Chapter Nineteen
The Prayer
He did not ask me anything.
That was the first thing. I had come to the gate of a man's workshop at six in the morning, in a dead boy's funeral jacket and another man's sweater, unshaven, unwashed, grey with dust, with the eyes of someone who has not slept in three days, and he looked me up and down once, quite slowly, and stepped back to let me in.
"Mind the step," said Mzee Ssekamatte. "It's higher than it looks."
I minded it. I came through the little wicket door into the yard, and the smell closed round me like water. The workshop was a long, low, cluttered shed, open at the front, with a roof of rust-eaten sheet metal, and the grey light came through it in a hundred small holes, so that the whole interior was pricked with tiny white stars. A Corolla stood on blocks with its bonnet open. Beyond it, a minibus with no wheels. Along the back wall, a bench, scored and blackened, with a vice and a litter of spanners, and above it, on nails, an orderly row of hung tools, each with its shape drawn round it in white paint, so that you could see at a glance if one was missing.
My father had done that. I knew it at once. I had seen him do it, on the wall of the shed behind our house, with a tin of whitewash and a brush, humming, when I was nine. A tool without a place, he had said, is a tool you will lose.
"Sit," said the old man.
There was a tyre, a big one, from a lorry, lying on its side near the stove. I sat on it. It was cold and slightly damp and gave a little under me, with a smell of rubber. He moved about the corner that served him as a kitchen, a shelf and a stove and a plastic jerrycan of water, and I watched his back. He wore a faded blue overall, patched at both knees, and a woollen cap pulled down over his ears. He moved slowly, with a kind of economical grace, as if every gesture had been tested long ago and found the least wasteful.
He set a cup in my hands. It was enamel, white with a blue rim, chipped at the lip. The tea was black and sweet and very hot.
On the shelf, there was another cup. I noticed it as I drank. It was the same pattern, set neatly beside the first, upside-down on a saucer. A second one, a third, a row of four, all clean.
"Why so many?" I said. It was my first word.
He did not look round. "I set out two every morning."
"For who?"
"Whoever comes." He poured his own. "I started when your father died. I thought, someone might want one. It was foolishness. For eleven months no one did. Then Dauda from the stage came, with a cough, and I was so pleased that I gave him two." The ghost of a smile. "Since then I have kept them. I don't think about it. It is only a habit. The kind a man keeps because he cannot be sure he is allowed to stop."
I looked at the cups. My throat began to hurt.
"Drink," he said. "It's going cold."
We sat for a long time.
I do not know how long. It might have been twenty minutes, it might have been an hour. The old man took a small stool by the stove, and I stayed on my tyre, and the light changed slowly in the roof, from grey to white to the first faint yellow. A cockerel crowed somewhere beyond the wall. A boy came to the gate and called, and Mzee Ssekamatte answered without moving, in Luganda, not today, tomorrow, and the boy went away. Outside, in the lane, a lorry went by with a long grinding hiss, and the whole shed hummed with it.
Neither of us said anything. And it was not uncomfortable. It was a silence like the one on the lake, in the boat, in the hour before sunset; a silence that was not an absence, but a kind of room, large and quiet, with the windows open.
He had said nothing about Ronnie. He had said nothing about the money. I understood, slowly, that he knew. Of course he knew; the whole of Kawempe knew. He had stood at the back of the cemetery, I realised, in a black suit I had not noticed, among a crowd of men. He had seen me leave.
At some point, he rose and fetched a rag, a grey, folded, oil-stained cloth, and held it out to me.
"For your face," he said. "I am sorry. It is only oil. But it is clean oil."
I laughed. I could not help it. It came out of me in a startled croak, and then it broke, and turned in my chest, and I took the rag and pressed it against my eyes. It smelled of engines. It smelled of him. And I sat there on a lorry tyre, in an old man's workshop, with a rag against my face, shaking all over, and he let me.
"Your father," said Mzee Ssekamatte, quite conversationally, "was not a good boy either."
I lowered the rag.
"I told you," he said. "He came to me barefoot. I never told you why." He sat down again on his stool, with the cup between his hands. His eyes, small and bright and pale, were fixed on something about a yard in front of my knees. "He was nineteen. He had run away from the village. He had taken his uncle's money, the whole of it, the price of a cow, and gone to Kampala. He wanted to be a man of the city. He wanted shoes." A dry smile. "For two years, he spent it. On drink, on women, on cards. On nothing. When it was gone, he slept in the old taxi park, in the back of a bus. He fought for his food. He stole."
