Chapter Four
The First Fall
The money came in an envelope.
It was the week before the second semester of my second year, and my mother had put it on the table without ceremony, next to the sugar tin, the way another woman might have put down a set of keys. A plain brown envelope that had once held the electricity bill. Inside were seven hundred and eighty thousand shillings in notes of ten and twenty thousand, soft with handling, bound with a rubber band that had once, I think, been part of a bicycle tube.
"Your fees," she said. "The bursar says the deadline is the fifteenth. Take it to the bank on Monday. Not Tuesday. Monday."
"Maama, I can pay by mobile money."
"Monday," she said, "at the bank. With the slip. I want to see the slip."
I knew what it cost her. I had watched her count it out the night before, sitting on the edge of her bed with the notebook open on her knee and the notes in small piles on the blanket: this pile from the stall, this pile from the SACCO, this pile from a week in which she had sold nothing and skipped lunch. She had sold two of my father's shirts to a woman at the market, the good ones, with the collars. I found that out later. I wish I had never found it out.
I said, "Thank you, Maama." I took the envelope, and put it in my school bag, and zipped the bag shut.
I carried it around for three days.
I want to describe how this happened, because I have never been able to tell it simply, and I think it is because it was not simple. People who have not done what I did tend to imagine a moment: a man standing at a crossroads, choosing evil with his eyes open. It was nothing like that. It was a slope. It was a series of small, reasonable, almost invisible steps, each of which could be defended on its own, and which did not, until the end, feel like steps at all.
The first step was that I did not go to the bank on Monday.
I had lectures. I had told myself I would go after. Then it rained, a long grey drumming rain that turned the road to a river, and I stayed in the library until closing. On Tuesday, there was a queue. On Wednesday, I took the envelope out of my bag in the library toilets, just to check it was still there, and held it for a while, the thick soft weight of it, and put it back.
Thursday, I met Ronnie for lunch.
He had a plan. He had always had a plan, and most of them had come to nothing, a brief enthusiasm for selling phone covers, a scheme with second-hand textbooks that had lasted nine days, but I had stopped being cynical about it. His energy was infectious. He sat across from me in the corner of a tiny restaurant behind the market, with his elbows on a table sticky with spilled juice, and lowered his voice in the dramatic way he did when he was going to say something that mattered to him very much.
"My cousin," he said, "works at one of the betting companies."
"Which one?"
"It doesn't matter. In the back. Data. He sees things." He leaned in. "Saturday. The match in the Spanish league. The one at nine. It's a sure thing."
"There's no such thing as a sure thing."
"I know. That's why I'm telling you. He said, he said, the one thing he's allowed to say, is that for this match the numbers don't make sense. The odds are wrong. Somebody has made a mistake. It's a mistake that will be fixed by Friday morning, and until then, whoever is in, wins. Big."
I laughed. I said, "Ronnie, if it were true, your cousin would be in a Prado."
"He is in it. That's how I know." He grinned. "But he can't put in too much. They watch the staff. He can't tell many people. He told me. I'm telling you."
I looked at him. I knew him. I knew that he believed what he was saying, that he had never lied to me in his life, that if he was wrong, it would be because he had been fooled, not because he was fooling me. That is what made it so hard to say no.
"How much?" I said.
"As much as you can."
I did not take out the envelope. I want you to know that. I did not even think of it, not in that moment. I thought of the thirty thousand in my pocket. I thought: I could put that in. Just that.
I put it in. And then, on Friday evening, with Ronnie phoning me every ten minutes to say the odds had changed, that they were shifting, that if we were going to do anything we had to do it now, I stood in the bathroom of our house with the door shut and the tap running, and I took the envelope out of my bag and counted six hundred thousand shillings off the top.
I told myself it was a loan. I told myself, with perfect lucidity, that I would pay it back before the fifteenth. The match was on Saturday. The deadline was Monday. There was a window. If I won, I would replace the money and keep the rest. If I lost, I would...
