It was approaching midnight when they got home. Muka Tom was waiting in the sitting room. “Where have you been?” was her greeting. Tom walked past her. But Kirabo floundered. In Nattetta, you had to greet grown-ups when you returned home. Muka Tom looked her up and down. “Where are you coming from?”
“Aunt Abi’s.”
“What have you been doing all this time?”
Kirabo looked at the bag of clothes she carried. Should she mention the restaurant? In Nattetta, it was rude to eat out if supper would be kept for you at home. “Nothing.”
“Was anyone else with you?”
Tom’s head popped through the door. “Kirabo, go to bed.”
Kirabo skipped out of the room. The sight of Nnambi’s miserable face! God pays back in cash with interest. For Nnambi’s gloomy face, Tom’s mistakes—marrying and having children behind Kirabo’s back—were forgiven.
6
From that day on, Tom and wife became Dog and Leopard—they could not bear the sight of each other. They did not quarrel; rather they existed in a fog of silence that wafted in and wrapped itself around the house. Locked away behind the heavy metal gates there were no noisy children, not even nosy neighbours coming and going to dispel the hostile gloom. The silence became predatory. Everyone was consumed. Even little Tommy’s whinging was low. In the evening when Tom came home, he brought false cheer with him and spoke to Kirabo as if his voice alone could fill the void.
However, Nnaki the maid thrived. She took pleasure in the couple’s woes. In the month Kirabo had been living with the family, she had gleaned a lot of information about Tom and Nnambi from Nnaki. But Nnaki’s friendship was accessible only when Muka Tom was not around. Nnaki resented Kirabo rather dramatically in her mistress’s presence. Because of this, Kirabo guarded what she said to her.
Nnaki, whose full name was Nnakitto, had been with the family since before little Tommy was born. She came from Mityana, the same village as Nnambi’s family. Apparently, when Kirabo arrived, Nnaki had been confused. “I thought Nnambi was your aunt.”
“What?”
“I swear, you look so alike—eyes, nose, lips—but I know the truth.”
Kirabo rolled her eyes because people will allege the most tenuous resemblance.
Nnaki’s father was an alcoholic. Her mother got cancer of the womb but instead of helping, her father took to drinking. For a long time Nnaki looked after her mother and her little brother.
“Cancer took its time eating her and I got fed up.”
Kirabo could not believe anyone could get fed up with their mother.
“If someone is going to die, then they should get on with it.”
“You wanted your mother to die?”
“She was not my mother any more. She was a child. The minute she died, ba ppa, I told people I was looking for a domestic job. I was recommended to Nnambi by her mother. When she agreed to take me, I said to my brother, ‘Let’s go.’ I left my father crying into his alcohol and took my brother to my aunt in Busega while I worked.”
“What about your father?”
“Hmm-hmm,” Nnaki shrugged with that ruthless air of hers. “He is his problem if he is going to waste his life crying for his wife. One day he will wake up and realise he had children too.”
This was Nnaki’s first job. She planned to do it for another three years, then to take a course in cookery and start a bakery. Her brother was in school. She paid his fees. “He has the chance to go to school. I lost mine,” she said. “If he squanders it, he is on his own too. I have told him, I did not birth him.” That was how Nnaki spoke. With hardness. But she delighted in the troubles of “Husband and Wife,” as she referred to Tom and Nnambi.
“Husband has changed since you came.”
“Really, how?”
“Before you came, he snubbed Wife because she would not allow you to live with us.”
“Hmm.”
“He only brought home sleep and change of clothes. No appetite, no curiosity about anything. We cooked food, served it; he walked past it. Wife did things—changed the house, curtains and things; but did Husband see?”
“And what did Wife do?”
“She cried. But Husband is a wall.”
“Ha.”
“The rich, kdto,” Nnaki clicked. “You see them cruising around in their fancy cars, living in their fancy houses, speaking their fancy English, bikoozi-bikoozi, yesh-yesh, and you envy them. But get close—the stench.”
