Monday, March 24, 2008
Promises
@ Two Men
Like all children I was afraid of my father, then I hated him, then I loved him, was indifferent to him, and I ended up pitying him. My father is dead now and I still don’t know what I feel about him. But I feel like I know him more. I’m still trying not to become the man I think he became. I still find it just as hard to talk about him with anyone as I find it difficult to talk about Mustafa.
In the beginning when we could talk about everything, Madeline used to be able to make me talk about my father. In late nights when we lay in bed, blanket curled on the floor like a big cat in the dark, naked, Friday night music thumping outside, Madeline’s head on my chest, playing with the hair on my chest, feeling the beating heart in her growing womb on the side of my stomach, we could talk about anything; in the those first months when I was deciding I was wanted to remain with her and our child she was carrying. She wanted to know about my father. I talked to her about my father, sometimes. Haltingly, stopping often, when I did not want to remember lying sometimes, when I remembered before I could help myself, the silences stretching and we would listen to the music and she would whisper, “It won’t be like that with us, I promise.”
She would shift from her comfortable position, hoist herself up on her elbow so that she was looking down at me and begin stroking my face, sometimes wiping nascent tears and she would kiss me tenderly, gently, like she was kissing a child. Kisses so sweet I wanted more of them and she was generous with them. Then we were not talking anymore but caressing turn on spots on our bodies and I was so glad we were not talking and she was begging me, “Please enter. Honey, please!” sometimes grabbing hold of my penis to guide it in, squatting, with her buttocks rubbing against my stomach, I had never had pillow talk like that.
We used to walk around naked after, me getting water for us to drink, sometimes juice, while she washed in the bathroom and it would be her talking, the splash of water making me listen harder. I don’t know if she was as happy as I was in those months, when my small apartment was still ours alone, before Aaron and Tezira were born; before every weekend afternoon was no longer ours but was to be spent at her friend’s or my friend’s or our families’ get togethers’. I was so happy in those moments, listening to her tell me the most extraordinary of intimacies she did not think extraordinary, falling in love with her, again.
Once she said she was so glad she was pregnant because I no longer needed to wear a condom. She enjoyed herself more when I did not wear one, and the condom wearing days reminded her of another phase of our relationship when, “I was so tired of reaching for my jeans when you were flashing down the condom because you wanted me out so you could go out drinking with your friends.” My friends: Mustafa. She hated Mustafa. Mustafa knew she hated him. She used to say Mustafa had insulted her. She said that he had told her once after watching her a long time at Gaba beach when I had walked through the sand to the bar to get us fresh drinks leaving them alone, “He must be head over heels over you because you have the softest butt he has ever felt. You carry promises of great nights.”
Mustafa never denied this. I never told him he was right. About her butt, about the nights. We talked about it once; we never talked about it again, on the balcony of A1, smoking, he had laughed, “The one woman of your women I should have impressed, I did not.” It was also the evening I had told him that Madeline was pregnant; I was going to become a father because she refused to abort. He had not said then, “They’ll get you through the women.” My father had.
I had told him that I had made a girl pregnant when we were standing on the steps of Buganda Road Courts, on a Monday morning, before the rushed bustle to the Police Prison’s bus would begin, when the photographers and the newspapers had lost interest in his embezzlement case because the end seemed nowhere in sight. He had stopped walking, looked at my mother, looked at me, and it was the first time I ever heard my father speak to me with adult bitterness, “How could you do this? How could you do this, now?” His hands were handcuffed infront of him and the khaki brown uniformed prison’s officer ordered, “Mzee, don’t stop walking,” but his instruction was not gruff and I was thankful.
I was walking alongside him in the line of prisoners headed into the bus and he had turned to me one more time, “Does she want to have the baby or….”
“She’s going to have the baby, Dad.”
Prison had aged my father and I could see the first grey hairs, it had also shrunken him. But it had not taken away the voice that I remember to this day having me in a giggling heap when I was a child, the voice that addressed me at the beginning of each school term, the voice that liked to drop honesty wisdoms from the 6 O’clock Uganda Television news broadcasts before I was sent to my algebra homework and bed, the voice I had heard so many times sending people I would never know in raptures when it was broadcast in radio broadcast snippets all over the country on the most contentious issues. Prison had not taken away that voice, cracked it or changed it. It was still intact.
He had looked at me, two people away from clambering onto the Luzira Maximum Prison’s bus, and said, “You have become a man, but are you ready to become a man?”
I had replied, because I did not want him to go with a question, “Yes, Dad, I’m ready.”
I was lying. To him. To myself. To Madeline. Making a promise Madeline had not yet asked me to suggest a name to, eight months before that dawn when the night nurse pointed him out in his cot in the ward where they kept the newborn babies apart and the nurse had said it was okay to cry, Madeline still passed out in her bed from all the medicines they had pumped in her. It was the dawn I stopped being me and I begun to learn how to love my father again.
In those hours standing before Aaron’s cot, where other father’s gradually joined me to look at their own, I knew for the first time, with definite certainty, I would never leave Madeline, would never want another woman to bear my children, like my father had, I knew you stop being young the moment you give birth to another life. Looking at Aaron, turning and making baby sounds in his cot, I was unafraid. Only his judgment seemed to matter. Only his judgment seemed to matter and he was my blood and I was his blood and I did not believe he would suggest they hang me like the courts of justice of the land were suggesting they kill my father. I was certain. Looking at the baby that was him. That dawn turning into morning. Making promises of a lifetime. I knew his name, Aaron, that morning, looking at him. I was born again the morning my son was born.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
"Fathers and Sons"
Part Two
@ Two Men
I once tried to leave her. Madeline. Before she became my wife, before we were married, before she was Tezira and Aaron’s mother, I tried to leave her. I was a week away from her. There has only been one other week that has been as bad as that week. That was the week my mother was ill in hospital, in dire need of an operation, the doctors waiting for her blood pressure to stabilize before they could operate, the hospital bill each evening higher and I had no money, no job, the golden evening sun at my back each evening, pleading at the Mengo hospital gate with the guard to let me in. I was never less a man than in that week.
I could not leave her. I wanted to leave her. Even before Madeline accepted to go out with me on our first date, I already had decided that I would leave her too. I thought I would leave her. My friends used to call her Marge the Barge because she was so fat. Is so fat. I used to laugh the loudest then. I had to. I was the first one to call her that. I had lasted a week away from her. It was the week I started drinking again, a year after I had tried to stop, two years before Mustafa died, knocked dead crossing a road, drunk. It was when I tried to leave Madeline that I discovered my heart had played a trick on me.
Tezira is like Madeline. Her eyes. Their eyes. Their eyes won’t leave me alone. Until Madeline, I could never understand why some men cannot not bear to tell a woman to her face that they are leaving. I had not told Madeline I was leaving her. I snuck away that week. And snuck back. I did not sleep many nights after that week. But it was better than the nights and days of the week when I was away.
Tezira was born the week my mother had her hernia operation. A day after. In the same hospital. Mengo. Their eyes…I could not get away from their eyes. Grandmother, mother and my daughter. Their eyes lying in their hospital beds. Their eyes on me. My left palm had throbbed for a week from gripping the iron headrest of Madeline’s bed so hard watching her and Tezira sleep, the morning she gave birth to her. Unable to sleep even after the doctor told me they were fine now. He did not expect any more complications.
Snapping open that green can of Heineken in the drinks aisle of Good Prices Supermarket on the afternoon when my mother came out of surgery, I had thought of Mustafa. She was in pain, she was delirious, she kept begging me for water I could not give her but she was going to live; after the operation. The snap of that Heineken was freedom.
