Item 4: No Boyfriends Until I Have a Job

4. No boyfriends until I have a job. A real job with a office. Boys are a distraction and distractions are how girls end up in the village.

I wrote that in the same blue Bic as everything else, but you can see I slowed down for the last sentence. The letters are rounder, more careful, like a girl copying a verse she has been made to memorise. The missing "n" before "office" is mine. The village is mine too, though I had never lived in one and had no idea what girls did there that was so terrible. In my mind it was a single place, somewhere past Mityana, where clever girls were sent after one bad decision to sell tomatoes and regret things.

Boys, distraction, village. Three steps, no detours. I was twelve and I had already drawn the flowchart.

So when I picked up the pen that August, the week the admission list came through, I didn't cross anything out. I added. Under item four, in smaller writing, crushed against the margin, eighteen-year-old me wrote: Makerere = 3 years. Stay focused. Lecture, library, hostel.

That was the fortress. I didn't call it that at the time. I called it being serious. The word "fortress" came years later, from a friend who listened to me describe my first year and said, "Eh, so you were a castle," and I laughed and said yes, a castle with no drawbridge, and she said, "Castles with no drawbridge are called prisons, nyabo," and I stopped laughing.

But that was later. For now, the castle was a good idea, and I was proud of it.

I should tell you what Makerere looked like to me in that first semester, because you have to understand what I was walling out.

I was in Mary Stuart, which everybody calls Box, for reasons that are either architectural or historical depending on which senior is lying to you. My room was on the second floor and I shared it with a girl from Mbarara called Prossy, who unpacked three suitcases in the first hour and announced that one of them was "only shoes." I had one suitcase, a basin, a mattress Mama had tied with sisal, and a plastic bag of groundnuts from an aunt who believed university students starved. (She was not entirely wrong.)

From our window you could see Freedom Square, and on the first Friday the whole square seemed to vibrate. There were guild campaigners in yellow and blue T-shirts, boys from Lumumba Hall marching past singing songs I was not supposed to understand and understood perfectly, girls in heels on the red murram as if the murram had agreed to cooperate. Someone was selling rolexes from a charcoal stove near the gate. Someone else had a speaker the size of a fridge. The Main Building stood behind all of it, white and serious, like a headmaster pretending not to watch the disco.

Prossy stood at the window with her hand on her hip and said, "This place is going to be sweet."

I stood beside her and thought: this place is going to be a test.

It's a strange thing to arrive at your dream and immediately start defending yourself against it. I had wanted Makerere since primary school. I had checked that list until my phone died. And within four days of arriving, I had decided that most of what made it Makerere was a threat to my being there. The music was a threat. The halls were a threat. The boys were the biggest threat, and they were everywhere, which seemed tactless of them.

So I made rules. I wrote them on a sheet of foolscap and stuck it inside my wardrobe door with cellotape, where Prossy would not see it (she saw it in the first week). I'm going to reproduce them for you exactly, because I kept the sheet. Of course I kept the sheet.

THE RULES (Year 1)

1. Lecture, library, hostel. No fourth location unless it is church or the clinic.

2. Back in Box by 7 p.m. Main Library closes at 10 but the road to Box is dark after 8 and darkness is where things happen.

3. No hall parties. No Lumumba. No "just passing."

4. No discussion groups with boys unless the lecturer assigns them. If assigned, sit at the end of the table.

5. If a boy asks for your number, give him your course code.

6. No sitting on the steps of the Main Building after 5 p.m. (Everybody knows why.)

7. Sunday is for church and washing. Saturday is for washing and reading. Wednesday is for reading.

8. Call Mama every Sunday at 4 p.m. Tell her the truth. (There will be nothing to hide.)

9. Do not learn to dance.

I want to sit with number nine for a moment, because I can still feel the righteousness in it. I couldn't dance anyway. Nobody was asking me to. I had simply looked at the wide world of possible temptations and decided to pre-emptively renounce one I hadn't been offered, the way some people refuse a second helping at a wedding before anyone has passed them the plate.

