Chapter Fifteen
The Distance Between Us
On the twenty-eighth of February, nothing happened.
That was the strange thing about it. I had braced myself for an explosion, a riot on the landing, a scream, a squad of police. There was none of it. I went to Bombo Road at eight o'clock, as before, and the glass door was shut, and the landing was empty. Not a single person waited on the steps. The brass rail had not been polished. A pile of leaflets had been pushed under the door and lay in a fan on the carpet inside, and when I pressed my face to the glass I saw that the television in the corner was off, and the framed skyline of Dubai had been taken down, leaving a pale rectangle on the wall.
On the pharmacy door, someone had stuck a small notice, handwritten in blue ink: Premises to let.
I stood and read it for a long time. A woman came out of the pharmacy with a paper bag, and glanced at me, and went on.
That evening, the Club's group chat was deleted. I had been a member of it for fourteen months. At six o'clock there were four hundred and nine participants; at six-oh-two, a small grey line at the top of the screen said, This group no longer exists.
I looked at the line. I looked at my phone, blank and cold in my hand. I sat on my bed with the door shut and heard, from the kitchen, my mother humming over the pot, a hymn, the one about morning by morning, and Patience laughing at something on the radio.
In my pocket I had no money. In my account, forty-one thousand shillings. In the world, the one thing that I owned that was still entirely mine was the lie.
I do not know how Joseph found out. I have asked him since. He says it was a coincidence, which is the sort of thing people say who have been very much helped by Providence, and don't wish to make a fuss. He was at a meeting, one of those quiet evening gatherings in the back room of a church hall where people sit in a ring of plastic chairs and say their names and the number of days. A man he had known in the programme was there, a gentle, balding man called Moses, a former bank clerk, and over the tea afterwards Moses had said, in an ordinary voice, that his sister had lost eight hundred thousand shillings in an investment scheme. It had gone on the first of the month. The office was shut, the man was gone, and nobody could find the boy who had brought her in.
"What was he called?" Joseph said.
"Kasozi," said Moses. "A student. From Kawempe. Clever, they said. He had a watch."
Joseph said nothing. He did not mention that his sister had a friend of that name. He told himself it was a common surname. He finished his tea, and he went home, and he lay awake until two o'clock, and then he went to Naomi's door and knocked.
I know this because she told me. She told me on a Saturday evening, a week after the twenty-eighth, in front of my own house, under the bulb.
It was the seventh of March. The sun was going down behind the iron roofs of Kawempe, and the sky was a deep dirty orange, and the lane was full of the smell of woodsmoke and frying onions and wet dust. A few children were kicking a plastic ball against the wall of the neighbour's house. I was on the verandah, on the jerrycan, with a cup of tea I had not drunk, trying to read a textbook I had been staring at for an hour.
I heard the gate.
I did not need to look up. I knew the sound of her sandals on the path, the quick flat slap of them, and I felt it go through me, a dread so pure and so physical that my hands began to shake. I put down the cup. It rattled in the saucer.
She came up the path slowly. She was wearing the mustard dress. Her glasses were on. She had her thermos in one hand, as always, and a folder under her arm, and she was walking with her shoulders drawn in and her chin lifted, in the manner of someone who has been rehearsing something for a very long time and has decided not to be interrupted.
She stopped at the foot of the verandah steps.
"Hello, Eli."
"Naomi."
"Is your mother in?"
"She's at the stall. Till eight. Patience is at... a friend's."
"Good." She nodded once. "I thought she might be."
She did not come up. She stood on the red-dust path, a pace from the step, with the last of the sun behind her and the bulb, newly switched on, throwing its pale yellow circle over my head. I saw her look at it. I saw her look at the house, at the polished concrete, the plastic chair, the Bible beside the stove. I saw her take it all in, with a slow, pained tenderness, as one looks at a place one has loved and is about to leave.
"I'm going to ask you a question," she said. "And I want you to listen to how I ask it."
"All right."
"I'm not going to say I believe you."
Her voice was very steady. It did not shake. That was what terrified me. The Naomi I knew was all edges and humour, a girl who laughed too loud and cried in public and said whatever came into her head. This one was quiet. She spoke as though she were reading a statement.