“They get you through the women,” I remember Mustafa saying. It was at the mortuary that it had first occurred to me that maybe Charity had been Mustafa’s lover. Her distress when we saw his body on the white gurney had shocked me. With a wail she had tried to fling herself on him, cover his bloodied body with her own. Shrieking, hands slapping the restraining elderly mortuary attendant’s face, she had meant it. We had to buy the mortuary attendant new spectacles. Her grief smote. He should not have died the way he died. Charity would not be allowed to come to his funeral.
Tezira is not upto my knee when I’m seated but when she looks at me the way she is looking at me, demanding I play Snakes and Ladders with them, I cannot refuse her. “Alright! Get the board!” I say hoisting her onto my knee, Aaron running for it. I did not want a son but it was when Aaron was born that my mother and Madeline became friends. I see me in Aaron sometimes. He was such a quiet baby. An easy birth too. After Tezira, Madeline said that if she is to ever give birth again, she is praying for a boy. I hope it’s a girl.
“She’s not the one who doesn’t want to have my children,” Mustafa had said to me when we were standing outside the vestry on the chilly mid morning after Aaron’s baptism at Rubaga Cathedral. We were all going for a lunch party at our house then and I had been waiting for Madeline who with a heavily swathed Aaron were at the center of a laughing group of her friends from school and work just outside the main entrance of the cathedral. My mother and her parents were talking to the priest on the stairs. We were going to use Mustafa’s Carib because then I did not have a car. Hajjat Kasule, his wife, driving later to our house in Mustafa’s silver BMW. I had wanted Mustafa to be Aaron’s godfather but it had not been possible.
“I can’t have a son like you. I cut my things.” He had waited for our hired photographer to wander away to Madeline’s group, “It was a long time ago. There were no condoms.” I had watched Madeline turn to call her parents and my mother for a group photo, Aaron held against her hip, receiving with wide-eyed patience and a woolly white skullcap almost toppling off his head the coos from Madeline’s friends. “I never thought I would one day be able to afford a child. I never thought I might want children. It’s good you did not listen to me. Children are not expensive, life is!” and he had laughed. Ten years ago.
Aaron takes any game seriously. He relishes winning. Tezira simply likes playing. Gets bored easily if she loses too many times, but if she wants to win, she wins. Madeline named Aaron, I named Tezira. Aaron was conceived the week after I came back after I had tried to leave, on a Wednesday afternoon in her childhood bedroom when we should have been in class, when unexpectedly there was no one home at her parents’. The giggling maid with two hundred shillings from me, happily going to a kibanda down the road to leave us alone. It was the afternoon my life changed forever. My day of deviations. I knew she was pregnant right after.
Did I kill my father? Yes, I killed my father.
TO BE CONTINUED…
@ Two Men
I once tried to leave her. Madeline. Before she became my wife, before we were married, before she was Tezira and Aaron’s mother, I tried to leave her. I was a week away from her. There has only been one other week that has been as bad as that week. That was the week my mother was ill in hospital, in dire need of an operation, the doctors waiting for her blood pressure to stabilize before they could operate, the hospital bill each evening higher and I had no money, no job, the golden evening sun at my back each evening, pleading at the Mengo hospital gate with the guard to let me in. I was never less a man than in that week.
I could not leave her. I wanted to leave her. Even before Madeline accepted to go out with me on our first date, I already had decided that I would leave her too. I thought I would leave her. My friends used to call her Marge the Barge because she was so fat. Is so fat. I used to laugh the loudest then. I had to. I was the first one to call her that. I had lasted a week away from her. It was the week I started drinking again, a year after I had tried to stop, two years before Mustafa died, knocked dead crossing a road, drunk. It was when I tried to leave Madeline that I discovered my heart had played a trick on me.
Tezira is like Madeline. Her eyes. Their eyes. Their eyes won’t leave me alone. Until Madeline, I could never understand why some men cannot not bear to tell a woman to her face that they are leaving. I had not told Madeline I was leaving her. I snuck away that week. And snuck back. I did not sleep many nights after that week. But it was better than the nights and days of the week when I was away.
Tezira was born the week my mother had her hernia operation. A day after. In the same hospital. Mengo. Their eyes…I could not get away from their eyes. Grandmother, mother and my daughter. Their eyes lying in their hospital beds. Their eyes on me. My left palm had throbbed for a week from gripping the iron headrest of Madeline’s bed so hard watching her and Tezira sleep, the morning she gave birth to her. Unable to sleep even after the doctor told me they were fine now. He did not expect any more complications.
Snapping open that green can of Heineken in the drinks aisle of Good Prices Supermarket on the afternoon when my mother came out of surgery, I had thought of Mustafa. She was in pain, she was delirious, she kept begging me for water I could not give her but she was going to live; after the operation. The snap of that Heineken was freedom.
“They get you through the women,” I remember Mustafa saying. It was at the mortuary that it had first occurred to me that maybe Charity had been Mustafa’s lover. Her distress when we saw his body on the white gurney had shocked me. With a wail she had tried to fling herself on him, cover his bloodied body with her own. Shrieking, hands slapping the restraining elderly mortuary attendant’s face, she had meant it. We had to buy the mortuary attendant new spectacles. Her grief smote. He should not have died the way he died. Charity would not be allowed to come to his funeral.
Tezira is not upto my knee when I’m seated but when she looks at me the way she is looking at me, demanding I play Snakes and Ladders with them, I cannot refuse her. “Alright! Get the board!” I say hoisting her onto my knee, Aaron running for it. I did not want a son but it was when Aaron was born that my mother and Madeline became friends. I see me in Aaron sometimes. He was such a quiet baby. An easy birth too. After Tezira, Madeline said that if she is to ever give birth again, she is praying for a boy. I hope it’s a girl.
“She’s not the one who doesn’t want to have my children,” Mustafa had said to me when we were standing outside the vestry on the chilly mid morning after Aaron’s baptism at Rubaga Cathedral. We were all going for a lunch party at our house then and I had been waiting for Madeline who with a heavily swathed Aaron were at the center of a laughing group of her friends from school and work just outside the main entrance of the cathedral. My mother and her parents were talking to the priest on the stairs. We were going to use Mustafa’s Carib because then I did not have a car. Hajjat Kasule, his wife, driving later to our house in Mustafa’s silver BMW. I had wanted Mustafa to be Aaron’s godfather but it had not been possible.
“I can’t have a son like you. I cut my things.” He had waited for our hired photographer to wander away to Madeline’s group, “It was a long time ago. There were no condoms.” I had watched Madeline turn to call her parents and my mother for a group photo, Aaron held against her hip, receiving with wide-eyed patience and a woolly white skullcap almost toppling off his head the coos from Madeline’s friends. “I never thought I would one day be able to afford a child. I never thought I might want children. It’s good you did not listen to me. Children are not expensive, life is!” and he had laughed. Ten years ago.
Aaron takes any game seriously. He relishes winning. Tezira simply likes playing. Gets bored easily if she loses too many times, but if she wants to win, she wins. Madeline named Aaron, I named Tezira. Aaron was conceived the week after I came back after I had tried to leave, on a Wednesday afternoon in her childhood bedroom when we should have been in class, when unexpectedly there was no one home at her parents’. The giggling maid with two hundred shillings from me, happily going to a kibanda down the road to leave us alone. It was the afternoon my life changed forever. My day of deviations. I knew she was pregnant right after.
Did I kill my father? Yes, I killed my father.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Thursday, February 21, 2008
"When They Catch You"
This story is for Ishta, a girl who asked me for more, and wouldn't stop.
