Item 3: Never Give Anyone a Reason to Talk

3. Never give any one a reason to talk. Be decent at all times. Even when nobody is looking. (ESPECIALY then.)

I want you to notice the capitals. At twelve I believed capital letters were a kind of legal seal, the way a stamp turns a piece of paper into a document. ESPECIALY was my way of telling the universe that I had thought about this one carefully. I had not thought about spelling it.

I also want you to notice the brackets. My younger self knew, even then, that the hardest part of being decent was the part nobody was watching. What she didn't know was that in Kampala somebody is always watching. There is no unsupervised hour for a girl. There is only the hour when the supervisor hasn't yet made a phone call.

The item came from somewhere, of course. Nobody invents "never give anyone a reason to talk" at twelve. I'd absorbed it the way you absorb the smell of your mother's kitchen: through years of standing near it. I'd heard it in the way Mama lowered her voice when a neighbour's daughter came home pregnant from boarding school. I'd heard it in the sermons, in the long pause our pastor took before the word "Jezebel." I'd heard it from my aunties, who could ruin a woman's reputation between the pilau and the cake without once setting down their plates.

So I wrote it in pen, underlined the word "decent," and believed it was a rule about my behaviour.

It was a rule about other people's mouths. It took me about three years and one disastrous Sunday to work that out.

Here is the girl I was at thirteen. Top three in class. Prefect for something I can no longer remember (sanitation, possibly, which meant I was in charge of a bucket). Choir. Scripture Union. Hair plaited every two weeks without complaint. When relatives visited, I was brought out like the good cutlery.

Here is the girl I was at fifteen. Eleventh in class, then nineteenth, then a number I would prefer not to put in a book that my mother may one day read. Hair relaxed against instructions, at a salon in Wandegeya, with money that had been given to me for a mathematical set. A collection of Mills & Boon novels hidden inside the hollowed lining of my suitcase, which I had cut open with a razor blade and sewn shut again with the careful stitches of a girl who had been taught needlework for exactly this purpose and no other. A friend called Brenda (not her real name, and she would want me to tell you she was not a bad influence, so I'm telling you) who could get anyone into anything.

I don't have a dramatic explanation for the change. Nothing happened to me. Nobody hurt me. I was not running from anything. I want to be clear about that, because every story about a girl who goes wild seems to require a wound, and I didn't have one. I had a body that was changing faster than my instructions, a brain that had discovered sarcasm, and a growing suspicion that the adults in my life had been reading me a script they hadn't written either.

Also, I was bored. You underestimate boredom. Boredom has started more revolutions than ideology.

The first rule I broke on purpose was small. Saturday afternoons were for "remedial lessons" at a teacher's house near Kisasi, which Mama paid for and which I attended faithfully for about four months. Then the teacher fell ill, and nobody told Mama, and I discovered that I now owned three hours of Saturday that no adult had a claim on. I could have gone home. I went to Brenda's.

At Brenda's we did the following: watched Nigerian films on a VCD player whose remote control had been bound with sellotape; practised walking in her elder sister's heels; listened to Bobi Wine and Chameleone with the volume at four, because her mother's house help was a spy; and drank Novida out of wine glasses with our pinkies out, discussing men we did not know as though we had divorced them.

That was it. That was the debauchery. If my rebellion had been a crime, the police would have released me with a warning and a soda.

But I came home at six with my exercise books unopened and told Mama the lesson had been on quadratic equations, and she said, "Good, you need those," and I went to my room and lay on the bed and felt something I had never felt before.

I felt like I had a room inside me that nobody else had a key to.

The next eighteen months were an escalation, though I'd never have called it that. I'd have called it living.

There was the Easter disco, which I attended in a borrowed dress after telling Mama I was at an overnight prayer at a friend's church. (There was, technically, a church in the vicinity. I could hear its loudspeakers from the dance floor. I counted that as partial attendance.) There was the boy from Kibuli who wrote me letters in green ink, which I found so romantic that I nearly answered one before noticing he'd spelled my name three different ways. There was the time Brenda and I took a boda boda to Nakumatt Oasis to look at things we couldn't afford, and I felt so free on the back of that motorcycle, my hair whipping out of the relaxer, that I laughed the whole way down Kira Road. The rider asked if I was okay. I said I'd never been better. This was true, and it terrified me a little.

My grades slid. Not off a cliff, just down a gentle slope, the kind you don't notice until you turn around and the top of the hill is out of sight. My class teacher wrote "Can do better" on my report, then "Has potential, must concentrate," then simply "Disappointing," which I thought was lazy of her. (If you're going to destroy a child, use a full sentence.)

