Helen-Rita Nakintu exited her uncle’s vehicle and glanced back at the convoy of relatives and well-wishers still winding, ridiculously, into the Entebbe Airport car park.
The spectacle would’ve been flattering if it weren’t so utterly unnecessary.
Uncle Oteng’s laugh thundered beside her, round and satisfied, the laugh of a man convinced God Himself applauded his parenting. Helen felt the familiar tug of irony, sharp as a pin.
And then, of all times, she thought of her father. The timing annoyed her more than the thought itself, trading actual grief for irritation, the way it always did, uninvited and impossible to shut out.
Uncle O hopped out of the car with a spring in his step, so theatrical it should’ve come with background dancers. He moved through the people already out of their cars, acknowledging their regard, their congratulations, even their sadness that she was leaving.
Helen watched him, the whole thing striking her as faintly absurd. Not sad. Just absurd. She laughed to herself, the sound a touch too brittle, as if daring whatever lay beneath to show itself.
He wasn’t bragging. Uncle O didn’t brag. He occupied.
Chest lifted, presence expanded, as though the achievement had passed through her and settled permanently in him. People congratulated him as much as her. By now, he could almost have been the one leaving for Britain. She glanced at him again, the swagger, the beaming grin, the way he carried her suitcase like something earned.
He had been her guardian since she was four. Her emotional geography was marked by him. Every ridge, every fault line.
But God, he was impossible!
And the one person who would have rolled her eyes at him with her was not here. Aunt Samalie should have been here. Instead, the last thing Helen had seen of her was the woman turning away after their embrace, disappearing into the house.
“Tambula bulungi, mwana wange.”
It had been years since her aunt had called her that. My child. Her voice had cracked when she said it. All the years between them, the arguments, the slammed doors, the stubborn reconciliations, collapsed into those four words.
Travel well, my child.
Something in Helen’s ribs had twisted then, close enough to grief to frighten her, before she had time to cast it out. Irritation was easier. So she told herself Aunt Samalie was simply tired from the celebrations last night.
Still, she had wanted, needed, to see her here.
She straightened her shoulders, as though posture alone could press the feeling back into place.
“See how the Good Lord kept that chaos on Masaka Road to one side?” Uncle O beamed, dragging one suitcase free and thumping it onto the trolley with satisfaction. “If that is not a sign for safe travelling, I do not know what is.” He straightened, a grin spreading like sunrise. “Because you, my precious lady, cannot be delayed for Cambridge.”
“For God’s sake, Uncle O!” she snapped, her voice carrying over the hum of the car park.
She wrenched the strap of her purse higher on her shoulder and checked her phone for the hundredth time. She tried to wall herself off from the noise, but the commotion was a physical thing.
A light flared, the sharp pop of a camera flash, accompanied by the bright, stuttering LEDs of a dozen mobile phones thrust into the air. Voices splintered the atmosphere, jagged and demanding.
“Helen! This side!”
“Just one, Nakintu!”
Phones, mostly Nokia sliders, Sony Ericssons, and sleek digital cameras, rose like a wall of glass and lenses; cameras angled for the kill. Everyone was reaching, desperate to snatch a piece of her for their screens.
Uncle O hauled the remaining suitcases from the boot, swelling with something larger now, something closer to possession. And for the first time, Helen admitted, silently, only to herself, that part of her wanted him to come with her.
Her fingers tightened around the purse, tracing the embroidered letters: F.A.L.L.i.N.G. Each one pressing like a bruise.
The purse was her going-away gift from Jjajja Teddie, her great-grandmother who had not spoken a word since she was a teenager, since the violence that had set their lineage in motion. Yet somehow she said more in silence than others ever managed with speeches. Her old eyes had pinned her, reading her like a page, leaving her nowhere to hide. And yet she too had turned and walked away.
Crowds swarmed, asking for pictures, celebrating her like a public holiday. She posed, tilted her head, signed shirts, anything to keep from falling apart.
Then the thought took hold: she could pick one of them, any of them, and give it away. The stampede would start instantly. Hands raised, bodies surging forward. Here, people believed in sudden elevation the way others believed in gravity. Pastors handing out miracles, prophets promising visas. Why not give away her scholarship altogether?
And that was the real joke: they would accept the miracle long before they accepted her truth. She enjoyed the cruelty of the thought more than she cared to admit. Because she, Helen-Rita Nakintu, was the one who had played her way into the scholarship. Now, it was just a trap she was choosing to spring.
You’re walking straight into it.
Her father drifted in again, uninvited, inconvenient, persistent. Six feet under. Just bones and skull. Fifteen years in the ground and still managing to intrude. She remembered him only in fragments. Nothing whole, nothing anchored, just a personality she had assembled over the years whenever her world threatened to collapse.
As though the dead were entitled to commentary.
She pressed a thumb to the keypad, waking the small screen. It was silent, offering nothing but the digital clock and a signal bar that refused to flicker. She looked again towards the line of cars still winding, willing Tobias’s car to appear among them. Willing Tabitha to have come to see her off. Tobias could have persuaded her.
People who barely tolerated her on an ordinary day had turned up, as if witnessing her departure might somehow bless their own futures. Yet three of the four people who actually mattered were nowhere in sight: Aunt Samalie, her cousin Mykel, and Tabitha.
Tabitha’s absence stung the most, a small, cold ache behind her collarbone, the memory of last night’s shouting match still raw. She almost admitted she had been in the wrong. Almost.
All because she had wanted to go to the club. As if wanting to feel alive for one night were unforgivable.
A heavy, metallic chime reverberated from the terminal speakers, followed by the distant hum of a flight announcement echoing into the open air. Helen didn’t look at the road again. She shoved the silent phone into her pocket, turned her back on everything she was leaving behind, and pressed straight into the waiting crowd.