@Two Men
“When they catch you, and they will catch you, they never let you go,” He used to tell me, his short stubby fingers with stained nails caressing the neck of his Pilsner, “They caught me.” His wet fingers would stop short of the blue Pilsner sticker and slide their way up the neck of the bottle again. Seated opposite him, I was glad for the afternoon beer, wishing it was evening though, because then I had scruples about drinking beer in the afternoon in Kisenyi.
He knew about my scruples. The first time he had suddenly suggested we skip one of our afternoon lectures and go have a drink, my startled, “Now?” had made him throw his head back, belly nearly popping out of his untidily tucked in white shirt, laugh so hard that the other students lounging under trees and leaning against the Faculty of Gender Studies had turned around to look at us. He had told me then, as we walked toward the university’s main gate, my long steps slowed down to his panting short ones, why he liked to drink any chance he got, and why afternoon drinking was his favourite. Indifferent to the gaping students with one ear phone in their ears, fiddling with large screened fancy phones like video games we were walking through that set my heart racing.
“My lips are not red for nothing; my eyes are not this colour because I was born with them like that. There was a time when the only drink I could get were the ones I made myself when I was so poor I was not ashamed to steal beggars’ clothes. No one can tell me I don’t deserve my drinks and to drink when I want, can they?” he had a loud, shrill voice, but it was a friend of his at the funeral who had told me that I was the only person Mustafa ever talked to like he was questioning himself.
I wonder if they have got me. It does not feel like they have. But I wonder if when they get you, you never realize that they have got you because you’re too busy thinking you are happy or maybe you’re too occupied in seeing to everyone’s happiness, you never get a chance to think, be alone and see. But it does not feel that way. God, I hope am not deluding myself.
Nakato’s Bar was the rich man’s bar in Kisenyi. It was not Nakato’s Bar anymore when Mustafa started bringing me here. She was dead by then. But it had been her bar though and I had been told how she had started it up and how she had died. Mustafa was part of her story but whenever I asked him about her, he became silent, a rare thing, and turned his face away from me, fingers pulling at his lower lip. He would never talk about her but this was the only bar he ever brought me to when we came drinking in Kisenyi, where he was happiest, always sitting in a special inner room that doubled as a room for an hour lovers. A small room with brown threadbare couches, low wooden coffee table so stained with drinks that it was turning black and two exits.
Mustafa loved this room in the afternoon, downloading his stout softening bulk into the corner of the sofa that was opposite one of the locked metal doors so the sunlight from the window through the dirty white lace curtains could flood his face. Sighing, undoing the button of his trouser. Charity, Nakato’s younger sister, grinning, asking us what we wanted, knowing Mustafa would explode, “But Kyality! Upto now you’re still asking us what we want? This woman is difficult!” he would shove away the coffee table with his foot against the sofa opposite us, the sight of it inducing more outbursts, “Naye when you’re getting us a new coffee table? This one is now only good for firewood! You shouldn’t be complaining that you have no newspapers to light the sigiri, you have this! I’m not bringing you anymore newspapers!”
“When they catch you, at first you think it is you who has caught them!” Mustafa would say, slashing the air between us with a fierce sword finger, “That is their magezi! They make you think they’re the ones who are giving up, kumbe, it is you!”
He would drop back into the hollow of his corner, rubbing his gleaming clean shaven head against the wall, as if before his eyes, on the askew coffee table, it was all happening again before him. He next short sip he would take from his Pilsner, bottle lifted off the dusty, cracked cement floor, would seem resentful; the bitterness of beer on his face like he was a first time drinker. “But you will see, you will see yourself. You and I are not different.”
It had seemed then like we were so different. Not to me. To everyone who knew us then. I liked to think that I was going to be the man he failed to become. That I was the better version of him. Tezira’s joyful screaming comes pealing through the house to me in this room like a bounding beach netball. Aaron is teasing her with our ten month old kitten again. My daughter and my son. They will soon be climbing all over me, pleading for a game of snakes & ladders and my pirate haaarrr!
It was when he was drunkest that Mustafa would bring his face close to me, voice lowered, saying, “They get you through the women.” I used to wonder if he was talking about Nakato or his wife whose photograph was in The New Vision and The Monitor newspapers nearly every week at some NGO gifting. I used to wonder why we could not just get drunk, why he would not get drunk like I was drunk then, leave me be, but he would shake me awake, spilling his life’s wisdom, “All our stories are women’s stories even if we do not like to admit it. They are!” I still see his eyes, saying that.
Tezira is in the room, laughing, “Daddy, snakes! Daddy, snakes!”
TO BE CONTINUED….
Monday, February 18, 2008
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Where I Have Been
This will make little or no sense to you but it does to me. I used to be the writer of sad stories, I used to be the poet of longing. Sad eyes were my specialty. I knew all the windows in the neighbourhoods I used to walk in at night that would have bulbs of electricity lighting my stumbling strolls. I was the singer of frustrated desire, mystic channel of two lovers in two towns cut off for eternity.
All that is gone now.
You wonder at my silence?
I have not lost a part of me. I have been on journeys to find he who I lost when staring in the hall of mirrors, I walked with the muse of exquisite longing. She said if you it is something you must do then do it, I will only be whole when you’re whole, to whole go on your journey. So I went. To find he who I lost entranced by the muse of exquisite longing, he walked away, I went back for him.
Two people I have wished for happiness more than any others are happy. I was waiting for this without knowing, brooding Sphinx silent, uncertain if tears or laughter would rack me next. I have found him! Write happy tales now, walking around in your world, the world is young! Let me celebrate you.
I used to think loss was sadness, before you. Foolish me! There are some evenings I have had thinking about the things we talked about that still make me smile, I was not just holding your hand, we were holding each other up. You kept me walking when I thought through the rubble of these torn deserted towns; we could never reach safety again. I was more afraid than I told you. We have come through!
I’m sitting in this car facing a river deep in the night, not alone. She is here. I’m here. I’m about to tell you a happy story…
All that is gone now.
You wonder at my silence?
I have not lost a part of me. I have been on journeys to find he who I lost when staring in the hall of mirrors, I walked with the muse of exquisite longing. She said if you it is something you must do then do it, I will only be whole when you’re whole, to whole go on your journey. So I went. To find he who I lost entranced by the muse of exquisite longing, he walked away, I went back for him.
Two people I have wished for happiness more than any others are happy. I was waiting for this without knowing, brooding Sphinx silent, uncertain if tears or laughter would rack me next. I have found him! Write happy tales now, walking around in your world, the world is young! Let me celebrate you.
I used to think loss was sadness, before you. Foolish me! There are some evenings I have had thinking about the things we talked about that still make me smile, I was not just holding your hand, we were holding each other up. You kept me walking when I thought through the rubble of these torn deserted towns; we could never reach safety again. I was more afraid than I told you. We have come through!
I’m sitting in this car facing a river deep in the night, not alone. She is here. I’m here. I’m about to tell you a happy story…
Friday, October 26, 2007
I Have Something To Declare
I have sat on dusty grounds looking puzzling out the brow of new worlds in afternoons that passed in silence. I have left behind wrinkles on stern faces that loved me and I knew to come here hoping for newness. I’m coming through the darkness, eyes squinting at the dash of light at the cave opening. I’m coming through again, dear reader!
