Chapter Nine
Something Different
"I need a favour," said Naomi.
It was the first Saturday in October. She had phoned me at seven in the morning, which no one did, and I had answered with my head under a pillow and my mouth full of last night's regrets. "Are you busy?" she said. I said I was asleep. She said that was the same as not busy, and that she needed a man with a loud voice and no dignity, and that I was the only one she knew.
"For what?"
"Story time."
"I'm sorry?"
"The children's ward. Saturday story hour. Moses was supposed to do it, he's a volunteer from my class, but he's got typhoid. Or he says he has typhoid. He sounded very cheerful for a sick man." I heard her take a breath. "It's an hour. They're mostly small. You just have to read them a book and do the voices. Eli, please. I'll buy you two rolex."
"Naomi, I haven't been inside Mulago for six years."
It slipped out. I had not meant it to. There was a short silence on the line, a rustle, the faint clink of a spoon against a cup.
"I know," she said, quietly. "Patience told me. That's partly why I'm asking."
I should have refused. I knew it as I sat up in bed, with the grey morning at the curtains and a dry sick feeling in my stomach. But there was something in her voice, a lack of cleverness, a plain, unguarded request, and I heard myself say, "What time?"
The paediatric ward was not the stroke ward. I told myself that as I walked through the main gate, past the maize-sellers and the boys with wheelbarrows and the old men on the wall, and into the long covered walkway that smelled of disinfectant and frying oil. It was a different building. A different floor. It was bright, and painted in faded yellows and blues, with cartoon giraffes on the wall, a little scuffed. A mother in the corridor was feeding a baby with a spoon. The sound of children crying drifted from somewhere, ordinary, rising and falling like the sound of birds.
None of it helped.
By the time we reached the second floor, my hands were cold. My heart was moving in quick shallow strokes, like a man running who has decided not to look back. And at the turn of the corridor, as Naomi pushed open a swinging door, a smell came out to meet me.
It was only the smell. Disinfectant. A faint sweetness underneath. And beneath that, so faint that I could never have described it to anyone, the scent of many people trying not to cry in public.
I stopped.
"Eli?"
"Give me a minute."
"Are you..."
"I'll be right there." I heard how thin my voice was. "Go on. Go in. I'll just... I need some air."
She looked at me for a second. Then she nodded, and let the door swing shut, and I stood alone in the corridor under a fluorescent tube that buzzed like an insect. A cleaner went past with a mop. I turned and walked, quickly, in the direction I had come, and found a door at the end that led to a stairwell, and went through it.
It was the same stairwell. Not literally; Mulago has a dozen. But it was concrete, and grey, and cold, with a green exit sign above the door and a window of wired glass on the half-landing through which the light fell in a dirty rectangle. A pair of old sandals lay abandoned on the third step. The walls were painted to shoulder height with dark green gloss, and above that, whitewash, grey with handprints.
I sat down on the stairs.
I put my head between my knees. I breathed, in, out, in. The old arithmetic came up in me like water through a crack: If You heal him. If You heal him I will never. I heard my own sixteen-year-old voice, thick with snot and terror, going up and up the stairwell and arriving nowhere. I felt the plastic chair with its crack across the seat. The clock above the door. Twenty to two.
Twenty to four.
I do not know how long I sat there. A long time. The door at the bottom opened and closed. Footsteps went up. A woman's voice, a nurse, sharply said something in Luganda to someone on the phone. I stayed where I was, with my forehead on my knees, and the cold from the concrete came through my trousers, and I breathed.
"I thought I'd find you here."
I did not lift my head.
"Don't get up." Naomi's voice was low, and a few steps above me. I heard the soft sound of her sandals, and then a rustle, and she sat down beside me. Not close. A careful distance, a stair-width, so that our shoulders did not touch. "I told them you'd be ten minutes. Sister Agnes is going to do the story. She does it in Runyankole. The children don't understand a word. They love it."
I managed a sound that was almost a laugh.
"I didn't know the way," Naomi said. "I only guessed. It's where I go." She was quiet for a moment. "Every ward has one. A stairwell. A place nobody goes. I found this one in my first week. I came here to cry. Then I came here to think. Now I come here because it's cold, and it's nice, and nobody asks me what I'm doing."
