Telling One Person

10. Never tell people your problems. Keep house business in the house. A clever girl solves her own problems and does not go crying to everybody like a baby.

There is a full stop after "baby" that went through the page. I can feel it with my thumb from the back, a tiny crater. At twelve I believed problems were like dirty plates: you dealt with them quietly in the kitchen, and the visitors in the sitting room never needed to know there had been a meal. I had absorbed this from the women around me, who could host a funeral, a wedding meeting and a quarrel with a co-wife in the same afternoon without once raising their voices above "Kale, you're welcome, sit."

I kept that item longer than any other. I kept it after I stopped waking at five, after I stopped praying with my eyes closed, after I stopped believing in item six in all three of its versions. I kept it in pen.

You would think a woman who has just been driven to a clinic by her mother, flask and all, has already broken it. I thought so too. I thought the hard part was behind me. I had stayed. I had told someone. I had gone on the Thursday. In my head the story was finished, the way a film is finished when the ambulance arrives and the music changes.

The nurse who called my name was a short woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she said it wrong, the way everybody outside my family says it wrong, and I answered anyway. Mama half stood. The nurse made a small gesture with her hand, palm down, the universal Ugandan sign for "Mummy, relax," and Mama sat again and held her handbag tighter.

The room had a desk, two plastic chairs, a calendar from a pharmaceutical company showing a smiling family on a beach, and a box of tissues that someone had clearly bought in bulk. I remember thinking: that is a lot of tissues for one room. Then I thought: that is the right number of tissues for this room.

She asked me the questions. How was I sleeping. How was I eating. Did I still have thoughts of ending my life. She asked the last one in the same voice as the first two, which shocked me, and then steadied me. I said yes, sometimes, less than before. She wrote that down. She asked whether I was safe tonight. I said Mama was in the waiting room. She looked at me over the glasses and said, "That is not what I asked," and I said yes, I was safe tonight, and this time it was true, and she wrote that down too.

Then she asked what I thought had brought me here.

I had an answer ready. I had rehearsed it in the car while Mama hummed a hymn under her breath, the one about the sweet hour of prayer, which she only hums when she is frightened. My answer was good. It had structure. It was the kind of answer a Makerere graduate gives.

I said I had graduated with a strong Second Upper and had been unemployed for over a year. I said I had applied for, at last count, a hundred and forty jobs, including one as a "Dynamic Field Officer (Must Own Motorcycle)" and one at a bank that wanted five years' experience from applicants under twenty-five, which is a mathematical problem nobody at the bank appeared to have noticed. I said I had watched my classmates post their first salaries in the form of restaurant photos. I said I had been raised to believe that hard work led to reward, and that the gap between what I had done and what I had received had broken something in my head. I said I felt like a failure. I said I was tired.

All of it was true. I want to be clear about that. I was not lying to her.

She listened without interrupting. When I finished she nodded and said, "Okay," the way you say okay to a child who has explained that the glass broke itself.

I went home that afternoon feeling like I had passed an exam. Mama made matooke with groundnut sauce, which in our house is the food of crisis and celebration equally, so you can never tell from the plate which one you are having. I ate. She watched me eat. Neither of us mentioned the clinic.

Over the next weeks I learned that help, when you actually find it, is mostly logistics.

The first logistic was money. The clinic visit had been free because a doctor at the referral hospital had written a note, but the counselling was another matter. A private counsellor in Kololo wanted eighty thousand shillings a session. I did the sum on my phone, the way I used to do sums for job adverts, and arrived at a number roughly equal to what Mama spent on food for the household in a fortnight. I was not going to ask for that. I was the one who was supposed to be sending money home by now. The nurse with the beaded glasses gave me a slip of paper with the name of an organisation in Nsambya that ran a sliding-scale programme. Sliding scale, it turned out, meant you paid what you could, and what I could was ten thousand, which was roughly the transport fare there and back if the boda guy was in a good mood and the rain held off.

The second logistic was the Thursday. Sessions were on Thursday afternoons at two. This sounds like nothing. You try explaining to a household of aunties why a jobless woman with no visible illness disappears every Thursday at half past twelve wearing her good shoes. Auntie Ruth, my mother's elder sister, who had come to stay "for a few weeks" in the manner of a government that comes to stay for a few decades, decided I had a boyfriend. Then she decided I had a job I was hiding out of pride. Then, around the fourth Thursday, she decided I had joined one of those churches that meets in a warehouse and makes you donate your rent. Each theory was more flattering than the truth. I let her keep them.