And at home there were confrontations, though in our house confrontations were conducted mostly in silence. Mama didn't shout. She cooked. When she was disappointed, the food got more elaborate. The night of the "Disappointing" report, she made matooke, groundnut sauce, fried fish, and greens, and served me first, and said nothing for the whole meal. Then she washed up alone and went to bed early. The next morning there was a Bible on my desk, open to Proverbs 31, with a bookmark. The bookmark was a receipt for my school fees.

I read the verses. I put the receipt back. I went to Brenda's on Saturday anyway.

I want to explain why, because the adult in me wants to defend the girl. It wasn't that I didn't love my mother. I loved her so much it sat in my chest like a stone. But I'd discovered something on the back of that boda boda, something the exercise book had no column for. I had a will. Not a plan, not a set of instructions, a will: an engine of my own that wanted things nobody had assigned to me. It wanted music and motion and the feeling of being unwatched. It wanted to choose.

Nobody had ever told me I had one. They'd told me I had potential, which is a will that belongs to somebody else.

I have to tell you about the aunties now, because without them this story makes no sense.

Every Ugandan girl knows the aunties, even if she doesn't share any blood with them. They are a kind of distributed intelligence network, more efficient than the Internal Security Organisation and better dressed. Some of them were my actual aunts. Most were women from church, from Mama's savings group, from the market, from the wedding introduction committees that ran our social calendar the way the rains run a farmer's. They had no official authority over me and absolute practical authority over my reputation, which, I was beginning to understand, was the only thing about me that anyone outside our house cared about.

A partial list of things the aunties monitored, compiled from memory:

1. The length of your skirt, measured against your knee, against your mother's knee, and against the skirt length of girls who had "ended badly."

2. Who walked you home and whether he was "from a good family," which meant a family whose own daughters had been monitored successfully.

3. Your laugh. Specifically, its volume. A girl who laughed loudly in public was "too free," a phrase that does not translate into polite English and does not need to.

4. Whether you greeted elders properly, kneeling, and how long you stayed down.

5. Whether your hair looked like you'd paid for it yourself.

6. Whether you looked happy in a way that suggested you knew something.

That last one is real. I was once told by a woman in the church car park that I was "smiling like someone with a secret." I was smiling because the sermon had ended. That was my whole secret.

The aunties had an instinct for which girls to watch, and the instinct was this: watch the ones who are enjoying themselves. Pleasure was the leading indicator. Before the skirt, before the boyfriend, before the pregnancy that every one of them seemed to predict for every one of us, came the moment when a girl started to laugh too loudly and look too pleased and walk like her body belonged to her.

At sixteen, I was laughing too loudly. I've mentioned my laugh before. People used to say they could hear it from the next compound. At sixteen it had just reached its full range, and I was using it everywhere: at the bus stop, at the canteen, in the church compound after service while my friends and I took apart the choir director's wig. I didn't know it was evidence. I thought it was mine.

The school was its own branch of the network. Our deputy headmistress, a tall woman who wore the same maroon suit for every term of my secondary education (I respected the commitment), had a gift for public announcements that named no names and named everyone. "Some girls," she would say at assembly, letting it hang in the morning air, "some girls are being seen in town on weekends in clothes their parents did not buy." Four hundred heads would not turn. Four hundred pairs of eyes would. You learned to keep your face very still. You learned that a still face was the closest thing to innocence you could offer.

And then there was the church, which held the final ledger. In our church the worst thing you could be wasn't a sinner. Sinners were the whole business model; the pews were full of them. The worst thing you could be was a talked-about girl, because a talked-about girl wasn't just in trouble, she was trouble for her mother. Every rumour about a daughter was received as a review of the mother's parenting. Every skirt was a referendum.

This, I would eventually work out, was the real enforcement mechanism. They weren't threatening me. They were threatening her.

The disastrous Sunday arrived on a morning in my S.5 year, at second service, during the announcements.

The night before, I'd gone to a birthday party in Ntinda. It was the tamest party in the history of parties: a girl from my class turning seventeen, her parents in the next room, a cake shaped like a handbag, a cassette of Lingala music and some American R&B that we were too shy to dance to until about ten o'clock, at which point we danced to it as though our lives depended on it. I'd told Mama I was spending the night at Brenda's to revise for mocks. Brenda had, in fairness, brought a textbook.

At around eleven, someone's elder brother arrived to drive some of us home, and one of the girls from church, a younger one who'd also lied to get there, saw me getting into a car with three boys in it. The boys were the birthday girl's cousins. One of them was twelve. That detail would not survive the night.

By the time I walked into church the next morning, freshly plaited and smelling of Brenda's mother's Vaseline, the story had already circulated. I knew because of the silence. Our church compound was never silent; it was a marketplace of greetings. That morning the greetings to me were half a beat late, and the women's eyes flicked from my face to my mother's face and back, the way you'd check two halves of a torn note to see if they matched.

