Two Lines

6. Get maried at 27 to a saved man with a good job. Then have 2 children. A boy first then a girl. (In that order.)

There is a small drawing beside this one. It shows two stick figures of decreasing height, the boy in shorts and the girl in a triangle dress, standing next to a square house with a chimney. No house in Uganda has a chimney. I must have copied it from a textbook printed somewhere cold. I was twelve, and I believed that children arrived the way the house did: on schedule, after the walls were up, in the right order.

I have looked at that drawing many times while writing this chapter. I have not yet managed to answer it the way I answer the others. I will try.

It was the second semester of my second year. I know because I remember the coursework deadline on the noticeboard outside the department, a sheet of paper with the corners curling where the Sellotape had given up. I remember I was tired in a way I put down to the coursework. I remember the smell of the rolex man's oil at the bottom of Kikoni making me stop on the path and hold the wall of a hostel I didn't live in. A boda man asked me if I was okay, and I said yes, I'm just fine, and walked on as if I had somewhere urgent to be.

I counted days on my phone calendar that night. I counted them again on paper, in pen, because I didn't trust the phone. Then I counted them a third time on my fingers, under the blanket, so my roommate wouldn't see the light.

I knew. I'd like to tell you there was a long stretch of innocent confusion, but there wasn't. There was about forty minutes of it, and then there was knowing, and then there were nine days of pretending not to know, which is a different and more expensive activity.

During those nine days I did the following things. I submitted the coursework. I went to a fellowship meeting and sang. I ate half a plate of matooke at a friend's birthday and gave the rest to her boyfriend, who was grateful. I laughed at things. People still say I have a big laugh, and I used it. I told my roommate that my stomach was off because of the cafeteria beans, which everyone would believe, because everyone had a stomach that was off because of the cafeteria beans. I avoided the boy I loved without seeming to avoid him, which took real skill. And every night I lay awake running a calculation that never changed its answer.

On the tenth day I went to a pharmacy in Wandegeya. Not the one closest to my hostel. The one two streets further, where nobody from my hall shopped, because I had decided (in that hard, clear voice I used to save for exam timetables) that being seen buying a pregnancy test was a separate problem from being pregnant, and I could at least solve that one. The woman behind the counter didn't look up from her phone. She put the box in a black kaveera without being asked. I remember being grateful to her the way you're grateful to a stranger who catches something you dropped.

I took it in the hostel toilet at six in the morning, before the queue for the bathrooms started. You're supposed to wait three minutes. I didn't need three minutes.

Two lines. The second one darker than the first, as if it had been waiting.

I sat on the closed lid with the stick in my hand and listened to the hostel waking up. A door. Someone's radio, a morning preacher on a Luganda station. Somebody shouting a name down the corridor. Water in the pipes. I sat there until someone knocked, and then I wrapped the stick in toilet paper, put it in the black kaveera, put the kaveera in my dressing-gown pocket, and walked out and said good morning.

You'll need to understand what two lines meant, and to whom, and I'm not sure I can do it without sounding like an aunt at a kwanjula. So I'll give you the facts the way I held them that morning.

I was the promising one. I have told you this. Relatives pointed at me. At my secondary school there was a girl two years ahead of us who got pregnant in Senior Five, and the headmistress used her as an example at assembly, without saying her name, for the rest of the year. Everybody knew her name. In my home church there was a phrase for a girl in this position, said quietly, with the head tilted: she has spoiled herself. Spoiled, like milk left out. In my family, people said nothing at all. Silence was how we handled anything we couldn't pray over in public, and the silence was louder than the headmistress.

And Mama. Mama, who had paid my fees in instalments and once sold a goat I'd named. Mama, who told everyone at the market that her daughter was at Makerere, using the full name, not "campus," because "campus" could be anywhere. Mama, whose saying about hard work I had copied into the front of a blue Picfare exercise book and believed the way you believe the floor will be there in the morning.

I carried the kaveera in my pocket all day. To a lecture. To the library. Back. I can tell you that it weighs nothing and that I felt it against my hip the entire time.

I told him that evening. We sat on the low wall near the Main Building, the one everyone sits on, so it looked as though we were just two students sitting on a wall. I'd rehearsed the sentence. I said it differently.

He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "Are you sure?"

I said I was sure.

He looked at his hands. He had good hands; I've told you he could fix anything, and I think he was looking at them because they had never failed him before. He said, "Okay." Then: "So what do you… what are you thinking?"

I noticed the pronoun. I want to be fair to him, and fair to the girl on the wall, so I'll say only that I noticed it and that I didn't ask him to change it. He said other things that evening. He said he didn't know. He said his father would kill him, which people say, and which in his family was not entirely a figure of speech. He said we should think. He said "we" twice. He walked me back to the hostel gate and stood there with his hands in his pockets, and I went inside, and that was the most we spoke about it for a while.

I'm aware that I'm moving quickly past him. That's deliberate. There's more to say about him, later, and it isn't mine to say yet.

Here's what I believed for the next week.

I believed I would keep it. I want you to know that, because the story people expect from a girl like me is that I panicked and acted at once, and it wasn't like that. I lay on my bed and did the arithmetic of keeping it. I'd defer a year. I'd go home. I'd stand in Mama's sitting room, under the framed photograph of my Senior Six results, and tell her. She would cry, and then she would make tea, because Mama cried and then made tea; I'd seen it at two funerals. My father's sister would say something about how she had always known, though she had never known anything in her life except the prices of things. The church would do its quiet head-tilting. And then, eventually, there would be a child, and the child would be loved, because in my family children were always loved, even the ones nobody had planned. Especially those, my grandmother used to say.