The third logistic was God. Our pastor, a kind man with a weakness for the word "breakthrough," had prayed over me in the vestry the month before. He had laid his hand on my head and rebuked the spirit of heaviness, and I had felt the warmth of his palm and nothing else. When Mama mentioned, carefully, that I was "seeing someone at a clinic for stress," he said the clinic was fine, God works through doctors, but I should also fast on Wednesdays. So I fasted on Wednesdays and went to counselling on Thursdays and on Fridays I was so hungry and so emotionally exfoliated that I slept until eleven, which twelve-year-old me would have reported to the authorities.

(I want to say something for that pastor, because it would be easy to make him the joke. He did not tell me to stop. He did not say that therapy was for people without faith. In our church, that alone made him a radical.)

The fourth logistic was me.

The counsellor was a woman called Mrs Akello, who wore cardigans in all weathers and kept a bowl of glucose sweets on the table between us. I never saw her eat one. I ate them steadily, one per difficult question, so you can imagine the state of my teeth by the end. She gave me homework. The first week it was a sheet of paper divided into a grid, one row per day, where I was to write down what I did each hour and rate my mood from one to ten. I looked at this sheet in the matatu home and thought: I have a Second Upper from Makerere University and I am being asked to colour in my feelings. I mocked it thoroughly in my head, in the voice of every relative who had ever asked me what exactly one does with a degree in Social Sciences.

Then I filled it in, because I have never in my life failed to do homework, and because the grid had boxes, and I have always been helpless before a box.

What came back was boring and useful. Mornings were twos. Afternoons after a walk were fours. Evenings when Auntie Ruth asked about my "plans" were ones. The night I helped my cousin with her Primary Seven maths, explaining fractions with a mango cut into eight pieces, was a six. I hadn't had a six in months. Mrs Akello looked at the sheet for a long time and asked me to do more of the mango thing. I said I couldn't exactly find a Primary Seven child every evening. She said, "You'd be surprised," and I was, later.

So that was what help looked like, week to week. A boda to Nsambya. Ten thousand shillings folded twice in my bra. A cardigan, a bowl of sweets, a grid. Walk in the afternoon. Eat something. Sleep at a reasonable hour. Come back Thursday. It was so dull. I had expected, I think, something closer to exorcism.

And I kept giving the same answer to the question underneath all the others. Why do you think you're here? Unemployment. The plan. Effort without reward. Every session I offered it again, polished it slightly, added a new job advert for comic effect. ("Wanted: Receptionist. Must be Born-Again, Light-Skinned and Not Above 23.") Mrs Akello laughed at the adverts. She did. And then she waited.

It was the sixth Thursday. I know because I had started counting them in the back of the blue Picfare book, six small strokes in the margin of the inside cover, in pen. It rained on the way and the boda dropped me at the gate soaked from the knees down, so I sat in Mrs Akello's room with my shoes off and my feet on a piece of newspaper she had laid down, like a child who has come in from playing.

She asked about the grid. I gave her the grid. She asked about my week. I gave her my week. Then she put down her pen and said, "Can I tell you something I've noticed?"

I said yes, because in Uganda you cannot say no to that question without starting a clan dispute.

She said, "Every week you tell me about the jobs. Every week you're very funny about it. And every week, when you get to the part about university, you go quiet for a moment and skip forward. Like you're stepping over something on the floor."

I looked at my feet on the newspaper. The headline was about fuel prices.

I want to describe this accurately, because I think the accuracy matters more than the drama. I did not burst into tears. I did not have a revelation. What happened was that my face got very hot and my mouth went dry and I reached for a sweet and didn't unwrap it. I held it. The wrapper crackled in my fist.

"There's something," I said.

She waited.

"It's not related," I said. "It's old. It's from before."

She waited.

I had told no one. Not Mama. Not my closest friend. Not the pastor, God forbid, nor God, really, because I had stopped addressing Him on that subject after the second time. Two people in the world knew, and one of them was me, and the other one I had not spoken to properly in a very long time.

I said, "I was pregnant. At campus." Then, because the sentence was a lie by omission, and I had spent so long being decent even when nobody was looking: "Twice."

It came out wrong. It came out too loud for the size of the room and then too quiet for the rest. I started explaining at the wrong end, with the second time, then went back to the first, then said something about the hostel, then said "I don't know why I'm telling you this, it's not why I'm here," which was the stupidest sentence I have ever spoken, and I have spoken a lot of them, including, in Senior Two, a confident defence of the theory that Kenya was an island. I did not tell her the decisions in any order that made sense. I said "I'm not a bad person" twice, without being asked. I talked about the dates. I could not stop talking about the dates, as if precision would make it respectable. I remember saying the name of the month of the first one and then saying "a Tuesday," as though she would need to file it.

Mrs Akello did not write anything down. That was the first thing I noticed. Her pen stayed on the table. She pushed the box of tissues an inch toward me, and I didn't take one, and she didn't push it any further.