"Joseph came to my room on Thursday night. He was upset. He'd been to a meeting. He said a man there had said a name, and he wasn't sure, and he didn't want to hurt me, but he thought I ought to know." She drew breath. "He said that the boy who recruited this man's sister into Bridge Capital was called Kasozi."
The ball struck the neighbour's wall with a flat smack, and one of the children shouted.
"I said that's not possible," said Naomi. "I said, Eli told me he's never been in it. I said, he looked me in the face, he said no, by the drain. I said, there must be hundreds of Kasozis in Kampala." Her mouth twisted slightly. "I was so sure. I was so sure, Eli, that I was almost angry with him."
I could not look at her.
"So I've come to ask you again," she said. "I want you to say it. I want you to look at me and tell me what you did."
I have been asked, in the years since, whether I could have lied again. It is a fair question. I think I could have. I had the sentences ready. I had the plausible, smooth, wounded-sounding denial, that's a different Kasozi, I can't believe you'd think... It would have worked, I believe. It would have bought a night, a week.
But I looked up, and I saw her face.
It was not angry. It was not even sad. It was the face of a person standing on one side of a very deep river, who has just seen the other bank, and who is going to jump regardless.
"Yes," I said.
My voice did not sound like mine. It was a thread.
"Yes. It was Bridge Capital. I joined in January last year. I put in five hundred thousand. I was paid. I kept putting in more. I brought in people. Ronnie, and Denis, and eleven others." I made myself continue. "I knew, by November. I knew it wasn't real. I heard him on the phone at a dinner. I knew that he was paying the old members with the new money. And I stayed in. And I brought in more."
She did not move.
"And the four million," I said. "My mother's. It was all of it. It was her SACCO savings. She trusted me. I told her it was safe. It's gone. All of it. There's no cooperative. It's in the Club, and the Club is..." I could not finish.
A long silence. The sun had gone. The sky was the colour of a bruise, and the first stars were pricking through. Down the lane, someone began to bang a pot.
"You told me no," said Naomi.
"I know."
"Twice. You told me you'd heard of it from Ronnie's cousin. You told me you'd advised him to stay away. And then on the day after Christmas, on the path, I asked you, and I said it to you in so many words, and you said no." She spoke each sentence evenly, like someone laying down stones. "I took your hand. I put my hand on your face."
"Naomi..."
"I thought, I've been unkind. I've doubted him. I walked all the way home thinking I'd been unkind."
"I was afraid."
"Of what?"
"Of this."
"Yes." She nodded. "Yes. I'd worked that part out."
She put down the thermos, carefully, on the bottom step. She put down the folder beside it. She straightened, and wrapped her arms around herself, though the evening was warm, and looked out into the dusk.
"You know what I keep thinking?" she said. "I keep thinking about Mama Peace. I took you to her. I took you there. I sat on the floor in that room and I watched you listen to a woman tell you how a man with a kind face took her daughter's school fees. And you said I'm sorry, and she said it wasn't you. And I watched you. I thought, he's so moved. He cares so much."
"I did. I do."
"You were sitting there," said Naomi. Her voice cracked for the first time. "You were sitting in her chair, with your phone in your pocket and the same man's name on it. And you let her say that to you. You let her forgive you for something she didn't know you'd done."
I put my hands over my face.
"And then you kissed me," she said, very softly. "That same afternoon. You kissed me, in the road. You'd just told me about the betting. You'd told me a true thing, a hard thing, and I was so proud of you, and so grateful, and I thought, this is how it's done. This is what it looks like when someone decides to be honest. And you let me. You let me think that was all of it."
"I wanted to tell you."
"Did you?"
"Yes. I tried. At Ggaba. And in the road. And on the path."
"But you didn't."
"No."
"Why?"
I took my hands away. I looked at her. She was crying now, silently, with her face quite still, and the tears running down on either side of her nose and dripping from her chin onto the front of the mustard dress.
"Because you were the only person who believed I was good," I said. "And I couldn't bear to find out you were wrong."
She made a small sound, half laugh, half sob.
"That's the worst reason," she said. "That's the worst reason you could have given me."
"I know."