Kirabo felt implicated and exonerated by Nnaki’s indictment. She was Tom’s child, but she did not belong with the rich people who cruised around in their fancy lives. The Europeanness of Tom’s wealth had alienated her, especially the way it reduced Grandfather’s wealth to nothing. As if she had lived a deprived life. At Tom’s house, she had all these attractive things around her and they showed on her body in the way she dressed, walked, spoke, and carried herself. But Tom’s European wealth was in house gadgets, a car, and in speaking English. Grandfather’s wealth was Ganda. His biggest wealth was his children and their education. Of course, he had land and land and land: you would have had to cycle for days to see it all. Not to mention livestock—cows, goats, sheep, and Zungu poultry—then coffee, cotton, and matooke shambas. But there was no glamour in that kind of wealth. Not in harvesting coffee beans or digging in the shambas or collecting firewood. Cows stunk. Milking them was disgusting. Goats’ droppings strewn everywhere. Mucking out chicken poo in the Zungu poultry barn. But here in the city, Tom wore a suit and tie to work. A car collected him. No mud, no dust, no debbe leaking down your head. Blue Band margarine, Kimbo cooking fat, Tree Top orange squash, a maid, Mateus, Cinzano, a cassette player rather than a gramophone which Grandfather played on special days. In this way, European wealth trounced Ganda wealth so thoroughly that no amount of land or farms could beat having electricity in your house. When you have grown up putting embers into the belly of a thick heavy iron, waiting for it to heat up, not being able to regulate it apart from putting it in water to cool down or swinging it to fire it up, and then one day you pick up this paper-light Philips flat iron, plug it into a wall, turn the dial to suit your garment, and sssssss, it slides effortlessly across your garment, no amount of loyalty to Ganda wealth would pull you back.
Kirabo was not of Tom’s world yet, but she knew she was on her way there.
The sun barely touched her skin because she rarely stepped outdoors. She had not sweated since she arrived. Her feet had not touched dust. She showered in the morning and in the evening with warm water. She dressed like she was going out all the time. She did not do chores any more in fear of running into her stepmother. Her clothes were washed, ironed, and stored in the cupboard or hung in the wardrobe. Every day about mid-morning, Nnaki came to her bedroom and asked, “Do you have any clothes for washing?” Kirabo had lost the rural anxiety over Nnaki cleaning up after her. Even when she heard Nnaki in the kitchen doing chores long after everyone had gone to bed and then so early in the morning before anyone got up, she no longer felt guilty, because Nnaki was Tom’s wife’s friend. Besides, she was paid to do it. But she knew that if Grandmother found out she lay in her bedroom doing nothing while a girl slaved away on her own all day, that after eating she left dishes unwashed in the sink, she would whip her backside raw.
Kirabo had even learnt to balance her mind at that precarious edge where she saw time in its natural, Ugandan mode but articulated it in the upside-down English mode. At first, it had felt schizophrenic as her mind computed ten hours of day but she said four in the afternoon.
•
The situation between Tom and Wife got so bad that Nnambi’s mother came to deal with it. Kirabo was in her bedroom when Nnaki opened the door and gasped, “Time has turned on itself. Mother-in-law has arrived to intervene.” The door closed and Nnaki ran back to the kitchen.
Kirabo’s heart sank. Tom’s wife was going to complain the whole day long about Tom and his daughter born on the side! Kirabo had found out that Nnambi, ha
ving married in church, gave Mwagale and Junior the central position in the family. Apparently, Kirabo was born on the edges of the family unit, and was therefore peripheral, regardless of her position as the eldest child. Of course, you would not hear such a thing in Nattetta, where a child was a child. But in the city, among the educated, the family had been restructured.
