Chapter Eight
Conversations After Church
I went back the next Sunday.
I told myself it was for Patience. She had asked, in her careful offhand way, whether I might "pass by" for the thanksgiving service, and I had said I might, in the tone of a man granting a favour. My mother had said nothing. She had only handed me a clean shirt, pressed, from the line, still smelling of sun, and gone on stirring the beans.
I told myself many things that month. I told myself I was not looking for anyone. I told myself that the jacket, newly returned from a dry-cleaner in Wandegeya, was an excuse to wear something decent, and that if the keyboard player happened to be at the keyboard, it would be a coincidence of the kind that happens in small churches.
She was at the keyboard.
She did not look up when I came in. She was frowning at a sheet of music propped on a stand, and Auntie Rose, a few feet away, was saying something loud and urgent about the second verse. I took a seat near the back, on the aisle, and for the whole of the first hour I watched the side of her face, and heard nothing that Pastor Lubega said.
When it was over, she was the first out of the door.
I went after her. I did not think about it. I found her in the yard beside the mango tree, with a plastic bag in one hand and a thermos in the other, shaking the thermos beside her ear, with a look of frank grief.
"Empty," she said, without turning. "I thought there was one more cup in it. I was sure."
"I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault. It's a tragedy of my own making." She turned, and pushed up her glasses with a knuckle, and looked me up and down. "Oh. The jacket's back."
"It was cleaned."
"I can see that. It looks smug." She hesitated, and dug in her bag, and produced a crumpled slip of paper, a receipt from a Wandegeya dry-cleaner, with a handwritten figure at the bottom. "Here. I said I'd pay."
"You don't have to."
"I do. It's the principle."
"It was eight thousand shillings."
"Which is exactly why." She held it out. "I'm a student. I'm very poor. Eight thousand shillings is four days of tea. I don't make a gesture like this lightly."
I looked at her, and I felt something shift in my face that I had not authorised. "Keep it," I said. "I'll tell you what. You can buy me a rolex."
"What?"
"A rolex. Chapati, egg, tomato. I'll show you where. It's down the road." I heard myself continue, with a bravado I did not recognise. "It's a fair exchange. You can't owe me eight thousand if you've fed me twelve hundred."
"That is the worst mathematics I have ever heard," said Naomi. "You're a Commerce student, aren't you? Patience told me."
"Did she?"
"She says you're brilliant at it. She says you've never once got a number wrong." She regarded me narrowly. "Fine. A rolex. But I'm choosing the stand."
She did not choose the stand. She chose the stand I would have chosen, which unnerved me: the one at the bottom of the hill, run by a stout, cheerful woman called Mama Sylvia, who had a gas ring balanced on a plastic crate and a flat black pan that had been seasoned by ten years of oil. Mama Sylvia took one look at us and said, "Ah! Courting!" and Naomi said, "We are not," with such alarmed speed that the woman threw back her head and roared.
We sat on a low wall nearby with our paper plates. The afternoon was fat and warm, full of the smell of frying and wet dust and exhaust, with the whole of Bombo Road roaring away beneath us, minibuses nosing through traffic, boda men weaving through gaps that did not exist. Naomi ate a rolex the way she did everything, with total concentration and no regard for her appearance: elbows out, egg falling, her glasses fogging over every time she took a bite.
"You eat as if someone's going to take it," I said.
"I have a brother," said Naomi, with her mouth full. "It's a survival skill."
"Older or younger?"
"Older. Six years." She swallowed. "He's called Joseph."
I waited. She did not say anything more. She picked an escaped tomato off her skirt and ate it. A bus went past, blaring music, and we watched it go.
"That's all you're going to say?"
"For now." She smiled, but the smile did not reach her eyes. "I like to ration. It makes people appreciate the information."
"That seems like a very strange approach to friendship."
"Is that what this is?" She turned to look at me. "I wasn't sure. I thought it was an exchange. A fair exchange. Twelve hundred shillings in return for a four-hundred-thousand-shilling jacket."
"Eight thousand."
"Is that so?"
"For the cleaning. The jacket's a sunk cost."
"There," she said, delighted. "Sunk cost. You see? I'm learning." And she laughed, a sudden bark, startling, loud enough that a passing woman turned her head. Naomi clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes huge above her fingers, and I laughed too, helplessly, until my ribs hurt and I had to put down the plate.
I had not laughed like that since Ronnie. I noticed it with some surprise, as one notices a pain has gone.
It became a habit. I do not know how else to put it.
I did not decide to make it one. It simply happened that when the service was over, I looked for her, and she looked for me, and we ended up at Mama Sylvia's, or walking along the verge of Bombo Road, or sitting under the mango tree with plastic cups of tea from the flasks. Sometimes Patience came too, hanging on my arm and talking, with a look of such barely contained satisfaction that I had to pretend not to see it. But more often it was the two of us. We found, without ever discussing it, that there was a great deal to say.