"Because you were right. I did believe it. I believed it so much." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "I don't need you to be good, Eli. I'm not stupid. I know what people are. I've sat in a hundred rooms with a hundred people who've done terrible things. I've sat with my own brother. I don't need anyone to be good." She drew a long shuddering breath. "I need to be able to tell what's real."
It was then that my phone lit up.
It was lying on the arm of the plastic chair, beside the cup, with the screen turned up. It must have been charging when she arrived; I had brought it out to the verandah with its cable trailing, and forgotten. I did not see it until I saw her see it, because her eyes had dropped, reflexively, toward the small bright rectangle, and held.
I looked.
It was a notification, a preview, in a plain grey box at the top of the screen. Brenda: Did you tell her something true yet?
I have wished many times that I had been quicker. That I had snatched it up. But there was no time; there was only the small white light, and the words standing there, as clear and inescapable as a name carved on a stone. I watched Naomi read them. I watched her lips move.
Did you tell her something true yet.
The silence was complete. Even the children had stopped.
"Who's Brenda?" said Naomi.
"It's not what you think."
"I haven't thought anything. I'm asking who she is."
"A girl from my class. She's... she was the one. You remember. The one I told you about. A year ago. The night."
"The night after the match."
"Yes."
"The one that meant nothing."
"It didn't."
"But she's texting you. Now. On a Saturday. Asking if you've told me something true." Her voice had gone quite flat. "What would she know that I don't?"
"Nothing. She only knows I've been... I've been in a bad place. I went to a bar, two weeks ago. She was there. She said some things about the Club, she'd heard rumours. I was drunk. I stayed on her couch." I heard it come out of me, a stream of words, each one making it worse. "On the couch, Naomi. Nothing happened. I swear it. I swear on..."
"Don't."
"It's true."
"I'm sure it is." She said it with a terrible gentleness. "I'm sure you slept on the couch. I'm sure she gave you a blanket. I'm sure that's all." She laughed, a thin, cracked sound. "That's what makes it so hard to be angry. It's all so plausible. Everything you say is true, and there is always something else behind it."
"Please."
"The eighth day," she said. "I sent you nineteen messages. I stood at the gate of your university. I sat in Mama Sylvia's for an hour in case you came. And you were on a couch in Wandegeya, with a girl, being comforted."
"I was crying."
"I know." The tears were running freely again. "That's the other thing. I know you were. I'm not so unfair that I think you weren't. I just..." She stopped, and pressed her fist against her mouth. For a moment she stood there, swaying slightly, with her eyes shut.
"I wanted it to be me," she said. "That's all. When you were crying. I wanted to be the one."
I got to my feet. I came down the steps. I did not know what I was going to do; I only knew that I could not bear the distance. But she held up a hand, flat, with the fingers spread, and I stopped as if I had run into a pane of glass.
"Don't," she said. "I can't. If you touch me I'll say it's all right, and it isn't."
"What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to tell your mother."
I stared at her.
"Tonight. When she gets home. Tell her all of it." Naomi's eyes were fierce and wet and unflinching. "I won't do it for you. It isn't mine to say. But I will not stand in a room with her and watch her smile at me while she doesn't know. I've done that once. I did it at Christmas. I sat on that jerrycan and drank her tea and thought, he's told her about the cooperative, it must be all right. I won't do it again."
"She'll..."
"I know what she'll do. I don't know how. But she has the right to be hurt by the real thing." She picked up her thermos, and her folder, and held them against her chest. "And you have the right to find out what she does when you're honest. You've never given her the chance."
"What about us?"
It was out before I could stop it. A child's question. She looked at me, and her face did something complicated.
"I don't know," she said.
"Naomi..."
"I'm not leaving because of the money. I want you to understand that. People lose money. People lie to protect people. I've seen it." She drew a breath, and when she spoke again it was so quiet that I had to lean forward to hear it. "I'm leaving because I can't tell which parts of you were real. Ggaba. The stairwell. The way you looked at me in that boat. I can't tell if you were doing it or being it. And if I don't know that, then I don't know anything."
"All of it was real."
"That's what I'm afraid of," said Naomi.
She turned. She went down the path, with her back very straight, and through the gate, which she closed carefully behind her, as one closes a door in a house where someone is asleep. I stood on the red earth and watched the mustard dress dwindle down the lane, past the children and the pot-banging and the woodsmoke, until it turned the corner by the church and was gone.
