Today
“So, then, what are you?” “Because you don’t agree when I say that you are beautiful, intelligent kind and…”
“Tough,” I chipped in.
“Hahaha,” we both laughed.
“Tough, yes…” He said, almost dreamily, the last bits of “yes” trailing off silently and fading far into the cool night that surrounded us. He stared at me, brow creased and eyes narrowed, then tilted his head as if to rearrange the thoughts in his mind that had somehow got displaced. He made no show of trying to hide the fact that he was trying to figure me out. He looked to me like he was doing a kind of mental study of a subject that was all at once mathematics, literature, and chemistry. I revelled in the confusion on his face.
“Alright. I give up. You tell me,” he said.
I reached for the lighter on the table and struck it at the end of the cigarette I had been twirling in my thumbs the entire time. I sucked at it and exhaled deeply, throwing a tiny billowy cloud into the darkness. The smoke went up in style like a cross between an Arabian belly dancer and her a wicked pole counterpart.
“Well,” I said, “I smoke weed, I love sex and I go to church. So, for one, I am a contradiction. “
“Secondly, I am a rebel,” I said
“I beg your pardon?” He asked, incredulity written all over his face.
“What did you hear?”
“A rebel…”
“Yes, a rebel…or an outcast, or an outlier, whatever. You know the bell curve?”
“The bell curve…yes…though, I do not know where you are going with this.”
I ignored him and continued. “Good. So on the bell curve, there’s the middle part where the majority of the population falls and then,” I inhaled deeply on the cigarette “there’s the two ends of it where I find that I normally fall. The outliers.”
I crushed the burning head of the cigarette between my thumb and the table and dumped it in a bin close by. The aim was so perfect, even I was inwardly pleased with myself.
Silence.
I did not bother to look at him to glean anything from his face, and quite honestly, I did not care. I have lived and loved naively long enough to know that most people care first and foremost about their own interests. I was being deliberate and brutal. I had my own interests, and in pursuing them, I was relentless and unforgiving.
“Look, I really don’t like you,” I said, looking him right in the eyes.
“Wait, what?” He asked, slightly shocked.
“I don’t like you,” I repeated, mulling over every individual word before I picked up the pace again. “It’s the power I have over men like you that I like. You don’t love me, and you know it. But you will not respectfully stay away. You decide instead to use me to satisfy your own ego. You have decided to me the object of your trophy hunt. I am no animal. I am a living, breathing being that desires companionship, but what do you do? You just come use me.”
“Well, I…uh…”
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
Two years ago
“Is this seat occupied?” I heard a woman’s voice ask, causing me to pull my head back from out of the bus window. She was large and motherly.
I shook my head from side to side and mumbled, “No”, then dipped it back outside and continued to watch the night life of Soroti, while I mused about how I was going to terminate a pregnancy for the second time. The woman promptly took the seat beside me, which I could tell by the sudden weight of her large hips kneading my sinful body like dough against the side of the bus. She smelled old and kind, if you can imagine the smell that kind, old people have; it is the smell of Lifebuoy soap and Vaseline petroleum jelly occurring together.
The first time had been unbelievably easy. It was like nothing had happened at all. I was in and out of the Doctor’s office in forty minutes. I had felt relieved and powerful, getting my whole life and its control back into my hands – just like that – after feeling like I had lost it only a couple of weeks earlier. After that incident, I had made two promises to myself, the first one being to resume and complete my professional accounting course that I had left a year ago, when I resigned from my upcountry job to come and live with my boyfriend Matthew in the Capital, Kampala. The second was to leave Matthew and never talk to him again.
Matthew and I met at a book sale event. He was impossible to miss, by the number of girls who flocked around him and his sales table. The girls around him were, judging from appearance, not much of readers, but the kind who attended events because they were just that- events. Seeing all the attention he was getting, I deliberately refused to pay him any. Lest he mistakes me for one of those desperate girls fawning over him. I am not that type, I said to myself. I focused instead on making sales at the table assigned to the publishing house I had volunteered to sell books for that day.
Matthew’s own was four tables away from mine, and both the sound and frequency of feminine laughter from it was as never-ending and irritating as it was impossible to ignore. While I disdained him for the way he surrounded himself with so many women, a part of me also envied the women for how cool they looked and dressed, knowing that my own sense of style- or lack thereof, for that matter, would never allow me to get the attention of a man like him.
Unbeknownst to me, my ignoring of Matthew triggered in him a curiosity and set him on a quest to get to know me. I was thus taken aback when he came, an empty white plastic chair in tow, and sat directly in front of our table.
“How are you?” He said, flashing a blinding bright smile that thawed every coldness I harboured against him. I could not believe that he had noticed me, after all. He extended his hand for a handshake, and I took it. He delegated the role at his sales table and spent the rest of the day at mine. By the end of the event, I was smitten. That marked the beginning of the end of life as I knew it, then.
Within two weeks of our dating, I was pregnant, and two weeks later, I was not pregnant anymore. Matthew had executed everything so quickly that before I could even blink, I was in and out of the doctor’s office, both perplexed and relieved. Yet the way he talked to me about “the situation” as he referred to it and how quickly he caused it to disappear was so cold and calculated that I feared for a moment the kind of person he was. I even glimpsed for a split second an unsettling glint in his eyes that I could not quite put a finger to.
All of this was forgotten a few days later, when he went back to his charming self, and I never left him like I had promised myself I would. It is only later that I would understand what it was that I saw in his eyes, a few months into the relationship.
“Madam, your ticket.” My neighbour’s voice reached my ears at the same time as her chubby, kind hands reached my shoulder.