"My father?"
"Your father." The old man nodded. "One night in the rains, a man in the park put a knife in his side. For a watch. It was a very bad watch. He lay in the mud behind the buses for two hours before anyone came, and the person who came was a taxi driver, a young one, a stranger, who did not need to stop." He paused. "He picked him up. He carried him to Mulago on his back, through the rain, nearly a kilometre. He sat beside him for four days."
I stared at him. A cold, prickling sensation had started in my scalp.
"The driver," I said. "What was his name?"
"Joel," said Mzee Ssekamatte. "Joel Lubega."
I put the rag down in my lap.
"He had a Bible in the glove compartment," said the old man. "A small one. He read it to your father, while he lay there. Not much. A verse or two. He had no great speeches. He only said, you are not as far as you think." He drank. "When your father came out, a week later, he walked to my gate. Barefoot. I said, what can you do? He said, nothing yet. I gave him a broom."
The cockerel crowed again. A thin finger of sunlight had reached the floor, and lay across the dirt between us, in which the dust turned, slowly, like a very small galaxy.
"He never told me," I said. "He never said any of it."
"He did not like to. He said it was not a story about him." Mzee Ssekamatte smiled. "He said it was a story about a man with a Bible in his glove compartment."
I could not speak. Somewhere in my chest, a thing that had been stretched very tight for a very long time shifted, and gave, with a soft internal sound, like a rope settling on a post.
You are not as far as you think.
"I don't know how to do this," I said.
"What?"
"Any of it." My voice was hoarse. "I killed him, Mzee. Ronnie. I could say it wasn't me. I could say there was a man who ran away with the money, and a boda rider who went too fast, and a lorry. But I looked at the phone. I looked at it. And I turned it over. And I took my mother's money, and I took Mzee Opio's pension, I mean Ronnie took it, but I was the one who... I brought them all in. I lied to the one person who..." I gasped. "I told a girl that I was good. And she believed it. And I knew."
"Yes."
"I don't know if I'm even sorry. I mean, I am. I'm so sorry I can't breathe. But I'm sorry the way you're sorry when you're caught. I don't know if there's any other kind in me." I had begun to shake. "I don't know how to pray. I tried, in the field, I screamed at Him, and it was just noise. I don't know if He's there. I don't know if He ever was. And if He is, I don't know why He would want..."
I stopped. The word would not come.
The old man waited.
"I've gone too far," I said. It came out in a whisper. "Haven't I? Isn't that what this is? There's a line. I crossed it. I crossed it a long time ago, and I just didn't know. And now I can't get back."
He put his cup down. He took off his woollen cap, and held it between his knees, and I saw that his head was quite bald, and spotted, and very small, like a child's.
"May I tell you something I know?" said Mzee Ssekamatte.
"Please."
"I do not know many things. I know engines. I know how long a man can go on with a bad gearbox. I know that if you hold a bolt the wrong way, no amount of force will turn it." He looked at me. "I do not know about God as well as Joel Lubega. He has read the books. I only know what Samuel told me, and what I saw."
"What did you see?"
"A man who thought he had gone too far," said the old man, "and was wrong." He turned the cap over. "Eliya. I have heard a great many people pray. In churches, in cars, in hospitals, at gravesides. Do you know which prayer I have ever heard that was answered?"
I shook my head.
"The ones that were true." He said it simply, like a man naming the price of a part. "Not the ones that were beautiful. Not the ones that had the right words. Your father's was not beautiful. When he lay in that bed in Mulago, and Joel asked him if he wanted to pray, he said, I don't know what to say. And Joel said, then say that."
"Say what?"
"I don't know what to say." His eyes held mine. "It is a very good place to begin."
I looked at him. The old face, all lines, the pale shrewd eyes. And I understood, with the dreadful, bright clarity of a person standing at the edge of a drop, that I had been waiting for exactly this, for six years, for my whole life; and that it was not a sermon, or a rescue, or a miracle. It was an old man in a workshop saying, then say that.
"I'll step outside," said Mzee Ssekamatte. He rose, with a small grunt, and put his cap on, and went to the wicket door. "I have a gearbox to see to. You'll not be disturbed."
"You don't have to..."
"I know." He paused, with his hand on the latch. "But I think a man should not be watched."