Number five was my favourite. I was very pleased with number five. I imagined some boy in a striped shirt leaning in by the Freedom Square noticeboard, saying, "Can I have your number?" and me replying, crisp as a bank teller, "BBA, first year," and walking off while he stood there absorbing the humiliation. It never happened exactly like that. It happened once, sort of, and the boy said, "Okay, which class?" and I panicked and told him the right one, and he turned up to it, and I had to move seats for three weeks. My rules had not anticipated follow-up questions.

And the fortress worked. I need you to hear that, because the easy version of this story is the one where the strategy is stupid and I'm stupid for following it, and that isn't true.

First semester, I was in the Main Library every evening. I had a seat I thought of as mine, on the upper floor near the Africana section, where the old shelves smelled of dust and floor polish and somebody's Vaseline. I learned which librarian would let you keep a book past closing if you looked tired enough. I learned that the CTF lecture rooms were cold in the morning and boiling by noon, and that if you sat in the third row in Accounting you could see the board without being near enough to be picked on. I learned to eat lunch in fifteen minutes at the Box dining hall, beans and posho that the menu called "supper" at any hour, and walk straight back.

My coursework came back with good marks. My first semester results came back with better ones. I called Mama on a Sunday at four, the way the rules required, and read her the grades one by one. There was a long silence, which with Mama is how you know, and then she said, "You see? Nothing comes to the one who sleeps," which is her version of the hard-work gospel when she is too moved to say the long version. I stood in the corridor of Box with the phone pressed to my ear and the girls going past in towels, and I felt like the fortress had been built by God.

Prossy, meanwhile, went to everything. She went to Lumumba's Sunday nights and to something at Nkrumah involving a sound system and a goat. She went to guild rallies and lost her voice. She came back from Wandegeya at eleven o'clock with chips in a polythene bag and stories about people I'd never met. Some nights she would sit on the edge of my bed, smelling of smoke and somebody's cologne, and say, "Come out with me once. One time. You will not die."

"I have a test," I'd say.

"You always have a test."

"Yes. Because I'm a student."

"Me too, I'm a student." She'd hold up her chips. "See? Student food."

She passed. That annoyed me more than I could explain. Prossy passed her first year with grades that were fine, perfectly fine, and she had danced at Lumumba and fallen in love twice and out of love once and been to a Kenyan boy's birthday in Kololo, and she still went home in December with results she could show her father. According to the flowchart, she should have been halfway to the village.

I remember lying awake one night in the second semester, listening to her breathe on the other bed, and doing the arithmetic. She had done everything I had forbidden myself. She was fine. I had done nothing I had forbidden myself. I was also fine.

Then why, I thought, was I so tired?

I didn't answer the question. I set my alarm for 6 a.m. and turned to face the wall.

Here is where I have to step in, because this is the part of the ledger that took me longest to understand, and I suspect you have your own version of it written somewhere, maybe not on foolscap.

Every rule on that sheet was a way of not being somewhere. Not at the party. Not on the steps. Not in the discussion group, or at least not near the middle of the table. If you read the list again, you'll notice that it contains no instructions for what to do if I ended up somewhere anyway. There's no rule for what to say to a boy you actually like. There's no rule for how to tell if you're being pressured. There's no rule for how to leave a room without explaining yourself. There's no rule for who to call if something goes wrong at nine at night and Mama is asleep and you're too ashamed to wake her.

The rules were exits. None of them was a map of the building.

I call this the difference between avoidance and readiness, and I want to be precise about it, because these two things look identical from the outside. Both keep you out of trouble, at least for a while. Both get you good grades and approving silences on the phone at four o'clock on a Sunday. Both look, to aunties and pastors and admissions committees, like discipline.

Avoidance is the decision to stay away from a risk. Readiness is the knowledge of what you'll do when the risk reaches you anyway.

Avoidance is cheaper at the start. You don't have to learn anything. You just have to say no, and keep saying it, and arrange your life so you're never in the room where yes is a possibility. Readiness is expensive early. It means talking about things that embarrass you. It means asking questions that make adults narrow their eyes. It means, sometimes, going into the room on purpose so you know where the doors are.

