Chapter Seven
Her
The baptism tank at Living Hope was a rectangle of blue-painted concrete set into the floor at the front of the church, behind the pulpit, and for the rest of the year it was covered with a sheet of plywood on which the choir stood. On the last Sunday of September, the plywood was gone. The water lay still and green-blue under the strip lights, and I sat in the front row, as promised, and looked at it as though it were a cliff.
I had not slept. I had told myself I would be there at eight. At nine I was still in the bathroom with the door locked, holding the tie my father had worn to the burial, which I had not yet decided to put on. My mother knocked once. She said, "Eliya, we're going," and I said, "I'm coming," and she said nothing, which was how I knew that she had no faith whatever that I was.
But I came. I came in my good suit, the one I had bought in January with Bridge money, and the tie, which I had finally knotted with trembling fingers, and I walked into the church at ten minutes past ten with the front doors still open behind me and the whole choir already standing. My mother was in the front row, in her green gomesi. She looked at me. She looked at me for a long moment, up and down, and then she moved her handbag off the empty seat beside her.
I sat. She did not say a word. After a minute, her hand crept over and rested on my knee, light as a leaf, and stayed there.
The service was long. There was a testimony from a man who had been healed of a stomach complaint, and a short, fierce sermon from Pastor Lubega about water, and a procession of children carrying jars. But I remember almost none of it, because I was watching the choir.
The youth choir had a new keyboard player.
I had not noticed her at first. She sat at the side, half hidden by the corner of the stage, behind a battered Yamaha that someone had donated years before and that always gave out a faint hum when it was on. I saw only a profile: a tall girl in a mustard-yellow dress, with short natural hair and a pair of large round glasses, bent over the keys with her tongue caught between her teeth. She was not performing. That was what struck me. Most people, when they sit down to play for a congregation, adopt a certain face: a luminous, faintly tilted, God-is-in-the-room look, designed to be seen. She had none of it. She played with her whole concentration, and when the choir came in a beat early, she frowned, and visibly adjusted, and glanced at the director with an expression of such open irritation that I almost laughed.
The director, Auntie Rose, a broad-shouldered woman in a purple head-tie, glared back. They seemed to have a long conversation that way without anyone's lips moving.
Then Patience came out.
She came from the vestry in a white robe that was too big, her hair covered by a white cap. She walked slowly, her bare feet silent on the carpet, her hands clasped in front of her. She did not look at anyone. She looked at the water. Pastor Lubega stood waist-deep in the tank in his own white robe, and he held out a hand, and she took it, and stepped down, one step, two, three, the water rising around her, and the choir began to sing very softly.
The keyboard came in under it. A slow chord, a long low sustained note, so quiet that you almost felt it before you heard it. I looked over. The girl had her eyes shut now. Her hands moved on the keys without hesitation. The sound she was making was not showy; it simply held the whole room, like a pair of cupped palms.
Pastor Lubega spoke. I did not hear what he said. I heard only the water, and the soft slapping of a robe, and my sister's voice, high and clear and not at all afraid, answering a question.
Then he laid one hand behind her head and one over her face, and tipped her backwards, and she went under.
The room held its breath. For a second, two, I could not see anything but a white shape beneath the green, the whole of her gone from the world. And something in me lurched, because I had seen this before, and I knew what it was: it was the cup rolling across the concrete, the breath going out of my father's mouth, the thing that was there and then, in the space between one moment and the next, was not.
Then she came up.
She came up streaming. Her cap had come loose. The water ran off her face and she gasped, once, a huge hungry gasp, and then she was laughing, and the whole church erupted, a roar of voices, and the keyboard swelled into something bright, and Patience stood in the tank with her robe plastered to her and her arms flung open, laughing and laughing.
I did not know I was on my feet until I felt my mother's hand in mine, and found that my face was wet.
They served tea in the yard afterwards, from big steel flasks on trestle tables beneath the mango tree, with plates of mandazi and slices of dry cake and the ladies of the church moving between the guests with the competent bustle of an army. Patience was surrounded. Her friends were hugging her, shrieking; an aunt had pushed a handkerchief into her hand. I did not want to push into the circle. I stood a little apart, at the mouth of the church door, in the shade, and took out my phone.
