Daphne betrayed us the last time she played Liar, Liar. She became remorseful upon seeing Penny soak her boyfriend’s jeans in paraffin and set them on fire. Daphne then went behind our backs and confessed to Penny that it was all a lie. A game. Liar, Liar. That Penny’s godsend of a boyfriend hadn’t really screwed Daphne in the backseat of Daphne’s Rav4. That didn’t solve anything, because Penny still broke up with her boyfriend. As in, burning your boyfriend’s clothes is a move that has no coming back from. It’s in the same terminal class as hooking up with his brother.
Daphne lost her best friend that day, and she lost, eternally, my respect too.
So, at breakfast in the guild canteen, when she came to our table, pulled a chair, sat down and asked to play again, Momo, Nisha and I weren’t particularly psyched.
Daphne leaned against the table, her cleavage spilling all over the wooden veneer and said, “Vee, I swear I won’t disappoint you. I’ve got the perfect lie.”
I glanced at Momo and Nisha, who, wanting to appear neutral, only shrugged. I shouldn’t have indulged Daphne, but it was the middle of October, we had flanked all our tests, and for the next month or so, Makerere University Business School would feel like living in someone’s memory of a university. Only that person’s memory would be fading.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s hear this lie?”
Daphne got up, hugged me, smiled at Momo and Nisha, then left the canteen.
“Hey,” I called after her. “The lie?”
Over her shoulder, she said, “Oh, you’ll hear it, Vee. It’s about you after all.”
Momo, all thoughtful, said, “Isn’t that against –”
“The rules? Yes,” Nisha said. She turned to me. “Shouldn’t you be like, worried – I mean, it must be a very good lie if she even warns us about it?”
I shrugged. Daphne couldn’t possibly back up any lie she would cook up about me. She was such a flake. Besides, she could only hurt me by fooling Momo and Nisha, who already knew we were only playing Liar, Liar.
After breakfast, Momo got up and wrapped her sweater around her waist, while Nisha grabbed her straw fedora and sunglasses, and we left. They had noon lectures. I had a saloon appointment I had been saving three days for. I couldn’t afford the weekly trips to Sparkles anymore. Not with Jerry out of the picture.
I got a facial and touch-up. It left me with a headache that could cripple a mountain. I couldn’t deal with a taxi, so I got a bodaboda back to Prudence Girls Hostel. This was around one p.m.
I slipped into our gate and found a chattering crowd gathered in the narrow parking. My head felt tight and unbalanced, I couldn’t stand around gossiping.
I made my way up the stairs, past spazzy-looking girls and boys, leaning against the railings, their attention drawn to something I couldn’t figure out.
Static excitement had charged the corridors, but this wasn’t like that time last sem when a fresher committed suicide. This was like when people gather at a crash site along Masaka road, to rob the dead.
I moved between them, saying, ‘Excuse me, Excuse me.’ They gave me more attention than my politeness required. I felt self-conscious, asked myself, is it my hair? Is there some unwashed green goo left over from my hurried facial?
Some of the unfamiliar faces pointed fingers at me, then turned back to speak among themselves in hushed tones. I didn’t mind them. I continued up the stairs until I reached the second floor and found Rachel, my roomie, leaning against the balcony railing, waxing her glasses on her crepe blouse, with a cigarette dangling from her hand. She saw me and shook her head.
“What?” I asked.
Rachel said nothing. She put her glasses back on and threw her cigarette into the flower pot.
I followed her into our room. Only it wasn’t our room anymore. It was a crash site. Momo and Nisha, restless, were standing over the mess on the floor. Rachel told me they had ransacked every inch of the room, even my dirty knickers in the wicker-basket. The carpet was rolled up, the TV and fridge unplugged, and our drawers rifled through.
Momo turned to me and said, “Where’s it?”
“Where’s what?”
“Don’t play around, Vee.”
I scoffed, thinking it was some kind of game
Nisha came over, snatched my bag and upended all its contents on the floor. They both dropped to their knees and searched through the mess. I went mute, paralyzed with shock. This wasn’t like one of those times when I don’t know what to say to something awkward so I play dumb. This was me just plain dumb.
“I can’t see it,” Momo said. “Where is it?”
I turned to Rachel, she just shrugged. She would have laughed if this wasn’t happening to me.
Momo stood up, her breath whinny, her eyes rimmed with tears that she was too angry to acknowledge.
“Please tell me what you think I’ve hidden?” I said.