I lifted my head. The light from the window lay across her knees. She had taken off her glasses and was holding them loosely in both hands.
"I don't do this," I said.
"Do what?"
"This. Fall apart in stairwells." My voice shook. "I'm sorry. I'm not... It's been six years. I thought I was fine."
"You're not falling apart." She looked at me. "You're sitting down. There's a difference."
I wiped my face with my sleeve. Beneath us, a long way down, a metal trolley rattled across a floor.
"Would you like to tell me?" she said. "You don't have to."
I did not answer for a long while. I looked at the old sandals on the step. And then, because it was a stairwell, because I was cold and tired, because her face was so open and so plain that it left no room for a performance, I told her.
I began at the beginning, with the verandah, and the cup, and the nine days. I told her about the stroke ward, the bed with the sticky mattress, the way my father's good hand had held mine. I told her what the doctor had said, that he understood and could not answer. I told her that I read to him from Job by mistake. That he made a sound, hhhh, an urgent, effortful sound, and I had never known what he was trying to say.
I told her about the deal.
I had never told anyone about the deal. I said it aloud, sitting on a concrete stair in a children's hospital, with her glasses glinting in her hands. If You heal him. I told her what I had promised. I told her that on the sixth day he had said my mother's name, and I had thought it was accepted. I told her about the plastic chair and the clock. I told her that I had promised to stay awake until morning, and that I had not.
"Twenty to two," I said. "I looked. I remember it. I said I would just rest my eyes for a moment, and when I woke up he was..." My voice cracked, and I swallowed. "I had promised. I had one thing to do. And I fell asleep."
"You were sixteen."
"That's not an answer."
"It isn't meant to be." She did not touch me. She did not say anything for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was very quiet. "I'm not going to tell you it wasn't your fault. I think you know that already, and I think it makes no difference."
I stared at her.
"I'm not going to tell you God has a plan, either. I don't know if He has. I don't know why your father died, and I'd be lying if I said I did." She turned the glasses over in her hands. "I'm only going to tell you what I think. I think you were a boy who loved his father so much that you tried to buy him back. And I think that's the most human thing I've ever heard."
"It didn't work."
"No." She looked at me then, and her eyes were wet. "It never does. That's the thing about the deals. They're the only thing we know how to do, and they never work. But it isn't foolish. It's just love, with nowhere to put itself."
I could not speak. A pressure had risen in my chest, big and soft and unbearable, and I put both hands over my face and bent forward, and the tears came, silently at first, then not. I was aware of the stairwell, of the green light, of my own harsh breathing. I was aware that she had not moved away. She sat there, a stair-width off, with her hands in her lap, like a woman keeping a vigil beside someone who has finally decided to sleep.
It was the first time in six years that anyone had heard that story and not tried to fix it.
When it was over, I lifted my head, and wiped my face, and found that she was holding out a small crumpled packet of tissues, the kind that come in plastic. I took one. I blew my nose, loudly. She laughed, and so did I, a ragged damp laugh, and the sound went up the stairwell and bounced off the concrete, and for a moment it seemed to me almost like a form of prayer.
"Come on," said Naomi, standing. She held out a hand. "Sister Agnes will have run out of animals by now."
I took it. Her palm was warm.
We walked back down the corridor, and she pushed open the swinging door. I stood in the frame, and I saw them: twelve, fifteen children on a faded mat, and a stout nurse in a white apron doing an elephant, with her arms for a trunk; a little boy with a drip in his arm laughing so hard that he'd fallen over; a girl in a bandana staring up at the nurse with her mouth open. The air was bright and loud and smelled of disinfectant.
I read them The Lion and the Mouse. I did the voices. I was awful, and they loved it. I roared until I was hoarse. When I looked up, over the head of a small girl who had climbed into my lap without asking, I saw Naomi at the back of the room, against the wall, with her arms folded and her glasses pushed up into her hair, watching me with an expression that I could not at all read.
It was only later, riding home, that I understood what it was.
She had not been looking at me with pity. She had been looking at me the way you look at something you had not expected to find, and have decided, cautiously, to keep.
We went to Ggaba the next Saturday.