I did not finish that thought. I put the envelope back in the bag, now noticeably thinner, and I went into the kitchen, where my mother was grating cassava, and said good night.
"You look pale," she said.
"I'm just tired."
"Eat something."
"I will."
She looked at me, and I looked at the floor, and I remember that I noticed, in that moment, a small crack in the lino beside the cupboard and thought how long it had been there, and that my father had always meant to fix it.
I will not describe the match in detail. I do not think I could. I remember the shop, a different one this time, bigger, crowded to the walls, with a smell of old sweat and rain on clothes, and four screens showing four different games. I remember Ronnie beside me, bouncing on the balls of his feet, and Denis Mukasa, a quiet boy from our class who had come along out of curiosity and sat with his hands between his knees as if he were in a waiting room. I remember my phone in my hand, with a slip of paper beside it on which a girl in a branded T-shirt had written a number, and under the number, in a neat round hand, Good luck.
It was a one-goal match for eighty-eight minutes. Then the home side missed a penalty. Then they scored, in the ninetieth minute, a goal from a corner, off somebody's knee, a clumsy tangled ugly goal that could not have been less like what I had been promised. And then there was the added time, and the whole room was shouting, and I was standing with my hands over my mouth, and then the whistle went.
I did not hear what happened next. Ronnie was on my back. Ronnie was on the floor. A man I had never met was thumping me on the shoulder, shouting something in Luo. The girl behind the counter stared at the screen for a moment and then at me, with an expression I could not read, and typed something, and printed a long strip of paper.
Two million, one hundred and forty thousand shillings.
I was trembling so hard that Denis had to hold my elbow. I stood in front of the counter while she counted it out, in notes so new they stuck together, and I do not think I had ever been so frightened of anything in my life.
"You've done well," the girl said.
She did not smile. She had the expression of a person who had said the sentence a great many times, and had noticed what happens to the people who hear it.
On Monday I went to the bank. I paid the fees: seven hundred and eighty thousand, in full, with a slip stamped and signed. I brought the slip home and laid it on the table beside the sugar tin, and my mother picked it up in both hands and read it carefully, all of it, the date, the amount, the stamp, and then folded it twice and put it in the pocket of her dress.
"Thank you," she said. "Thank you for doing it on time."
"It's what you asked."
"I know. Not everyone does what I ask." She touched my face. It was a rare thing: she was not an affectionate woman, in the demonstrative way. Her hand was dry and warm, and smelled of cassava and soap. "Your father would be so proud of you."
I did not say anything. I went into my room and shut the door and sat on the bed with my hands pressed between my knees, and listened to my heart.
In the bottom of my bag, wrapped in a plastic sack, were one million three hundred and sixty thousand shillings that did not belong to anyone.
I should have told her. I knew it. I knew it as plainly as I knew my name, and I had a whole speech ready, rehearsed in the shower: Maama, I did something foolish. I borrowed from the fees. I won. I'm sorry. It was not a long speech. It would have taken thirty seconds. And I think she would have been furious, and then she would have cried, and then, in time, she would have forgiven me, because she was my mother.
I did not say it. I told myself it would worry her. I told myself the thing was done, and the money was now mine, in the sense that I had earned it, by being clever, by taking a risk. The risk had paid. Why disturb a woman who had so little peace by confessing a sin that had come to nothing?
That is the logic of every sin I have ever committed. It never feels like wickedness from the inside. It feels like sparing someone.
The night after I paid the fees, I went out.
The party was in a rented room in Kikoni, up a flight of concrete stairs on the outside of a building, with the music coming out of the window and down into the street. I do not remember who the host was. Ronnie knew him. Ronnie knew everyone. By ten o'clock the place was packed so tight that the dancing was mostly a kind of swaying. I stood in a corner with a bottle in my hand, and people kept coming up to clap me on the back, because Ronnie had told them what I had done, and in that room I was, briefly and absurdly, a hero.
"The one who knew," a boy said, shouting over the speaker. "The one who saw it coming!"
