Whose Handwriting Is This?

9. Dress decently at all times so that men respect you. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Short skirts are an invitation.

I would like to say that I wrote this one from deep personal conviction. I was twelve. My deepest personal conviction at twelve was that Blue Band tasted better from the tin than on bread. The temple line I can place almost to the minute. It came from Pastor Kasirye, on a Sunday when the youth service had been merged with the main service because the youth pastor's car had broken down at Kibuye. "Short skirts are an invitation" was Mrs. Nakato, our Senior One class teacher, who said it every Monday at assembly while looking at the same three girls. I was not one of the three girls. I wrote it down anyway, the way you write down a bus number you do not need, just in case.

The group chat kept coming in for most of that night. Two hundred and six messages. Wedding contributions, a baby shower, somebody's cousin selling Brazilian hair, a long voice note from a girl named Patience about a job she had got at a bank. I listened to the whole voice note. I did not die. That surprised me enough that in the morning I went to the cupboard in Mama's sitting room, the one with the sliding door that sticks halfway, and took out the exercise book.

You know the one by now. Blue Picfare, MY LIFE PLAN on the cover in capitals, underlined three times, the third line wobbling off the edge as if my hand had run out of conviction before the cardboard did. I had been opening it for months, but only to particular pages, the way you only press on a bruise you already know is there. Item 7 when I was feeling sorry for myself. Item 6 when I wanted to feel worse. Item 4 when I wanted to argue with someone who could not argue back.

That morning I decided to read the whole thing, front to back, properly. I want to be honest about why. I was going to find the mistake.

I had a theory, and it was a good theory. It went like this. The plan was sound. The plan had been written carefully by a serious child and endorsed, implicitly, by every adult who ever patted my head. Somewhere between page one and the girl lying on the bed with a cracked flash disk, I had deviated. If I could find the exact point of deviation, the item where I first went wrong, I could understand the failure, and if I could understand it I could, at least, stop being surprised by it. This is what passes for hope when you have been unemployed for over a year.

I sat at the dining table with the book, a cup of tea going cold, and the pencil from the kiosk. I had already been doing the Four-Column Ledger by then, one item at a time, the way you have watched me do it in this book. Planned, Happened, Paid, Revised. I had a sheet of foolscap ruled into four for each item, clipped behind the book with one of Mama's clothes pegs. That morning I put the sheets aside. I was not revising. I was investigating.

I read it like a lawyer reads a contract when her client is the one being sued.

Item 1, Make Mama proud. Breached. Item 2, Makerere. Fulfilled, but look what I did there. Item 3, never give anyone a reason to talk. Breached, twice, though nobody had talked yet, which only meant I was in arrears. Item 4, no boyfriends until a job. Breached so thoroughly it was almost impressive. Item 5, good grades. Fulfilled, but what was the use? Item 6, married at twenty-seven to a saved man with a good job, a boy first then a girl. I was twenty-six. There was no man, saved or otherwise. The children had been and gone in a different order, in a different way, and I had not told anybody.

I made a list in the margin of an old bank statement. Breached, fulfilled-but-useless, breached, breached, fulfilled-but-useless, breached. It looked like a school report written by a teacher who had given up. I remember feeling something close to satisfaction. Here it was in writing. You see? I had not been imagining it.

Then I got to item 10, and the investigation got stuck.

10. Have a big house in Muyenga with a gate that opens by itself. Put a fountain.

A fountain. I sat looking at that word for a long time. I have never wanted a fountain. I have never stood near a fountain and thought, yes, this, I would like to pay a water bill for this. I tried to remember being a child who wanted a fountain and I could not find her anywhere. What I found, instead, slowly, was a picture. A double-page spread in a magazine, one of those glossy East African ones that cost more than a week of bread, which Auntie Specioza used to bring when she visited and leave on the arm of the sofa for Mama to admire. A Nairobi businesswoman in a gold dress standing beside her fountain, arms open, as if she had personally invented water.

I had not wanted the fountain. I had wanted to be the kind of child who would one day be in the magazine on Auntie Specioza's lap.

That was the first item. I did not trust it. One magazine fountain does not overturn a whole plan, and I was not ready to let myself off. So I went back to item 9, the temple and the skirts, and wrote in the margin, in pencil, very small: Pastor K + Mrs Nakato. Then I went to item 6, the wedding at twenty-seven, and tried to do the same thing, and I could not, so I did the only thing available to me at eleven in the morning on a weekday in my mother's house. I went to find Mama.

