A Girl is a Body of Water Read online

  Kirabo looked into Nsuuta’s glassy blue eyes. They looked back at her. Nothing in her manner suggested she was blind.

  “As for your two selves, you will have to come back. I need to consult my powers.”

  Something warned Kirabo against coming back. That is how addiction to witching starts—with multiple consultations. But what was the alternative? She had to stop the flights before they got out of hand.

  “Okay, but I only want to stop flying, that is all. I don’t want to do anything horrible.”

  “Don’t worry, I will take care of it. When you find time, come back and I will tell you what my powers saw. Now run home before you get in trouble. And remember, not a word to anyone about this.”

  “I promise.”

  As Kirabo stepped outside she remembered the other thing that had been troubling her.

  “Nsuuta, can you find my mother for me?”

  Nsuuta started. Kirabo did not wait for her to recover. She ran across the courtyard and back into the road. Behind her, Nsuuta smiled. A huge, fat smile. Twelve years ago, when Tom arrived with a six-month-old baby without a mother, Nsuuta had predicted this moment. What did her grandparents expect? That they could love the mother out of the child? Through the years Alikisa, Miiro’s wife, had turned Kirabo and the rest of the family against Nsuuta. Then her blindness had grown worse, making it impossible for her to lure Kirabo over to herself. Yet, out of nowhere, Alikisa’s spite had delivered the child right into her hands. With a bonus—the idea of flying out of her body. It was as if Kirabo was biologically Nsuuta’s own. This notion of flying would give her the perfect angle to start. Nsuuta clapped wonderment. Sometimes God loved her as if he would never kill her. She stood up and closed her door. She was ready.

  4

  Since there was not a grain of sleep in sight, Kirabo opened her eyes. She raised her head off the pillow and listened. Across the room, Grandfather breathed evenly. She put her head down again, yawned, turned on her left side, then on to her back. She pushed the covers below her waist, then kicked them to the foot of her bed.

  When she had returned from Nsuuta’s house, her absence had not been noticed. But during supper, seeing Grandmother’s trusting face, the way she fussed over her (“Why are you toying with your food, Kirabo?”), made her feel like a hyena. A chill came over her. She pulled the covers back up, yawned again, and turned on her right side. She tucked in her knees and when she started to warm up, she eased on to her back. Her head fell to one side. Her hands became so weak she could not lift them.

  She was outside the house, floating above the doorstep. It was as dark outside as it was in the bedroom. The wind was strong. Banana leaves flapped so close it sounded as if she stood in the middle of Grandmother’s plantation. She flew across the front yard, on to the road. She started up the hill, counting the houses as she went. All the homes were asleep, the road empty, the silence blissful. Even malice appeared to be taking a rest. She came to the last home before the hilltop, the reverend’s house, where Grandmother grew up when her father was reverending the villages. Closer to the hilltop, the dispensary stunk of disinfectant even at night. Nsuuta was its first nurse before she lost her sight.

  Kirabo reached the top of the hill. The road cut between the twin peaks of Nattetta Hill. On the right peak was the Protestant church and its schools. On the left peak was the Catholic parish and its schools. She turned to the right, the Protestant side and her church. She flew to the roof and climbed the steeple. She stood on top of the spire holding on to the cross, the highest point in Nattetta. She held the other hand out and leaned away from the cross. She started to swing round the cross, round and round, picking up speed until she spun so fast the village below disappeared and heaven was a vortex. Then, like a cannon, she launched into the sky, up, up, until she couldn’t go higher. She stayed. The world below was nothing, pitch-black. She waited, waited. Then a light began to germinate, sprouting out of the ground below like a bean planted in a tin. It grew to the size of a candle flame. When it became the size of a bulb, Kirabo’s heart expanded; that was the place where her mother liv—

  Bo, I am calling.

  She fell back into bed. Batte was returning from Modani Baara. As drunk as a frog. Kirabo buried her head in the pillow. Somehow he only started singing when he reached Miiro’s house.

  I am a smile-thrift, you know, Mother ran out of smiles.

  Mother gave me a voice so huge I cannot help singing.

  It was so heavy, God held it with both hands.

  But humans are such, they would bear the sky a grudge.

  Hmm-hmm, let me sing: I am a son of beauty.