He went out. The little door closed behind him, softly. A bar of light fell across the floor, slid, narrowed, and went.
I was alone in the shed.
I did not kneel.
I want to say that, because it matters. I thought of it. I thought of the way I had done it in January, with my elbows on the mattress, and I knew at once that this was not that. I sat on the tyre where I was, with the cup in my hands, and the rag in my lap, and the sun lying in a white bar across my shoes. The tools hung on their wall, each in its painted outline. The Corolla stood with its mouth open. A drip fell somewhere with a small dry tick.
I opened my mouth. For a long time, nothing came.
And then I said, quietly, in the same voice that I used for talking to Patience:
"I don't know what to say."
The words went out into the shed. They did not echo. The drip ticked. A fly walked across the windscreen of the Corolla.
"I don't know what I'm doing anymore." My throat was thick. "I don't know what I'm doing. I haven't known for years. I think I thought I did. I think I thought I had it, all of it. I thought I was a person who knew." I let out a breath. "I don't. I don't know anything."
I shut my eyes.
"I've messed up. That's the... that's the only way I can say it. I've messed it up. All of it. I took my mother's money. She trusted me and I took it. I told Naomi I wasn't in it, and I was. I said it to her face. I made Ronnie's father lose everything. I..." The tears came, and I let them. "Ronnie called me fourteen times, and I turned the phone over. I laughed. I was laughing, and he was..."
I could not go on. I sat there with my face in my hands.
After a while, I found that my mouth had started moving again.
"I've run from You. You know that. You've known it the whole time. I ran from You at Mulago, in the stairwell, and I've been running ever since. I told myself it was something else. I told myself I was busy. I told myself I was growing out of it. But it was running. It was just running very well." A broken laugh. "I'm good at it. I'm so good at it. I got very far."
The light shifted. A strip of it fell across my hands.
"I tried to say it before. In January. I asked You to give it back. The money. And You didn't, and I thought, well, that's what You're like. But I wasn't asking for You. I was asking for the money. I wanted You to be a, a clerk. I wanted You to fix the numbers." I gulped. "I don't want that now. I mean, I do. God, I do. I want it all back, I want him back, I want to wake up and it's Friday and I pick up the phone. I want it so badly it makes me sick. But I know You can't."
I lifted my head. I looked at the roof, at the thousand small stars of light, tiny and white and scattered, like something spilled.
"I know You can't," I said. "And I know it isn't Your fault. I said it was. I screamed it, in a field. Where were You. But I know where You were. You were in the bar. You were at my elbow, You were in the phone, You were in every one of those fourteen calls. And I turned You over."
It was out. I had not planned it. It rose in me as a thing rises that has been waiting, and came out in a low, wrenching sob.
"I turned You over."
I sat very still.
Somewhere in the lane, a woman was calling a child. A taxi hooted. A dog barked twice, and was silent.
"I don't even know if You still want me." My voice was very small. "I don't know if there's a line. I think there might be. I think I might have crossed it. If there is, I..." I swallowed. "I just want to say I'm sorry. Not because I'm caught. I'm caught, and I'm sorry for that, but that isn't it. I'm sorry because of Ronnie. Because of his face. Because of what I did to the people who loved me. Because You were there, and I..."
I broke off. I put my hands flat on my knees.
"That's all," I whispered. "That's all I've got. It's not a good prayer. I'm sorry. It's not even a prayer. It's just..." I laughed, a thin cracked sound. "It's the truth. It's the only thing I've got that's true."
There was silence.
I waited. I do not know for what. A sign. A word. A hand on my shoulder, a sudden warmth in the chest, the light through the roof turning gold. I had been told all my life that this was how it went. That a man knelt, and confessed, and the heavens opened.
The heavens did not open.
The drip ticked. The fly walked across the glass. The sun went on lying in its pale square across the floor, and the dust went on turning, and the minibus without wheels stood quite still on its blocks. There was not a sound in the shed except my own breathing.
Nothing.
I sat there for a long time, with my hands on my knees, and I felt the old cold coming back, the silence of the ceiling, the stairwell, the dark room. You see, said the voice at the back of my mind, the one that had followed me for six years. You see? Nobody.
And then something small happened.
I do not want to make too much of it. It was very small. It was so small that, had I been looking for it, I should have missed it. It was only that, in the middle of that silence, I became aware that it did not feel empty.