There were nineteen messages in the Bridge Capital group. I scrolled through them. A photo of Mr. Walusimbi shaking hands with a man in a suit outside what looked like a hotel. A note about the upcoming Dubai delegation. A string of thumbs-up. I replied to a couple. I should say that I was good at it by then, quick, warm, tolerably witty, a man with a role.
"Excuse me."
I looked up, and the tray hit me.
It was not hard. It was merely that she had been turning, carrying a tray with perhaps a dozen cups on it, and I had been standing in the doorway, and the physics was straightforward. A wave of hot tea went down the front of my shirt and the inside of my jacket, my good jacket, the one with the lining, and across my phone, and pooled at the toes of my honey-coloured shoes.
"Oh," said the girl in the mustard dress. "Oh. Oh, no."
I could not speak. The tea was hot, and then, very quickly, merely wet. I stood there with my arms held a little out from my sides like a man being measured for a coat, while the sweet brown liquid dripped from my sleeves.
"I am so sorry," she said. She put the tray down on a stool with a clatter. "I didn't see you. You were standing in the doorway."
"I was standing in a doorway," I said, "because that is where doorways are."
"Well, yes. But you were standing in it like a man waiting for a taxi."
I stared at her. She was not what I would have called pretty, I decided, in a first quick spasm of defensive spite. Her face was too long, her chin too sharp, with a small old scar across it, a pale crescent. Her glasses were too large, and slid down her nose, and she pushed them back up with a knuckle in a gesture that was already, somehow, familiar. But her eyes, behind the glass, were enormous and dark and quick, and at the moment they were doing something that I could not at first identify, because it was so unexpected.
She was trying not to laugh.
"This jacket," I said, "cost four hundred thousand shillings."
"Why?"
"What do you mean, why?"
"Why did it cost that much?" She tilted her head, genuinely curious. "Is it made of something? Does it do things?"
"It's a good jacket."
"It's a wet jacket." She snatched a napkin from the table and began to dab at my sleeve, with a rough, brisk efficiency that was somehow worse than if she had been gentle. "It's tea, you know. It's not blood. It will dry. You should wear something with fewer opinions."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The jacket. It has a lot of opinions. I can tell from here. It's the kind that looks at people." She dabbed. "It's the kind of jacket that has a watch."
I looked down. The watch was still ticking at my wrist, a small gold glint beneath the sodden cuff. I felt my ears go hot.
"Are you always this rude?"
"Only to people I've spilled something on," she said. "It's a defence mechanism. I get embarrassed and my mouth does things." She straightened, and held the soaked napkin in her fist, and for the first time she looked me full in the face. I saw her notice something, a flicker of recognition. "Oh. You're him."
"Who?"
"The brother." She said it with a kind of delighted horror. "The one who walked out. Patience's brother. Oh no. I just threw tea on the brother."
"Who told you I walked out?"
"Everybody." She said it simply, like a weather report. "Everybody told me. You're famous. The deacon told me. Sister Rose told me twice, in the kitchen, in the voice she uses when she's pretending to be discreet. A lady with an enormous hat told me while I was setting up. There's a boy, she said. Samuel's boy. He walked out in the middle of the sermon. Such a shame." She grimaced. "I was hoping to meet you. I just hadn't planned on doing it with a tray."
"I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say to that."
"Nothing. I'm talking too much." She took a breath. "Sorry. Truly. About the jacket. I'll pay for the cleaning."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. It's a four-hundred-thousand-shilling jacket that has opinions." Her mouth twitched. "I'm Naomi."
She held out her hand. It was a long hand, narrow, with a pianist's spread of fingers and a plaster wrapped around the tip of one of them. I looked at it. And then, to my own surprise, I laughed. It came out unexpectedly, a short wheeze of a laugh, the first real one I had had in days.
I took her hand. It was warm and dry and gripped harder than I expected.
"Eliya," I said.
"I know." She grinned. "Eli. Auntie Rose says you're hopeless. She says you're a very clever boy with no sense. I'm choosing to reserve judgement."
Auntie Rose was not, strictly speaking, anyone's aunt, but she was Naomi's mother's elder sister, which made her a real one; and she was also, I learned over the course of that Sunday, a woman of formidable will who had spent three months begging her niece to come and play the keyboard for the youth choir of a church in Kawempe that was nowhere near her own home.
"Her own church has a perfectly good instrument," Auntie Rose told my mother, in the shade of the mango tree, in a loud whisper that carried to the road. "A proper piano. A grand. But she says she cannot be there at the moment. Too many eyes."