“Oh,” I pulled my head out of the window again, to the sight of the dark skinned Somali bus conductor who was checking the receipts of the passengers and also cutting them for those who did not have receipts. He stood in the bus corridor, the receipt book held firmly in his left underarm, and a bic pen in his right hand. As the bus jostled in and out of the potholes, I marvelled at the expertise with which he managed to ground himself by leaning the weight of his body against one of the bus seats. He looked young, eager, but definitely not naïve.
“I don’t have one,” I said
“Where are you going? Kampala?”
Where was I going? I looked at him as if he would tell me where I was going, and his no-nonsense face told me I was going to Kampala.
“Kampala,” I said.
He quickly scribbled in the receipt book and tore out a ticket for me. I paid him the 40,000 shillings fare, got the receipt, and stuffed it in the inside pocket of my jacket. This time, I did not go back to looking outside the window. The bus was now plunging ahead full throttle, and the wind outside had quickly turned cold.
I threw on the hood of my jacket and tied the laces under my chin. Then I closed the window and leaned my head against it. In that position, I saw the trees and shrubs whizz past my eyes and tried to identify each of them as they came; simultaneously using the dizzying sight as an eraser for the unrelenting picture of the two red lines on a strip that the woman in the clinic had showed me to help me understand the words she had said but that I could not- or rather would not – comprehend.
“Is this for pregnancy or for HIV?” I had asked.
“Both strips are showing two lines.” I heard the woman’s voice say. She continued, “That means both are positive.”
“Shea butter. Ekoreto. Mango. One. Two. Three.” I continued to count the trees and shrubs in the language I knew them – English or in my local language, Ng’Karimojong, as they whizzed past my eyes. I was woken from my reverie by the buzzing of my phone. I reached for it from the inside pocket of my jacket. It was a message from WhatsApp from a number I did not know.
“Hey. av bin trying 2 reach u. This is Matthew. Wen r u cmng to K’la??”
“Fuck you,” I texted back, and blocked the number.
That means both are positive.
The voice continued to echo in my mind. Suddenly, I noticed that I no longer had a neighbor on the bus. When and why did she leave? I must have been too distracted to notice her moving away. I started to feel uneasy. Did she know I was sick? I looked around at the other passengers and they clearly were oblivious, each lost in their own world. Then I saw her come back and take her seat.
“I went to stretch my legs a bit,” she said, turning to me and smiling like she owed me some kind of accountability. I stretched my lips in a forced smile and acknowledged her politely. Her eyes, voice and demeanor were oddly comforting.
They reminded me of the woman that lived next door to Matthew’s apartment who had helped me gather my clothes when, in a drunken rage, he threw them out of his apartment. This was four months into our relationship. I was on my way to visit my mother in the village when he accused me of lying to him about my true whereabouts.
He demanded that I should first pass by his house if I was truly honest about where I was. I had already arrived at the taxi park but decided to turn back, just to prove to him that I was not lying to him and that he was mistaken. Not only that, but also to announce to him that I was pregnant. I had planned to inform him of this when I returned from visiting my mother but then I thought that since an opportunity to inform him earlier had presented himself, why not? As soon as I arrived, he demanded that I unpack my luggage.
“Excuse me?”
“Unpack your luggage”
“I’m sorry, but what you are asking for is unreasona…”
There was the sound of mini-explosion as his gigantic palm landed on my cheek, causing me to spin and hit my head against the wall of the living room. The painting hanging on the wall, depicting an African woman and her many sacrifices unhooked itself from the wall, fell to topple the vase with artificial flowers below it, and both came crashing down. Chips of brown clay splattered across the grey woolen carpet. What I initially thought was saliva, pooled in my mouth. I got up from the floor and ran to the bathroom to spit it in the sink. It was all blood, and two teeth. My eyes popped wide in horror. It was never to be the last time, this type of beating.
My phone rang again. I cursed, knowing it was another call from Matthew.
“Will you stop calling me?! You have already ruined my life what more do you want?!”
“Um…Excuse me, Madam, I am calling from Case Clinic. Is this Miss Phoebe Atim?”
“Oh, I am so sorry, madam. Yes…”
“I called to inform you about your test results. We conducted one further test –the PCR test – which is more accurate than the strips, and it has been determined that you are, in fact, HIV negative.
“What?! Are you sure?”
“Yes, Madam. This test is almost one hundred per cent accurate. You are an outlier, madam. The strips are usually accurate. We normally conduct the PCR test for avoidance of doubt, and a few cases – such as yours – turn out to have been false positives with the strips, after all. Your results will be sent to your e-mail. You can call us back in case you have other questions. Have a good day.”
“My daughter! Why are you crying? Are you okay?” The woman next to me on the bus asked. “Your dress is covered in blood!”
“What?!” I looked at the front of my dress, and indeed, it was covered in blood.
“Are you pregnant, my daughter?” She asked. Before I could answer, she said, “I think you have miscarried. I am so sorry for your loss”
I was too stunned to speak. I unblocked Matthew and texted him: “DO NOT EVER CALL ME AGAIN” And blocked him again.
Today
My date shifted in his chair while I carried on with my monologue.
Finally, I rubbed my hands together and placed my elbows on the table, my fingers interlocked, and my chin rested on them. I stared at him. I felt a rage rising from the pits of my stomach. It made me angry because I was right.
Damn, I thought. I had not yet even explained to him how I was a rebel.
PS: This story was first written as a final (CAPSTONE) project during the writing class called POWIM, offered by the site, Journal Of A Jesus Girl. It was one of two that emerged best from the final fiction projects of the class.