It was her idea. She said she needed to see water. She said it so seriously that I did not argue; we took a taxi to the beach in the morning, squeezed into the back of a minibus between a woman with a basket of live chickens and a boy with a guitar case, and got out at the end of the road where the tarmac gave way to a stretch of beaten earth. Beyond it was the lake.
I had not been there in years. I had forgotten how large it was. It lay under the white sky, flat and grey-green, with a long haze at the edge where it met the horizon, so wide that it seemed to have no other side. The shore was lined with fish stalls, with little fires and sizzling pans, and boats drawn up on the sand, wooden, painted in chipped blues and reds, their names lettered on the bows. Grace of God. Patience. Mama's Pride. A small boy was fishing from the end of a jetty with a stick and a string. Somewhere a radio was playing.
"Oh," said Naomi. She had stopped in the sand with her sandals in her hand. "Oh, that is exactly what I needed."
We ate tilapia, whole, fried crisp and golden, with the eyes still in, and a pile of chips, with our fingers, sitting on a bench under a canvas awning while a light wind blew in off the water. Naomi picked the flesh off the bones with great delicacy and told me about her father.
"He's an accountant. He's very good. He's the church treasurer, and he has never in his life made a mistake in an account, and he has never in his life said I'm sorry." She sucked her fingers. "I don't think he knows how. I think the words would stick."
"That sounds hard."
"It's not hard. It's just... it's a house with a lot of ledgers. Everything is counted." She wiped her hands on a napkin. "When Joseph got sick, it was the first time he'd come across something he couldn't balance. He didn't know what to do. So he did what he knows. He closed the book."
"What do you mean, closed it?"
"He stopped saying his name." She said it lightly, looking at the lake. "At the church. At home, even. Joseph went into the programme in March, and my father told everyone he was away on a course. A course in what, nobody asked." She smiled, a flat little smile. "It's very effective. It's amazing what people will accept if you say it with enough confidence."
I wanted to say something. I did not know what. I thought, And I have been doing the same thing, in a different shape, for six years.
"He's coming home next month," said Naomi. "Joseph. He's finished the programme. He's clean. Ninety-one days. I've counted."
"That's wonderful."
"It is. It is." She nodded rapidly. "I'm very happy. I'm so happy that I feel sick." She laughed. "I'm terrified, Eli. Isn't that stupid? He's been better before. He's been better four times. I can't... I don't know if I can watch it again. And I don't know what kind of person that makes me, to be so afraid of the thing I've been praying for."
"It makes you someone who loves him."
"Does it?"
"Yes."
She looked at me. The wind had loosened a twist of her hair, and it lay across her cheek. Behind her the lake moved in long slow breaths.
"Thank you," she said. "I'll remember you said that."
In the afternoon, we hired a boat.
It was a small one, a rowing boat with a patched hull and a man to row it, a thin grey-haired fisherman called Mzee Kabuye, who said he would take us out to the first channel marker and bring us back for ten thousand shillings, and that if the lady wanted to put her hand in the water, she should be careful of the weed. Naomi sat in the bow in her yellow dress with her sandals beside her. I sat in the stern. The oars knocked softly in their pins. The shore drew away, the fish stalls shrinking, the smoke thinning, the radio fading till there was nothing but the slap of the water and the creak of the wood.
She did put her hand in the water. She trailed her fingers through the lake with her eyes closed, and the light lay on her face, and I looked at her, and I felt something in my chest that I recognised and had not felt in a very long time, and had no wish at all to name.
I had not looked at my phone for four hours.
I noticed it, with a small shock, as one notices a quiet where there had been a noise. In my pocket, it was silent, or if it was not, I had not felt it. There were no messages from Mr. Walusimbi. There was no call from Ronnie. There was no Brenda, no group, no dinging, nothing. Only the lake, and the boat, and a woman's wet hand.
Something is different, I thought.
I did not know what. I could not have said. It was not that I was good, or free, or reformed; I was none of those things. I had a drawer full of lies at home and a bank account fed by other people's savings. But for four hours, in the middle of a lake, I had been entirely present. I had not been performing. I had not been running. I had been, for a moment, only a young man in a boat, with someone he liked.
"What are you thinking?" said Naomi, without opening her eyes.
"That I'd like to stay out here."
"Out here?"