"Too many eyes," my mother repeated, gravely.
"There is a family situation." Auntie Rose lowered her voice by an inch. "A brother. A matter of the bottle. It's all being handled, but you know how the Ntinda congregation is. They can smell it." She sniffed. "So Naomi plays here. She says she likes it. She says nobody looks at her here as though she were an exhibit."
"That is understandable."
"It is very understandable. But does she turn up on time? Does she wear the right colour? I have told her, yellow, Naomi, yellow with a white scarf. And what does she come in?"
"Mustard," my mother said.
"Mustard! Mustard!"
I was standing a few feet away, with a napkin pressed against my ribs, and I heard all of this, and I did not look at the girl. But I was aware of her. She had gone to the far end of the table to refill the flasks. She was pouring out tea with her back to us, very straight, with the particular stiffness of someone who has heard every word and is determined not to turn round.
A brother. A matter of the bottle.
I thought: so she is hiding too.
It was the first thing that I understood about her. I did not understand it very well. But it lodged in me like a splinter, as a small surprising tenderness, and I stood there in my ruined jacket and watched the back of her neck.
I should have gone home then. There was nothing to keep me. Patience was in her new white dress, being photographed in front of the church sign by an aunt with a phone; my mother had a dozen people to thank; and the Bridge group was buzzing in my pocket with news of a special opportunity. I had my excuses lined up.
Instead I found myself, an hour later, standing in the doorway of the empty hall.
The guests had thinned. Most of the plastic chairs had been stacked against the walls, and the late light came in long and gold through the high windows, lying across the floor in bars. The baptism tank was still full. A single sheet of plywood leaned against it, half dragged across. And at the far side of the stage, in the corner, alone, bent over the Yamaha with her glasses pushed up into her hair, was Naomi.
She was playing.
It was not a hymn. I knew, at once, that it was not meant for the church, because she was doing something no one would do in front of an audience: she was playing it slowly, with mistakes, circling back, trying one chord and then another, her head tilted, listening for the exact sound she wanted. It was a Luganda love song, an old one, the kind my mother hummed over the stove. I knew the tune. I had not heard it played like that, stripped of the singing, the melody left alone and a little bit afraid.
I stood still, and let it go on. The light moved. A fly circled the empty room.
She stopped. She had hit a wrong note, and winced, and tried it again, and this time got it, and sat back with a long soft sound that was nearly a laugh. And then, without turning her head, she said, "I can hear you breathing, you know."
I started. "I wasn't..."
"You were. You're a heavy breather. It's a flaw." She swivelled on the stool. Her glasses were back on her nose. In the golden light, her face looked younger, and very tired. "Is it still dripping?"
"Only slightly."
"Good. Come here. I want to ask you something."
I walked across the floor, between the stacked chairs. The tank gleamed at my left like a dish of water in a dim kitchen. When I reached the Yamaha she looked up at me, with the keyboard glowing faintly behind her, and for a moment she said nothing at all.
"Was that real?" she asked. "In there. When your sister came up. The crying."
I felt my face change. "That's none of your..."
"I'm not being cruel. I'm asking." She said it quietly, and in the large clear eyes there was no mockery now at all. "I play for a lot of people who cry in church. I've sat behind a lot of them. Sometimes it's real. Sometimes it's the music. Sometimes it's what they think they ought to be doing." She pushed her glasses higher. "I can usually tell. Yours was real. I just wanted to check."
"Why?"
"Because then you're not what Sister Rose said." She turned back to the keyboard. "Never mind. Go home, Eli. Your mother's looking for you."
I did not move. I looked down at her long hands on the keys, at the plaster on her finger, at the small scar on her chin. "Who told you to stay?" I heard myself say. "At the keyboard. Alone. After everyone left."
She did not answer for a moment.
"No one," she said at last. "That's why."
Outside, somebody was calling my name. I knew the voice: it was Patience, shrill and delighted, saying something about photographs. The sound came through the open door like a stone through water.
"Go," said Naomi.
I went. At the door I turned, as people always do, as I had done the day Pastor Lubega walked back into the church, and I looked at her one more time. She had bent again over the keys and was playing the song, the old one, slowly, with her eyes closed and her lips moving a little, as if she were saying something under her breath that was not quite words.
It was the oldest thing I knew, that tune. I had known it all my life.
I heard it all the way home.