In my family, in my church, in most of the Uganda I grew up in, a girl was taught avoidance and called ready. Nobody sat me down and told me how to say no to someone I wanted to say yes to. Nobody explained the difference between being careful and being informed. In Senior Two, a nurse came to our school, held up a diagram for eleven minutes, and told us that the best method was "to concentrate on your books." Then she left. Our headmistress thanked her for her "valuable contribution." (I have since met furniture that made more valuable contributions.)

So when I built the fortress, I wasn't being foolish. I was being obedient to the only strategy I had ever been given. The twelve-year-old who wrote item four had been told that distraction leads to the village. She did the only sensible thing with that information, which was to stay as far from distraction as possible.

That is where the first entry in the PAID column comes from, and it's a strange one, because in first year it didn't look like a cost at all. It looked like a profit. Every Sunday call was a deposit. Every result slip was interest. The cost was invisible because it was being charged to an account I didn't know I had, the one where you're supposed to store practice. Practice at saying what you want. Practice at reading people. Practice at being a body in a room with other bodies without either fleeing or freezing.

I had zero in that account. I had never made a single deposit. And I didn't know it, because nothing had ever made a withdrawal.

The night I broke the first rule was in the second year, in March, and it was Prossy's birthday.

She'd booked a table at a place in Kabalagala, not a hall party, which I noted at the time as a technicality in my favour. Eight of her friends, a cake shaped like a handbag, somebody's cousin with a car. She asked me three weeks in advance, which I recognised as a strategy, and then she did the thing that made it impossible: she didn't push. She just said, "I want you to be there. If you can't, I understand," and went back to painting her toenails.

I spent two days arguing with my wardrobe door.

Rule one said no fourth location. Rule two said back by seven. Rule three said nothing about Kabalagala specifically, but Rule three was clearly a spirit-of-the-law sort of rule. I took the foolscap down and read it, all nine items, and then I opened the blue Picfare to item four and read that too. Boys are a distraction and distractions are how girls end up in the village.

There would be boys at Kabalagala. That was simply a fact. There would be boys and music and possibly a goat.

On the Friday, at six-thirty, I put on the one dress I owned that was not for church. It was green. Mama had bought it for my cousin's introduction ceremony and I had worn it once, with a gomesi sash over it that I now removed. I looked in the small mirror on the back of the door, over the foolscap rules, and saw the two of them together, my face and the list, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that one of them was going to lose.

Prossy came in, stopped, and put her hand over her mouth.

"Don't," I said.

"I'm not saying anything."

"You're saying it with your face."

"My face is happy for you. Let my face be happy." She went to her shoes suitcase, which I had never been permitted to touch, and took out a pair of flat silver sandals. "These. Not heels. You'll fall."

"I won't fall."

"Mukwano, you have never walked in heels on Ggaba Road at night. Take the sandals."

I took the sandals.

Here is the part I want you to notice, because it's the only thing in this chapter I'm going to ask you to watch closely. Before I left, I sat down on my bed and did something I had never done before. I made a plan for the evening that wasn't a plan to avoid it. On the back of my timetable, in pen, I wrote:

Kabalagala. Leave by 11. Boda money: 5,000 in the bra, not the bag. If uncomfortable, go to the toilet and call Prossy's cousin (number below). Don't drink anything you didn't see opened. You are allowed to leave without explaining.

I didn't know where that list came from. Nobody had taught it to me. I think I assembled it from things I had overheard, Prossy's stories and fragments from girls at the dining hall, a radio programme I'd half-listened to in Wandegeya, the scraps of other people's readiness that had blown into my fortress through the cracks. It was the first set of rules I had ever written that assumed I would be in the room.

I folded it and put it in the bag, next to the boda money that I had been told explicitly not to put in the bag, and then I moved the boda money.

I'd love to tell you the night was a disaster or a triumph. It was neither. It was mostly loud.