Nnambi’s mother was a typical rural woman—middling height, skinny, age spots, a nylon busuuti, a head wrap. She looked nothing like her daughters (Kirabo had by this time met two other sisters). Nnambi’s mother did not have their trademark large eyes, wide lips, or sharp nose. She arrived carrying a load on her head. Inside it was a live chicken whose head peered through a hole in the fold; yams; an array of rural fruit for her grandchildren—apiculata, jackfruit, soursop, ginger lily, custard apple, guava, and Cape gooseberries—and a gallon of banana juice which was put in the fridge to chill. Mwagale squealed as her grandmother unpacked the rural delights and Kirabo rolled her eyes.
The old woman was not resentful. Her attitude was You are not my grandchild, but you are a child. After lunch, mother and daughter sat outside on the porch to talk men. From where the world starts to where it ends, when women start to lament men the sun could drop from the sky and they would not realise. Nnambi and her mother must have forgotten that Kirabo’s window opened right above the steps to the porch. Or they meant for her to hear them. Nnambi started by enumerating an arm’s length of Tom’s marital crimes. She concluded with, “I had borne all of that, Mother, but then he brought the girl without telling me, and my children ceased to be. Kirabo is a princess, the whole house is about Kirabo!”
There was silence. As if the old woman was too shocked to speak. Then she sighed exactly the way Grandmother would at a petty city wife.
“Me, the way I see, it looks like love in your marriage is growing old. But what is special about that? Love grows old. And like all things ageing, complications have started to appear. In your case, he has brought his child. Show me the problem in that.”
Kirabo smiled.
“Mother, I swore I would not bring up a man’s child. Men will not marry you if you have had a child—why would I bring up his? Look at all Father’s children you brought up. You encouraged him by accepting them. On top of that, none of them has been grateful to you.”
“I chose to bring them up. You have no right to get angry for me.”
Kirabo was liking this woman.
“But this too is my decision, Mother. I want to bring up my own children, full stop.”
“So why did you send for me?”
Nnambi’s mother was as soft as nails. Even Grandmother would have put it a bit gently.
Nnambi started to cry. “I hic just hic wanted hic to hic talk hic to hic you.”
“Okay, okay, stop crying.” Her mother mellowed a little. “No man is worth your tears; you hear me? Keep them for your children.” Kirabo lay still. The air was so electric she could feel the static. “I begin to suspect you married for fickle reasons. We knew about the child. Maybe she is a difficult child—I don’t know, but she is not the problem here.”
“But—”
“Listen, Nnambi,” she interrupted harshly, “getting married is not going to heaven. Maybe the first two, three, even five years it is heaven, but you must drop back to earth sometime. Sooner or later the storm strikes. You are busy with the children; he is bored with the routine. The marriage is tossed this way and that. Mostly, he is tossing it, but the world belongs to him. He can get another woman on the side for relief. So, what do you do—pick up your breasts and throw them in the hearth?” There was a pause. Nnambi blew her nose. “Now is the time to decide whether you came into this marriage for a visit, in which case I suggest you pack your bags and come home with me, or if it is about those two little ones, in which case I suggest you tighten your girdle, because this is just the beginning. From what I see, you have made him the centre of your life and armed him with arrows to hurt you. We sat you down for the bridal sessions and told you the hard facts of marriage, but did you listen? No. Because you were in love, love, love. Now love is rusting, you are crying.”
“But yii, Mother—”
“Let me put things into perspective. Do you know what your father was really like?”
“I know he had children all over the place.”
“That is nothing. Most men do that.” She paused. “When it came to contemptuous men, your father was the flag-bearer. He so slept with everything with a wiggle in that village, they named him Mutayisa. Put a banana-tree stump in a dress and that man would stop to check again. One day, before you were born—who was the baby at the time? It was around 1947; it must have been your brother Mpiima—your father came home with Jjali.”
“This Jjali Nnakku’s mother?”
“The very one.”
“Jjali was this city girl who called herself Solome. Your father had Zungucised too, he called himself Franco. Jjali was bleached ripe like I don’t know what. She had a huge luggage for a backside, which she put in those minidresses called kokoonyo. Yii, that day I stole looks at Jjali while cowering in my ruralness, because the god who gave her everything had just served her my man and my marriage too. They arrived at night. Your father brought beef because Jjali felt like eating meat. I cooked it even though it was late. Because we had no extra bed, your father told me to leave my bed for their use.”
