Let's Tell This Story Properly

by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

  After collecting our bags, I did not realise that I was walking ahead of Mum and Nnaava until I stepped outside Arrivals and a man leapt out of the waiting crowd yelping, ‘Nnabakka?’ I looked back for Mum; she was not there. I looked at the man again. ‘Dad?’

  He had wilted: shorter, skinny, dry. His eyes were old. He held me quietly as if savouring the moment. Then he shrieked, ‘Nnaava,’ let go of me and ran to my sister. Then he was back. ‘God, Nnabakka: where are you going with this tallness?’ Then back to Nnaava: ‘Yii, yii, you’re getting married!’ Back to me: ‘At least I still have you…’ Then Mum arrived and Dad deflated.

  There was no pretending things away any more. Luckily, Mum smiled and Dad rushed to her. They hugged as if he had knocked into her and was steadying her. Then he grabbed her trolley and channelled the rest of his emotions into pushing it. A man stepped out of the waiting crowd and took my trolley. I frowned at Dad. He explained, ‘That’s Kajja, the driver.’

  We followed Dad and Kajja through a tunnel-like walkway until we came to the car park.

  Someone clicked a car lock and the lights of two large vans came on. As I started towards the vans, a group of Chinese men and women rushed past, got into the vans and, without lingering, drove off. Kajja, the driver, saw me staring and laughed, ‘Ah, the Chinese: Ugandans abandon this country like it’s a desert, but to them it’s an oasis.’

  I felt the sting in ‘abandon’ and gave Nnaava a what has it got to do with him look. Kajja wheeled our luggage towards a car while Dad steered Mum’s to another. Nnaava frowned at me then glanced in Mum and Dad’s direction. I looked. Nnaava squeezed my hand. As Kajja put our luggage in the boot, we got in the back of the car and Nnaava whispered, ‘I’m glad we’re not travelling with them; can you imagine?’

  Before I replied, Kajja got into the car and our awareness of what was going on in Mum and Dad’s car intensified. It was like hearing moans from your parents’ bedroom. And Kajja, like an older sibling distracting the younger ones from their parents’ moment, launched into telling us about the development that had taken place in the country since we left. But as we drove from the airport, I couldn’t help glancing back at Mum and Dad’s car. It followed ours like a bad reputation.

  Kajja enjoyed our surprise at the good roads.

  ‘The tender for road maintenance was given to a Chinese company. They repair road surfaces every other year. China has injected life into our economy.’

  We wowed. There were new buildings everywhere along Entebbe Road.

  ‘You know that your European countries no longer allow our corrupt officials to put their money in your banks?’

  We exchanged looks.

  ‘Eh eh! These days they pack the money in suitcases and buy land and build flats and shopping malls and things like that.’

  I contemplated the possibility that development had come to Uganda partly because ‘our’ European countries had finally banned ‘his’ corrupt Ugandan officials from banking with them and partly because China had injected life into the economy. Kajja did not realise that it takes more than holding a British passport to make you British. Clearly, he knew what had happened and had taken Dad’s side.

  ‘The owner of that building committed suicide,’ he was saying. ‘Tsk, he was stupid! Anti-corruption caught him and was forcing him to regurgitate the money he ate. He hanged himself, poor guy.’

  Mum and Dad’s car made to overtake ours. Dad drew level. He hooted to indicate that Kajja was driving too cautiously. I smiled. I had forgotten what a speed junkie Dad was. Kajja stepped on the pedal, but the distance between ours and their car was great.

  ‘That building is empty. No one can afford to rent it. It was built for the CHOGM when your queen came for the Commonwealth.’

  A huge neon sign, Xhing Xhing, glowing red atop a high building, welcomed us into Greater Kampala. But in Katwe, shanty structures still stood defiant as if testimony to a hidden truth. We applauded Katwe’s heroism but knew it was desperation.

  ‘Katwe is still Katwe.’ Kajja was apologetic. It will be the grandchildren of our great grandchildren who will eradicate it.

  The cityscape had changed so much we kept reminding ourselves of what had been. ‘That used to be… there was a market there…’ turning to the right, to the left, looking for familiar features. Had I been on my own, I would have missed the turning to our house. Huang Fei luxury flats stood where the road used to be.