"On the water. For a while."
"Mm." She smiled. "That's the first completely honest thing you've said all day."
"It's not the first."
"Well. The first without a joke in it."
I laughed. Mzee Kabuye, at the oars, grunted, in the manner of a man who has seen a great many couples and has stopped being surprised.
The sun went down the colour of a bruised plum.
We sat on the sand with our backs against the hull of an upturned boat, and the sky went through all its changes, orange, then pink, then a deep dusty violet streaked with grey. The water lay quiet. A few lights had come on along the shore. Behind us, on the road, a lorry ground away, and the smell of woodsmoke came down from the stalls, and from somewhere I heard a child's voice calling a dog.
Naomi had begun to hum.
It was not the love song. It was a hymn, an old one, one I knew in my bones: Great is Thy faithfulness. The one my sister had sung in the church on the morning of the party. She did not sing it. She hummed it, quietly, with her chin on her knees, the way a person hums who does not know she is doing it.
I felt it go through me like a hand through cloth.
"Don't," I said.
"What?"
"The hymn. Not that one."
She stopped. She turned her head. "I'm sorry. I didn't realise."
"No. It's... I'm not angry." I tried to find the sentence. "It was my father's. I haven't been able to... I can't hear it without..."
"Okay." She nodded. "I won't."
"It's all right if you do."
"It isn't. Not tonight." She was looking at me, in the failing light, with that grave, unhurried attention. We were very close. The edge of her sleeve brushed my wrist. I could smell the lake on her, and fried fish, and faintly, her tea. "Eli."
"Yes?"
"Can I ask you something? You don't have to answer."
"Go on."
"Do you pray at all?"
It was a simple question. It fell between us like a coin. I looked at the water, and I looked at my hands, and for a long moment I could not make my mouth work.
"I used to," I said. "I don't know if I do now."
"But you'd like to."
I did not say yes. I did not say no. And she did not ask again. She only nodded, slowly, as if I had told her a great deal. Then she turned her face to the lake and let the silence be, and it was the easiest silence I had ever sat in.
I do not know who moved first. I have gone over it many times, in the years since, and I have never been able to decide. I only know that the space between us grew smaller, by degrees, by inches, until I could feel her breath on my cheek and see the flecks of light in her eyes. Her lips parted. Her hand came up, a light dry touch against the side of my jaw. I closed my eyes.
Then she stopped.
She did not pull away sharply. She simply held still, her hand against my face, and I felt the warmth of her breath, and then the cool of the air between us as she drew back.
"Not yet," she said.
I opened my eyes. She was looking at me with an expression so grave, and so tender, that I wanted to look away. "I'm sorry. I'm not... it's not that I don't want to." She laughed shakily. "God knows I want to. It's only..."
"What?"
"You're holding something." Her voice was very soft. "I can see it. I don't know what it is. I'm not angry. I don't think it's a terrible thing; I think it's just a thing. A thing you haven't said." She took her hand from my face and folded it in her lap. "I'm not going to ask you. I'd like you to want to tell me. But I think when I kiss someone, I'd like to know who it is."
My mouth was dry. I thought of a pink Bible under a bed. I thought of a buzzing phone. I thought of a folder full of red dots on a map, and a woman crying into her wrapper, and a banner with a bridge on it that did not exist.
Tell her, said a clear voice in me. Now. Here. Tell her.
I opened my mouth.
"I understand," I said.
It was the cheapest lie I had ever told, because it was true and it was a lie at once. I understood. I understood every word. And I did nothing at all.
She nodded. She smiled, a small, brave, slightly crooked smile, and got to her feet, brushing the sand from her dress. "Come on. Mzee Kabuye says the last taxi leaves at eight."
We rode home in the dark, in the back of a minibus with a flickering ceiling light, her head against the window and mine against the seat. She fell asleep somewhere past Nsambya. I sat very still, so as not to wake her, with her shoulder lightly touching mine, and the lights of the city sliding over her face, and I thought: I have found the one person who might see me, and I have just asked her not to.
I looked at my phone. Fourteen messages. I did not open any of them.
Somewhere past Wandegeya, I closed my eyes, and for the first time in many years, without words, without a plan, without any bargain at all, I let myself want to be good.