Sunday, October 7, 2007
KIM +14
“I'm sorry for the things that I did not say
Like how you are the best thing in my world
And how I'm so proud to call you my girl
I understand that there's some problems
And I'm not too blind to know
All the pain you kept inside you
Even though you might not show
If I can't apologize for being wrong
Then it's just a shame on me
I'll be the reason for your pain
And you can put the blame on me
You can put the blame on me
You can put the blame on me
You can put the blame on me
You can put the blame on me”
AKON, Sorry, Blame It On Me
The two rooms are empty now, Sunday afternoon silence, I have not been to my house on the hill in Ntinda. One day I will go back. One Saturday, with more money in my left back pocket wallet than I ever earned in two years where I used to work when I lived in the house on the hill, I will go back. Hire a Muslim caped boda boda rider, puzzled at his client who asks him to stop on a path that seems to lead nowhere and stands for eternity looking at a view of some hills he does not know the names of, mumbling to himself. One day, I will stand outside the window now with an unfamiliar curtain that was the window of my bedroom, looking up, remembering, the pocket Sony digital camera I came with, borrowed from a girl who makes me laugh at the way she says, “Yay, yay,” brimful with the hurriedly taken photos of many angles I took of one window that look the same to everyone. One day perhaps I will come back. One day… but I have left my house on the hill and I will not be going back. The day she called is the day I left.
The day she called is the day I did not go home again. The day she called is the day I stopped using my first Mango line. The day she came back was the first evening I did not walk Kampala road alone, my workday done, my friends all gone, staving off the hours when I would have go home alone to a room thinking, the same thing always. The day she called, first day of life after death. My heart in my fingertips in the seconds paused over the faded YES button of my ringing Samsung phone. In the ticking seconds, hearing before I had picked up, what I had for months waited to hear breathed out, “Yes, today, if it’s okay, we can meet. Crown House, yes, then we can decide.”
Thursday, busiest day of my week, in the afternoon, not done with my glass of mild orange juice with too much sugar and oily doughnut, working through lunch, Handel’s Hallelujah startling the lightly napping room in my direction. Angry glances urging me to pick up. Living, dying, coming back in the seconds my eyes staring at Fiona’s caller photo flashing on my screen, through blurred eyes ascertaining that the glare from my computer was not making me see a number I had willed myself to stop hoping was flashing on my screen whenever my phone vibrated before the crash of Handel’s Hallelujah forced me to pick up. A willing that had taken me months to achieve and then, she called.
My stomach gone, a cliff fall yawning emptiness there. Unable to feel my legs, my knee caps all that were left under the too low thin wood table on which my computer sat, pressing. My voice a ghost of a whisper, a dry croak surely all I could summon from my parched throat if I tried answering. But beyond all this, certain that getting up from behind my old black Dell desktop computer facing the gray wooden door into the partitioned office meant never coming back here, on that Thursday afternoon when she called. The waiting on disaster over. After ten months, Fiona wanting to see me again.
Pressing YES, yanking open doors, nearly running. Flurried hurry, outside our office block, boda boda scanning.
All my favourite Kampala memories snatched glimpses on the back of boda bodas. Before her, after her, the wonder of Kampala never ceasing tumbling into the blinking shutters of my eyes. Like I have not passed Hot Loaf on Jinja Road so many times in my life before, in taxi trips once a kid with a moustache who had never been to Kireka, tense the whole trip, looking out for the Shell petrol station she had told me would tell me I had reached Kireka. Like I have not walked past the Ministry of Internal Affairs before, oh so long ago, the cheapest drink was the only drink I could afford then, Andrew I remember you calling on me for afternoon tipples I protested not much too because I needed them more than I ever told you, walking back in the evening, the traffic jam a snare to the office to try and work at what the whole day I had failed to do, wondering if I would ever come here to own a passport too, that was not my world, I would never be good enough, expensive perfume wearing clipped accents like the men I saw on the gates speaking in two mobile phones not from show. Yeah! Jinja Road roundabout, green lettered AAR, Kitugum House before the chaotic petrol station, my soul has slithered into the ineffective drainage system that a little rain oozes onto the slippery flooded road, souls screaming, walking in a tired daze here, my dreams were dying on my parched lips when I had no walking companion, could not afford a bottle of Rwenzori Mineral Water, everyone used to wonder why I walked so much, oh if you only knew! Kampala was never just a city to me, in love with her before I knew I was, Fiona became one of my Kampalas’. Crown House would never be just a brown tiled building after today, Baker’s World meeting, she was already there. Seeing her before she saw me, still carefully reading the menu card, she was here!
Stand still for this day, world, getting off my boda boda. The sun is not in the sky, it is on my back burning on in the inside of my tucked in corporate blue shirt she bought me those years ago when I told her I had got my first job, promising her we were going to live richly. Baby girl, the future is here! I was her past now. Not wearing anything I ever bought her. Not that necklace, those Masai bangles, the shawl from Pemba, her nails were without the gold cutex I once painted her nails with, in the nights when we would sit in the dark waiting for electricity to come back on, I on the floor leaning against the bed, talking, there was nothing of me on her, she was not mine anymore.
Fiona!
She did not know whether to hug me or if I was supposed to hug her, nervous, my one-again awkward angel. She was gone again, the girl she used to be, had become when we were US, the girl I stood with deep throat French kissing with in the Old Taxi Park on an early Tuesday morning with everyone around before I dazedly clambered into my Luweero bound taxi, I had never anticipated such boldness from her. The taxi would not be quiet all the way to Luweero, talking about how degenerate we were, but I was not really listening or offended, unable to get the goofy smile off my lips….she had done! My God, she had done it! My research trip to Luweero slow-motion slipping by in a blur of furtive borrowed telephone calls and text messages, desperate to be back with her, a week of separation seeming like an eternity.
She was gone, the girl I stood deep throat French kissing with in the Old Taxi Park Tuesday morning once…
I wanted a confirmation. It was all I wanted to know. Before gathering her into a hug, the smell of her College Inn room powder hitting me, Makerere University Senate Building standing in line to clear for student IDs remembering the first time I heard her voice coming back, before anything, in Baker’s World, I wanted to know.
“It’s over, isn’t it?”
She was quiet awhile, standing there, waiting for me, our worlds in her silence,
“Yes,”
Then I knew what I wanted to do. With this afternoon, with the rest of my life,
“What do you want us to eat?”
“Coffee, bread, and two sausages and chili! For me.”
She had done it, after all these months, again. I was playing to part when I protested.
“But you never eat chili sauce? Why do you ask for it?”
Then she said, shrugging her shoulders in that cute way that never offended me however much I had tried to be, “Just for just.”
And in a phrase we were back on Campus, the last lecture done with and I wanted to go with Feroz and the guys down to Club 5, she had her girlfriends with her and still she wanted me to go with them right upto Africa Hall. My passionate plea that “But you’re not alone?” not working, she wanted me to walk her back to their hall for no particular reason other than, “Just for just,” and there I was, in a spell unable to say NO, going with them, from frowning to laughing and I would never figure out how the transition happened.
All I know is that in between the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Main Building, walking on the lower side under those trees, a guy among six girls admiring how they earned right of passage from the taxis with the conductor one arm holding on, hanging out of the door and other cars weaving for parking space with their black business suited Evening Student drivers, I was happy again. Justina outraging the girls who listened intently even as they pretended they were not with details from Ssenga sessions she had attended over the weekend when her sister was getting prepped for marriage and the potholes of water in the tarmac were mirrors for a purple darkening sky and those yellow flowers fallen from the trees were little boats of hope, Fiona’s arm holding mine through my red clipboard, shaking with laughter, her breasts brushing against my arm and I knew I was not going back to Club 5 anytime soon nor were the girls going to her room this evening as we dropped further and further behind them, so much to say about the day that I did not know I had to say and she was smiling, eyes downcast whenever we met a gang on its way to class or from a class but her arm never untangling from mine.
