A Guy Gets A Call From His Best Friend’s Girlfriend. She Asks Him To Do Her A Favour

It was a weak morning, it was the reason I hate waking up before eight. The sun climbing with weary effort up the black hills of Mengo, nudging into a grey sky streaked with long, thin clouds. It made me think of lines of vomit in a puddle outside a bar after a storm. I hate waking up before eight. I don’t want to see this crap.

The Caldina hummed sedately, switching to a calm purr on corners as we rolled down empty roads into the curves and valleys of Nateete. We had given up on small talk, Desire and I. I had tried, but my early
morning sullenness was too heavy to lift off with just a couple of flippant remarks and that perkiness of hers that I had come to expect was completely absent.
There had been a trace of it when I arrived at The Agency (forgive me; I didn’t bother to get its name) hugging my shoulders and frowning.
The cab driver who brought me, totally insensitive to my irritable state, had turned on that station I hate, and I had been buffeted by Country music all the way from Nateete. She was already seated in the passenger seat of her car. She leaned
out and waved me over.
“Christopher, baambi, I’m so glad you could do this for me…” she had began to say.
“Chris,” I interrupted curtly. Then, realizing that that might have sounded rude, added, “I mean, no problem. I don’t have much else to do.”
What followed were large gaps of silence that sounded even wider because of the sharp smallness of the peaks of words that separated them.

“It’s a cold morning.”
“Yeah. I think the rains are coming.”
“Yeah.”

“You should have brought a sweater.”
“I know.”

“Really chilly.”

Desire didn’t like silence, and I did think of lifting myself up out of my funk to get into some sort of conversation, but then it was six thirty in the morning. Fuck that.
“Where are we going?” I asked, fingering the keys, tapping the levers and gears and pedals, getting a feel of the car. And I could feel her shrink when she said, “You know the place in Nateete called Ewomusawo?” after she said that, I could sense her retreat into herself. As if those words just turned the lights off.

I don’t like driving. I never quite got the instincts to kick in, so I had to be alert all the time. I drove on edge, always sure that I will be focusing on the wrong thing, and neglecting the other thing and that is when some kid will run into the road in front of me and make us both a statistical inevitability. I drove with both hands clinging to the wheel as if I was hanging off it, my eyes darting all over the road, the hair on the back of my neck pricking through my shirt collar. At the end of any trip I would be exhausted.
I don’t talk when I’m driving, and I don’t think of anything else apart from the task at hand. I cannot escape the awareness that I am pushing tons of potential death. I focus keenly.
I knew where Ewo’musawo was. Desire emerged from the humming silence to say, “Turn in here,” as soon as the junction appeared.

I swung the car into a brief spell of tarmac that gave way to a deeply rutted and gulleyed stretch of dirt road. Easier to relax on these, because you have to move slower. This one was worse than most, though, and the car had to virtually assume its quadruped nature and creep, step, climb and clamber over trenches and ditches and humps to move
ahead. Eventually we wound round a corner, past the only really flat surface since we got off the road—a few metres square of mud pounded down to make the football pitch of a primary school—and round a concrete wall to a row of silent doors adjacent to windows painted green. Musawo means doctor. This row of rooms was three small clinics, a tiny lab, and a dispensary. That is why they called the place that. A lot of times I have been to places like this, where huge wide areas take their name from one small specific corner, and never ever got to the actual source of the name.

There was a time a while ago, when I used to come to Nateete frequently. I was curious about marijuana, and there was a guy around here who could hook us up. It was just about a month of weekends, then I decided that the high wasn’t worth the tricks my memory played, and I stopped my trips to the suburb. But I remembered the name of this part of Nateete. Ewo’musawo. This was the first time I was actually seeing the doctors’.

I parked. Desire sighed heavily and looked at the buildings. The dirty walls, the rusty tin roofs, the dirt pathway with dust settled and still in the weak light looked extremely sad. She sighed again. And that is when I finally woke up from the morning languor, and snapped out of my driving tension and realized that I had driven her to a clinic hidden in Nateete at a quarter past six in the morning. She was going to have an abortion.

She didn’t even look at me. Her gaze fixed on the long corridor between the clinics and their wall, in contrast to the rest of the compound, it was shining and clean, freshly mopped. She said, “It will be like an hour,” she said.
I didn’t know what to reply.

“Okay,” I said. She inhaled deeply as if sucking in strength to move, and shoved herself out of the car. As she walked down the corridor I saw her reflected beneath herself in the shiny cement floor.

The sky was open and the sun was now bright but I felt as if a storm
had just fallen right on top of my head. Had she tricked me or had she trusted me? Had she been manipulating me or had she really, truly just turned to me for help? I could almost see streams of blood flow down that corridor. I got out
of the car and walked quickly out of the compound. In panic. I didn’t want to be seen there.

I walked through Nateete’s ugly paths, its ragged scattered bush and its clusters of weed and wild grass, its guttered pathways, the still rivers of deep green crud flowing beneath slum houses, stinking in the rising heat. I saw pregnant goats and dirty naked babies with bald heads scuttling from one hovel to another, young women with old eyes bent over basins and saucepans looking up from their work at me with my Nike sneakers and sunglasses. I stepped over the goat shit and squinched my nose when the smell of frying cassava mixed with the smell from the rivers of sewage. And I saw that the world was so much larger than my own life.

When I returned to the clinic, I found Desire already in the car. She was lying in the back seat, her feet folded together up to her stomach. Her eyes shut. I climbed into the drivers seat. I didn’t want to wake her. She wasn’t asleep. She got up as soon as she heard me at the door and by the time I was in the seat, she was sitting upright.

I looked into the rear view mirror and saw her rubbing her head. Silence would have been more natural now, but I had to ask.
“Does he know?”
She continued to rub her temples. Not as if there was pain, just in the way you do when you need to do something to the thoughts in your mind. “I can’t tell him.”
Now I also grasped my head. She got out of the back of the car and held her belly lightly as she opened the passenger seat. She got in and I could see her eyes were swimming.
“I would have preferred not to be involved in this, Desire,” I said. “You could have hired a cab to bring you…”
“You’re his friend. That is why I asked you,” she said.
“You think that because you couldn’t have him here you could have me and that will make it alright?”
She flared up suddenly. “Look, it’s my body. It’s not his and it certainly isn’t yours, okay?”
“You think that means this won’t hurt him? And now you’ve put me in the middle of it—Desire, I’m going to have to tell him…”
“Don’t!” she snapped. The tears were streaming now. She leant back to catch her breath and gather herself together. “Don’t tell him. Nze I’ll tell him myself. Just take me back. please?”
She curled up tighter and tighter in her seat as we drove, and I know I almost killed five people on the journey back. At the agency I parked, turned off the engine and was set to fly out of the car—I was angry and bewildered and for some reason frightened, but she grabbed my shirt. “Christopher.”
“What.”
“Thanks.”