eli." She said it softly. "I'm not going to shout at you. I'm not your church. I told you that before. I just wanted..." She stopped, and made a small, impatient gesture with her hand. "I wanted to see your face when I said it. And I've seen it."
"What does it say?"
"That you're waiting for a verdict," said Brenda. "And you already know what it is."
I looked at the table. A thin, brown line of beer ran down the side of the bottle.
"I'm sorry," I said. It came out cracked. "I'm sorry about Gladys. I didn't... I never meant..."
"I know."
"I'd give anything to..."
"I know." She put her hand over mine. It was small and warm and dry. "Stop. You'll hurt yourself."
And I put my head down on the table, between my arms, in the middle of that bar, with the music going and a boy at the next table laughing at something on his phone, and wept. I wept without noise. My shoulders shook. Brenda said nothing. She did not stroke my hair or tell me it would be all right. She only sat there, with her hand on my sleeve, and let it happen, as one might sit beside a leaking pipe, waiting for the water to run out.
When I looked up, she was watching me with a face I could not read. It was neither pity nor contempt. It was something quieter, an acknowledgement, almost, a nod from one person to another across a very wide gap.
"You can stay at mine," she said. "If you want. On the couch. I won't make it weird."
"Brenda..."
"I mean the couch." She smiled, a little crookedly. "I'm not twenty years old. I know what I do and what I don't. You've had a bad night. You can't go home like this. Your mother will smell it."
I should have said no. I have thought about it every day since. A man who has just wept for a girl he has wronged does not go back to the room where he wronged her. But I was so tired. I was so tired that the idea of a couch, of a door that locked, of a place where no one knew my name, was as sweet to me as water to a man in a desert.
I went.
She gave me a blanket. She gave me a glass of water and a plastic bucket, in case. The room was as I remembered it, small and tidy, with the wig-heads on the shelf and the calendar on the wall, now turned to the right month, and the photograph of her mother, squinting into the sun. She turned out the light and lay down on the bed with her back to me. For a long time neither of us spoke.
I lay on my back on the narrow couch. I could hear her breathing, slow and even. Outside, a boda went by, and a woman called to a child. The streetlight made a long orange stripe on the ceiling.
"Kasozi," said Brenda, out of the dark.
"Yes?"
"Do you still pray?"
"I don't know."
"My mother says that's the only honest answer." A small rustle. "I stopped, you know. Years ago. When I came to Kampala. It seemed like something for people who could afford it." A pause. "But I keep the Bible. I don't know why. I can't throw it away."
"I saw it."
"I know you did. I saw you looking." She laughed softly. "Pink. My grandmother gave it to me. She said, Brenda, whatever happens, the cover can be wiped clean."
I turned my head. In the faint light I could see the line of her shoulder, and the curve of her wrapped hair.
"Is that true?" I asked.
"I've no idea," said Brenda. "I'm hoping."
I slept. It was a heavy, black, dreamless sleep, the sleep of a man who has run out of things to do with his body. And when I woke it was nearly noon, and sunlight was lying across my face in a hot white blade, and the room was empty. On the table by the couch was a plate with two pieces of bread and a note in round, firm handwriting: Gone to lectures. Eat. Go home. Tell your mother something true. B.
I picked up my phone. It was dead. I had not charged it. I plugged it into the wall, and it lit with a soft chime, and then, for a long minute, it did nothing but chatter, a stream of vibrations, one after another, as the messages came in.
Nineteen from Naomi. Four from my mother. Two from Patience. One from Ronnie.
I scrolled to Naomi's, and read the last.
It's been eight days. I don't know what's happened and I don't know if I'm allowed to ask. But I need you to know that I'm here. That's all. Whatever it is. I'm here.
I read it. I read it again. I put the phone down on the couch, and sat with my head in my hands in the hot, silent room, with the smell of another woman's soap in the air, and the dry bread in front of me, and the pink Bible on the shelf above the bed.
Then I picked it up and I typed, I'm sorry. I've been ill. I'll call you tonight.
I sent it. And I knew, as I pressed the button, with a calm so complete that I might have been reading it off a page, that I would not call. That I would lie again. That I would go on lying until there was nothing left to lie about, and that on that day, which I could already see at the end of the road like a dim, small, unlit house, there would be no one left to hear it.
I did not yet know how soon it would come.
I went home that afternoon. My mother was in the yard, hanging out the washing. She looked up as I came through the gate, and her hands stopped, a wet shirt dripping between them. She looked at my face, and at my crumpled clothes, and she did not say anything. She only put the shirt over the line, and pinned it, and went into the house.
When I came in, there was a cup of tea waiting for me on the table. It was cold. It had a skin on it. Beside it, under a saucer, was a slice of bread.
She had saved it. Every morning, I understood, for nine days. She had made me a cup, and put it under a saucer, and waited.
I sat down in front of it. I drank it cold, to the bottom, and did not taste anything at all.