The lit night library we would not frequent until exams and course works were suddenly bearing down on us like a corner curving speeding Toyota Carina car with headlights on, on evenings like this was a giant lit space ship. Soon we would be back here reading, or trying, having commandeered a table for our clique upstairs where we could look out through the huge windows at the unfortunate hurrying figures who would never get a seat tonight, up where the History textbooks no one read were. We would be going for supper in phases and I don’t know why we bothered coming back. We would not be going to read anymore. Beginning with quips about the supper Mess everyday meal of beans and posho and how full of gas it made our tummies loudly complain, we could not be serious anymore. Fiona trying so much for seriousness, phone ear-plugs in her ears, smile hovering on her lips even as she tried so hard to read from the top of the page to down was irresistible to rib, feet out of shoes running under the table for hers, I wanted to hear her laugh out loud, not just giggle, writing her chits I slipped into the next text book I knew she would need to reach for, again and again, until she would cup her lips in her palm, determined not to roar with laughter for we would be thrown out of the library, and there were several scowling faces bodies leaning against railings, shelves, tired from standing, trying to stare us out of seats we seemed not to be interested in using but never moving, never leaving them till when the library was closing for the night and we would walk the girls in our reading group in the night back to their halls, playing along the way, Martin mumbling furiously when Fiona tickled him from behind causing his papers to fly through the air, “Children! Children all of you! I’m not studying with you tomorrow!” but by lunch the next day was the one trying to synchronize everyone’s movements to whichever venue we were going to do our reading from, no one protesting his bossiness or remembering how it had come to pass that during a certain part of the semester geeky Martin somehow became the leader of our group not through any conscious effort on his part or relenting on ours but that it just was.
Fiona had taken my Fridays in the same way and though drinking my third Bell beer in the company of Club beer drinkers, my glass abandoned, in Wandegeya Deep Blue on afternoons when the lecturer had not come, I liked to argue I would not be with her but my boys I knew it would not be. An A-Level Friday evening ritual broken by a girl who had not at all tried hard to break it like my pleading mother had tried and my threatening father who told me not to come home on Saturday if I was not in the house by 11pm Friday night because she did not know it had existed before her. Friday evenings no longer boisterous car convoy drives to Ange Noir nights then on to Club Silk but Fiona nights when her roomies were out and we were in, in Africa, some Spanish soap opera lip synched into English on some TV station we were not watching and Fiona was out on the balcony making a home cooked meal, me on the bed, her goat skin brown bound photo album not much browsed and we were talking and talking and the more the meal simmering on the little green paraffin stove she was making was aromatic, the more stern were her commands that I do not step in her ‘kitchen.’ The more she admonished, the more I stepped talked my way into her ‘kitchen’ because, “I like to smell the back of your neck, come on! Just a little. Just for just?” and I knew she would not really stop me though she was waving the spotted crushed tomato whelps spatula at me to bar me. Meals we ate from each other’s plates with the TV and radio on, barely dressed for the night heat, planning our Saturdays and Sundays, all the world in that Usher and Enrique posters peeling off the wall room, her room, in Africa, Friday night and I promising her, “You should not be asking me if I will ever sleep with another woman, if I will ever love another woman. You should be making me promise that I will never eat another woman’s cooking because your cooking is the best cooking in the world, you cook better than my mother,” meaning it because it was true, “If I did not love you, I would love you for your cooking,” her quiet smiling eyes speaking to me, listening, I making more promises in that room than I will ever make again, meaning everyone of them.
I have been back there since. One day in the weeks when Makerere University was shut down for the first time in its history because of student strikes, I went back, on a day when I had not planned to go back but never told her, never admitted that I walked everywhere where we used to walk. I never told her that I had stood leaning against the railing that leads to the main entrance of the Faculty of Social Sciences in the stillness of that afternoon when no one was around and my eyes were glassy with tears remembering her here. How I had first seen her leaning here, coming up with Martin through the grass, ignoring the gravel path, from the Senate Building where we had been trying to clear to get our first year student IDs, her back to me and she was with Feroz even then whose eyes and lips I could see were telling her someone was checking her out but she would never tell me how Feroz described me but smile every time when I badgered her to tell me what Feroz had said. I never told her how I had gone back down to see the Pool above Nkrumah Hall smiling to myself remembering how I had begun to attend Pastor Ssempa’s crusade activities because that is where she used to go every Saturday night fervour-wracked to be within the radius of her presence. On the day I came back in those weeks Makerere was closed standing on the stairs with no one around wondering at how much I had wanted her, how much despite all her saying she never noticed me there in the same row with her, I knew she had known I was the one who would not stand up to praise and worship, consumed in the misery of my still to be requited love, she the shy girl who praised with an abandon of lifted arms and closed eyes that burned itself on my mind so I could not sleep when I went back to my room, waking sweaty and hot knowing I need her the way fevered way lips burning need cooling water. I could not survive without her, stunned in my helpless need. I had gone back and I never told anyone that I went back.
The Faculty of Arts was locked when I went back. I would be long gone when it was opened again. So I had stood holding the bars, peering in across the hallway to the Journalism department laboratory where we had gone one Saturday afternoon in our second semester to open our first email addresses in Yahoo! In the days when she knew my email password and she had made me choose her password for her because she wanted me to know it and open her email on her behalf whenever she was not able to make it to an internet café because, “You you know many internet people.” I had gone back, briefly. And she would never know. Racing in my mind through the years to the year right after when we had broken up when I truly believed I could never live without her, again. Working now, supposed to be busy, without her there my world never been fuller of yawning spaces no heaped unwatched film DVDs, musical concert invites, laundry for many Saturdays could fill up. The waiting each day for that dreaded 3pm hour on my phone clock on a phone which might fail to call, might fail to send the most vital SMSes or the alarm not wake me on mornings when I had crucial appointments but whose clock never malfunctioned when it came to showing me that it was the 3pm of another day, another day coming to an end and there was a house on a hill in Ntinda wondering why I was not coming home. That hour that I used to try so much to fill and was the emptiest of all walking on Jinja road roundabout, lying I preferred to walk because the traffic was too much, trying so much not to look into the furniture stores on that road, and there was this absurd hope somewhere in the searching eyes that scanned the people that had purpose at 3pm I would meet Fiona and maybe like in the movies, a connection would happen, glass would cease to exist, and the connection that had gone down would be repaired. In search of the marked ones. How I did not want to go back into the office in the afternoons that became too quickly 6pm, and I would sit there trying not to notice how everyone politely kept on talking to me, eye peaks at their watches because they wanted to go home, their happy eager faces waiting there and I had none. How many times telling myself that they were going back to sterility, to nothing spectacular, I had done all that they were doing. They would go home and after the first 30 minutes of breathless recitation of what the day had been like, they would either sit in rooms of silence broodingly exchanging hostility or seek oblivion and escape in a tacky soap opera on TV so the hours could pass. Reminding myself how the sex became so routine and they were ok with that because they had forgotten what I was getting every time there was a new body in my bed. And there were many times that had worked. They were many times I came close to believing that it was working. Came close but I knew that I was fooling myself. Like my tongue slurping for the last drops at the end of those beers with a friend I had not seen or thought of for so many months and when we met, visited all the old sites of open air bars watching the road, ordered the same exact brands we used to drink, sat in the postures we used to sit and never once confessed the whole evening that the beer did not taste the same anymore or that behind the old, unshared jokes with anyone else a yawning boredom hung, I was unconvinced that I would ever forget her. I had never had. I had never thought she would cease to be a part of my system and searching out movies of loss and poems that highlighted the static non-passage of time, time does not take away the time, but at its most merciful blunts the edge, I was convinced I was with the horde marked as having lost and lost for good. I was of the horde and kissed Kim with my darkness. For the longest time. I was in the darkness, the darkness. In my house on the hill in Ntinda, alone most times. Not afraid of the nights after midnight that would never find me awake, Vodka sachets strewn on the for the days unswept cement floor around my bed, waking to knock the candle petering in its Kiwi shoe polish tin, reaching for the green Tumpeco mug of water I never slept without filling because I would need it later and there usually would not be the light to search in the other room for the last remnants of water somewhere in the other room in my house, the electricity not coming back for a long time and if I could not have the water there and then, panicking I was dying of thirst. Thirst no amount of water could ever quench, a Nile Perch fish flapping on the drying floor boards of a boat headed to shore, dying.
