Chapter Sixteen
The Night Everything Changed
The bar was called Sunrise, and it faced west.
I mention this because it is the kind of detail that stays. A narrow room on a side street in Wandegeya, with a tin roof and plastic chairs and a television bolted high in one corner, and over the door a hand-painted sign with a sun on it, a yellow circle with a smiling face and rays like the spokes of a wheel. In the evenings, when the light came down the street, it turned the whole front of the place gold. By ten o'clock, of course, it was dark. But the sign was lit from behind by a single bulb, and every time I have passed a place with a sun on it since, I have felt my stomach drop.
I had meant to stay five minutes. I had gone in to buy airtime. A boy from my class, Kizza, whom I knew slightly, a round-faced, cheerful boy who did a bad impression of the dean, had caught my elbow at the counter and said Kasozi! Where have you been? You look half dead! and pushed a bottle into my hand. There were six of them at a table by the window. They had just finished a test. They were loud, and relieved, and very young, and I was so grateful to be among people who were laughing that I sat down.
I should tell you what I told myself.
I told myself that I had good news. That the office would open on Monday. That I had a message in my pocket with the word safe in it, and a photograph of a man at an airport gate. I told myself that I had come out of a tunnel. I told myself that I deserved one beer.
I had three. The first went down like water. By the second, a fine warm pleasantness had begun to spread through me, a loosening of the muscles, a lifting of weight, and I leaned back in the plastic chair and listened to Kizza explain, at enormous length and with a wealth of invented detail, how the dean had once been seen weeping in a car park. I laughed. It was a real laugh. It came up through my chest without my asking, and it felt, God forgive me, wonderful.
At about ten o'clock, my phone lit up on the table.
It was lying beside my bottle, face up. I saw it light. I saw the screen come on, white and small in the dim, and on it the name. A word, and beside it a tiny picture of a flame.
I looked at it.
I have gone over this moment so many times that it has worn smooth, like a stone in a river. I know exactly what I thought. I did not think he needs me. I did not think something is wrong. I thought, with a faint warm indulgent amusement: Ronnie. He has heard the news.
I thought: He's going to be insufferable.
I thought that he would be shouting. That he would be saying I told you! I told you he'd come through! I thought I would see him tomorrow, and let him buy me a drink, and we would sit on the roof of his building and look at the lights. I could hear his voice in my head. I could see his grin, with the gap in his eyebrow.
It rang for a long time. A buzz against the wood, a skittering, the little flame jumping on the screen. Kizza glanced down at it, and then at me. "You going to get that?"
"It's Ronnie," I said. "It'll keep."
I turned it face-down.
I remember doing it. It was a smooth, lazy, practised movement, a flick of two fingers, the way you close a book you mean to come back to. The screen went dark against the wood. The buzzing went on beneath my hand, a low insistent rattle, like a trapped fly.
Somebody told a joke. I do not remember what. It was about a boda rider and a bishop. Everyone shrieked, and somebody slapped the table, and I put my head back and laughed until the tears came into my eyes, and under my palm, on the wet wood, the phone stopped, and started, and stopped.
I have told you that I do not remember what the joke was. That is true. But I remember the sound I made. It was a high, helpless, delighted whoop, the laugh of a person with nothing at all on his conscience, and I can still, on certain nights, in the hour that belongs to nobody, hear it come back down the years and strike me across the face.
It rang fourteen times.
I know because I counted them afterwards. I sat on a hospital bench with the phone in my hands and went through them one by one, reading the times, as you might read the stations of a journey you had not known you were on. Nine forty-one. Nine fifty-three. Ten-oh-two. Ten-oh-nine. They came faster as the night went on. Ten-twenty. Ten-twenty-four. Ten-thirty-one, ten-thirty-two, ten-thirty-three. Then a gap. Then eleven-oh-six, and eleven-ten, and eleven-fourteen.
Fourteen times my friend had sat somewhere in the dark with a phone against his ear, listening to it ring.
