Nights

Atwiine squeezed all her rage into tapping her hand on her thigh. She found that if she focused on this, she could go without thinking about beating the very air that made her dress flap in the aftermath of the passing Boda Bodas.

Binaisa road, Mulago. Boda Bodas whizzed past, honking here, and there a cyclist shouting at another, taxi conductors calling to pedestrians who ignored them and walked on.

She stood before six coffins. She had been wrong—this wasn’t as easy as picking out what to wear.

She walked from one coffin to the other, considering each in turn, and tried not to think of the annoyance that was the world. She looked at everything and wondered how it would feel for him when he lay inside. How he would look out of the narrow glass window on the bridge of the casket to see . . . to see . . . to see what?—the blackness of the earth in which he would be interred? No. Life.

She was going to show him life in all its splendour. So the window on the bridge was a door. It was to—

“Door? Eh! I have never seen a coffin with a door. But I can make it for you,” Ssalongo said, finding a pocket of silence in which to respond to the yapping woman.

The world seemed louder when he spoke. Her fingernails dug into her palm, easing only when he stopped talking. She resumed her tapping. So the window, no, the door, yes it had to be a door he could crack his bones and yawn while looking out of, each morning offering a new site for the million beauties she had prepared for him. A million dreams. A million nights.

As far as Atwiine remembered, they had both cried when they were first given to each other. Atwiine had felt a string tauten the distance between their hearts. Then the strumming had begun; the music of his cry, his laughs and the secret language they shared. Who did Joan and those white-coated strangers think they were telling her Luke wasn’t crying, and never would? Who were they to pretend to be her ears?

She heard him in the clapping of leaves in the wind, saw his unstable gait in the shifting of clouds and his growth in the ageing of days. And when she lay down on nights, she lived his whole life with him before morning came with the stupid sun.

“I don’t know them,” Ssalongo was quick to interject. She had stared straight at him when she spoke of clouds and clapping leaves and some people pretending to be her ears.

The six coffins before her were stiff like soldiers at inspection each hoping they shone brighter than the others, their kinks ironed flatter . . . kinks. Mujuni had said something about kinks. Mujuni.

What was it about him that made him such an easy choice? His stubborn surety that he would win her over in the end? Had it been how he said things with certainty? Was it that she’d felt chosen?—like he was some biblical prophecy and their union its manifestation.

“Nyabo,” Ssalongo said, “forgive me but. . . Who is Muju—”

Taptap. Why wouldn’t they shut up! Just shut up!

“Nyabo, saagala nkumanyira kumacha kuno.” Ssalongo wagged his finger at her.

The tap went faster and harder, faster than the rhythm of the pounding sun then quieted a fraction, enough for her to notice the coffins once more. The carpenter was staring at her and her at the wooden caskets. When was the last time she’d chosen anything that turned out good? Never. Mujuni? No. He . . . how had he put it?—they were fated for each other? Gasiya. Rubbish!

                                                                                                             ***

Atwiine’s reality sluiced into a shape-shifting beast of a hateful world and stupid suns drumming away the memory of Luke. Two years into their cohabitation and Mujuni had never missed a night with her. Now on the twelfth-night, he hadn’t come home she felt . . . discarded. Later that night, Atwiine woke up from a dream in which Mujuni was insisting on the name John-Mary into the nightmare of blood-soaked sheets, dry lips and a desert for a throat. She was met by a cold pillow when she turned to his side of the bed. She managed to croak his name, the wind whistled back through a narrow slit of the bedroom window open a crack. Sounding like a woman wailing. The type of cries one would think would raise the dead if it were possible. She waited for pain and when it never came she held her belly and wailed with the wind.

***

Atwiine had found Mumu Coffins next to Baana ba Kintu butcher at the summit of Katanga along Binaisa Road. It boasted of affordable designer coffins the dead would show off in the afterlife.

Coffins underneath turpentine in a shade—which made up Mumu’s Coffins—welcomed her like a long lost friend with the boasting signpost as an inside joke.