  Hmm-hmm, let me dance: life is a thief.

  Hmm-hmm, let me drink: the dead were hasty.

  Where is my mother, the most beautiful …

  Who has seen her, I will reward—

  Batte’s voice staggered under a high note and collapsed. The problem with Batte, Kirabo thought, was that he was shrouded in mystery. On the one hand you had Batte the village drunk, who sang the residents awake every night; and on the other there was Batte the shy recluse. There was the rare one, Tom’s best friend, whom you glimpsed when Tom came to visit. What Kirabo knew about him, she had gleaned from whispers and careless remarks.

  Apparently, as a boy, Batte lived with his mother, Nnante, an unfortunate second wife in whom the husband quickly lost interest. Batte was her only child. He was a hard-working boy—always at home helping with chores, then doing homework. In school, he was so clever Miiro got him into Kololo High, an Asian secondary school in the city. However, when the time came to go out with his friends like teenage boys do, Batte remained the same good boy. Nnante started to hint that she would manage the chores, that he could put away his homework and go with Tom to look for fun, but Batte refused. She shoved him outside, saying, “The kitchen is for women.”

  “Poor Nnante,” Widow Diba once sighed, “how she haunted the bushes.” According to Widow Diba, Nnante found every leaf, root, seed, sap, and stem of a plant recommended to cure Batte’s lack of adventure. It did not matter where—deep in the jungle, in the swamps, on riverbanks, or on hilltops—Nnante made the journey. And she administered the herbs in all forms: smoked, sniffed, chewed, tied around Batte’s waist, mixed with food, or mixed in his bath. Nnante tried everything. She even took him to the River Nile and immersed him in water—but wa, nothing. Until a snake put an end to her quest.

  Nnante was found stiff and dry in the bush with herbs gripped in her dead hands. Widow Diba pried them out. And when Batte was collected from the city where he worked, Diba said to him, “You see these herbs, young man, you see them, hmm? I had to break your mother’s fingers to prise them out. Take them. If they don’t heal you of whatever is wrong, then I don’t know.”

  The herbs did worse. Batte did not go back to his city job. He stayed in his mother’s little house and cried and degenerated into the village drunk—reticent and reclusive by day, singing his mother out of the grave by night.

  Kirabo’s mind grew incoherent. She was at Batte’s house, but the church steeple floated by, followed by Nsuuta’s book cabin, then her grandparents’ wedding picture. Footsteps were coming, faint. They crunched loose gravel, getting louder. The shoes appeared, then the legs. She would recognise her mother’s skinny legs anywhere. But before the rest of her body appeared, the legs were whipped away.

  •

  Why does rain make pee painful? Kirabo crossed her legs and made rhythmless wiggles. She peered outside; there was no one about. The toilet was too far and the rain would not stop. You can pee on the verandah; the rain will wash it away. She edged along the verandah. By the time she got to the furthest end, the pee was unstoppable. She fumbled with her knickers and barely managed to squat in time. Glorious relief. Columns of rainwater, formed by the corrugated iron roof, fell like lines of colourless strings. On the ground, puddles receiving them danced in rippling waves. Her own rivulet snaked from between her legs, hesitant at first, then certa
in, hurtling across the verandah until it fell over the edge into the puddles. The waves in the puddle grew outwards. Too bad she had run out of pee. Funny, though: it was getting warm, cosy even despite the rain.

  Kirabo woke up. A wet patch under her hip was starting to get cold. She sat up. It was not even raining outside. For a while, she sat in her pee, trying to come to terms with what she had done. If only she could sew her peeing hole closed. She could already hear the teenagers jeering What map did the cartographer draw last night? as she took her bedding out for washing. She eased her bottom on to the patch—it would be dry by morning—and lay back. But after a while, the wet patch started to make her skin itch. She sat up again.

  “Jjajja?”

  Miiro caught his breath and lifted his head. “Has it rained in your bed, kabejja?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hop into mine then.” And he moved towards the wall.

  Kirabo pulled off her wet nightdress, felt for a dress in the dark, and pulled it on. She jumped into her grandfather’s bed, curled into his back, and smelt Barbasol on his skin. By the time he pulled the blanket up to her neck, she was asleep.