Mama didn't know yet. She was talking to someone about the harvest thanksgiving. I watched her laugh, and I watched a woman beside her stop laughing a fraction early.

The announcements came after the second hymn. The pastor did the usual: a wedding meeting, a fundraising drive for the new roof, a reminder that the youth fellowship was looking for responsible young people to lead Bible study. And then a short, sorrowful pause, and: "Parents, please. Know where your daughters are on Saturday nights. Some of our girls are being seen in places, and in company, that would shame you. We are praying for them."

He didn't look at me. He didn't need to. About eleven women did it for him.

I'm going to slow down here, because I want you to see this part clearly and I'm not going to joke about it.

I looked at Mama. She'd understood. I could tell from the back of her neck, which went rigid, and from her hands, which had been resting loosely on her hymnbook and now held it closed with her thumbs. She didn't turn around. She sat through the sermon, which was long, and the offertory, which was longer, and the closing hymn. She shook hands with people afterwards. She smiled. She greeted the woman who I was fairly sure had started the story and asked after her knee.

We walked to the taxi stage without speaking. In the taxi, wedged between a man with a cock in a sack and a woman eating roasted maize, Mama said one thing, very quietly, in Luganda, so the other passengers wouldn't follow.

"They are not talking about you. They are talking about me."

Then she looked out of the window for the rest of the journey.

At home, she went into the kitchen and started cooking. I knew what that meant. A meal was coming, an elaborate one, and silence would be served with it, and on Monday there would be a Bible open on my desk, and on Saturday I would decide whether to go to Brenda's. I could see the whole week laid out like a timetable. I'd lived it before.

I had my story ready. I'd spent the whole service writing it in my head, and it was a good one. I'd been at Brenda's, revising. A friend's birthday had been nearby. We'd gone for an hour, chaperoned. The car belonged to a parent. The girl from church had seen wrong, or was lying, or was jealous. Each part was nearly true. Each part was precisely the kind of thing I'd been saying for two years, and the problem with nearly true stories is that they work. They'd worked every time.

I stood in the kitchen doorway with the story in my mouth.

Mama was peeling matooke. She was peeling it very fast, the way she did when she was holding something in, the knife taking off the skin in long green strips that dropped into a basin at her feet. She didn't look up.

I could feel the shape of what would happen if I told the story. She'd half believe it, and the half she didn't believe would go into the silence, and the silence would go into the food, and the next time an auntie said something, Mama would have to defend a version of me she didn't trust. She'd have to do it in the church car park, with her nice handbag and her careful smile, armed with my lies.

I don't think I worked all that out in words. I think I just saw her hands.

So I put the story down. I came into the kitchen, took the second knife from the drawer, sat on the low stool on the other side of the basin, and started peeling with her. I wasn't good at it. I took off too much flesh. She noticed and said nothing.

After about four bananas, I said: "I wasn't at Brenda's revising. I was at a birthday party in Ntinda. I lied to you so I could go. I've been lying to you about Saturdays for a long time. The car was taking us home. There was nothing else. But I lied, and I'm sorry you had to hear it in church."

Her knife stopped.

I want to tell you she cried, or hugged me, or gave me a speech. She did none of those. She looked at me for a long time, long enough for the radio in the sitting room to finish a whole advert for Nile Special, and then she said: "How long?"

"Since S.3."

She nodded slowly. She went back to peeling. After a while she said, "You peel like a man," which in our house was the closest thing to a ceasefire.

That's the decision. I'd like to make it more dramatic, but it was a girl choosing, for once, to put her true story on the table instead of her rehearsed one. It took about forty seconds. It cost me my Saturdays for the rest of the year (she was clear about that, later, over a meal that was mercifully ordinary: beans and posho, a dish with no emotional subtext whatsoever). It cost me Brenda, more or less, because Mama called Brenda's mother, and Brenda's mother was mortified, and two mortified mothers can end a friendship faster than any argument between the friends themselves.

And it didn't stop the talk. That's the part my twelve-year-old self would have found impossible. I told the truth, I took the punishment, I went to every Saturday remedial and came home with my books opened, and the aunties went on looking at me in the car park as though I were wearing the party on my face. A woman in Mama's savings group asked her, months later, whether "that girl" had calmed down. Mama said I had. The woman said, "Mm. They say that." Telling the truth had repaired the house. It had done nothing at all for the compound.

Here is the audit. I've done it in the ledger, the way I've been doing all of these, the first three columns in pen and the fourth in pencil.