I learned that she was twenty-one, a year younger than I was, and in her final year of Social Work at Makerere. I learned that she had wanted to be a doctor and had failed to get the grades, and that she told people she had chosen social work with a lift of her chin that implied she had been about to say something else. I learned that she had never in her life been able to play football, though she had tried, repeatedly, out of stubbornness, and had once broken her own wrist doing it.
"How?" I asked.
"I kicked the ball and missed and fell over."
"That's not how a wrist breaks."
"I fell very hard." She considered. "I was seven. My brother was laughing so much he couldn't help. In the end my father had to carry me to the clinic."
"And your brother?"
"He got a beating." She smiled, a small, odd, private smile. "That was the last time anyone beat him, I think. Afterwards he was too clever."
I learned that she drank an astonishing amount of tea: seven cups a day, on a good one, eleven on a day with exams; that she kept a thermos in her bag the way some people keep a rosary. I learned that she talked to herself, in two voices, when she was practising, a low serious one and a sly mocking one, and that she did not know she did it. I learned that she was afraid of dogs, of lifts, and of being thought stupid, and not at all of the dark.
But the thing I noticed most, the thing that drew me back each week, was something quite different. It was her honesty. There was a bluntness in her that I had not met in anyone. It was not the careful frankness of Pastor Lubega, or the stern directness of my mother. It was almost reckless. She said things out loud that most of us have thought and never dared to say, and she said them in the middle of conversations about other things, so that you did not see them coming.
"I hate the church voice," she announced one afternoon.
We were sitting on the wall. It had rained at noon, and the gutters were running, and the air was cold and smelled of wet iron. She was cradling a plastic cup in both hands, with a thin spiral of steam rising between her fingers.
"What church voice?"
"You know. The one they all use. God is good." She dropped her voice into an intonation of such liquid serenity that I almost choked. "All the time. The one that comes out of people when someone has died. When they have lost a job. When they've been in a bad accident. God is good, praise Him, He has a plan." She shook her head. "I do not hate the sentence. I want that to be understood. I believe the sentence. On my good days. I hate what it does. It's a lid. It's a thing you put over someone's pain so you don't have to look in."
I was very still.
"At my brother's... at a certain event, last year, a woman came up to my mother and said, God is good. She said it right to her face. Like a slap. And my mother said yes, He is, because what else could she say? She smiled. She smiled for two hours. And that night I found her in the kitchen with a towel over her mouth so my father wouldn't hear."
She stopped. Her face had changed. I had the odd sense that she had said more than she had intended and was now looking at the words from the outside, wondering how they had got there.
"Sorry," she said. "That's a lot. I don't know why I told you that."
"Don't be sorry."
"I'm not usually..." She laughed, an unhappy little gust. "Everyone thinks I'm so composed. It's the hair. People see short hair and glasses and think, oh, that one has it together."
"I didn't think so."
"No?"
"I thought you threw a tray at me."
"It was a misjudgment of angles." But she was smiling again, with the sideways tilt of her head. "What about you? What's your voice?"
"I don't have one."
"Everyone has one."
I thought about that. A hawker went past with a tray of sunglasses, calling. I watched a boda man arguing with a woman about a fare, the two of them leaning toward each other like opposing trees.
"I used to have one," I said slowly. "I think I used to be very good at it. I could say amen in the exact right place and in the exact right tone and I could feel people trust me." I turned the cup in my hands. "I don't use it now. I don't know what I'd use instead."
She did not say anything. She did not tell me that it would be all right, or that God had a plan, or that she would pray for me, any of the lids. She only looked at me for a long moment, with her large serious eyes, and then she nodded, as if I had told her something that she had suspected and was glad to have confirmed.
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?"
"It's a start." She finished her tea. "You're allowed to not know. Nobody's keeping score."
I nearly said: I think someone is. I swallowed it, and said instead, "What about you? Do you still believe it? The sentence?"
"On my good days."
"And the bad ones?"
She looked out at the road. "On the bad days I play the keyboard anyway," she said. "And sometimes by the end of the song I've changed my mind." She shrugged. "It's not a very impressive method. I've never come up with a better one."
"What's your project?" I asked her, the following Sunday.
"Which one?"
"You said you had a final-year research. For Social Work."
"Oh. That." She made a face. She was sitting cross-legged on the church steps, with the thermos beside her and a battered folder open on her knee, and she did not look like someone who wanted to talk about it. "It's dull. It's about money."
"I like money."
"I'd noticed." But she was grinning. She pushed the folder across. "It's called Informal Investment Schemes and Household Debt in Peri-Urban Kampala. Don't fall asleep."