Momo bit her lower lip. Nisha looked at the cluttered mess, like she wanted another look-around.
“I never thought you could betray us like this, Vayolah,” Momo said.
Viola, Momo. Not Va-yo-lah.
I reached out my hand to, I don’t know, calm her. The last time she was mad at me was, hmmn, forever ago.
“I thought we were friends,” Nisha added, her voice shaky, but she betrayed no emotion on her doll face. Which wasn’t surprising, sometimes Nisha is a bookshelf with no books. She’s the kind of person who smiles and frowns with only her eyes. Talking to her can be an endless exercise of reading between the lines.
“Well, friends tell each other stuff,” I said. “I don’t even know what I’ve done to get you two so bitchy –”
“Bitchy?” Momo cut in.
Yes.
“Guys,” Rachel stepped up, her hands held high. “What’s this all about?”
“Shut up, Judas,” Nisha said. “Stop protecting her.”
I laughed. “Momo, Nisha, whatever Daphne told you, it’s not true.”
“This has nothing to do with Daphne,” Momo said.
“This is about you betraying us,” Nisha said.
“Oh enough, both of you, just, enough. Okay?” I clapped. “Great acting, you had me fooled, hahaha, but the joke’s not funny anymore. Now put my stuff back together, and maybe we can get back to where we were?”
No one spoke for a while.
“Let’s go, she’s not going to tell us,” Nisha pulled Momo’s hand. Momo didn’t move. She stared as though she wanted to do evil things to my toothbrush then make me use it.
Nisha pulled her hand again. “Let’s go Momo, we don’t have friends here.” Nisha guided Momo to the door. Momo wheeled back and picked up, the silk scarf she got me for my birthday.
Their departure was stamped with more rude stares.
Rachel closed the door behind them and scoffed and shook her head. “Friends, huh?” She could comfortably say that. Rachel had always been so self-absorbed, like a hospital-patient. Just me, me, me all the time. But I couldn’t help taking her side. I mean, Friends? Really, who needs them? Not me, not if they were that fickle.
Rachel picked up the spilled CDs and magazines. I picked up the knickers and clothes.
As we reorganized our room, Rachel told me how Momo and Nisha had stormed in, calling me filthy names. They didn’t tell her what they wanted, they just ransacked the room. Rachel had thought it was a game, like we used to play in first year.
Oh, first year, those pillow fights and drink-ups, and third-year benchers, what happened to us, how did we get here? It was like we got to third year and everybody got a personality-transplant. Now we are allergic to the people they once were. The old Momo wouldn’t have called me all those names, and I know I deserved to be called worse, but she had always been there for me. And me, the old me wouldn’t have pretended to not care so much.
“What are you going to do?” Rachel asked.
I thought about it a moment then said, “Make Daphne wish Penny had burnt her instead of her boyfriend’s clothes.”
MUBS was someone’s fading memory of a campus and the memory of Daphne seemed to have faded along with it. No one could remember the last place or time they had seen her.
I went to her hostel in Samuel Courts, looked into her room through the open window. Her bed seemed like it hadn’t been slept in for weeks. Very neat, even for Daphne. Neither was she at the basketball court. She wasn’t in the library or in the guild canteen. I couldn’t find her in any of her usual places, but however large MUBS is, her lie had spread like exam fever, especially among the third years. Some of it was in my head but I was sure a lot of the third years knew, at least about the Momo-Nisha thing. I could feel eyes following me everywhere.
I crossed the scattered gardens around the lecture blocks behind the admin block. I crossed the post-grad block, passed the guild offices, sloped down to the mosque, and moved aimlessly in its gardens. Just walking, trying to hide in plain sight, even if I didn’t really need to. But that was the thing with Liar, Liar., a well told lie makes you a target to everyone. MUBS becomes a much smaller hell than it usually is.
I could hide, I thought. I could have gone home, commuted from Ntinda for a few days. But I would not have escaped it. Plus, I wasn’t going to give that Mrs-I-have-got-the-perfect-lie the satisfaction of seeing me squirm. Besides, if her last episode with Penny was any indication, Daphne would fold. But how much would I suffer first?
Lectures passed in a daze. I wasn’t really attentive throughout the four hours. My eyes were glued to the door, waiting for Daphne to show up, if not her, then at least Momo and Nisha, but no one showed up.