  ‘What happened to the old woman who lived here?’

  ‘Yeah, her guavas were pink inside and sweet rather than salty.’

  ‘Development swept her away.’

  ‘But she looked after her family graveyard; it used to be—’

  ‘Yes, it used to be around here. She kept it neat with flowers; was it removed?’

  ‘I’m telling you, her children were negotiating with buyers even as she gasped her last breath.’

  • • •

  Mum and Dad were getting out of their car when we arrived. There were huge security lights on every side of the house, but the compound was asleep. Still, I could see that the mango and guava trees were so tall they came to window level on the first floor. Even the hedge was higher. The trees had eaten up so much space the compound looked smaller. The pawpaw tree was gone.

  It was close to two in the morning but instead of heading for the door, I retraced my steps along the veranda like I used to, swinging and skipping, to the back of the house. Everything—the outdoor toilet and bathroom, the outdoor kitchen, the kennel, the clothes lines—was still the same. I walked back to the front. It was then, as I got to the front door, that I realised that something was wrong. Dad was unlocking the door rather than someone opening from inside.

  ‘Dad lives alone?’

  Don’t ask me, Nnaava shrugged.

  There is a knowledge that returns to you the minute you arrive home. It is not just unusual, it is downright suspicious for a man Dad’s age and stature to live alone in a big house. It makes people uncomfortable. They whisper, ‘What does he get up to in that house on his own?’ They even ask you, smiling, ‘But why are you hermiting yourself like that? Living alone is not good for your mind.’

  I stopped at the doorstep, leaned forward and peered inside.

  The house was bare.

  Only one sofa of the old set stood in a corner of the sitting room. No carpet, no coffee table, no TV, no bookshelves, no curtains. The wedding pictures, our photographs, batiks, even the banner, CHRIST IS THE CENTRE OF OUR HOME, were all gone. I turned to Dad. He tried to conceal his pleasure at my confusion. I looked at Mum: her face was stone. Nnaava anticipated my reaction and looked away before I turned to her. Why was I the only one shocked?

  I stepped in. It felt like a ghost returning home after decades of being dead. It was our house, but not the home I had left behind. The emptiness made the rooms large. It made our crumpled flat in Stockport seem like a matchbox. I wanted to laugh at the lone chair at the small dining table. What happened to the glass dining table we had?

  No fridge? The security lights outside illuminated the rooms eerily.

  I opened the door to the kitchen and turned on the light. An earthen sigiri without any ash squatted on the floor.

  Stains of the grime the cooker had made on the floor where it once stood were indelible. A pan, a plate, a cup, a spoon, a fork. They had not been used in a long time. The cupboards were empty. Someone had cleaned hastily.

  As I walked back to the sitting room, Nnaava came down the stairs saying, ‘All the bedrooms are empty except theirs.’

  ‘This is how you left the house.’ Dad came towards us, his voice apologetic. I turned to Mum but Dad, perhaps to spare her, added, ‘What you left behind for me was enough. Tonight, and for the three weeks you’re going to be around, we can bring mattresses. On the other hand, we can furnish the house, even tomorrow if you want, provided that you’re coming back to use it.’

  Silence fell and then stretched.

  The question of coming b
ack had arisen too soon. We needed to sit down, catch our breath and recover from the ten years. Then consider thinking about it.

  ‘Can we get mattresses for tonight?’

  It was right that Mum should say that. After all, she stole us away while Dad was on a pastors’ retreat in the US. Nostalgia is a bitch. I had missed home after all. I was not just confused, I was hurt that my home had been gutted so ruthlessly, that Dad looked as abandoned as the house.

  ‘The girls will be in a better position to take that decision after they have rested.’ Mum distanced herself from any decision of coming back.

  Dad stepped out of the house and told Kajja, who sat in the car, to bring the mattresses.

  Within no time, Kajja arrived with two new foam mattresses. He dropped them on the floor in the sitting room. We looked at him like there are three of us, where is the third?

  ‘That’s it,’ he said.

  Silence came again.

  ‘Take one of them to a spare bedroom for me,’ Mum said. ‘The girls will share.’