  5

  She almost danced when she arrived at Nsuuta’s house and the front door was open. It had been two days since the first consultation, and between family and chores she had not found a single gap in which to slip away. But yesterday old Teefe had died; all the grown-ups were at her funeral. Nonetheless, Kirabo looked cautiously up and down the road, then peered into the gardens close by before sprinting across the front yard. She had also carried a satchel with her playthings, as if she was on her way to Giibwa’s to play. As she got to the front door, Nsuuta appeared from the inner room, dishevelled.

  “Eh, I woke you up? Forgive me. I saw the door open and thought What luck—Nsuuta is at home.”

  “Yes, I was—”

  “Did you not go to Teefe’s funeral?” Kirabo stepped into the diiro.

  Nsuuta grabbed the doorframe on both sides as if Kirabo was pushing to go into her inner rooms.

  “I returned in the morning to doze a bit. I must have overslept. What is the time?”

  “Towards six hours of day. The sun is almost in the middle of the sky …” Kirabo’s nose caught something in the air; she sniffed, and a puzzled look came over her face.

  “What is it? Does my house smell?”

  “Is my grandfather here?”

  “Who, Miiro? What would Miiro be doing here?”

  “I smell him.”

  “Smell him, child, how can you smell a person?”

  “I know my grandfather: he has been here.”

  Nsuuta’s eyes moved left and right, left and right, without focus. “I’ve been sleeping all morning: Miiro has not been here.”

  “Then he is coming.”

  “Really?”

  “I told you, I am a wit—”

  “You have to go, Kirabo.” Nsuuta crossed the diiro, grabbed Kirabo’s arm, and led her out of the house and across the courtyard. When they got to the road, Nsuuta let go of her hand and whispered, “Tell me, how does your grandfather smell?”

  “Like love. Love smells like flowers.”

  Nsuuta threw back her head and laughed.

  “But Grandmother smells like vegetables—aubergine, garden eggs, jobyo spinach.”

  Nsuuta stopped laughing. A shadow floated across her blue eyes.

  “I know my Grandfather; he—”

  “You know nothing.”

  Kirabo was startled.

  “How can you know anyone when you don’t even know yourself?”

  Kirabo wanted to protest—I know myself—but she was smarting from Nsuuta’s rebuke. Then Nsuuta touched her shoulder as if she had snapped at the wrong person.

  “What I meant, child, is that we are our circumstances. And until we have experienced all the circumstances the world can throw at us, seen all the versions we can be, we cannot claim to know ourselves. How, then, do we start to know someone else?”

  Kirabo was perplexed. All she had said was that she knew her grandfather. Why all this grown-up talk?

  “I have to return to Teefe’s funeral,” Nsuuta said. “Come back soon; I have got news for you.”

  “You have? Did you see my flight the other night?”

  Nsuuta nodded.

  “I swung on the church steeple again.”

  “And I saw your mother.”

  Kirabo gasped. “You too saw the light grow at her house?”

  “Hmm, now go.” Nsuuta turned away.

  As she watched Nsuuta walk away, Kirabo covered her mouth as if it was too much happiness and she needed to hold it back. Then she ran up the road, the satchel of playthings bobbing on her back. Finally, she was going to see her, she would know what it felt like to have a mother. Then she made promises to herself: I will never take her for granted, no rolling my eyes the way Giibwa does at her mother. She skipped up the road. I will be cured of flying.

  •

  There was still time to go and play with Giibwa before the grown-ups came back from Teefe’s burial. Kirabo crossed the road and took the trail to Kisoga, Giibwa’s village. The path was overgrown on both sides with bamboo thickets. Kirabo skipped along. The day was perfect—no chores, and because of Teefe’s timely death, no grown-up in sight. Everywhere was a lightness in the air, one that came only when grown-ups were away. All that loving, that making sure you are okay and behaving, got heavy sometimes. Everywhere children played tappo, nobbo, gogolo, seven stones. The only sad thing was that Kirabo had made a promise to Nsuuta to keep quiet about her mother, which meant she couldn’t share the good news with Giibwa.

