The Item I Forgot to Write

4. No boyfriends until I have a job.

5. Be the first in the family to have a masters.

That's the whole of it. Item four, then item five. Between them is a single ruled blue line with nothing written on it, the kind of gap a printer leaves so the words don't crowd. I have looked at that line more times than I have looked at some of my relatives. It is the most honest part of the document.

You will notice what isn't there. There is no item that says If you fall in love anyway, here is what to do. There is no sub-clause, no parenthesis, no ESPECIALY. The girl who planned for which university, which degree, which age she would be somebody by, and how to behave when nobody was looking, did not plan for the one thing every Ugandan film, every Nigerian film, every Sunday school warning and every aunt at every kwanjula had been telling her about since she could sit up. She didn't forget it, exactly. She left it out on purpose, the way you leave a snake off a map of your compound. If it isn't drawn, it isn't there.

So this is the chapter where the ledger has an empty first column. I've tried to fill it in. I've sat with a pencil over the Planned space and nothing comes, because there was no plan. There was a rule against, which is a different animal. A rule against is a locked door. A plan is knowing what you'll do when somebody knocks.

Somebody knocked in my third year. Actually he didn't knock. He came in through the window, and he fixed it on the way.

By third year I was very good at being a fortress. You met the fortress in the last chapter: the timetable, the hall curfew I kept more strictly than the hall did, the group discussions held in daylight in the library with at least three witnesses, the way I could decline a party invitation so warmly the person felt thanked. I had a reputation. Boys in my course called me Madam Chair, which I pretended to dislike and secretly had embroidered on my heart. Girls in my corridor came to me for notes and, sometimes, for the number of the clinic, which I had memorised for other people. I was helpful. I was decent at all times. I was, by the measure of the blue Picfare, winning.

I met him because of a broken desk lamp.

I should be clear that the lamp was not a metaphor at the time. It was a cheap yellow thing from Owino with a switch that worked only if you held it at a particular angle with your thumb, which meant I read Development Economics one-handed for most of a semester. It was the week before exams. A girl from my discussion group had borrowed my notes and brought her cousin's friend along to return them, because she was going to Kikoni and he was going past my hall. That was the entire chain of custody. I have since thought about how many small people had to be going small places for that evening to happen, and I have decided not to think about it too often.

He stood at the door of the common room with my folder under his arm and watched me sign for it like a parcel. (I had a sheet. People signed when they borrowed and signed when they returned. I am not going to defend this.) Then he looked past me at the lamp on the reading table, where I'd been working, propped up on a dictionary so the switch angle would hold.

"That one is going to burn you," he said.

"It's fine. It just needs encouragement."

"It needs a new switch."

He said it the way you would say it's raining, no flirtation in it at all, which is maybe why I let him pick it up. He turned it over, looked at the base, and asked the matron's girl, who was hanging around pretending to sweep, whether anyone had insulating tape. Nobody had insulating tape. He went out. I assumed that was the end of it and returned to my notes, slightly offended that he hadn't asked my name. Twenty minutes later he came back with a roll of black tape from the kiosk at the gate and a small screwdriver from his own pocket, a red-handled one with the paint worn off where his thumb went. He sat on the floor of the common room in his good trousers and took my lamp apart.

I watched him the way you watch somebody else's child doing something dangerous. He didn't talk while he worked. When he finished, he wound the tape around the switch housing three times, pressed it flat with his thumbnail, and clicked the switch. On. Off. On. No angle, no thumb, no dictionary.

"Don't put it near the curtain," he said, and gave it back.

"How much?"

He looked at me as if I'd asked him how much for saying good morning. Then he laughed, short, mostly through his nose. "You people from this hall."

"What about us?"

"You pay for everything."

And he left. No number. No name, even. I found out his name from the girl in my discussion group two days later, which I told myself was for the purposes of the borrowing sheet.

I want to describe what happened next accurately, because I've told it at weddings as a comedy and it was, mostly, a comedy, and also because it's the last stretch of my life I can remember without wanting to look away.

He began to turn up. He wasn't pursuing, or he would have said he wasn't. He had a friend in a room near my hall, and the friend's door had a hinge that needed attention, and then the friend's radio, and then the friend's bicycle, which was apparently a full-time patient. He would pass the common room on his way to these emergencies and say hello. If my folder was out he would ask what I was reading. If I told him, he would listen with the whole of his face, and then ask one question, usually a good one, and then go off to heal the bicycle.

My corridor noticed before I did. Corridors always do.

"Your engineer was here," said my neighbour, who was doing Social Work and treated the whole hall as her field placement.

"He is not my engineer. He is not an engineer. He is doing Land Economics."

"So you know his course."

"It was on the borrowing sheet."

"Madam Chair," she said, with enormous tenderness, "there is no borrowing sheet for him."