I opened the folder. The page was dense with underlining, and some of the underlines had underlines. There were tables, a rough map of Kawempe and Makerere and Kisaasi with small red dots scattered across it, and a list of interview questions in a neat round hand.
"It's mostly women," Naomi said. "Market women, mostly. Small business owners. They put their savings into things. Clubs. Groups that promise, you know, thirty percent. Forty. Fifty. And for a few months they pay. And then one day the office is shut and the man is gone and the phone is off."
I kept my eyes on the page. I felt the blood move slowly in my face.
"I've interviewed thirty-one so far," she went on. She had picked up her thermos and was turning it in her hands. "I thought it would be statistics. It isn't. It's... You sit in someone's one-room house, and there's a woman, she's fifty, she's selling tomatoes since she was twelve, and she tells you that she put in the money for her daughter's school and it's gone. And she's not even angry. She says, I should have known. That's what gets me. They always say that. They always take the blame."
"They were deceived."
"They were." She looked at me. "That's what I keep telling them. But they're so ashamed. They don't tell their husbands. They don't tell their pastors. Half of these schemes are run by people from the churches, you know. Ushers. Elders. Brothers. They use the language. They use come and see and sow and reap. It's... there's a word for it. Affinity fraud. They find a trusting community and they get in through the door of the church."
"Not all of them are fraudulent," I heard myself say.
"No?"
"There are legitimate investment groups. Cooperatives. SACCOs. There are legal structures. Some of them make real returns."
"Real returns," said Naomi, "of thirty percent a month?"
I did not reply.
"I haven't met a good one yet." She said it gently, without suspicion. She had, I saw, no idea at all. She was simply a young woman, passionate about something, talking to a friend. "I'm sure there are some. I'm sure someone, somewhere, is running an honest club. I just haven't found them. All I find is women crying into their wrappers."
I closed the folder. I handed it back to her carefully, with both hands, as one hands over something fragile.
"It sounds important," I said. "Your work."
"It's the only thing I'm good at," said Naomi simply. "Sitting with people while they're telling the worst thing that's ever happened to them." She tucked the folder under her arm. "My brother says I should have been a priest."
"Do you want to be?"
"I want to be useful." She stood up. "Come. Mama Sylvia has a new chilli."
I followed her down the hill. The afternoon was bright and cool; the road shone. In my pocket the phone buzzed once, twice, a long vibration like a trapped insect. I did not take it out. I knew what it was. I knew exactly who.
I walked beside her. I listened to her talk about chilli. And I thought, I will tell her. I thought, I will tell her this week. I thought, when the time is right.
I have thought a great deal since about the way a sin waits. It does not shout. It does not follow you down the road. It simply stays in your pocket, buzzing, patient, certain that you will come back.
The day I first heard her pray, I was not expecting it.
It was a Wednesday. I had not planned to see her; she had a placement that day at Mulago, in the children's ward, and I had been walking through the hospital grounds on an errand I will not describe, an errand to do with a friend of Ronnie's who owed a man some money. I was passing the paediatric block when I saw her through a window.
She was sitting on a low stool beside a cot. The child in it was perhaps four, a skinny boy with a drip taped to his arm, asleep with his mouth open. Naomi had her glasses off and in her lap, and her head bowed, and one hand resting lightly on the rail of the cot. Her lips were moving.
I should have gone on. It was private. I knew that. But I stopped, with my back against the cold wall of the next building, and watched through the dusty glass.
She was not praying as anyone had ever prayed in my hearing. There was nothing of Pastor Lubega's slow thunder in it, nothing of the church voice. She spoke quickly and quietly, with small hesitations, as though she were telling a friend a difficult thing and checking, as she went, that the friend was still listening. I could not hear the words. I could see her face. Her eyebrows lifted, fell. Once she smiled, very slightly, a rueful twist. Once her shoulders shook.
When she finished, she did not say amen. She only sat there for a moment longer with her hand on the rail, her glasses in her lap, looking at the sleeping boy. Then she put her glasses on, and stood up, and smoothed the thin blanket over his chest, and went to find the nurse.
I stood against the wall for a long time.
I had not prayed like that since I was eleven. I had forgotten that it was a thing a person could do: speak to God as to someone sitting on the other side of the cot. Not asking for a miracle, only reporting in. This is what I see. This is what I'm afraid of. Stay.
Stay.
I thought of a dark room and a boy's voice. I thought: God, I'm scared. Please stay.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I took it out and silenced it without looking, and for the first time in months I felt the small hard shame of it, like a pebble in a shoe, of a man who is carrying something that he cannot put down in a room where everything else is simply, quietly, put.
I went home. I did not tell her I had seen.