  She came to the Nnankya, a stream which formed the border between Nattetta and Kisoga. Because Nnankya, the spirit who owned the stream, was a clanswoman, Kirabo walked to the bank to say hello. The stream was silent, as if still. Yet tiny fish wriggled against the flow. They were so transparent she could see their spines. Kirabo shut out the rest of the world to hear the Nnankya flow. Water made irate noises where stones or plants stood in its way; it sucked its teeth when there was a dip in the gradient. Something hidden under the silt blew bubbles to the surface, tadpoles probably. For a while Kirabo listened to the stream. Then she jumped in and made a splash. Fish vanished, water muddied. Her feet sang at the cooling effect. After a while she stepped out on to the stones and skipped from one to another until she reached the other side. She said “See you” to Nnankya and carried on.

  A stench of cow dung and urine whipped her face, and Miiro’s kraal came into view. It was empty; the herdsman had taken the cows to graze. She walked past the kraal, past the herdsman’s house, past four other dwellings until she came to Giibwa’s home. Only the labourers who worked in Miiro’s coffee, cotton, and matooke shambas lived here in Kisoga. Their wives grew food on the land Grandfather allocated to them while the husbands laboured. At the end of the month the men came to the house and Miiro counted out their money, which they signed for in a book.

  Giibwa’s mother was using her bare hands to level cow dung for mulching and manure. Kirabo knelt and greeted her. She replied in Lusoga, even though Giibwa and her father were Ganda. Apparently, Giibwa’s mother had said, “Why speak Luganda, which is lame Lusoga?” The audacity. All the grown-ups said it. Because of this, residents called her Gyamera Gyene behind her back. Some bullies called Giibwa the same to her face. But the phrase did not make sense to Kirabo. Gyamera gyene is of trees; it means they grow by themselves rather than being planted.

  Kirabo asked if she and Giibwa could go out to play.

  Giibwa and Kirabo could not have been more different. Giibwa was cherubic, whereas Kirabo was trouble. Giibwa was shorter, a little chubby, where Kirabo was a reed. Giibwa smiled like a sunflower, Kirabo frowned and blinked. Giibwa was meek, while Kirabo was in charge, all-knowing, her views thrust on friends. Giibwa was so light-skinned, people called her Brown—“You mean Bulawuni?”—and marvelled how God gave Mwesigwa, Giibwa’s father, a beautiful daughter,
and a pang of jealousy would stab Kirabo. But it would not last, because she was Miiro’s kabejja and Giibwa was the daughter of his labourer.

  “Some food, Kirabo?” Giibwa asked.

  Kirabo shook her head: no way was she eating anything there, not after seeing Giibwa’s mother roll dung with her bare hands. Giibwa served some beans and a few planks of cassava. Watching her eat, hunger started to scrape Kirabo’s stomach. But it was too late now. She could not change her mind. She watched Giibwa wipe away thick gravy with the plank until the plate was clean. Before they set off, Giibwa dropped two clusters of ndiizi bananas into Kirabo’s satchel.

  “Today, we will go to my house,” Kirabo said.

  “What do you mean, ‘your house’?”

  “You mean I have never told you? I have a house. It is big, huge, with a lot of land. My grandfather gave it to me. Come, I will show you.”

  Giibwa followed Kirabo reluctantly. “Why would he give you a house?”

  “To belong to me.”

  “But you are just a girl.”

  “My grandfather says I am special. It belonged to Great-Grand Luutu.”

  Giibwa kept quiet. They turned into a trail going southward, which avoided the crossing at the Nnankya. They walked between sweet potato gardens, cassava, beans, and maize. And when they reached the swamp it was gardens of sugar cane and yams. Finally, they joined the main road and walked towards the border between Nattetta and Bugiri, where Kirabo’s great-grandfather Luutu’s house was located.

  The house was huge. Bigger than Miiro’s. A mansion compared to Giibwa’s home. It had a large stoep surrounded by mosquito mesh, which must have been the fashion back in Great-Grand Luutu’s time. The rest of the house was skirted by a wide, elevated verandah. A shell of a car, a Zephyr, perfect greenish skin, sat on the ground overgrown with weeds. A woman vaguely related to Miiro lived there.

  Kirabo, hands on hips, shook her head at the unkempt state of the property. “This is unacceptable. Look at the state of the compound.” She waved a hand like a seasoned landlady. “I am going to have a word with Grandfather; these are breeding grounds for snakes.”