She was at the back, by the charcoal stove, sorting beans on a tray, picking out the small stones with the speed of a woman who has done this since Obote. I stood in the doorway with the book.

"Mama, did you tell me to get married at twenty-seven?"

She did not look up. "Who is getting married?"

"Nobody. In my plan. I wrote that I'd marry at twenty-seven. Did that come from you?"

She picked out a stone and threw it into the grass. "When a child is still on the back, she thinks the mother's eyes are her own eyes." She picked out another stone. "I married your father at twenty-two. I did not want you to rush."

"So the twenty-seven was yours?"

"Twenty-seven was Jjajja Florence. She used to say a girl who marries before twenty-five ends up raising her husband also." Mama looked up then, briefly, the look she gives a cooking pot to check whether it needs more water. "You were listening to her? You never listened to anybody."

"I wrote it down."

"Eh." She went back to the beans. "Then you were listening."

I stood there a while longer. Mama does not do conversations about feelings. She does conversations about beans, and if you are patient, the feelings arrive in the beans. I waited. Nothing more came except the tray being shaken, the good beans sliding to one side, the stones left exposed.

I went back to the dining table and wrote beside item 6: Jjajja F. (via Mama, who did not even agree with her).

After that I could not stop.

I want to describe the next two hours carefully, because they changed what I did with my hands before they changed anything I thought. I went through every item with the pencil. For each one I asked a single question. Who said this first? And I wrote the answer in the margin in letters so small you need to tilt the book to the window to read them.

Item 1, make Mama proud. That one is complicated, so I wrote: Mama, partly. Also every relative at every report day. Also me.

Item 2, Makerere, not Kyambogo. Uncle Godfrey, who studied at Makerere in 1983 and has not stopped mentioning it since, including at funerals.

Item 3, never give anyone a reason to talk. The whole parish. Specifically the women's guild. Specifically Mrs. Ssekandi, who once gave a reason to talk herself, which is how I learned what talk was.

Item 4, no boyfriends until a job. Mama, Mrs. Nakato, a drama at the school's Christian Union called "The Wages of Sin," in which the girl who had a boyfriend ended up in the village, and in the final scene, I am not making this up, the village was represented by a single banana leaf.

Item 5, a master's degree, first class if God allows. Our headmaster's speech day address, in which he announced that first class was the only class for the children of this school. Second upper was added by me later, as you know, as a concession to a busy God.

Item 7, be somebody by twenty-five. A poster in a bookshop on Kampala Road. I can see the font. White letters on a red background, a man in a suit pointing at me from across the shop like a recruitment advert for the British army. I do not know what the somebody was supposed to be. Neither did the poster.

Item 8, read the whole Bible by fifteen. Pastor Kasirye again. He had a reading chart. I got to Leviticus and stopped, which I now understand to be the traditional place.

Item 11, buy Mama a car. Every gospel musician on Sunday morning radio thanking God for the car they bought their mother.

There are fourteen items. I sourced eleven to other people before lunch. I want to put that sentence down plainly and leave it there for you, because I sat with it on the foolscap for a long time. Eleven out of fourteen.

What I did next was small and a bit absurd. I got up and went to the kitchen, came back with Mama's red ballpoint, the one she uses for the electricity book, and at the top of the inside cover, above the date in my twelve-year-old handwriting, I wrote: Compiled by. Then I put the red pen down, picked the pencil back up, and wrote the list. Pastor Kasirye. Mrs. Nakato. Jjajja Florence. Uncle Godfrey. The women's guild. Mama. The headmaster. A bookshop poster. A magazine belonging to Auntie Specioza. Gospel radio. Me.

I wrote "me" last because I was the last person I could find.

I sat there and looked at the cover of that list, and the question I had carried into the morning, why did I fail, simply would not sit right anymore. I tried it several times, the way you try a key that has always worked in a lock that has been changed. Why did I fail. Why did I fail at Jjajja Florence's age for marriage. Why did I fail at a poster on Kampala Road. Why did I fail to build Auntie Specioza's fountain.

It came out as a different question on its own, and I said it aloud, which made a hen outside go quiet. "Whose dream was I failing at?"