  Awkwardness hissed. There is nothing more excruciating than watching your father make a fool of himself trying to get your stony mother into his bed. We had just arrived after a decade of separation and so far he had made two clumsy passes at her. I wished I was a toddler.

  Kajja heaved one of the mattresses above his head and walked towards the stairs. Dad, humiliated in front of his man, closed his face. But it did not last.

  ‘Okay.’ He clapped, then rubbed his hands. Looking at me and Nnaava he asked, ‘Do you wish to eat first or take baths?’

  We looked at each other.

  ‘Will the food be brought here?’ I asked. ‘There are no plates or cutlery.’

  ‘As I said before, you swept the house clean when you left.’ He smiled at me even though he was talking to Mum. ‘We could go to Fang Fang: you like Chinese?’

  ‘I’m too tired to go out again.’ Mum was irritable. ‘Besides, I didn’t come home to eat Chinese.’

  I threw myself on the remaining mattress and Nnaava joined me. Mum and Dad remained standing. Tension tightened around the lone chair: Mum’s injured anger and Dad’s desperate guilt. Mum had declined the chair. Nnaava and I maintained our neutrality as if unaware. To break the silence, Nnaava said that we would bathe while Dad went to look for food. As soon as Dad and Kajja left, Nnaava and I wheeled our suitcases to the bedrooms.

  God knows where Dad found Ugandan food at that time of the night. He and Kajja came back with two women. They had everything—plates, cutlery and all the Ugandan food I had forgotten. I was starving. Dad must have booked them in advance.

  Later, as I slipped onto the mattress next to Nnaava, I asked how we had ‘swept the house clean’. Nnaava was fifteen when Mum stole us away, I was eight. Nnaava was bound to know.

  ‘Mum, partly out of anger and partly to raise the money for our flight, pawned everything in the house, save for a single item for him…Who knew he would leave everything the way we left it for ten years?’

  I remembered the day we left. Mum woke us up very early in the morning—she was with her militant sister, Aunt Ndagire—and told us to get dressed: ‘We’re leaving.’ We ate breakfast hastily. I did not read much into ‘leaving’ even though we spent three days at Aunt Ndagire’s before flying out. At the time, I thought we were going abroad for a visit. Mum and Dad travelled a lot. Abroad was a place you visited and did a lot of shopping for family. I didn’t see Mum strip the house. I didn’t find out that we had left Dad for good until two months later in Manchester, when, after I had been badgering her about Dad and when we would go home, Mum said, ‘We’re not going back to your father: we’re on our own now.’

  I didn’t ask why. It was the way she said your father as if she was no longer related to him. I first got suspicious when we were enrolled in school and joined a surgery. But I dismissed my suspicions because you trust your mother. Looking back, I should have realised when we left Uganda during term time. But that’s being young for you.

  Then Mum stopped speaking in muted tones on the phone to Aunt Ndagire and I heard that Pastor—Mum called Dad Pastor—had almost collapsed when he returned from the retreat to an empty house. Apparently, he went around Mum’s relatives and friends asking for information about us. None of them knew where we were except Aunt Ndagire, who would not talk to him. He begged, prayed and fasted—for a telephone number, but god was mute. I heard Mum say, ‘Let that woman cook also.’

  It tore flesh to hear it. It hurt that Mum had told Aunt Ndagire about it. It should have been a family secret. Parents ought to know that children are awfully protective of their family. That while they’ve fallen out with each other, we haven’t. Why humiliate each other within our hearing? It hurts in unspeakable ways to hear them say horrible things about each other. It doesn’t matter what the other parent has done, children are slow, even reluctant, to apportion blame.

  And so, through Mum’s conversation on the phone, I found out that we had fled Uganda amidst a scandal. My father, a whole pastor, had fathered a child on the side. Mum, unable to take the scandal (a pastor’s wife patched with another woman, as if she was not enough), had fled to Britain. I refused to think about it. I did not think about the child either. But it hurt daily that we were in a strange country, that Mum was struggling to make ends meet. For a long time, I hated Mum for bringing us to Britain.

  Now I asked Nnaava why we weren’t staying at Aunt Ndagire’s: ‘Why come back to a house we stripped and fled?’

  ‘Dad paid for our tickets.’