I did not answer one of them. At some point I turned the phone over, I think, and glanced at the screen, and saw the number, 9 missed calls, and thought, he must be drunk, and flipped it back. At ten forty, I went to the toilet and checked my messages, and saw that he had sent one: CALL ME. In capitals. I stood in the cracked-tile cubicle with the smell of bleach and old urine and thought, in a minute, and put the phone away.
At eleven, I got up. I said goodnight to Kizza and the others. I said I had to find a friend. I was a little drunk, a little wired, in the mood that comes with a good piece of news, when one wants to share it, to be seen. I stood in the doorway of the Sunrise with the sun-sign glowing over my head, and rang him back.
It went straight to a recording. The woman's voice, high and sweet and mechanical. The number you have dialled is not available.
I tried again.
Not available.
I tried a third time. And then, on the pavement, with the street noise rising around me, I felt for the first time that evening a small cold finger on the back of my neck. Not fear. Not yet. Only a faint disquiet, like the feeling of having left a tap running.
He's turned it off, I thought. He's gone to bed. He's decided to be dramatic.
I started to walk toward his building. It was a ten-minute walk.
I had gone perhaps two hundred metres when my phone rang again. I took it out. It was not Ronnie. It was Denis.
I have heard it said that grief arrives in a wave. That is not how it came to me. It came as a sound. The sound was Denis's voice.
"Eli."
"Denis, I'm trying to find..."
"Eli, where are you?"
"Wandegeya. Why? What's..."
"Ronnie's been..." And there it stopped. There was a long breath, a ragged scraping noise, as of a man trying to speak through a mouthful of sand. "He's been in an accident. They've taken him to Mulago. A boda. On Jinja Road. A man rang me from his phone. They said... they said to come. They said to come quickly."
I did not say anything. I stood on the pavement in the dark, with the phone against my ear. A boy went past me on a bicycle, ringing his bell.
"Eli? Are you there?"
"How bad?"
"I don't know."
"How bad, Denis?"
"I don't know," said Denis, and now he was crying, a high thin helpless sound, like a child's. "They didn't say. The man said just come."
I do not remember the ride.
I know that I ran to the corner, and that there was a boda man there, a stocky, bearded man with a yellow jacket, who took one look at my face and said nothing at all, and that he drove as I have never been driven, through red lights and the wrong side of the road, with his horn blaring, between two minibuses with a hand's width to spare on either side. I know that I held on to his jacket with both hands and said, over and over, into the wind, in a voice I did not recognise, please, please, please. I know that I was not praying. I did not know whom I was speaking to. It was only that the word had come loose, and I could not stop it.
At the gate of Mulago, I threw the man a note. I did not look at what it was. I ran.
Casualty at night is a different country. There is a great white light over everything, from the long tubes in the ceiling, and under it a great crowd of people, waiting, in rows, on benches and on the floor. Mothers with babies, men holding bloody cloths against their heads, a girl asleep in her school uniform with her mouth open. A man was shouting somewhere, a long incoherent complaint. A trolley rattled by with a body on it, covered with a sheet. And above it all, the sound of a hundred people breathing.
I pushed my way to the desk. A nurse was writing in a ledger. She did not look up.
"Opio," I said. "Ronald Opio. A boda accident. Jinja Road. They said he was brought here. I'm his friend."
"Wait."
"Please. I need to..."
"Wait," said the nurse, and looked up, and then, at my face, her own changed. Not much. A softening, a sort of flattening of the lines about the mouth. I knew that look. I had seen it six years ago, in a car, in the headlights, on two other nurses. It was not unkind. It was the look of someone who has done the sum.
"Are you family?"
"I'm his friend. His closest... his only." I heard how it sounded. "His father's on his way. He's a guard. He works nights. I'm all that... please."
She hesitated. She looked at the ledger, and then at the double doors at the end of the hall, and then at me.
"Come," she said.
They had put him in a side room.