I believed this for five days. I practised the first sentence I'd say to Mama. I said it to the ceiling. I said it in the bathroom with the tap running.

Then I tried to say it on the phone.

She called on a Sunday afternoon, the way she always did, after church and lunch. I could hear the market in the background; she had gone to collect money from someone who owed her. She asked about my studies. I said they were fine. She asked about my health. I said I was fine. She asked whether I'd been to church, and I said yes, which was true, I had gone and sat at the back and not sung. She told me that the pastor had mentioned "our children at university" in the prayers, and that she had thought of me, and had said my name under her breath so God would know which one.

I had the sentence ready. It was in my mouth.

She said, "You are the one who makes all this worth it, you know."

And I said, "I know, Mama," and asked about my little brother's school fees, and she told me, and we talked about that for eleven minutes, and then her phone credit ran out.

I didn't decide on the phone. I want to be exact. I decided two days later, in the library, on the second floor, at the desk by the window with the broken blind. I'd opened a textbook so that anyone passing would see a student reading. I wasn't reading. I took the blue exercise book out of my bag. I'd brought it to campus in my first year, a private joke with myself, a lucky charm, and I opened it to the page with the stick figures and the house with the chimney.

I read item six three times.

Then I closed it, put it back in my bag, took out my phone, and searched for the thing I'd been refusing to search for. I wrote a phone number on the inside of my wrist in biro, because I didn't want it on the phone. I went outside and stood behind the building where the smokers stand and called it.

I decided not to continue the pregnancy. That's the sentence. I've written it many ways for this book and deleted all of them, and this is the one I'm leaving, because it's the plainest.

I'm not going to tell you about the place, or the day, or what was done. That isn't because it's shameful to tell; other women have told theirs, and I honour them. It's because those details are the last thing I own about it that no one else has handled, and I'm keeping them. What I'll tell you is that I went alone. That I paid with money I'd saved from my upkeep and from a tutoring job, in cash, in an envelope. That I took a boda back and asked him to drop me at the hostel gate and not at the door, and that he went over a pothole near the Kikoni junction and I bit the inside of my cheek until it bled rather than make a sound. That my roommate was out. That I lay on my side facing the wall for most of two days and told anyone who knocked that it was the cafeteria beans.

I did tell him, afterwards. A text. He replied: "Okay. Are you ok?" I said yes. He said, "I'm sorry." Then, a few minutes later, as if he'd been holding the phone the whole time: "I'm here." I read it many times. I didn't answer. I don't know, even now, whether that was his failure or mine or simply what happens when two people who were taught exactly how to avoid trouble and nothing at all about what to do inside it are left alone with it.

I never told Mama. I've never told anyone in my family. You're reading this before they do, which is its own kind of sentence.

On the third day I went back to lectures. A lecturer made a joke and the room laughed, and I laughed too. My friend Grace, sitting next to me, turned and looked at me, a little too long, and said, "Eh, there's that laugh. Where have you been?"

I said, "Around."

So. The Ledger. I've been doing this for six chapters, and I know how it's supposed to go. Four columns. You've seen me fill them.

PLANNED: Married at 27 to a saved man with a good job. A boy, then a girl. A house with a chimney.

HAPPENED: Pregnant at twenty, in second year, unmarried, at Makerere. Decided alone. Told him afterwards, by text. Told no one else.

PAID:

I have sat with the pen over this column for a long time. When I started this book I imagined the Paid column as an invoice, something you could total, settle and file. With other items it has worked that way, more or less. I paid a year of sleep for my admission. I paid a few friendships for my fortress. Prices, receipts.

This one doesn't total.

What I paid: the money in the envelope. The two days facing the wall. The bitten cheek. A Sunday phone call I can still recite. A version of my mother's face I've never had to see and have imagined so often that it feels like a memory. A hymn I can no longer sing at the back of church without leaving before the last verse. The particular silence between me and the boy on the wall, which never fully lifted and which we both learned to talk over. A small calculation I still do without wanting to, about how old someone would be now. Every time Grace said there was that laugh, a little flinch where she couldn't see it.

I'm writing it in pen because it happened, and pen is for things that happened.

REVISED:

The pencil is beside me. I've sharpened it twice this evening, which is what I do instead of writing. I tried "I did my best with what I knew." I rubbed it out; it was true, and it was too neat, and it sounded like someone else talking. I tried "I wish someone had been with me," and rubbed that out too, though I'll admit the paper there has gone thin.

If you're keeping your own ledger, and if you've got an entry like this one, I'm not going to tell you what to write in your fourth column. I don't know yet what goes in mine. I'll tell you only that it's allowed to stay empty for a while, and that it isn't the same as being finished.

On the page in front of me there's the stick-figure boy in his shorts, and the girl in her triangle, and the square house with its chimney that no house here has. There's the column in pen, full. And there's the column in pencil, with the faint grey ghosts of two sentences I couldn't keep.

I've put the pencil down. The hostel I lived in is far away now, and the room I write in is quiet, and I can hear the generator next door, and somebody's radio, and nothing else.

If any part of this chapter touches something you are carrying, you do not have to carry it alone. In Uganda, you can call the Mental Health Uganda helpline or reach Reproductive Health Uganda for confidential support; your university counselling service is another place to start. If you are outside Uganda, your local health service or a trusted clinic can point you to someone who will listen without judging.