The place was a rooftop with plastic chairs and a DJ who believed in volume the way some pastors believe in tongues. Prossy's cake was carried out by a waiter who walked like he was escorting a minister. Her friends were kind to me in the slightly alarmed way people are kind to someone they've heard about and assumed was imaginary. "So you're the one who reads," a girl called Esther said, and I said yes, I'm the one who reads, and she said, "Eh, good for you," with a sincerity that made me want to go home.

I drank a Mirinda Fruity that I watched the waiter open. I ate two pieces of the handbag. I sat at the end of the table, which Rule four would have approved of, though Rule four had not anticipated a table this long.

At about nine-thirty, a boy sat down next to me. I'm not going to tell you much about him, partly because there isn't much to tell and partly because it doesn't matter who he was. He was somebody's friend from Kyambogo. He had a soft voice and he had to lean in to be heard, which I found very inconvenient. He asked what I studied, and I opened my mouth, and Rule five rose up inside me like a hymn.

"BBA," I said. "Second year."

He nodded. "Okay. And you, what do you like?"

I didn't have an answer. I want to be exact about this. I wasn't being coy, and I wasn't being careful. I sat there in my cousin's introduction dress and my roommate's silver sandals, with a Mirinda in my hand, and I could not think of a single thing I liked that I could say out loud to a boy at a party. Accounting? The Africana section? A particular seat near the window in the Main Library?

"Reading," I said eventually.

"What do you read?"

"Notes."

He laughed. It was a nice laugh. I laughed too, because I had made a joke, apparently, though I hadn't meant to. Then the DJ played something everybody else knew, and the whole table stood up at once, and he said, "You're coming?" and held out his hand.

I'll tell you exactly what I did. I looked at the hand. I thought of Rule nine. I stood up. I went with him onto the patch of concrete they were calling a dance floor, and I stood there in the middle of thirty people moving, and I moved my shoulders in a way I hoped resembled dancing and probably resembled someone trying to dislodge a mosquito. It lasted maybe four minutes. He was polite about it. Prossy, across the floor, saw me and screamed so loud that two strangers turned to see if someone was hurt.

When the song ended I said, "I need the toilet," which was in my plan, and went, which was also in my plan, and stood at the sink looking at myself under a fluorescent tube that made everybody look like they had malaria.

My heart was going very fast. I wasn't frightened. I didn't know what I was. I took the folded timetable out of my bag and read my own list again: You are allowed to leave without explaining. I read it twice. And then, because I could, because I had written it down, I decided not to leave. I washed my hands and went back out.

He had gone to get drinks for someone. When he came back he asked for my number. I didn't give him my course code. I didn't give him my number either. I took the blue biro out of my bag and said, "Give me yours," and he did, and I wrote it on the back of my palm, because the timetable was full.

At five to eleven I hugged Prossy, who was crying because of the cake, and found a boda, and rode back to Box with five thousand shillings warm against my ribs and the number fading on my hand in the wind.

When I got back to the room it was eleven-twenty. Rule two said seven. The corridor was quiet, someone's radio playing Galaxy FM low behind a door. I sat on my bed in the green dress and took off the silver sandals and set them side by side on Prossy's suitcase, exactly where I'd found them.

Then I got out the blue Picfare.

I want to tell you I was thinking something profound. Mostly I was thinking that my feet hurt and that the number on my palm was starting to smear. I opened the book to the last page, the inside of the back cover, where at twelve I had written nothing at all. And I copied the number there. In pen. Ten digits, a little shaky, under a heading I didn't write, because I couldn't think of one.

I've wondered since why I put it there and not in my phone. I think it was because the phone was a place for things I intended to use, and the exercise book was a place for things I intended to keep. I don't think I meant to call him. I think I meant to prove the evening had happened, in the same ink as the rules it had broken.

I never called. That's the whole story of the boy from Kyambogo, if you were waiting for more. He was a hand held out and a soft voice and four minutes of mosquito-dancing, and then he was ten digits in the back of an exercise book, and then he was nobody. Some evenings are a door you walk through. Some are just a window you open for air.