My mother came home at eight. I heard her at the gate, the heavy steps of a tired woman, the scrape of the stool she carried on her head. I had been sitting on the verandah step in the dark for an hour. The bulb burned over me. The moths had come.
She stopped at the foot of the steps, with the stool in her arms, and looked at me.
"Eliya? Why are you sitting out here?"
I opened my mouth.
I want to tell you that I said it. That I stood up, in the yellow light, and said, Maama, I have to tell you something, and told her. It is what I should have done. It is what Naomi had asked me to do. It is what every cell in me knew to be right.
I looked at my mother's face. She was fifty-one, and she looked seventy. There was dust in the creases at the corners of her eyes, and the line between her brows had deepened to a groove. She was carrying a stool and a plastic bag with half a loaf of bread in it, the last of the day's supper. She had stood at that stall for eleven hours, selling second-hand children's shirts to women who haggled over fifty shillings. She had four million two hundred thousand shillings in a room above a pharmacy, and she was waiting for it with a patience so bottomless that I could not look at it.
"Naomi came," I said.
"Oh?" She smiled faintly. "I wish I had been here."
"We argued."
"About what?"
"Nothing. It's... it's a misunderstanding. About something I said." I could not meet her eyes. "She'll come round."
"She is a good girl."
"I know."
"Don't lose her," my mother said, and put down the stool, and went into the house.
I sat there for a long time afterwards. I heard her moving about the kitchen, running water, setting a pot on the stove. I heard her humming. I heard, a little later, the creak of her bed.
And I understood that I had been given a door, and had not gone through it, and that doors of that kind do not stay open.
The next two weeks were a long, blind, shuffling time, like a man walking in fog.
Naomi did not call. I did not blame her. I did not call her either. I wrote her four messages, long ones, careful ones, and deleted them all, because none of them said anything that was not a request. I passed the church on Sundays and did not go in. Once, from the end of the lane, I heard the keyboard, faint and clear, a slow chord rolling out into the afternoon, and I stood in the dust with my hand on a wall, listening, until it stopped.
I saw Ronnie twice. He was thinner, and quieter, and his laugh had gone thin and bright, like a wire. He told me that the men in the building had begun to ask him things. He told me his father had stopped asking. "He doesn't say anything now," said Ronnie. "He just looks. He looks at me when he comes home in the morning, with that face, you know, that soldier's face, and he doesn't say it. And that's worse."
"It'll be all right."
"Will it?"
I said yes. I said it as one says a thing in a language one no longer understands. Ronnie looked at me for a moment with his bright, unhappy eyes, and nodded, and said, "I believe you, mukwano."
It was the third time. I have never since been able to hear those words without a small cold flinch.
On the twentieth of March, a Friday, the Club's number came back to life.
I was in the kitchen when the message arrived, a single line in a new group, set up by a stranger. Dear members. The office will reopen on Monday. All contributions are safe. Please await further communication. Come and see. There was a photograph beneath it, grainy and badly lit, of a man in a navy suit standing at an airport gate with his back to the camera.
I held the phone in both hands, and read it, and felt something rise in me that I had not felt for weeks, and which I recognised, with disgust, as hope.
It's coming back, I thought. It's all right. It's coming back.
In the next room, Patience was singing. She had taken to it again, lately, in the evenings, in her high pure voice, an old chorus from church. It floated in through the wall, light and unsteady, a bird alighting on a wire.
I did not know it was Friday. I did not know that in eleven hours, somewhere on the other side of the city, a friend of mine would be sitting alone in a rented room with a bottle, looking at a message that said Come and see.
I only knew that I had been given a reprieve. I put the phone in my pocket. I went out into the evening, to find Ronnie, to tell him the news.
I have thought many times about that evening. I have thought: if only I had been quicker. If only I had gone straight to him. If only I had not stopped at the shop to buy airtime, and then at the corner to talk to a boy from my class, and then, because the news was good, and I felt for the first time in a month that I could breathe, at a bar, where somebody I knew bought me a beer.
If only.
But it is the nature of those words that they have no end. You can say them all your life. And they will not move the hand of any clock.