What I did in those weeks was build a series of justifications so elaborate they deserve a place in the faculty of law. Talking to him was networking; his course had good job prospects and I might need contacts. Walking with him to the Main Library was safety in numbers, a number being two. Accepting a rolex from him at the stall in Wandegeya was a cultural courtesy, because refusing food in Uganda is basically a declaration of war. When he walked me back to the hall gate at 6:45 p.m., fifteen minutes before my personal curfew, that was punctuality.

(I want to say, for the record, that I was twenty-one years old and had never been kissed and was conducting this entire operation as though I were a mid-level civil servant avoiding an audit.)

The thing I couldn't justify was the laughing. I have a loud laugh. Mama says I got it from her side, from an aunt who was once asked to leave a funeral. I'd spent most of university keeping it at a respectable volume, the hall-approved, lecture-approved, church-approved setting. With him, it came out at full size. He had a way of saying something completely flat, something like "The bicycle has decided to die with dignity," and then looking at the floor while I fell apart. He seemed to enjoy setting me off more than he enjoyed being funny. I'd laugh until the porter looked over, and he'd stand there with his hands in his pockets, satisfied, like a man who had fixed something.

He fixed everything. That is what I remember first when I remember him then, before anything else. My flask lid that wouldn't seal: a thin strip of rubber from an old tube, cut with a razor blade. The zip on my good bag: a paper clip threaded through the pull, bent into a loop, still there years later. The leg of the plastic chair in my room that rocked: a folded square of cardboard, which he measured twice against the floor before he wedged it under. My phone charger, which only worked if you held the cable in a hook: he opened the plug with the red screwdriver, looked inside, said "eh," and closed it again working. He never announced any of it. I would come back from a lecture and find the thing working and him gone, and I'd stand there holding my flask like a woman holding a letter.

I'd grown up in a house where love came as food and instruction. Mama loved me in matooke and proverbs and reminders to iron my uniform the night before. I understood that language perfectly. This was a dialect of it I had never heard: love that arrived as a thing that used to be broken and now wasn't, with no speech attached, and no invoice.

Here is where I'd like to tell you I weighed it all carefully against item four.

I did not weigh anything. The fortress didn't fall, either, as such. What actually happened was smaller and much more embarrassing. One evening at the end of exams, he didn't come.

He'd said he would. He'd said, the day before, in his trailing way, "Tomorrow I'll pass. After my paper. If," and then he hadn't finished the sentence, which I'd taken for a promise because I'd stopped listening after tomorrow. I sat in the common room from five o'clock with a novel I had read before, at a table with a clear view of the door. Six o'clock. Six-thirty. Six forty-five came, my personal curfew, and I did not go upstairs. I want you to understand how large that was. In three years at Makerere I had never once been in the common room after 6:45 p.m. on a weekday. The porter noticed. He actually looked at his watch.

At seven I closed the book. At seven-ten I was walking.

I didn't decide to walk. My body went out of the gate and turned left toward his hall while my mind, which had run my life since I was twelve, trotted behind it making objections. It is getting dark. You don't know which block. What will you even say. People will see you. This is precisely the kind of reason to talk that item three. I walked faster to get away from it. I walked past Freedom Square, where some boys were shouting about a guild election, past the lecture rooms with their lights going off one by one, and I didn't have a single sentence prepared. I, who prepared for church announcements.

I found his block by asking a boy on the steps, who looked at me with a sort of anthropological delight and pointed. I found his room by the sound: something metal being tapped. The door was half open. He was on the floor, of course, with a desk fan in pieces around him and the red screwdriver in his teeth, and when he looked up and saw me in the corridor of a boys' hall at a quarter past seven he took the screwdriver out of his mouth very slowly, as though I might be a hallucination caused by fumes.

"You didn't come," I said. That was it. That was my sentence. Three years of debating society.

"My roommate's fan." He gestured at the pieces as if they'd jumped him. "I was coming."

"It's quarter past seven."

"I know." He looked at the fan, then at me. "You're here."

"Yes."

"Your hall."

"I know where my hall is."

He stood up. He wiped his hands on his trousers, which did nothing, because the grease was on his trousers too. And he didn't do any of the things the films had prepared me for. He didn't say anything romantic. He reached past me, very carefully, and pulled the door all the way open, so that the corridor could see us, so that nobody could say anything about a girl in a boy's room with the door closed. Then he went back to the fan.

"Sit," he said. "Ten minutes. Then I'll walk you back."

I sat on his roommate's bed, in full view of the corridor, and watched him put the fan back together. Boys passed and looked in and said "Ssebo" to him and nothing to me, and I didn't care, and I knew I didn't care, and the not caring frightened me more than any of them did. When the fan came on he turned it toward me, and it blew my hair into my face, and I laughed so loudly a boy down the corridor shouted "Eh! Who is that?" and he called back, flat as a table, "Nobody. A visitor," and looked at the floor, satisfied.