I do not know how to say it better. I had known the other kind. I had known the dead silence, the flat, indifferent, ceiling kind, the silence of a phone ringing in an empty room. This was not that. This was the silence of a room in which someone is present and does not speak. The silence of a hospital corridor at night when a person sits down beside you. A silence that had weight, and breath, and warmth.
It did not tell me anything. It did not say I forgive you. It did not say it will be all right. It did not take away a single thing I had done.
It only stayed.
I sat with it. I did not move. I felt, absurdly, as I had at eleven, in the dark, in a bed in Kawempe, when something in my chest had unclenched like a fist. God, I'm scared. Please stay.
Stay.
And I knew, as one knows a thing in a dream, with no evidence whatever, that He had.
When Mzee Ssekamatte came back, the sun was well up.
I heard the latch click. I did not look round. I was still on the tyre, with the cup in my hands, long cold. He came across the floor, with his slow, uneven tread, and stopped beside me. He did not say anything. He looked at my face, for perhaps ten seconds, with those small pale eyes.
Then he nodded.
"There is a kettle," he said.
"Mzee..."
"And a loaf. I have been to the stage." He held up a paper bag. "I thought you might be hungry. A man should eat after he prays. It is a thing I have noticed. They are always starving."
I took the bag. It was warm. Inside were two thick slices of bread with a smear of margarine, and a boiled egg, and a small paper twist of salt. I looked at it. I do not know why that was the thing that undid me, an egg and a twist of salt, but I put it in my lap and began, again, to cry, and the old man sat down on his stool and poured more tea and said nothing at all.
I ate. I ate it all. It was the first food I had tasted since Sunday, and I have never in my life had anything so good.
When I had finished, he held out a phone. It was an old brick of a thing, black and scratched, with a cracked screen and a strip of tape round the back.
"Yours is dead," he said. "I saw. Ring your mother."
"I can't."
"You don't have to say anything." He put it in my hand. "Only that you are alive. She has not slept in four days. I passed the house at five. The light was on."
I looked at the phone. My hand was shaking.
"What do I say?"
"Whatever is true," said Mzee Ssekamatte. "It is a short list, I find. It makes the call quicker."
I pressed the numbers. I knew them by heart. It rang once. It did not ring a second time. There was a click, and a silence, and then, very low and quick, a voice I would have known anywhere, in any dark, at any distance, said:
"Eliya."
"Maama."
"Where are you?"
"I'm at Mzee Ssekamatte's. At the garage." I could barely speak. "I'm... I'm all right. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry I didn't..."
"Stay there," said my mother.
"Maama, I need to tell you..."
"I know."
"No, you don't. I need..."
"Eliya." It was very gentle. "I know that you do. And I know that you are going to. But not on the telephone." I heard her draw a long breath, and heard behind it, faintly, the clink of a cup. "Stay there. Do not move. I am coming."
The line clicked and was dead.
I sat with the phone in my hand. Across from me, on his stool, the old man poured the last of the tea into my cup, and tipped the kettle to see if there was more, and there was not, and he set it down with a small clank on the stove.
"She is coming?"
"Yes."
"Good." He nodded. "Then you had better wash your face. It is a long time since she saw it."
He pointed to a basin in the corner, a battered tin one, on a stand, with a bar of green soap and a cracked mirror nailed above it. I got up. My legs were stiff and my head swam. I went across the floor in the pale sunlight, between the dismantled engines and the hanging tools, and stood in front of the glass.
A stranger looked out. Hollow-cheeked. Grey. Eyes red and swollen, a day's beard on his jaw, a black jacket hanging from his shoulders like a sack. A man who had been somewhere and come back.
I put my hands under the tap. The water was ice-cold. It ran over my wrists and I cupped it and threw it in my face, and gasped, and did it again.
When I looked up, I was not different. I want to say that, because I know how it ought to go. I was exactly the same man. I had done every one of the things I had done. The money was still gone. Ronnie was still dead. In an hour, I would have to stand in front of my mother and say words that would break something that could not be mended.
But I had prayed. And the thing that I had prayed to had stayed in the room.
It was not much. It was a candle in a draught. But as I stood there with the water running down my face, I understood for the first time that I did not have to carry the dark by myself.
Outside, in the lane, a woman's voice was calling, and the gate was rattling, and a small, quick, determined pair of feet were coming down the red earth, running.