Then sleep stopped coming. 4 emptied Vodka sachets with terraced ridges of soreness on my tongue, little nibbled rolex with cautious brown cockroaches sniffing at the gaping mouth of its kavera on the floor, 2am, room flooded in returned electricity from the single 100 watts bulb in the ceiling, office life scattered in the shoe stamped papers crumpled in bed with me and in all corners of my bedroom, I could not sleep anymore. I could not. Vodka, Dollar Gin, Coffee Spirit, Kim in bed with me, nothing could make sleep come. Awake after a day in the sun, walking everywhere to my appointments, night and I could not sleep, fast forwarding through all the DVD movies I came home with, my terror of the day come into the night, no sleep. Washing supper dishes months-ignored 2am, there was no sleep, all the laundry pressed and folded to military pleats perfection, 5am a white foil cup of cocktails with no name in my left hand and green mug of water in the other I was on the edge of my bed waiting for the dawn dressed for work everyday and there was no radio I wanted to listen to, 20 channels, nothing to slow the careening, no sleep! My house on the hill no longer my haven, no escape now. Stop thinking. Stop thinking! Take my soul out into the night. I don’t want to think anymore, please! I don’t want to think anymore.
Beyond mid week afternoons lost in the plushness of cheap Cineplex ticket seats, I was still thinking of her and not just her, thinking of her with the man I had heard she was going out with since us. I wanted it to stop. Wanted not to not want to know anymore to know if she had told him too that she liked to feel his fingers not on the tips of her breasts but running along their pimpled edge like a stream in motion, shivering all over with pleasure. I did not want to wonder anymore whether he had noticed how rubbing lingeringly the bristles of his beard on her belly just above her pubic hair rendered her helpless, giggling, her orgasm building to tenderly whispered prophecies in her ears, his arms around her waist from behind, his fingers below, in a caress not above a whisper in her ear constructing a step-by-step grid of exactly what he was going to do to her. I did not want, in a bar in some edge of town estate, stumbling out to look for a wall to piss against, stand instead trying to figure out what the moving figures behind the lit curtains in all the houses around this bar were doing, had fate and chance brought me here to this moment, to stand here pissing my money in a jet of beer urine against a brick wall that would never be plastered because it was hidden from view, to witness without ever being sure that she was the woman in the room beyond this wall and to Salif Keita, he was undressing her, I was forgotten, she would never imagine I was here, a brick wall between us, here tonight when I would go home alone was her first night with the man who was not me. All my aching would never bring her back, I was the one in taxis and on foot, failing not to wonder if he had brought her to this house once, she standing back behind him, rubbing his elbow as he shoved the key into a padlock, cocking his eyebrow at her, grinning, he wanted her as much as she wanted him and he was going to have her, she was going to let him. I did not want this anymore! Had they gone on a boat, hired, Sunday afternoon…please, please, stop this! Oh mind of mine! Rest!
Rest.
Like how you are the best thing in my world
And how I'm so proud to call you my girl
I understand that there's some problems
And I'm not too blind to know
All the pain you kept inside you
Even though you might not show
If I can't apologize for being wrong
Then it's just a shame on me
I'll be the reason for your pain
And you can put the blame on me
You can put the blame on me
You can put the blame on me
You can put the blame on me
You can put the blame on me”
AKON, Sorry, Blame It On Me
The two rooms are empty now, Sunday afternoon silence, I have not been to my house on the hill in Ntinda. One day I will go back. One Saturday, with more money in my left back pocket wallet than I ever earned in two years where I used to work when I lived in the house on the hill, I will go back. Hire a Muslim caped boda boda rider, puzzled at his client who asks him to stop on a path that seems to lead nowhere and stands for eternity looking at a view of some hills he does not know the names of, mumbling to himself. One day, I will stand outside the window now with an unfamiliar curtain that was the window of my bedroom, looking up, remembering, the pocket Sony digital camera I came with, borrowed from a girl who makes me laugh at the way she says, “Yay, yay,” brimful with the hurriedly taken photos of many angles I took of one window that look the same to everyone. One day perhaps I will come back. One day… but I have left my house on the hill and I will not be going back. The day she called is the day I left.
The day she called is the day I did not go home again. The day she called is the day I stopped using my first Mango line. The day she came back was the first evening I did not walk Kampala road alone, my workday done, my friends all gone, staving off the hours when I would have go home alone to a room thinking, the same thing always. The day she called, first day of life after death. My heart in my fingertips in the seconds paused over the faded YES button of my ringing Samsung phone. In the ticking seconds, hearing before I had picked up, what I had for months waited to hear breathed out, “Yes, today, if it’s okay, we can meet. Crown House, yes, then we can decide.”
Thursday, busiest day of my week, in the afternoon, not done with my glass of mild orange juice with too much sugar and oily doughnut, working through lunch, Handel’s Hallelujah startling the lightly napping room in my direction. Angry glances urging me to pick up. Living, dying, coming back in the seconds my eyes staring at Fiona’s caller photo flashing on my screen, through blurred eyes ascertaining that the glare from my computer was not making me see a number I had willed myself to stop hoping was flashing on my screen whenever my phone vibrated before the crash of Handel’s Hallelujah forced me to pick up. A willing that had taken me months to achieve and then, she called.
My stomach gone, a cliff fall yawning emptiness there. Unable to feel my legs, my knee caps all that were left under the too low thin wood table on which my computer sat, pressing. My voice a ghost of a whisper, a dry croak surely all I could summon from my parched throat if I tried answering. But beyond all this, certain that getting up from behind my old black Dell desktop computer facing the gray wooden door into the partitioned office meant never coming back here, on that Thursday afternoon when she called. The waiting on disaster over. After ten months, Fiona wanting to see me again.
Pressing YES, yanking open doors, nearly running. Flurried hurry, outside our office block, boda boda scanning.
All my favourite Kampala memories snatched glimpses on the back of boda bodas. Before her, after her, the wonder of Kampala never ceasing tumbling into the blinking shutters of my eyes. Like I have not passed Hot Loaf on Jinja Road so many times in my life before, in taxi trips once a kid with a moustache who had never been to Kireka, tense the whole trip, looking out for the Shell petrol station she had told me would tell me I had reached Kireka. Like I have not walked past the Ministry of Internal Affairs before, oh so long ago, the cheapest drink was the only drink I could afford then, Andrew I remember you calling on me for afternoon tipples I protested not much too because I needed them more than I ever told you, walking back in the evening, the traffic jam a snare to the office to try and work at what the whole day I had failed to do, wondering if I would ever come here to own a passport too, that was not my world, I would never be good enough, expensive perfume wearing clipped accents like the men I saw on the gates speaking in two mobile phones not from show. Yeah! Jinja Road roundabout, green lettered AAR, Kitugum House before the chaotic petrol station, my soul has slithered into the ineffective drainage system that a little rain oozes onto the slippery flooded road, souls screaming, walking in a tired daze here, my dreams were dying on my parched lips when I had no walking companion, could not afford a bottle of Rwenzori Mineral Water, everyone used to wonder why I walked so much, oh if you only knew! Kampala was never just a city to me, in love with her before I knew I was, Fiona became one of my Kampalas’. Crown House would never be just a brown tiled building after today, Baker’s World meeting, she was already there. Seeing her before she saw me, still carefully reading the menu card, she was here!