I smiled. I said I had been lucky. And a small hard part of me, a part that had not existed three years ago, whispered: you were not lucky. You were right. You are the kind of person things work out for.
It was around eleven that I saw Brenda.
Brenda Nantale was in my Commerce class. I knew her the way you know people who sit at the front: by the back of her head, the angle of her hand when she raised it, the confident ring of her voice when she answered a question the lecturer had not quite finished asking. She was small and dark and always dressed as though she had somewhere better to go, with big gold earrings and a way of looking at you that was both amused and entirely serious. She sold wigs on the side, I had heard. She sent money home to a village near Masaka.
She was sitting on the windowsill with her heels hooked on the radiator, watching the room, a plastic cup of something clear in her hand. When our eyes met she raised her cup to me, very slightly, with an expression I would think about for a long time afterwards. It was not flirtatious, exactly. It was recognition.
"Kasozi," she said, when I came over. "The star."
"It was a lucky game."
"I heard. Congratulations. Did you tell your mother?"
I looked at her. "Why would I?"
"No reason." She sipped. "It's just that you have the face of someone who hasn't."
I did not like how accurately she had seen me. I turned to leave, and she said, laughing, "Don't go. I'm not your church. Sit."
I sat.
I do not remember much of what we talked about. Her mother, I think, who had a stall in Nyendo market and a bad hip. The lecturers. A girl in our class who was pretending to be rich. I remember that she was funny, truly, unexpectedly funny, with a dry, sly humour that crept up on you; and that she listened, too, with her head slightly tilted, as if what you were saying were not a tiresome noise but a thing to be weighed. I remember that at some point my hand was on the windowsill beside hers, and neither of us moved it. I remember the second drink, and the third.
I remember, quite clearly, a thought that came to me around one in the morning, as the party began to thin: My father would not have wanted this.
It arrived in his voice, unbidden, exactly the way he would have said it, mild and calm and not at all angry. Eliya. Is this what you want?
I put it away. I put it away with the efficiency I had been practising for three years. I looked at Brenda, at the bare curve of her shoulder where her sleeve had slipped, and I said, "Do you want to go?"
"Where?"
"Anywhere."
"Anywhere's not a place," she said. But she was already getting down from the sill.
I woke in a room I did not know.
It was small and very tidy. A single bed pushed against the wall. A shelf of folded clothes and a cardboard box of wig heads, blank and faceless, staring at me from the corner. A calendar with a photograph of Lake Bunyonyi on it, still turned to the wrong month. On the table by the window, a framed picture of a woman in a headscarf holding a toddler, squinting into the sun. Brenda's mother, I thought, and the toddler, perhaps, Brenda.
It was nearly six. There was grey light at the curtains. I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling, at a damp stain in the corner that had the shape of a country I could not name, and every part of my body knew exactly what I had done.
I do not want to go into detail. I will say only that the shame came first, before anything else, before the headache, before even the sense of where I was, a flat cold weight that settled on my chest and did not move. And under it, quieter, a sound I had not heard in a long time. It was the sound of a small boy, behind a water tank, in the dark, saying, God, I'm scared.
I turned my head. Brenda was awake. She lay with her back against the wall, watching me, her arms around her knees, and I could not tell what she was thinking.
"You do that thing," she said.
"What thing?"
"You look at the ceiling like it owes you money." She smiled, not unkindly. "It's okay, Kasozi. I'm not going to make it weird."
"I'm sorry. I didn'tâ"
"Don't." She lifted a hand. "Don't apologize to me. If you've got something to be sorry for, it isn't for me." She said it lightly, almost carelessly, and then, seeing my face, added more softly, "I mean it. I'm a grown woman. I knew what I was doing. Are you going to leave before it's properly morning?"
"I should."
"Everyone should," said Brenda, and turned her face to the wall.
I dressed in the half-dark. I could not find my second shoe. When I finally did, it was under the bed, beside a small plastic Bible in a pink cover that I do not think she had touched in years, but which she had kept, as people do, in the way you keep a letter from someone you have disappointed.