When I finally stopped she said, "Thank you for telling me."

That was it. That was all she said for a while. Then she asked, "How long have you been carrying that by yourself?"

I counted. Out loud, on my fingers, like a child with a mango. It was years. More years than I had been unemployed. More years than I had been depressed, if you measured depression by the time I couldn't get off the bed, which I now suspect is the wrong way to measure it.

I unwrapped the sweet and put it in my mouth and it tasted of nothing, then of oranges.

Here is what I did not expect. I did not feel lighter, at least not then. I felt exposed, like the morning after you have told a friend too much at a party and you lie there replaying it. On the boda home I held onto the rack behind me with both hands and thought: now someone knows. Now it's real. Now she'll look at me differently on Thursday. I almost didn't go back.

I went back. She looked at me exactly the same. She asked about the grid.

Over the weeks that followed, the unemployment did not go away, and neither did the job adverts, and neither, I should say plainly, did the bad nights, though they thinned. What changed was the shape of the conversation. I stopped performing the Makerere graduate with a well-structured grievance. Some Thursdays we talked about the pregnancies. Some Thursdays we didn't, and that was allowed, which surprised me. I had assumed that once a secret was out it had to be dealt with completely, like a burst pipe. Mrs Akello treated it more like a wound you look at a little at a time, and then cover up again so it can breathe.

I did not tell Mama. I want you to know that. This is not that kind of book, or not yet, and maybe not ever. Some secrets, once you have set them down in front of one safe person, you are allowed to keep carrying for a while longer in a lighter bag. One person was what I could manage. One person was enough to show me that the floor would hold.

When I got home from the eleventh Thursday, I opened the Picfare book to item ten and drew the ledger beside it in the margin, the way I have been doing all along, four columns, the lines a little crooked because the book was on my knee.

PLANNED: Keep house business in the house. Solve my own problems. Don't cry to everybody like a baby.

HAPPENED: I kept it in the house. Then I kept it in my body. I kept it so well I forgot where I'd put it, and spent a year blaming the job market for a weight that had been there long before the job market had my CV.

PAID: This is the column that kept getting longer. I'll write it the way I wrote it that night, no jokes, because there weren't any.

Years of saying "I'm fine" in the same tone I use to say "I'm coming."

Every wedding where an auntie asked when I would be bringing someone home, and I laughed, and went to the bathroom.

Grief I never had permission to have, because grief requires admitting there was something to lose.

Sleep.

The ability to tell the difference between the sadness that came from unemployment and the sadness that came from before, so that when the second one moved in beside the first, I thought they were the same visitor.

A year of counselling sessions spent describing the wrong problem, at ten thousand shillings a time, which my Makerere economics lecturer would call a misallocation of resources and I would call a very expensive way to talk about job adverts.

Most of my twenties, in a certain sense. Not all. Most.

I sat looking at that column for a long time. Silence, it turns out, is not free. It only looks free because you pay in instalments, and nobody sends a statement.

REVISED: I picked up a pencil for this one. It felt like holding someone else's hand. I wrote:

Some house business needs a visitor. Tell one safe person. Then decide about the next.

The handwriting is smaller than my pen handwriting. Less sure of itself. I have noticed that about my pencil, and I don't yet know what to make of it.

That evening I did something item ten would have reported to Auntie Ruth. I picked up my phone and opened a conversation I had been ignoring for months, from my friend Nabukenya, from campus, who had been sending me cheerful messages since graduation (a sunset, a meme about landlords, a voice note of her singing badly at a wedding) and receiving thumbs-up emojis in return. I had been thumbs-upping her for a year. Her last message, three weeks old, said: I haven't heard you laugh in so long. Are you okay? Like actually?

I typed a long message and deleted it. I typed a short message and deleted it. I typed: No, not actually. I've been seeing a counsellor. I've been in a bad place. I left out the pregnancies. I left out the corridor. I left out almost everything. It was clumsy and partial and it was the most I had said to anyone who was not paid or related to me in years. I pressed send before I could make it funny.

The ticks went blue almost immediately, which meant she had been looking at her phone, which meant she had been looking at our conversation. The little typing appeared and disappeared three times. I put the phone face-down on the bed and stared at the ceiling and thought: well, that's that, now she knows I'm a mess.

When I turned it over there was a single message.

Me too. Butabika outpatient, every second Tuesday, since last March. I didn't tell anyone either. Can I call you?

I read it four times. Since last March. All those sunsets. All that singing. The phone started to ring in my hand, her name across the screen, and for a moment I simply watched it, the way Mama and I had watched the man on the television stirring his pot. Then I answered.