You may have to do this with your own plan, whatever form it takes. It might not be an exercise book. It might be a vision board from a church retreat, or the things your father said in the car to school, or the list in your phone titled "Goals 2019." I am not going to tell you what you will find. I will tell you that I had been reading my plan as if a grown woman had written it after careful thought, signed it in front of witnesses and agreed to be held to it. A twelve-year-old with a Bic pen, eavesdropping on a room full of adults, wrote it in the time between homework and supper. She did not know about unemployment rates. She did not know about the cost of transport to an interview in Ntinda. She did not know that you can do everything the poster said and still be lying on a bed in your mother's house at twenty-six. She did not know what her own body would do, or what she would decide about it, or how long she would keep quiet afterwards. She had none of that information. Nobody gave it to her, because nobody had it to give.

You cannot sign a contract at twelve. Ugandan law will tell you that much for free. I had been holding myself in breach of an agreement I was never old enough to enter.

I am telling you this as if it arrived in my body as relief. It did, partly. My shoulders came down from somewhere near my ears. I ate lunch, posho and the beans Mama had sorted, and I tasted them, which I had not been doing for some time. But there was something else underneath, harder to describe, and I do not want to tidy it up for you.

If the plan was borrowed, then the eleven items I had been grieving for over a year had never been mine to lose. I had grieved anyway. I had paid in full. The nights awake doing the arithmetic of being twenty-six with nothing. The weddings I avoided so nobody could ask. The way I stopped picking up when Uncle Godfrey called, because I could hear Makerere in his voice. The things I did at university and afterwards to protect item 3, the silence I chose and kept choosing, the not telling Mama, the not telling anybody. Some of what I paid for that item cannot be refunded. I knew that at the dining table with the pencil in my hand, and I know it now. I paid it in someone else's currency, and the debt was still real.

Certainty had been doing a job for me. As long as I believed the plan was right and I was wrong, I at least knew where I stood. Guilty. A prosecutor knows what to do with a guilty person. Without the plan as a contract I did not know what I was, or what I was supposed to want, or what to put in the Revised column of anything. I sat at the table with eleven sources in the margin and no idea what came next.

Mama came in around four with a basin of washed plates and saw the book open, the red writing on the cover.

"You have written in red in your plan." She said this the way she might have said, you have put salt in the tea.

"I've written who it belonged to."

She dried a plate. She held it up to the window and looked at it, as if a plate could hide something from her. "A borrowed hoe," she said, "does not dig the borrower's field the way she likes."

I waited for more. Mama put the plate down on the pile.

"So what do you want?" she asked, and went out before I could answer, which was just as well, because I did not have one.

I tried that evening. I took a clean foolscap sheet and wrote across the top, in pencil, What do I want. Then I sat there. Everything that came was either another borrowed item in a new dress, a good job, a nice place, people to stop asking, or it was a thing I did not want, which is easier to find and less useful. I crossed out the question and tried it another way. What do I want to have. Same problem. A list of objects is a list of things other people can see. I knew that list already. It had a fountain in it.

I wrote a third version and left it uncrossed, mostly because I was tired:

What do I actually want to feel?

I did not answer it that night. I could not have. I had not asked myself how I felt about anything without immediately checking it against a column, and I did not trust the answers. I did write some of the ones that came, small and ugly, at the bottom of the page. Not ashamed at weddings. Rested. Able to hear my phone ring without my stomach going. Safe to tell the truth to one person. I looked at that last one for a while and left it there.

Then I went back to the three items I had not sourced, because they bothered me. Item 13 was mine, I was fairly sure, in the dull way a sentence can be mine: Keep my room tidy. That had no author but laziness. Item 14 was a joke I'd written for myself, Never eat matooke without g.nut sauce, which I have honoured more faithfully than anything else in the book.

Item 12 was at the bottom of the second page, and I had read it so many times in the past year without noticing it that it took me a minute to see it at all. The writing is different from everything above it. It is not pressed hard. There are no capitals, no underlining, no parenthesis to close the loopholes. It slopes slightly uphill, the way my handwriting did when I was writing fast and happy and nobody was checking.

12. see the sea. put my feet in it and see if it is really salty like they say.

I looked for a source. A teacher, a pastor, a poster, a relative. Nobody in my family had seen the sea. Nobody at church preached about it, except Jonah, and he did not recommend it. I searched for a long time, honestly, turning the pages back and forth, the pencil ready. I could not find anyone to write beside it.

At nine that night, with Mama's radio on the late news in the next room, I picked up my phone, opened the browser, and typed: bus Kampala to Mombasa price.