It was small, and bare, and very bright, with a white tiled floor and a steel trolley in the middle and a metal cabinet against the wall. A green curtain hung at one end, half drawn. A young doctor was standing by the trolley, with his hands behind his back, and a policeman in a grey uniform sat on a stool by the door, writing something on a clipboard. When I came in, they both looked at me, and neither said a word.
On the trolley, under a white sheet, was a shape.
I stood in the doorway. I could not make my legs work. For a long time, I do not know how long, I only stood, and looked at the shape, at the small rise that was a foot, the longer rise of a leg, the narrow arch of a chest. I thought: that is not him. He is taller than that. I thought: he was always taller than he looked.
"Mr. Kasozi?" said the doctor, gently. He had my name from somewhere. "I'm very sorry. He was dead on arrival. He had very serious injuries. There was nothing we could do."
I heard it. I did not understand it. The words went by me like objects in a stream.
"He was wearing a helmet," said the policeman, from the door. He said it neutrally, in a sort of mild informing tone. "The rider insisted. The helmet cracked. But the impact was..." He paused. "He was thrown into the path of a lorry. He wouldn't have felt a great deal."
"Where is the rider?"
"In the next room. He has a broken arm. He's young." He looked down at his clipboard. "He says your friend was shouting at him to go faster. He says there was a man in Naguru, a man he wanted to find. They'd been drinking, the two of them. He says he tried to say no."
I walked across the room.
I do not know what made me do it. The doctor started to speak, and stopped. I reached the trolley and put my hand on the sheet, at the place where the head would be, and the cloth was cold under my fingers, and I turned it back.
I will not describe his face. I have never described it to anyone, and I do not mean to begin now. I will say only that it was his. That there was a long scratch down the left cheek, and a bruise like a dark cloud over the temple, and that the gap in his eyebrow, where he had been thrown against a wall at the age of nine, was still there, a small pale break in the hair. That his eyes were closed. That he looked, more than anything, like a boy who has fallen asleep at a party and been put down on a bed.
"Ronnie," I said.
It was an absurd thing to say. I knew it was. I said it again.
I put my hand on his forehead. It was cool. It had the exact cool, smooth, waxen feel of the forehead of a person who is not there.
And I remembered a warm hand in mine, a hospital chair with a crack across the seat. I remembered that his had been warm.
His hand is still warm. I had thought it, six years ago, because the mind will do anything to protect itself.
This one was not.
I do not know how long I stood there. The doctor must have gone. The policeman, too; at some point I became aware that the room was empty, and that someone was standing beside me, quite close, holding my arm. I turned my head, and it was a nurse, a different one, an older woman with a kind round face.
"Come and sit, son," she said. "Come, come. You can't stay here."
I let her lead me out. She put me on a bench in the corridor, under a poster about handwashing, and brought me a plastic cup of water, and I held it in both hands and did not drink. Across from me, a woman in a faded dress was rocking a baby and murmuring to it. A cleaner went by with a mop. The light buzzed.
I took out my phone.
I do not know why. It was the only thing in my hands that was still working. I held it, and the screen woke, and there it was, the long list of them. Ronnie 🔥. Missed call. Ronnie 🔥. Missed call. I read it from the top. Nine forty-one. Nine fifty-three. I read the times. I read them one by one, as I have said, the whole stations of the journey, and when I came to the end, to the last, eleven-fourteen, I understood what I was looking at.
Eleven-fourteen. At eleven-fourteen, I had been standing in the doorway of a bar called Sunrise with the sun-sign glowing over my head, listening to a woman's recorded voice say that the number was not available.
He had stopped calling at eleven-fourteen.
Because he was already on the road.
Beneath the list there was a small new line, in grey. Voicemail (1). Forty-one seconds. I looked at it. My thumb hung over it, quite steady. I have never known why I did not press it. I think I knew, with the clear dreadful knowledge of the very frightened, that if I did, I would hear his voice, and I would not be able to survive what it said.
I put the phone face-down on my knee.
Mzee Opio came at a quarter to one.