Lectures ended, and as I walked out of the hall, a group of seemingly anonymous girls blocked my way. The looks they gave me were as flat as iron boards. Daphne had fed them the lies too. They wanted to pull out my hair and feed me their shoes.
One spit on my pumps. I spat back and she was wearing only sandals. It escalated pretty fast. She tried to slap me. I went back into the hall and glided between the rows of desks and slipped out through the side door and ran up to the Main Library.
Hiding in the library, I felt like maybe I had taken a very dim view of the whole thing. Daphne’s lie was bigger than me or Daphne, or Momo or Nisha.
I needed to worry. Seemed like the gears of what was real, what was true, had slipped. And I didn’t even have a clutch to hold on to.
The food court at Akamwesi Complex was never deserted, not at even at eleven thirty in the night, but this time it was. That was a blessing in disguise. I couldn’t deal with any familiar face. I ordered fries, nyama choma, and banana frappé and then made a last minute dash for Samuel Courts.
Daphne’s Rav4 was in the parking lot, but the lights in her room were off. I knocked. No one answered. Determined not to leave without seeing her, I waited in the corridor for hours. I dozed off, and woke up after two o’clock, to cold chips, sharp-smelling nyama choma, and the frappé had melted under my arm.
Perfect. Just perfect.
I checked Daphne’s room again, no lights, no Daphne. I walked out and found her Rav4 gone. The askari allegedly didn’t notice what time she drove out.
It felt like the whole of MUBS was siding with her.
I left Samuel Courts cursing and walked back to Prudence Girls.
Rachel was still up. She played Shaa’s Sugua Gaga on the music system. That was her official I’m-having-sex-don’t-knock song.
Perfect. Just perfect.
I sat down in the corridor, my knees brought up high to my chest. I wanted to curl into a ball and just roll away and get stepped on by a truck.
My calves hurt, my neck was stiff and I stunk.
I was too tired to be awake and too awake to be tired. This must be what it feels like to be a zombie. I could go to Jerry, but it wouldn’t have been fair to toy with his feelings. Me showing up in the middle of the night looking as I did would have hyper tensed his hopes. Some bridges once crossed are better left burned. There are only a finite number of times you can break-up and make-up and break-up with someone.
I tucked my chin into my hoodie and nibbled my cold fries and nyama choma. The lukewarm frappé left a sour taste that turned my stomach. I leaned over the balcony and vomited. Sorry.
I wiped my mouth and settled back down, curled into a fetal position and fell into a restless sleep filled with anxious dreams of crucifixions and bodiless mouths sweeping me up and eating me.
At four, I shivered awake. Rachel was shaking my shoulders.
“You were screaming,” she said.
Her face was lean and ruddy in the dim balcony light. Her eyes were vacant, and her hair was all over the place. She wore only a tank top, shorts, leggings, and she puffed a cigarette. Rachel had been smoking for as long as I had known her. She once told me she was afraid she would lose it, personality-wise, if she ever stopped smoking. She’d had four roommates before me. None stayed more than a week. I could tolerate almost everything about Rachel. I just couldn’t let her cook, though. The pepper she ate could choke an Indian. Maybe all those cigarettes had scrubbed all the sensitivity from her taste buds. Neither could I go dress-shopping with her, standing next to her I’d always end up looking like a talking elephant. It was enviable, Rachel’s ability to not gain weight despite how much she ate. All her coughing was the greatest weight-loss exercise.
Rachel was my only friend right now. She offered me a cigarette.
“To calm you,” she said.
We had been roomies for three years. I didn’t smoke but she never missed an opportunity to offer me a cigarette. I said thanks like I always do. I hugged her, dragged myself inside the room, and crawled under the heap of pillows on my bed.
She came in after about two more cigarettes. She switched the light back on and sat on my bed. Her hands flat on her thighs. She talked, but I drifted to sleep easily.
She shook me and continued. “Remember that time in first year?” she said. “When you walked in and found me doing that… that disgusting stuff with the eggplant, and you laughed so hard? But you said you weren’t laughing at me. You said you were laughing ’cause it was happening to you a lot—walking into people doing disgusting stuff, I mean. Do you remember that?
“It’s four,” I said. “Can’t we do this tomorrow?”
“Do you?”
“Rachel, is there a moral to this?”
“I’d like to think we’re close… Not as close as you and Momo and Nisha, but close, at least close enough not to stab each other in the back. Yeah?”
I nodded.
