It had taken Nakibuka a long time to find out that things were not going well between her and her niece. In her estimation, she had done a wonderful job preparing an uptight ex-nun for what was by family standards a very high-profile wedding. It had taken a lot of patience and cajoling, and she had expected some gratitude and a warm relationship in return, but apparently that had been asking too much. Invitations for Padlock to visit her had remained unanswered, and her visits to her niece’s home had become progressively colder. Her choice of Padlock as her daughter’s godmother had proved a catastrophe of shattered idealism. It was then that the older woman realized that something was wrong, and she withdrew. She consoled herself that her niece’s marriage was rock solid and that her counselling duties were redundant.
Years passed without the two women exchanging visits. Nakibuka’s marriage became stormy: her man wanted more children, she didn’t. She saw no use in having six children just to prop up a rotting marriage. The canings started. She insisted that if he really wanted to beat her, she would rather have it where she had had it before: on “government meat,” as they called the buttocks in school, the only place a teacher was authorized to beat a child. She could not imagine herself with a swollen eye or a torn lip or a broken nose.
The beatings on government meat resurrected the slumbering ghost of a platonic adolescent crush from her school days, and amidst its ashes rose the figure of her niece’s husband, Serenity. What had begun with furtive eye contact in her niece’s parental home and culminated in shoulder touching on the wedding night nurtured Serenity’s cheerfulness and attentiveness when she visited or when they met at family functions. At one such family function, a funeral which Padlock didn’t attend, they had talked for close to an hour, feverishly, spontaneously. She invited him to visit her and her husband, hoping that his manners would rub off on her man. Serenity never appeared.
Unlike the time when, possessed of adolescent hormonal devilry, she wrote letters every other day to the teacher she was infatuated with, even hinting at suicide, she remained calm. Except when her nights were haunted by the events of the wedding night. When thoughts of that gleaming male flesh cooking in the heat of the bridal bedroom made her tremble. When coincidental resemblances to Serenity of men she met or bypassed made her heart beat violently and seized her muscles with lingering paralysis. When Serenity’s form filled her mind as she lay down to be caned on “government meat” and she screamed and begged, swelling her man’s ego with the falsehood of love sounds disguised as pain-choked noises. Months and months passed as she waited for Serenity to make a move. She attended every family function, every wedding, every funeral and every clan gathering in the hope of refilling her mind with his voice, the sight of him and his scent, but he eluded her.
The day he appeared on her doorstep, his clothes smelling of the evening air, his shoes coated with dust, dogs howling in the background, she could hardly hide her shock. She hid in the bedroom for a long time, calming herself, preparing to accept rejection, negative reports about Padlock and pleas for her intervention to save his marriage. Rejection had to be taken with dignity; she was ready. Back in the room with Serenity, conversation flowed naturally and almost careened out of control when she discovered that it was not her intervention he craved but her caress. She was not looking for a husband, nor was he looking for a wife. They had both been looking for lovers. With her husband out of the way, they were left to themselves, the dogs in the background harbingers of things to come. There was no going back now. She could not give up Serenity, and neither would he give her up.
The unexpected undercurrent of sweet guilt at this first meeting with Padlock made the older woman’s voice shake a bit, but since it was not taboo for them to share a man, she managed to look her niece in the eye. The friction and resistance she read there were expected. A maternal uncle robbed of his wife by his nephew would have worked up the same frustrated intensity, sorry that the robbery was not traditionally taboo. By now Nakibuka had admitted to herself that she was Padlock’s rival. Better-looking and more confident, she could afford to be generous and nice to her beleaguered niece, who looked worn, like an old boot. The younger woman was being courted by premarital, post-convent winds, which made her look as if she were shouldering all the world’s tragedies. If she did not take care, Nakibuka thought, soon birds would be nesting in her hair, baby hippos snorting in her belly and hyenas rubbing their rumps in her armpits.
Nakibuka concluded that Padlock worried too much, thrived on pressure and misery, and that it was too late to change her. She had learned her lessons badly and controlled her man too openly; no wonder he had turned his back on her. Nakibuka was happy that it was all in the family. If Padlock did not want to share Serenity, she could go to hell.
Padlock did not say much, preferring to keep her feelings to herself, happy to keep Nakibuka guessing. Serenity had betrayed her; so had this woman. She had not taken Serenity to task; she saw no use in quarreling with this whore. The next twenty hours were so wretched that they reminded her of the floating, gorging feeling she had experienced when Sr. John Chrysostom chucked her out of the convent so many years ago. She wanted to wring this whore’s neck, but she couldn’t stoop that low. She put her tribulations at the feet of Jesus, thinking of Judas Iscariot. The proximity of her whoring aunt made the hours wail with chilly desolation and isolation amidst this crowd of laughing, romanticizing, reminiscing relatives. Each minute sank into her with the force of an eagle’s talon. She fought time with her only cherished weapon: thoughts of home, her own home, where she was supreme ruler. The rest — her relatives, their voices, the food, the noise in the distance — became blurred, sealed in a miasma of endless fog.
At night Padlock lingered in the darkness, watching the stars. She suddenly remembered Mbaziira and the Miss Singer letter. What if it was Nakibuka who had engineered the plot? But how had she come to know about Mbaziira? Impossible.
Padlock noticed no one on the bus home; she had not noticed her relatives when they bid her farewell. Vendors assaulted her somewhere along the way, pushing things in her sightless face, but she didn’t see them. By the time she entered her pagoda, Padlock was shaking with excitement, as though she had just eluded drooling devils stationed all along the road. The house smelled slightly of fish and of washing soap, but that did not matter: smells, like pests, could always be annihilated. She checked the rooms to make sure that nothing was missing. Everything was intact: she was impressed. She had not expected Serenity to do such a good job, what with his nose always in a book and his heart with his cronies at the gas station. This was real power, she thought, a system which worked despite its enforcer’s absence. The stench of diapers drove her from the bathroom; her nose longed for the more cultured smell of sewing-machine lubricant. Her head was already buzzing with the sound of the machine, savoring what inexperienced ears called dreary monotony. The sound reminded her of a train, safe in its singular track, unstoppable in its purpose, single-minded in its labor toward its destination. She felt like a train. She dared Nakibuka to destroy her family: she would be reduced to bits, like any other whore suicidal enough to stand in Padlock’s way.
Her nerves fully assuaged with the sounds and smells of home, she contemplated her following task with ease; she had to make a dress for a girl who was going to be baptized in two days’ time. If there was enough time, she could also make a dress for a woman who was going to attend a wedding in a week’s time. There was various repair work she had to do. Her life was back on track. The girl had top priority: she would probably become a nun, Padlock thought wistfully. Nunhood, the convent and the vows were things that would speak to her for the rest of her life. Nunhood, she said to the walls, makes a woman a woman among women, a priestess, a goddess, a queen of heaven.