I took down the foolscap the next morning. I didn't throw it away (of course I didn't). I folded it into quarters and put it in the Picfare, between item four and item five, where it still is. Then I sat at my desk and wrote a new sheet. It had only three lines on it, and it went inside the wardrobe door where the old one had been:

1. You can go places.

2. Know how you'll get home.

3. You are allowed to leave without explaining.

Prossy read it when she woke up, standing in front of the wardrobe in her nightdress with her hair tied in a scarf. She read it for a long time. Then she said, "Number three is good," and went to shower.

I kept going to the library. I kept getting good grades. I kept calling Mama at four on Sundays, and I told her the truth about Kabalagala, more or less. "I went to Prossy's birthday," I said, and she said, "Mm. And?" and I said there was cake shaped like a handbag, and she laughed, and that was the end of it. Rule eight had promised there would be nothing to hide. It turned out there was just less to say than I'd feared.

That was March. The new sheet stayed up until the end of second year. Three lines. They were the best rules I had ever written. I didn't notice, then, that they were also very short.

So, the ledger.

PLANNED: No boyfriends until I have a job. A real job with a office.

HAPPENED: I kept it for a long time. Longer than most of the girls I knew, longer than Prossy, longer than the boy from Kyambogo would have waited if he'd been waiting, which he wasn't. I kept it so well that by the middle of second year I'd started to think of it as the easy item. Then I didn't keep it. The next chapters are about that, and I'm not going to hurry them.

PAID: This is the column I want to slow down on, because I think it's the column you'll have the most trouble filling in for yourself.

When you look at a rule you kept, the cost is hard to see. Kept rules don't send invoices. They send result slips, and approving silences, and aunties who say, "That one, she is serious," at weddings in your presence. Everything in the visible account goes up. What I paid for item four, in first and second year, was practice. I paid in conversations I didn't have, rooms I didn't enter, questions I never asked anyone because asking would have meant admitting I might one day need the answer. I paid in a whole vocabulary I never learned: how to say what I liked, how to read when someone was being kind and when they were being something else, how to say no gently or yes carefully. On one rooftop in Kabalagala, I discovered I couldn't name a single thing I enjoyed. That was a receipt.

Avoidance had kept me safe from the risks I could see coming. It had taught me nothing about the risks that would come anyway.

That's the one line I'm allowing myself, and you'll notice it's still a little smug, which is how you can tell I wrote it about my younger self and not to her.

REVISED: This one is in pencil, and the pencil is soft, so it has smudged where my hand rests on the page.

Love will come before the job, or after, or at the same time as something worse. You cannot schedule it. Instead of building walls, learn where the doors are. Write your Kabalagala list before you need it.

I'm not going to give you nine rules. I've given enough people nine rules, mostly myself.

But I'll tell you what I'd ask you to do this week, if you're the kind of woman who had a foolscap sheet inside her own wardrobe door, real or imagined.

Take a piece of paper. Not your phone; paper. On the left side, write the rules you kept in your early twenties, the ones you were most proud of. No parties. No boys. No debt. No asking for help. Whatever yours were. Write them in pen, the way you meant them.

Now, beside each one, ask a single question: if this had found me anyway, did I know what I'd do?

Don't answer for the woman you are today. Answer for the woman who was keeping the rule. If she would have known what to do, write ready beside it. If she would have just stood there, looking at a held-out hand with her mind gone white, write avoided.

You don't need to do anything with the list yet. Just look at how many of each you have. Then, for one of the avoided rules, only one, write a Kabalagala list underneath it. How you'd get home. Who you'd call. What you're allowed to do without explaining. Write it in pencil, because you're guessing, and guessing is allowed now.

Mine is still in the back of the Picfare, next to ten digits I've never dialled and a heading I never wrote. I looked at it last month while I was looking for something else. The ink has gone slightly brown. The three-line sheet from second year is folded in there too, between items four and five, and when I unfolded it I noticed for the first time that it has no fourth line. It tells me I can go places, how to get home, and that I can leave. It doesn't say a word about what to do if I want to stay.