I heard him before I saw him. It was the limp: a slow, deliberate, uneven sound, a long step and a short one, on the concrete of the corridor, coming fast. He had run most of the way from the bank, I learned afterwards, in his guard's uniform, in the heavy black boots, and he had left his post without a word to anyone. When he came round the corner, he was in the grey-green of his work clothes, with his cap in his hand, and a torch still hooked to his belt, and he was breathing in great ragged heaves like a man who has been under water.
I stood up.
He did not see me. He went straight to the desk. I heard him say, in a low, steady, terrible voice, his son's name, and the nurse's answer, and then there was a silence, a very long one, in which I watched the back of his neck. It was a thin brown neck, creased like old leather, with a line of white at the hairline where he had shaved. His shoulders were very straight. He stood like a soldier at attention.
Then he turned his head, and looked down the corridor, and saw me.
I have been looked at by many people. I have been looked at by my mother, and by Naomi, and by a woman in a one-room house in Bwaise. I have never been looked at like that. There was no accusation in it. That is the thing I cannot explain. There was only a kind of immense stunned attention, as of a man who has been struck, and who is looking at the one person who might tell him why.
"Eliya," he said.
"Mzee."
"Is it true?"
"I'm so sorry."
"Is it true?"
I could not answer. I only nodded.
The old man did not cry out. He did not fall. He stood quite still, and his face did something slow and appalling, a kind of collapse from the inside, as a building comes down when its supports are removed. His cap dropped from his hand. It rolled a little way along the concrete and lay on its side.
I picked it up. I held it out to him. He looked at it, and then at me, and said, in a conversational voice, as though continuing a talk we had been having for years:
"He was a very good boy."
"I know."
"He was the best."
"I know, Mzee."
"I don't have any..." His voice broke. "I don't have anyone else."
I did the only thing I could. I put my arms round him. I felt the whole stiff length of his body, the rough wool of the uniform, the thin bones of his back, and I felt him shudder, once, a long deep tremor that went through him like an earthquake through a wall. He did not hold me. He did not put his arms up. He only stood there, rigid, and let me, and over his shoulder, down the long bright corridor, I saw the nurse look away.
After a while he said into my collar, "They said he called you."
"I..."
"The policeman. He told me. They had his phone, in a bag. He said it showed fourteen calls." The old man drew back, and looked into my face. His eyes were bloodshot and wet and very clear. "To you. Fourteen. Before the last."
"Mzee..."
"Where were you?"
It was not said harshly. It was not a charge. It was a question, put by a tired man in a hospital corridor who wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything, to be told that there was a reason.
And I could not tell him. I could not say, I was in a bar called Sunrise, laughing at a joke about a bishop. I could not say, I looked at the screen and turned it over. I could not say, I thought he was being dramatic.
"I didn't hear it," I said.
It was my first lie of that night. It was the worst of the lot. I said it in a low broken voice, looking him straight in the eyes, and I watched him believe it.
"No," said Mzee Opio. He nodded slowly. "No. You wouldn't have. It was noisy, I suppose. In the city." He put a shaking hand on my shoulder. "He said you were the one person who didn't lie to him. He said it a month ago. At supper. Baba, Eli never lies."
I closed my eyes.
I felt his hand on me, heavy and warm and trembling. I felt the whole weight of it. And I stood there under the long white light of Mulago, with a dead boy in the next room and his father's hand on my shoulder and my phone burning a hole in my pocket, and for the first time in my life I understood, with the whole of my body, the meaning of the word damned.
Not as a doctrine. Not as a threat. But as a plain, flat, practical description of a place: the place where one stands when one has done a thing that cannot be undone, and been forgiven for it by someone who does not know.
We sat down together on the bench. The old man took off his torch and laid it on his knee. He did not speak again. For a long while we sat there side by side, like two men waiting for a bus, and the corridor hummed, and the woman with the baby sang softly in the dark.
At some point, the nurse brought us tea. It came in plastic cups. It was sweet and weak and lukewarm.
Neither of us drank it.