Stand still for this day, world, getting off my boda boda. The sun is not in the sky, it is on my back burning on in the inside of my tucked in corporate blue shirt she bought me those years ago when I told her I had got my first job, promising her we were going to live richly. Baby girl, the future is here! I was her past now. Not wearing anything I ever bought her. Not that necklace, those Masai bangles, the shawl from Pemba, her nails were without the gold cutex I once painted her nails with, in the nights when we would sit in the dark waiting for electricity to come back on, I on the floor leaning against the bed, talking, there was nothing of me on her, she was not mine anymore.
Fiona!
She did not know whether to hug me or if I was supposed to hug her, nervous, my one-again awkward angel. She was gone again, the girl she used to be, had become when we were US, the girl I stood with deep throat French kissing with in the Old Taxi Park on an early Tuesday morning with everyone around before I dazedly clambered into my Luweero bound taxi, I had never anticipated such boldness from her. The taxi would not be quiet all the way to Luweero, talking about how degenerate we were, but I was not really listening or offended, unable to get the goofy smile off my lips….she had done! My God, she had done it! My research trip to Luweero slow-motion slipping by in a blur of furtive borrowed telephone calls and text messages, desperate to be back with her, a week of separation seeming like an eternity.
She was gone, the girl I stood deep throat French kissing with in the Old Taxi Park Tuesday morning once…
I wanted a confirmation. It was all I wanted to know. Before gathering her into a hug, the smell of her College Inn room powder hitting me, Makerere University Senate Building standing in line to clear for student IDs remembering the first time I heard her voice coming back, before anything, in Baker’s World, I wanted to know.
“It’s over, isn’t it?”
She was quiet awhile, standing there, waiting for me, our worlds in her silence,
“Yes,”
Then I knew what I wanted to do. With this afternoon, with the rest of my life,
“What do you want us to eat?”
“Coffee, bread, and two sausages and chili! For me.”
She had done it, after all these months, again. I was playing to part when I protested.
“But you never eat chili sauce? Why do you ask for it?”
Then she said, shrugging her shoulders in that cute way that never offended me however much I had tried to be, “Just for just.”
And in a phrase we were back on Campus, the last lecture done with and I wanted to go with Feroz and the guys down to Club 5, she had her girlfriends with her and still she wanted me to go with them right upto Africa Hall. My passionate plea that “But you’re not alone?” not working, she wanted me to walk her back to their hall for no particular reason other than, “Just for just,” and there I was, in a spell unable to say NO, going with them, from frowning to laughing and I would never figure out how the transition happened.
All I know is that in between the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Main Building, walking on the lower side under those trees, a guy among six girls admiring how they earned right of passage from the taxis with the conductor one arm holding on, hanging out of the door and other cars weaving for parking space with their black business suited Evening Student drivers, I was happy again. Justina outraging the girls who listened intently even as they pretended they were not with details from Ssenga sessions she had attended over the weekend when her sister was getting prepped for marriage and the potholes of water in the tarmac were mirrors for a purple darkening sky and those yellow flowers fallen from the trees were little boats of hope, Fiona’s arm holding mine through my red clipboard, shaking with laughter, her breasts brushing against my arm and I knew I was not going back to Club 5 anytime soon nor were the girls going to her room this evening as we dropped further and further behind them, so much to say about the day that I did not know I had to say and she was smiling, eyes downcast whenever we met a gang on its way to class or from a class but her arm never untangling from mine.
The lit night library we would not frequent until exams and course works were suddenly bearing down on us like a corner curving speeding Toyota Carina car with headlights on, on evenings like this was a giant lit space ship. Soon we would be back here reading, or trying, having commandeered a table for our clique upstairs where we could look out through the huge windows at the unfortunate hurrying figures who would never get a seat tonight, up where the History textbooks no one read were. We would be going for supper in phases and I don’t know why we bothered coming back. We would not be going to read anymore. Beginning with quips about the supper Mess everyday meal of beans and posho and how full of gas it made our tummies loudly complain, we could not be serious anymore. Fiona trying so much for seriousness, phone ear-plugs in her ears, smile hovering on her lips even as she tried so hard to read from the top of the page to down was irresistible to rib, feet out of shoes running under the table for hers, I wanted to hear her laugh out loud, not just giggle, writing her chits I slipped into the next text book I knew she would need to reach for, again and again, until she would cup her lips in her palm, determined not to roar with laughter for we would be thrown out of the library, and there were several scowling faces bodies leaning against railings, shelves, tired from standing, trying to stare us out of seats we seemed not to be interested in using but never moving, never leaving them till when the library was closing for the night and we would walk the girls in our reading group in the night back to their halls, playing along the way, Martin mumbling furiously when Fiona tickled him from behind causing his papers to fly through the air, “Children! Children all of you! I’m not studying with you tomorrow!” but by lunch the next day was the one trying to synchronize everyone’s movements to whichever venue we were going to do our reading from, no one protesting his bossiness or remembering how it had come to pass that during a certain part of the semester geeky Martin somehow became the leader of our group not through any conscious effort on his part or relenting on ours but that it just was.
Fiona had taken my Fridays in the same way and though drinking my third Bell beer in the company of Club beer drinkers, my glass abandoned, in Wandegeya Deep Blue on afternoons when the lecturer had not come, I liked to argue I would not be with her but my boys I knew it would not be. An A-Level Friday evening ritual broken by a girl who had not at all tried hard to break it like my pleading mother had tried and my threatening father who told me not to come home on Saturday if I was not in the house by 11pm Friday night because she did not know it had existed before her. Friday evenings no longer boisterous car convoy drives to Ange Noir nights then on to Club Silk but Fiona nights when her roomies were out and we were in, in Africa, some Spanish soap opera lip synched into English on some TV station we were not watching and Fiona was out on the balcony making a home cooked meal, me on the bed, her goat skin brown bound photo album not much browsed and we were talking and talking and the more the meal simmering on the little green paraffin stove she was making was aromatic, the more stern were her commands that I do not step in her ‘kitchen.’ The more she admonished, the more I stepped talked my way into her ‘kitchen’ because, “I like to smell the back of your neck, come on! Just a little. Just for just?” and I knew she would not really stop me though she was waving the spotted crushed tomato whelps spatula at me to bar me. Meals we ate from each other’s plates with the TV and radio on, barely dressed for the night heat, planning our Saturdays and Sundays, all the world in that Usher and Enrique posters peeling off the wall room, her room, in Africa, Friday night and I promising her, “You should not be asking me if I will ever sleep with another woman, if I will ever love another woman. You should be making me promise that I will never eat another woman’s cooking because your cooking is the best cooking in the world, you cook better than my mother,” meaning it because it was true, “If I did not love you, I would love you for your cooking,” her quiet smiling eyes speaking to me, listening, I making more promises in that room than I will ever make again, meaning everyone of them.