“Yesterday I was probably the only one who reserved any room for doubt about you. Everyone wanted to crucify you, but I didn’t believe any of it –”
“And I’m very grateful for that, Rachel, but –”
“Let me finish. I didn’t believe any of it, until things started to connect to things only you and I could know, like that day two years ago.”
“Oh, God, not you too.”
“I mean, I’m not all that aloof, I watch a lot of TV and I’m sometimes prone to internal winds you can never feel, but I’d like to think I’m not that daft to not have at least caught you doing what Daphne said you did. But you must have been doing it from somewhere else ’cause I’ve searched this whole room and I can’t find your diary.”
“I don’t own a diary.”
“You wouldn’t call it a diary. It’s much more to you… Is it in your bag?”
She jumped off the bed and upset my bag’s contents on the floor.
“Where is it?” she asked.
“All this is about a diary?” I scoffed. “We’ve been roomies for years. If I had a diary, surely you’d have seen it, wouldn’t you?”
“At this point, Viola, I’m not sure I even know who you are?”
Me, a diary, very good, Daphne. Very good. I thought.
The light didn’t go off, neither did Rachel move. “Where is it, Vee?”
I could hear her breathing, it was slowly becoming raspy.
She drew closer.
“We trusted you with our secrets, Vee, and you betrayed us. My name has already been spoilt. I don’t want to know what my boyfriend will think, but I can’t let you hurt anyone anymore…”
I turned and faced her. “I don’t know what you are talking about,” I said.
“Where’s it, Vee? I’m not going to ask again.”
“Go to hell, Rachel. All of you, just go to hell.”
She leapt at me. I couldn’t move. I was trapped under the duvet. She slapped me twice, shouting, “Where is it?”
Being thin and wasted made Rachel light, so I pushed her off. She landed on the carpet and crawled on the floor and unplugged the flat iron. I scrambled out of bed. She chased me. I got out of the room and slammed the door, bolting it from the outside. A few lights came on, Rachel woke them up with her banging the door and threatening to kill me.
I zipped up my hoodie and walked away.
So much for my I-don’t-hurt I-don’t-get-hurt attitude. I thought.
It was an hour before dawn and I was walking to Bugolobi, with no phone, no purse, no I.D, no shoes. You win, Daphne. You win.
I walked back towards Samuel Courts and sloped down a noisy Kataza. I couldn’t risk stopping the speeding Bodabodas. That time of night, it was asking for a Police Statement, an HIV test, and P.E.P. I walked past the well-lit Village Mall, its lights filled the air with a buzzing static feel that lathered my skin in goose pimples. I hugged my hoodie tighter and moved straight on the main road, limping on the smooth tarmac till I got to Bugolobi market. I walked past a quiet Bamboo Nest, and crossed up to the flats, Block B. The askari hassled me a while until I gave him the coins I had tucked in my jean pockets.
Jerry’s apartment was on the third floor. His lights were on. He must have dozed off while playing his Xbox.
I hesitated. Stood in the parking lot, behind the swings, looking at his windows hoping to see a silhouette of him or something. My self-pity complex was the size of a whale. What I needed was a good cry for what Daphne had done to me, but I’d settle for a warm bed.
I climbed up the cold stairs, leaning against the walls. I got to his door and knocked for five minutes before he opened, cursing and jeering. He softened upon seeing me.
He let me in, taking stock of my appearance. He didn’t ask about my shoes, he just scolded me for my carelessness.
“You could have been raped or strangled or strangled and raped.” he said.
We sat on the sofa and I told him an ‘agreeable’ version of my story: Rachel had company and I had no where else to go.
He arched his brow. At least he didn’t push me to tell the truth.
“Well, I’m glad you came here,” he said, as he hugged me, then he rested his fingers on my knee.
I yawned. “I could murder some sleep,” I said.
He pouted, his mouth looking like the top of a pumpkin. But he let it go. The old Jerry wouldn’t have given up easily. I insisted on taking the couch.
He went into his bedroom and returned with a pillow and sheets.
My stomach growled. “If there’s anything to eat,” I said with a smile, “I could murder that too.”
All he had was spaghetti, and wheetabix, with no milk. The spaghetti was sloshy, tasteless, but nothing a dollop of Heinz could not fix. He sat and watched me clear it, then he kissed me on my forehead as he left with the dirty bowl.
If I’d had any pity left over from pitying myself, I probably would’ve followed him back into his bedroom, but enough self-poisoning for one day, Vee. I told myself.