PLANNED: Never give anyone a reason to talk. Be decent at all times. Even when nobody is looking. (ESPECIALY then.)

HAPPENED: Between fifteen and seventeen I lied about my Saturdays, relaxed my hair against instructions, went to two discos and a birthday party, rode a boda boda laughing down Kira Road, and let my grades slide from the top three to somewhere I won't print. I got caught by a rumour that was partly false. I told Mama the truth in the kitchen. People talked anyway, before and after.

PAID: My Saturdays. A friend. A drop in my grades that took most of S.6 to climb back from. A term of my mother's silence. Something harder to name: the first time I saw that my behaviour could be spent from her account. That I wasn't the only one who paid for me.

And on the other side of the column, because I've decided the Paid column has to record what came in as well as what went out: the discovery that I had a will. That there was a room inside me with its own key, and that the girl who lived in it was not a demon or a Jezebel or a disappointment. She was a person who wanted to dance and to laugh out loud and to choose things. Also, the discovery that when that girl and my mother were in the same kitchen, the truth worked better than the performance. I've used that one more than anything I learned in S.5 Chemistry.

REVISED: This is the part I write in pencil, and you know my history with pencils. At twelve I wouldn't touch one. Pencil was for people who weren't sure. I'm still a little embarrassed every time I sharpen it.

The revision took me three attempts. The first one said, "Don't care what people say," which is the kind of thing you read on a matatu sticker, and which is a lie, because I do care, I always will, and so does every woman I know who grew up in a church compound. I rubbed it out. The second one said, "Be decent for yourself, not for them," which was closer, and also smug, and sounded like a youth pastor who owns sunglasses. I rubbed that out too.

Here is what's there now:

3. People will talk. That was never in my control. What is in my control is whether the people I love are defending a true version of me or a performed one. Keep the true one where they can find it.

It's longer than the original. Pencil entries usually are. Certainty fits into a short sentence. The truth needs room to sit down.

I need to tell you one more thing about that girl, and then I'll give you the step.

After the kitchen, I didn't stop wanting what I'd wanted. I went back to the books because I'd decided I wanted Makerere badly enough to trade my Saturdays for it, and because I couldn't stand the look on Mama's face at the taxi stage, and because some part of me knew that the will I'd discovered on the boda boda could pull in more than one direction. I'm proud of that. I worked like a person possessed. I came back up the hill.

But I also took the laugh down a few notches, and I didn't fully notice I'd done it. I started keeping my face still in church, and then in class, and then, gradually, in places where nobody was keeping score at all. I'd learned that pleasure was what the aunties watched for, and I'd absorbed that lesson somewhere deeper than the lesson about truth. If you've ever caught yourself checking a room before you allow yourself to enjoy something, you know exactly what I mean. I'm still checking rooms. I'm trying to work out which of those checks are wisdom and which are just the deputy headmistress, still standing at the front of my mind in her maroon suit, saying, "Some girls."

I don't know the answer yet. That's partly what the rest of this book is for.

Here's your step for this week. It builds on last week's, so if you made that call to the person you rehearse for, you've already done half of it.

Think of one story you tell about yourself that is nearly true. It doesn't have to be a big lie. Most of ours aren't. Maybe it's what you say at family gatherings when someone asks how work is going. Maybe it's the explanation you gave your mother for a gap in your CV, or the version of a breakup you told your church friends, or why you didn't go home last Christmas. You'll know which one it is because you can feel its edges; you've polished it.

Write it down, exactly as you usually tell it, in the first column. Then, underneath, write the version you'd tell if no auntie on earth could hear it. Don't edit it for kindness to yourself or anyone else. Just make it accurate.

Now look at the two side by side and ask one question. Not "Who would judge me?" They will judge you, or they won't; you lost the vote on that one a long time ago, and so did I. Ask instead: who is currently defending the first version on my behalf? Who's standing in a car park somewhere, holding my nearly true story like a handbag, smiling at the woman who asked?

If the answer is nobody, keep the story for now. Some stories are nobody's business and should stay in the room with your own key.

If the answer is somebody you love, then this week, find a kitchen. It doesn't have to be literal, though it helps to have something to do with your hands. Sit across from them and offer the true version. Keep it short. Don't explain it to death. You'll want to; I nearly gave my mother a forty-minute alibi with diagrams. Say the true thing, say what you're sorry for if you're sorry for anything, and then stop talking and let the silence be as long as it needs to be.

You may lose something. I lost my Saturdays and a friend. Write that in the third column, honestly. Then write, beside it, what came in. You won't know what it is straight away, so leave space. My entry took fifteen years to fill in.

And if, when it's over, they tell you that you peel like a man, or chop onions badly, or have always been stubborn, take it. In some houses that's how the door gets opened.