Prologue
Fourteen
The phone said fourteen.
I held it close to my face, the way you hold something you do not want to read, and the screen threw a small blue light across my hands. Fourteen missed calls. The name above each one was the same, the name I had saved years ago with a flame next to it because he thought it was funny, and because he had once told me, laughing, that I should never save him as just Ronnie. "Ronnie is a boring name, mukwano. Make me look like a problem."
Under the fourteen calls there was one voice message. Forty-one seconds. I had not played it.
It was a little before four in the morning and I was standing on Jinja Road, on the side that faces the wall, not the side with the shops. The rain had stopped sometime in the last hour, though the air still smelled like it. Water ran along the edge of the tarmac in a thin brown line. A single lorry went past very slowly, its headlights dragging across the puddles and then across me, and the driver did not look at what I was looking at. Why would he? To him it was a piece of road.
To me it was a piece of road too, if I am honest. That was the part I could not forgive. It was only tarmac, with a few stones kicked into the gutter and a plastic bottle cap, and a long pale smear where rain and boda men with buckets had scrubbed at it for days and still not made it clean. There was a candle stub tucked against the wall. Someone had lit it and the rain had put it out. Beside it, half hidden in the grass, a piece of cracked plastic from a helmet visor lay shining like a coin.
I crouched and picked it up. It was lighter than I expected. I turned it over, and over, as though there might be instructions on the back.
Everything I had on me was in the pockets of a black jacket borrowed from a friend for the burial, three sizes too wide in the shoulders. My shoes were soaked through. My mouth tasted of tea gone cold and not much else; I had not eaten properly in four days. And all that time, every hour, the memory of one particular ten o'clock came back to me: the phone beginning to light up on a table, and me looking at the screen, and turning it face-down, and going on laughing at something I no longer remember.
That is the part that comes back to me first, even now. Not the road. The laugh.
I had never played the message. Four days, and I had not been able to.
I tried to pray.
I want you to understand that I did try. I was raised on prayer the way some children are raised on porridge: warm, early, and without being asked whether I wanted it. My father had prayed over me every morning of my life until the morning he could not. I knew how to do it. I knew the shape of the words, the way you lower your head, the way your voice drops when you say the name. I opened my mouth on that road with the visor in my hand and I could not find a single sentence in me that did not sound like a lie.
Our Father, I thought, and stopped. It was too much to ask of a man like me, to call anyone that.
God, I tried instead, and heard how small the word was against the sound of the road, against the far-off hum of the city that never really sleeps, against the water still running toward the drain. God, where—
I did not finish it. I was not sure I wanted the answer. And I was not sure, standing there, that anyone was on the other end of the question.
I have told this story to very few people. My mother knows most of it, because she was inside it. A man who is now an old friend knows parts of it, because he found me. The woman I eventually married knows all of it, because I decided one day that I would rather be known and loved slowly than admired and loved falsely, and it was the hardest decision I have ever made, and the best.
I am telling you this part first because it is the part I would skip, if the choice were mine. If I were writing a neater book, I would begin with the boy who believed, and let you meet him, and let you like him, and only later show you what he became. I will do that. I will take you back to the beginning, to a house in Kawempe that smelled of tea and Vaseline and the paraffin of old lamps, to a man who fixed engines with his hands and spoke to God as though He were sitting on the next stool. You will meet my mother and my sister. You will meet a girl who spilled tea on me before she had decided whether she liked me, and a friend who made a flame next to his name in my phone.
But I wanted you to know where the road ends up, before I ask you to walk it. I wanted you to know that I was not always a man who had something to say about grace. I was a man standing at four in the morning with a broken piece of plastic in his hand, who had run from God so successfully that he had very nearly escaped Him, and who had discovered that escape is not the same thing as freedom.
The sky over the city was beginning to change. It does that early here, a dull gray first, like old dishwater, and then a thin line the colour of weak tea along the roofs of Nakawa. A boda rider came slowly up the road with his headlight on, saw me, slowed further, and I saw him decide not to ask whether I needed a ride. He accelerated away.
I put the visor back where I had found it, exactly where it had been, as if that mattered. Then I stood up, and my knees hurt, and the phone buzzed once more in my hand.
Not Ronnie, of course. Ronnie was never going to ring again. It was only the network, telling me my airtime was almost finished.
I did not know, standing there, that across the city in Kawempe an old man was already awake. That he was pouring water into a blackened kettle, and lighting a charcoal stove, and taking down two enamel cups from a shelf, though he lived alone. I did not know that my mother had not gone to bed. I did not know that a small light was burning on a verandah at the end of a muddy lane, as it had burned on every night of my life that I had been out in the dark.
I knew nothing at all.
I only knew that I had no more places to go, and that for the first time in years I was too tired to pretend I did.
So I started to walk.