He walked me back. At my gate it was nearly eight. The porter wrote something in his book. Before I went in, the man who had fixed my lamp, my chair, my flask, my zip and my charger said, to his shoes, "I'm not good at saying things."

"I've noticed."

"So." He looked up. "So I'll just keep coming."

I went upstairs, sat on the bed, and did not open my notes. I opened the Picfare instead. I don't know what I was looking for. I turned to item four. No boyfriends until I have a job. I read it the way you read a sign on a road you've already turned off. Then I looked at the empty line beneath it for a long time, and I took a pen, my good blue Bic, because I was still the girl who didn't use pencils, and I held it over that line, and I wrote nothing at all.

I've told you that my strategy at Makerere was called good decisions. It's what aunties called it, what my pastor called it from the pulpit when he prayed for the university students, what Mama called it when she rang on Sundays and asked if I was keeping myself well. I believed I had a talent for good decisions. I see now that what I had was a talent for not standing near the place where a decision would be needed. I never learned to swim. I just stayed out of the water and called it being a strong swimmer.

So when the water came up anyway, I had nothing. No rules for inside, only rules for outside. I knew how to refuse a party, how to sign out a folder, how to be home by 6:45. I didn't know how to say what I wanted from a man, because I had never been allowed to want it. I didn't know what I'd agree to and what I wouldn't, because the whole point of the fortress was that the question would never arise. I didn't know how to tell a friend, I'm in love and I'm frightened, because the friend would have said Madam Chair? and I'd have had to admit that the chair was empty. I couldn't ring Mama. In our house, a daughter at university was asked about her grades and her health and her church, in that order, and a boyfriend came up only when he was ready to bring a goat.

I want to say it carefully, because it's the only line in this chapter I'll let myself underline: a rule that keeps you out of a room teaches you nothing about how to live in it.

That was the exposure. It wasn't him, exactly. He was gentle, and dry, and he left doors open. The exposure was me, standing inside my own life for the first time without a single instruction, laughing at full volume and having no idea what came next.

Let me do the ledger, because the blue line deserves to be looked at properly.

PLANNED: (blank)

I have left it blank. I could have written No boyfriends until I have a job here, but that belongs to item four, and item four was a prohibition. This line is for the plan. There wasn't one. Look at it with me for a second. That white space is the most accurate thing I wrote at twelve.

HAPPENED: In my third year, at the end of exams, I walked out of my hall after curfew and across campus in the dark to a boys' hall I'd never entered, because a man who fixed things hadn't come when he said he would. I sat with the door open while he finished a fan. I fell in love with him the way you fall off a boda: suddenly, completely, in front of witnesses.

PAID: This is the column I keep wanting to fill in with what came later, and I'm not going to, because it hadn't come yet, and the girl on his roommate's bed didn't know. What it cost her that night was small and exact. My 6:45 rule. My one-volume laugh. The porter's opinion of me. The illusion that I was a person who made good decisions, rather than a person who'd been very careful never to be asked. I paid those gladly. I'd pay them again. The rest of the bill arrives in the next chapter, and I'd rather you met it there, the way I did, without warning.

REVISED: In pencil, on the blue line between four and five:

4½. If love comes, it will not ask your plan's permission. Before it does, decide three things while you are calm: what you want, what you won't do, and one person you'll tell the truth to. Write the person's name.

I didn't have a name to write, back then. I'll be honest: there's a name there now, in pencil, and it isn't the name you'd guess. But that's a later chapter.

So here's what I'd ask you to do, while the lamp is on and you're calm.

Open whatever you've been using: the back of the notebook from the last chapter, the note on your phone, the receipt in your bag. Find the gap in your own plan. Everybody's has one. Maybe it's love. Maybe it's money, or illness, or a child, or a parent getting old, or the possibility that you might one day want something your family won't understand. Whatever you were taught to stay away from instead of taught to handle. Write it at the top.

Under it, write the three lines from my 4½, in pencil, and answer them as yourself, today, not as the girl who kept the rule:

What I'd want, if it came.

What I won't do, even if I want to.

One person I'd tell the truth to.

The third one is the hardest. You'll find you can write what I want in two minutes and what I won't do in five, and then you'll sit with the pencil over the third line and run through every name you know and discover that most of them would ask about your grades, your health and your church, in that order. Write a name anyway. If there truly isn't one, write not yet and the name of a place where you could find one: a counsellor at your university, a clinic, a helpline, a cousin who once told you something nobody else knew. A name is better. Somewhere is better than blank.

Then do one small, physical thing. I mean this literally. Send that person a message that isn't about anything. Thinking of you. How's your week? You aren't confessing. You're checking that the line is connected, the way he'd click a switch on, off, on, before handing it back. You want to know it works before you need it in the dark.

I didn't do that. I had a man who could fix anything and a blue exercise book with a white line in it, and I walked into the next year of my life with the door wide open and nobody at all who knew where I'd gone.