4
Since there was not a grain of sleep in sight, Kirabo opened her eyes. She raised her head off the pillow and listened. Across the room, Grandfather breathed evenly. She put her head down again, yawned, turned on her left side, then on to her back. She pushed the covers below her waist, then kicked them to the foot of her bed.
When she had returned from Nsuuta’s house, her absence had not been noticed. But during supper, seeing Grandmother’s trusting face, the way she fussed over her (“Why are you toying with your food, Kirabo?”), made her feel like a hyena. A chill came over her. She pulled the covers back up, yawned again, and turned on her right side. She tucked in her knees and when she started to warm up, she eased on to her back. Her head fell to one side. Her hands became so weak she could not lift them.
She was outside the house, floating above the doorstep. It was as dark outside as it was in the bedroom. The wind was strong. Banana leaves flapped so close it sounded as if she stood in the middle of Grandmother’s plantation. She flew across the front yard, on to the road. She started up the hill, counting the houses as she went. All the homes were asleep, the road empty, the silence blissful. Even malice appeared to be taking a rest. She came to the last home before the hilltop, the reverend’s house, where Grandmother grew up when her father was reverending the villages. Closer to the hilltop, the dispensary stunk of disinfectant even at night. Nsuuta was its first nurse before she lost her sight.
Kirabo reached the top of the hill. The road cut between the twin peaks of Nattetta Hill. On the right peak was the Protestant church and its schools. On the left peak was the Catholic parish and its schools. She turned to the right, the Protestant side and her church. She flew to the roof and climbed the steeple. She stood on top of the spire holding on to the cross, the highest point in Nattetta. She held the other hand out and leaned away from the cross. She started to swing round the cross, round and round, picking up speed until she spun so fast the village below disappeared and heaven was a vortex. Then, like a cannon, she launched into the sky, up, up, until she couldn’t go higher. She stayed. The world below was nothing, pitch-black. She waited, waited. Then a light began to germinate, sprouting out of the ground below like a bean planted in a tin. It grew to the size of a candle flame. When it became the size of a bulb, Kirabo’s heart expanded; that was the place where her mother liv—
Bo, I am calling.
She fell back into bed. Batte was returning from Modani Baara. As drunk as a frog. Kirabo buried her head in the pillow. Somehow he only started singing when he reached Miiro’s house.
I am a smile-thrift, you know, Mother ran out of smiles.
Mother gave me a voice so huge I cannot help singing.
It was so heavy, God held it with both hands.
But humans are such, they would bear the sky a grudge.
Hmm-hmm, let me sing: I am a son of beauty.
Hmm-hmm, let me dance: life is a thief.
Hmm-hmm, let me drink: the dead were hasty.
Where is my mother, the most beautiful …
Who has seen her, I will reward—
Batte’s voice staggered under a high note and collapsed. The problem with Batte, Kirabo thought, was that he was shrouded in mystery. On the one hand you had Batte the village drunk, who sang the residents awake every night; and on the other there was Batte the shy recluse. There was the rare one, Tom’s best friend, whom you glimpsed when Tom came to visit. What Kirabo knew about him, she had gleaned from whispers and careless remarks.
Apparently, as a boy, Batte lived with his mother, Nnante, an unfortunate second wife in whom the husband quickly lost interest. Batte was her only child. He was a hard-working boy—always at home helping with chores, then doing homework. In school, he was so clever Miiro got him into Kololo High, an Asian secondary school in the city. However, when the time came to go out with his friends like teenage boys do, Batte remained the same good boy. Nnante started to hint that she would manage the chores, that he could put away his homework and go with Tom to look for fun, but Batte refused. She shoved him outside, saying, “The kitchen is for women.”
“Poor Nnante,” Widow Diba once sighed, “how she haunted the bushes.” According to Widow Diba, Nnante found every leaf, root, seed, sap, and stem of a plant recommended to cure Batte’s lack of adventure. It did not matter where—deep in the jungle, in the swamps, on riverbanks, or on hilltops—Nnante made the journey. And she administered the herbs in all forms: smoked, sniffed, chewed, tied around Batte’s waist, mixed with food, or mixed in his bath. Nnante tried everything. She even took him to the River Nile and immersed him in water—but wa, nothing. Until a snake put an end to her quest.
Nnante was found stiff and dry in the bush with herbs gripped in her dead hands. Widow Diba pried them out. And when Batte was collected from the city where he worked, Diba said to him, “You see these herbs, young man, you see them, hmm? I had to break your mother’s fingers to prise them out. Take them. If they don’t heal you of whatever is wrong, then I don’t know.”
The herbs did worse. Batte did not go back to his city job. He stayed in his mother’s little house and cried and degenerated into the village drunk—reticent and reclusive by day, singing his mother out of the grave by night.
Kirabo’s mind grew incoherent. She was at Batte’s house, but the church steeple floated by, followed by Nsuuta’s book cabin, then her grandparents’ wedding picture. Footsteps were coming, faint. They crunched loose gravel, getting louder. The shoes appeared, then the legs. She would recognise her mother’s skinny legs anywhere. But before the rest of her body appeared, the legs were whipped away.
•
Why does rain make pee painful? Kirabo crossed her legs and made rhythmless wiggles. She peered outside; there was no one about. The toilet was too far and the rain would not stop. You can pee on the verandah; the rain will wash it away. She edged along the verandah. By the time she got to the furthest end, the pee was unstoppable. She fumbled with her knickers and barely managed to squat in time. Glorious relief. Columns of rainwater, formed by the corrugated iron roof, fell like lines of colourless strings. On the ground, puddles receiving them danced in rippling waves. Her own rivulet snaked from between her legs, hesitant at first, then certain, hurtling across the verandah until it fell over the edge into the puddles. The waves in the puddle grew outwards. Too bad she had run out of pee. Funny, though: it was getting warm, cosy even despite the rain.
Kirabo woke up. A wet patch under her hip was starting to get cold. She sat up. It was not even raining outside. For a while, she sat in her pee, trying to come to terms with what she had done. If only she could sew her peeing hole closed. She could already hear the teenagers jeering What map did the cartographer draw last night? as she took her bedding out for washing. She eased her bottom on to the patch—it would be dry by morning—and lay back. But after a while, the wet patch started to make her skin itch. She sat up again.
“Jjajja?”
Miiro caught his breath and lifted his head. “Has it rained in your bed, kabejja?”
“Yes.”
“Hop into mine then.” And he moved towards the wall.
Kirabo pulled off her wet nightdress, felt for a dress in the dark, and pulled it on. She jumped into her grandfather’s bed, curled into his back, and smelt Barbasol on his skin. By the time he pulled the blanket up to her neck, she was asleep.