I have been back there since. One day in the weeks when Makerere University was shut down for the first time in its history because of student strikes, I went back, on a day when I had not planned to go back but never told her, never admitted that I walked everywhere where we used to walk. I never told her that I had stood leaning against the railing that leads to the main entrance of the Faculty of Social Sciences in the stillness of that afternoon when no one was around and my eyes were glassy with tears remembering her here. How I had first seen her leaning here, coming up with Martin through the grass, ignoring the gravel path, from the Senate Building where we had been trying to clear to get our first year student IDs, her back to me and she was with Feroz even then whose eyes and lips I could see were telling her someone was checking her out but she would never tell me how Feroz described me but smile every time when I badgered her to tell me what Feroz had said. I never told her how I had gone back down to see the Pool above Nkrumah Hall smiling to myself remembering how I had begun to attend Pastor Ssempa’s crusade activities because that is where she used to go every Saturday night fervour-wracked to be within the radius of her presence. On the day I came back in those weeks Makerere was closed standing on the stairs with no one around wondering at how much I had wanted her, how much despite all her saying she never noticed me there in the same row with her, I knew she had known I was the one who would not stand up to praise and worship, consumed in the misery of my still to be requited love, she the shy girl who praised with an abandon of lifted arms and closed eyes that burned itself on my mind so I could not sleep when I went back to my room, waking sweaty and hot knowing I need her the way fevered way lips burning need cooling water. I could not survive without her, stunned in my helpless need. I had gone back and I never told anyone that I went back.
The Faculty of Arts was locked when I went back. I would be long gone when it was opened again. So I had stood holding the bars, peering in across the hallway to the Journalism department laboratory where we had gone one Saturday afternoon in our second semester to open our first email addresses in Yahoo! In the days when she knew my email password and she had made me choose her password for her because she wanted me to know it and open her email on her behalf whenever she was not able to make it to an internet café because, “You you know many internet people.” I had gone back, briefly. And she would never know. Racing in my mind through the years to the year right after when we had broken up when I truly believed I could never live without her, again. Working now, supposed to be busy, without her there my world never been fuller of yawning spaces no heaped unwatched film DVDs, musical concert invites, laundry for many Saturdays could fill up. The waiting each day for that dreaded 3pm hour on my phone clock on a phone which might fail to call, might fail to send the most vital SMSes or the alarm not wake me on mornings when I had crucial appointments but whose clock never malfunctioned when it came to showing me that it was the 3pm of another day, another day coming to an end and there was a house on a hill in Ntinda wondering why I was not coming home. That hour that I used to try so much to fill and was the emptiest of all walking on Jinja road roundabout, lying I preferred to walk because the traffic was too much, trying so much not to look into the furniture stores on that road, and there was this absurd hope somewhere in the searching eyes that scanned the people that had purpose at 3pm I would meet Fiona and maybe like in the movies, a connection would happen, glass would cease to exist, and the connection that had gone down would be repaired. In search of the marked ones. How I did not want to go back into the office in the afternoons that became too quickly 6pm, and I would sit there trying not to notice how everyone politely kept on talking to me, eye peaks at their watches because they wanted to go home, their happy eager faces waiting there and I had none. How many times telling myself that they were going back to sterility, to nothing spectacular, I had done all that they were doing. They would go home and after the first 30 minutes of breathless recitation of what the day had been like, they would either sit in rooms of silence broodingly exchanging hostility or seek oblivion and escape in a tacky soap opera on TV so the hours could pass. Reminding myself how the sex became so routine and they were ok with that because they had forgotten what I was getting every time there was a new body in my bed. And there were many times that had worked. They were many times I came close to believing that it was working. Came close but I knew that I was fooling myself. Like my tongue slurping for the last drops at the end of those beers with a friend I had not seen or thought of for so many months and when we met, visited all the old sites of open air bars watching the road, ordered the same exact brands we used to drink, sat in the postures we used to sit and never once confessed the whole evening that the beer did not taste the same anymore or that behind the old, unshared jokes with anyone else a yawning boredom hung, I was unconvinced that I would ever forget her. I had never had. I had never thought she would cease to be a part of my system and searching out movies of loss and poems that highlighted the static non-passage of time, time does not take away the time, but at its most merciful blunts the edge, I was convinced I was with the horde marked as having lost and lost for good. I was of the horde and kissed Kim with my darkness. For the longest time. I was in the darkness, the darkness. In my house on the hill in Ntinda, alone most times. Not afraid of the nights after midnight that would never find me awake, Vodka sachets strewn on the for the days unswept cement floor around my bed, waking to knock the candle petering in its Kiwi shoe polish tin, reaching for the green Tumpeco mug of water I never slept without filling because I would need it later and there usually would not be the light to search in the other room for the last remnants of water somewhere in the other room in my house, the electricity not coming back for a long time and if I could not have the water there and then, panicking I was dying of thirst. Thirst no amount of water could ever quench, a Nile Perch fish flapping on the drying floor boards of a boat headed to shore, dying.
Then sleep stopped coming. 4 emptied Vodka sachets with terraced ridges of soreness on my tongue, little nibbled rolex with cautious brown cockroaches sniffing at the gaping mouth of its kavera on the floor, 2am, room flooded in returned electricity from the single 100 watts bulb in the ceiling, office life scattered in the shoe stamped papers crumpled in bed with me and in all corners of my bedroom, I could not sleep anymore. I could not. Vodka, Dollar Gin, Coffee Spirit, Kim in bed with me, nothing could make sleep come. Awake after a day in the sun, walking everywhere to my appointments, night and I could not sleep, fast forwarding through all the DVD movies I came home with, my terror of the day come into the night, no sleep. Washing supper dishes months-ignored 2am, there was no sleep, all the laundry pressed and folded to military pleats perfection, 5am a white foil cup of cocktails with no name in my left hand and green mug of water in the other I was on the edge of my bed waiting for the dawn dressed for work everyday and there was no radio I wanted to listen to, 20 channels, nothing to slow the careening, no sleep! My house on the hill no longer my haven, no escape now. Stop thinking. Stop thinking! Take my soul out into the night. I don’t want to think anymore, please! I don’t want to think anymore.
Beyond mid week afternoons lost in the plushness of cheap Cineplex ticket seats, I was still thinking of her and not just her, thinking of her with the man I had heard she was going out with since us. I wanted it to stop. Wanted not to not want to know anymore to know if she had told him too that she liked to feel his fingers not on the tips of her breasts but running along their pimpled edge like a stream in motion, shivering all over with pleasure. I did not want to wonder anymore whether he had noticed how rubbing lingeringly the bristles of his beard on her belly just above her pubic hair rendered her helpless, giggling, her orgasm building to tenderly whispered prophecies in her ears, his arms around her waist from behind, his fingers below, in a caress not above a whisper in her ear constructing a step-by-step grid of exactly what he was going to do to her. I did not want, in a bar in some edge of town estate, stumbling out to look for a wall to piss against, stand instead trying to figure out what the moving figures behind the lit curtains in all the houses around this bar were doing, had fate and chance brought me here to this moment, to stand here pissing my money in a jet of beer urine against a brick wall that would never be plastered because it was hidden from view, to witness without ever being sure that she was the woman in the room beyond this wall and to Salif Keita, he was undressing her, I was forgotten, she would never imagine I was here, a brick wall between us, here tonight when I would go home alone was her first night with the man who was not me. All my aching would never bring her back, I was the one in taxis and on foot, failing not to wonder if he had brought her to this house once, she standing back behind him, rubbing his elbow as he shoved the key into a padlock, cocking his eyebrow at her, grinning, he wanted her as much as she wanted him and he was going to have her, she was going to let him. I did not want this anymore! Had they gone on a boat, hired, Sunday afternoon…please, please, stop this! Oh mind of mine! Rest!
Rest.
(THE END)
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