I stood there looking at it for a very long time.
Then I went out into the dawn, and down the concrete stairs, and into a street that smelled of wet dust and last night's fires. A woman was already sweeping the step of a shop. Two schoolchildren in blue uniforms passed me, arguing about a football. I walked to the main road and flagged a boda and rode home with my face turned into the wind so the rider would not see it.
It was a Sunday. I had forgotten.
My sister was to sing. Patience, then fourteen, had been picked for a solo with the youth choir for the first time, and for a month she had talked about nothing else, practising in the yard, in the bathroom, behind the tank, her high clear voice rising over the roofs of Kawempe. My mother had been up since four ironing her dress. When I came in through the gate at seven, with my shirt creased and my eyes red, they were both already dressed, waiting. Patience in yellow, with a ribbon. My mother in her good gomesi, the green one, with the shoulders that stood up like wings.
"You look terrible," said Patience.
"Long night. Studying."
"On a Saturday?"
"Pati," said my mother, quietly.
"I'll get changed," I said.
I stood in the shower for a long time with the cold water running over my head. I scrubbed at my skin until it stung. I knew it was absurd, and I did it anyway, the way you might wash a floor that has already been washed. Then I put on my good shirt, the white one, and a tie of my father's, and came out and walked to church between the two of them, my sister's small hand tucked into the crook of my arm.
The service began at ten. The drums, the heat, the smell of Vaseline and starch. Pastor Lubega had a way of beginning slowly, standing in front of the congregation with his hands folded and looking around the room as though counting us, and then saying, very softly, "Good morning, family," and having the whole building say it back as one voice. It never failed. It did not fail that morning. I felt it go through me, the old sound, the old belonging, and my eyes filled, and I did not know whether it was joy or something nearer to grief.
When Patience stood up to sing, I stopped breathing.
She was so small, in front of that room. She held the microphone in both hands, the way a child holds a cup. She waited for the keyboard, and then she opened her mouth and a voice came out that I would have said was not hers, so pure and so steady that the whole congregation seemed to lean toward it. It was an old hymn, one my father had sung on the verandah while mending a chain. Great is Thy faithfulness. And when she reached the line that goes morning by morning new mercies I see, I saw my mother put her hand flat against her chest.
I sang with her. I could not help it. My mouth knew the words. I sang so loudly that the woman in front of me turned around, and I smiled at her, and kept singing, with my eyes closed and my face wet.
It was a perfect performance.
I understood that somewhere in the second verse. It arrived with a small chill, like a draught from a door I had not known was open. I was standing in a church I loved, with my sister's voice flying over my head and my mother's hand pressed against her heart, singing about mercies new every morning, with the scent of another woman's soap still on my skin. And nobody could tell. Not the woman in front of me. Not Pastor Lubega. Not my mother, who had known me since before I could speak.
I could do this. I could do it perfectly. I could stand in the middle of God's house, with a stolen night behind me and a stolen sum in my bag, and sing a hymn with real tears, and nobody would know that anything was wrong.
That was not the thing that frightened me.
What frightened me was that the tears were real.
I did not understand it yet. I did not yet see that a man can mean every word of a song and still be running from the One it is about. I only felt, standing there, a hollow opening in me, like the first crack in a dam, and I closed my eyes, and sang on louder, and did not let myself look at it.
When it was over, my mother found me in the crowd outside. She put her arms around me, tight, and I smelled her old soap and the starch of her gomesi. "Your sister," she whispered. "Did you hear her? Did you hear?"
"I heard."
"Your father," she said. And then could not go on.
I held her. Over her shoulder I could see Pastor Lubega, standing at the church door, greeting people with both hands, and as I watched he turned his head and looked directly at me. He did not smile or nod. He only looked, for perhaps a second, with his slow, patient eyes, the look of a man who has sat in a great many taxis and knows when a passenger is not going where he says he is.
Then someone took his hand, and he turned away.