The sun was stretching itself and yawning its morning yellow over the world. Cool morning to everyone else but her. It clouted her memory of him away as chunks of night sublimated in daylight. Nights which held motherhood.

Ssalongo, who had not had any customer in a long time, his business circling the drain, was ready to accept anyone, ignoring any peculiarities, as long as they held money for him. He talked on and on about each coffin she stopped to inspect, pointing out the salient and subtle features laymen wouldn’t comprehend, encouraging her to buy this one or the other. This started an hour ago when his morning had appeared with Atwiine staring at his sales. All the while, Atwiine had tapped harder and harder until her thigh was hot with pain.

Suddenly, the brown coffin —Jesus, dead on a cross and stuck onto the bridge below a glass window seemed to jump out and grab her attention like predators and their prey. This was the one. Did it look any different from the others? Not really. But Atwiine now saw his body lying in it, his face peaceful and content with her choice. The crown and fishtail were smooth shiny brown skin that fell into geometrical folds at the ogee to the top body moulding. The interior panel looked . . . dreamy —that was what came to mind swollen and white as clouds, spongy to the touch. Atwiine could see Luke floating. Dreaming. Living. And had the world not gasped into a silence?—the stupid sun ceasing it’s pounding on her head, the sound of humanity turning to a murmur as she saw him smile. Yes.

Then it started again. It’s hate now wilder and more spiteful.

“Nyabo that is the price,” Ssalongo said, to get her attention.

She had to have the coffin. That was to be the bed upon which Luke floated and lived as he journeyed. Whatever it took. She couldn’t give him life but she could give him beautiful dreams of life.  For centuries and centuries. Beautiful like the taste of air on a misty morning. Like the joy of being chosen and died for—the way, Mujuni had described the extent of his love for her. Lies! But it would be true of her love for Luke.

This stupid sun! This stupid man!

“Nyabo, stop being insulting,” Ssalongo warned. Where he could, he managed to butcher English words but spoke mostly Luganda. Atwiine spoke English all through as though daring him to speak the same language.

“You talk of dreams. Simanya dreams. Simanya beauty. Are you okay up there?” He fingered his temple and jeered. “Go away if you’re not buying.”

Her palm froze over her burning thigh. In her mind, Luke laughed the laugh she only heard at night. And then she saw him. Behind her eyelids. Atwiine realised she had always seen him, a hazy mirage. It was this mirage that showed her how to escape the confines of their home where Joan and her brothers had her locked up. It was the same mirage she had seen in the distance leading her from shade to shade and from coffin maker to coffin maker. Day after day, week to week. They had all chased her away with sticks or stones, the mirage had run with her. It had led her to the warm corners of verandas for a night’s rest and dug through garbage with her, to find remains of food to eat. It was never any clearer but she was comfortable around it, trusting it completely. It would come in the day and stay with her until the night where she felt the same comfort while she played, bathed, took Luke to school and did all the motherly things.

Now it had solidified into Luke. He was running from her, urging her to follow. Her hand caught him and he screamed in delight. His smooth light-complexioned skin, like Mujuni’s, his deep brown eyes, his tiny teeth, his chuckle . . . oh, his chuckle. Happiness. This is to be his dream of life. Happiness.

“Nyabo, now why are you crying?”

Atwiine touched her hands to her face like it was a foreign thing and when they came away they were wet.

It had been him choosing the only gift she had left to offer. The chuckle echoed in her head. Echoing and echoing until—

“Gwe nyabo!” this time Ssalongo shouted. “Now why are you laughing like a child?” He lifted the coffin she’d chosen, to show that she couldn’t have it. Atwiine saw this and the echoing chuckle died.

Taptap went the palm. The sun drummed. Her head boiled. The world screamed in her head. Quiet! Quiet! Why doesn’t it just shut up!

“Aate no saagala kamanyiro.” Ssalongo put the coffin down and jeered at Atwiine. “You’ve been calling me stupid and insulting me and I was quiet. Who do you tell shut up? Hm? You think you are the—”