“What?!”
“I slept in the diiro that night with Mpiima, who was still on the breast.”
“What?”
“Perhaps he did it to get rid of me because he was too cowardly to throw me out. Meanwhile, in the morning, Jjali needed a hot bath and breakfast.”
“Mother!”
“Fried eggs!”
“Don’t tell me, Mother, you waited on them.”
“Kdto.”
“Me, no.” Nnambi’s voice huffed very close to Kirabo’s window. “How could you let them?”
“Sit down and tell me what I should have done; gone back to my parents with eight children? Or become a nekyeyombekedde and sold alcohol in the city like Jjali did after your father left her? What if he did not look after my children? Had I taken you away from your father or abandoned you to another woman, I doubt we would be sitting here, you talking to me like this. Remember he has been a good father to you all. And when he returned to us, our family was intact. Yes, I suffered, but you all share the same father. In any case, even if I had left him, what were the chances the next man would be different?” She paused and took a breath. Then she gave a cynical laugh. “God knows what that woman, Jjali, did to your father, because when he left her, he never looked back, not even to toss a coin towards your sister Nnakku’s upkeep. Sometimes I want to go to Jjali and say Whatever you did to our man, thank you.”
“Hmm-hmm, Mother, me? No way. Forget him loving his children. He is supposed to! No way. No way.” Nnambi said no way the same way she said full stop in English.
“Hmm.” Her mother laughed sarcastically. “Suddenly your Tom is a novice compared to your father.” She sighed. “And, child, you would bear everything if you had eight children. You would leave your bed so he could lie with his harlot.”
“I knew about Nnakku and her mother, but I never thought it was so blatant as that. These days Father is always at home taking care of you, so active in church … Why did he do it?”
“Because there were no consequences for him.”
Silence.
“You both look settled, so contented with each other. I envied you.”
“Hmm!”
“Did you forgive him?”
“Forgive him?” The mother laughed. “Child, how do you forgive something not apologised? Instead, I forgave myself of him as we say. My heart let him go and I stopped hurting. Maybe I am contemptuous sometimes. Once upon a time, he sailed up there in the sky. But now he is so old a hyena would not eat him spiced. His being a good husband now is perhaps his idea of an apology.” A sigh. “However, your brothers, becau
se they saw it all, will not forgive him. They have even offered to build a house for me so I can leave him. It is your brothers who buy my clothes, it is your brothers who bring me money, it is I who give him some sometimes …”
“True, the boys worship you, Mother.”
“That is what I am trying to say, Nnambi. Think about it: for all your brothers’ worship of me, are you sure they are not cheating on their wives?”
“Kdto!”
“Here is another thing. Can you believe I wake up in the middle of the night and your father is wide awake with worry?”
“Why?”
“He says you should leave if you are unhappy.”
“He does?”
“You are his princess. No man should make you cry. But I was my father’s princess too.” The woman’s voice caught. She must have contained the emotion because her voice came back strong. “That is why women of old used to say to their men, ‘What you do unto me, some bastard will do unto your precious little girl.’ It is like a law.”
There was a pause, as if Nnambi had accepted her mother’s perspective, but then she exploded. “No way, Mother, no way. I am not you. The world is changing …”
Kirabo was indignant. My father is not a tyrant, Miiro is not a bastard, Sio is not a dog. She considered warning Tom. But what would she say? That your mother-in-law was here and said you are bored with marriage and are wrecking it?
7
The silence in Tom’s house tightened, despite Nnambi’s mother’s intervention. Until Friday night the following week, when the boil bust.
Tom came home early, at around three. One car door banged, which meant he was driving. Perhaps he had come to pick something up, Kirabo thought. She heard him get into the corridor.
“Nnambi?” he called cheerily.
A Girl is a Body of Water Page 14