  ‘Do you think she’ll forgive him?’

  ‘Who knows? Ten years ago she couldn’t bear to hear his voice, today she’s sleeping in the same house as him. Maybe she’s tired of the poverty in Britain.’

  ‘Maybe it’s for your engagement rites: we have to put on a show of togetherness. Besides, she has to prepare the house to receive Mulumba’s family.’

  ‘You know what a reconciliation between Mum and Dad means? You come back with Mum!’

  I put my head down. That question again. I lifted my head and said, ‘I’m about to start university: there’s no way I’m coming back before I finish.’

  ‘Kdt,’ Nnaava clicked. Mum’s decision would not affect her. She had a job and would be moving in with Mulumba after the wedding.

  ‘You can’t undo ten years of living in Britain just like that!’

  ‘Maybe they won’t reconcile.’ Nnaava did not seem to care either way.

  I wanted them to get back together. I liked the sound of ‘Mum and Dad’, I liked the idea of coming home to them, them growing old together, of bringing grandchildren to them in the same house.

  The fact that Mum had not asked for a divorce in the last ten years was hope.

  ‘Look’—I sat up—‘Mum’s resistance is weakening. I mean, why is she sleeping in a separate bedroom? It’s an invitation to Dad to sneak in with her while we sleep. If she really wanted to send him a clear message, she would have slept here with us.’

  Nnaava giggled, ‘Ten years without Dad: she’s as horny as a nun!’

  Dad walked in and I jumped. I heard myself say, ‘Dad, can you bring back my chair and bed and plate and cup?’

  He stopped, smiled and shook his head in disbelief. ‘Come here.’ He hugged me. Then he looked at Nnaava expectantly and she was obliged to say, ‘Mine too,’ then she added matter-of-factly, ‘We need to furnish the house before Mulumba’s clan arrives.’

  I had spoken too soon. Perhaps it was because I resented Mum for using me and Nnaava as a whip to flog Dad. I should have been allowed to gather my own anger against him. I should have been asked if I wanted to leave him, especially as it was such a drastic departure.

  Surprisingly, Nnaava was the one that sneaked, after three years in Britain, and rang Dad. She had started university and was broke. For a long time, I thought she had got a boyfriend until one day the phone rang while she was in the bathroom and I saw the Ugandan area code. I answered it. I too agreed not
to tell Mum that we were in touch with him. Dad was forthright about his infidelity. He had accepted the punishment god had imposed on him—that of losing his family. He would never marry as long as Mum was single, but he would look after the child he had fathered. He rang twice a week and sent me and Nnaava money regularly. Though I felt that I deserved my father and Mum had neither the right to deprive me of him nor to inflict a life of poverty in Britain on me, I still felt guilty going behind her back.

  • • •

  That first Sunday at Dad’s church.

  We were guided to the front row to our former seats set aside for the pastor’s family. The three chairs were empty. Nnaava and I sat down on the sides leaving the middle seat for Mum like we used to. I looked back, wondering where she had gone. Mum sat on the row behind us. Her chair, empty between Nnaava and me, formed a gap that told the whole church things that I would rather have kept private. I was tempted to sit on it and gag it, but it was too loud.

  Nnaava leaned across and whispered, ‘Looks like Mum’s legs are still crossed.’

  I did not laugh.

  But Dad was unruffled. Our presence had energised him. He did not look so desiccated any more. He wore one of the suits Nnaava and I had bought for him. When he stood up to go to the pulpit, he walked tall. He opened his sermon, entitled ‘Hope in a Hopeless World’, with: ‘Is god good?’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘All the time?’

  ‘God is good.’

  I had forgotten how it felt to be part of Dad’s congregation. Because I was born into it, it had been a routine, unquestioned, expected; it was life. Now I stood outside, a spectator. The thing is, it’s easy to lose your faith in Britain, where everything is under scrutiny. You can’t live life without questioning it. And when it comes to Christianity and faith, British scrutiny is vicious. I still went to church in Manchester, but for Mum’s sake. Church had become theatre. I enjoyed dressing up, meeting up with friends, the performance and the music. Mum felt it was the safe place to meet future husbands and I could see her conniving with other mothers to make introductions between sons and daughters.