#
The sun swam in through the split drapes and settled on my face like surgical lights. I felt more tired than when I went to sleep. My throat was twizzly, like a rusted lock being picked, and my head was spinning.
It was eleven o’clock. Jerry was probably already on his third cup of coffee at the Stanbic Head Office at Crested Towers. He was tall, affable, good family – if we third years are supposed to aim high, I couldn’t have aimed any higher. Only problem, though, was, Jerry was an emotional toddler. Sex and Xbox were the only ways he could express himself.
I got up and showered in the master bathroom. The water that swirled down the plughole of the bathtub looked murky, like light tea. I would have loved to think of it as a metaphor for all the dirt that had been heaped on me the previous day, being washed away.
I should have felt cleaner, but I stepped out of the shower feeling dirtier. Call it paranoia, but I feared that, back at school no more than three kilometers away, dirt was still being heaped on my name, in spite of Daphne’s Liar, Liar having officially ended.
I didn’t dwell on those sinking feelings. I did what ex’s do. I snooped around. I mean, if Jerry didn’t want me snooping around, he would have locked the bedroom.
I sniffed his shirts, same DKNY Red Apple cologne, Gillette Aftershave, Adidas anti-perspirant clinging to the soft fabric. I checked his wicker-basket for the Beeswax smell of his dirty laundry. Then checked the drawer under his bed, the condoms. It was stocked. At least he was being safe. Was I jealous? Hmmn, maybe.
In the next drawer, he kept his diaries.
It was weird, that of all people Daphne could have accused of keeping a diary, she thought of me first. Weird still how I couldn’t even think of Jerry. I totally blanked out about that one particular habit of his. He had always kept one. Our problems centered on communication, not that we were one of those grumpy couples that only communicated through passive-aggressive silent-treatment, and grudge-sex. Jerry was the kind of guy who could talk for hours and say absolutely nothing. He urged me to read his diaries if I wanted to know anything about him, or about how he really felt. He was a firm believer in transparency, no secrets. He wanted a fulfilling, but intellectual relationship, like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s, without the ménage a trois, of course. But I never read his diaries because I believed diaries are supposed to be private.
Until that morning.
Yes. Rachel was right. I had the uncanny aptitude of walking in on people doing those nasty things they would do only if they were sure no one was watching, and I told Jerry all these things.
He must have written about them in his diaries.
I picked up the ones from two years back, and coughed like Rachel while dusting them, but that was a small price to pay for finding out the truth. Daphne’s lie?
The diaries were quite heavy reading, but I found all that stuff about Rachel and the eggplant, about Momo and Nisha swapping uncles, about the girl who spit on me in class, about how Jemimah really topped our class. Plus a bunch of other girls from hostel, whose faces I couldn’t place to the names and room numbers.
My first thought was this was too much of a coincidence to be real. Second thought was how could Daphne have known? I never told Momo or Nisha about Jerry’s diaries, and Jerry, macho-man that he was, didn’t walk around telling people he kept a diary.
I dumped the old diaries and jumped to the current, the one after our last breakup. It was heavier reading, mostly about the breakup, about wishing I would rot in hell for dumping him through Facebook. Yes, I know, I know, I deserved that and more, I mean, who does something like that? There were pages full of colorful expletives about me that I wish I could unread.
I skipped a few dates, and got to around the middle of last sem, when Daphne had that episode with Penny. A week or so later, Daphne and Jerry started dating. Typical rebound stuff, only Jerry always made Daphne talk about me, especially along the lines of who was I dating?
She must have figured out a way to get back at me for abandoning her after the Penny affair. I was her oldest friend and, in her time of need, I chose a stupid game over her.
The last entry she featured in was from the day before yesterday, Jerry wrote about Daphne breaking it up. Why? Daphne said “She had a feeling, Vee would come knocking on my door.”
I slumped back against the bed, and let all that sink in.
Daphne, you crafty little nympho, you cheated at Liar, Liar, again.
You told the truth.
~~
Derek Lubangakene is a poet, writer of Fantasy fiction and a screenwriter, living in Kampala, Uganda. His poetry has been published in The Missing Slate and The Kalahari Review, plus in a few local newspapers. He was also longlisted for the 2013 Golden Baobab Prize. He is an avid reader, an incessant tweeter (@d_slays_dragons) and occasionally blogs about writing on his personal blog dereklubangakene.wordpress.com
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Also in this Issue
Short Stories
Poems