In partnership with Commonwealth Foundation, Granta presents the regional winners of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Joshua Lubwama’s story is the winning entry from Africa.

The first time we came home blowing into used condoms, excitedly wondering where the hell that balloon variant – endlessly stretchy and transparent – had been all our lives, Mother, who was out in the kitchen negotiating with the fire, her Caribbean skirt swaying with the smoke, leapfrogged the oaken barrier and pulled them from our lips. One by one, she washed out our mouths with soap and instructed us to brush our teeth. She then asked after the origin of those balloons.

‘Fatima,’ declared my six-year-old sister Amoo, between spitting. I elaborated that we’d gotten the balloons from Fatima’s backyard. Fatima was the young woman who had moved into the house Mr Okapo had vacated.

‘Stay away from this Fatima,’ Mother said, my insistence on a reason being met with a frigid stare that froze me over. The second time it happened, us sauntering into the compound with those transparent balloons between our lips, Mother abandoned her laundry and charged towards me screaming stupid boy, knocking me onto the ground with her forearm. It had only been three days.

‘I told you what, stupid boy?’

‘Mother, they’re just balloons,’ I argued, crawling away from her.

‘Oh, yeah? If you like balloons so much, why don’t you buy your own?’

‘Because we –’

‘Get up. Right now.’

I scrambled to my feet, dusting my khaki shorts.

‘Take me to that whore. Lead the way,’ said Mother, turning to fetch her slippers.

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘The balloons, who gives them to you? What’s her name? Faridah?’

‘Fatima. But we just picked them from –’

‘Yes, start moving.’

Fatima shared a compound with four other tenants; five terraced two-room houses within a walled enclosure, the red gate a little too close to the road. Outside, Mother yelled ‘Faridah’ while hammering on the gate with her clenched fist. Tugging at her sleeve, I whispered, ‘Fatima’. She ignored me and carried on yelling Faridah. When Faridah didn’t show, she stuck her left arm through the hole in the gate door and let herself in.

‘Are you coming or what?’

I shuffled in after her. The occupants of three of the five houses were standing on their porches, beholding a mad woman and her ten-year-old son.

‘Faridah is who of you?’

For a whole week, Amoo and I steered clear of the red-bricked walls that housed Fatima and her compound. And then it started to seem like we’d forget her. On Saturday, Father made a stately appearance. He would, whenever he was home, have me read to him from the newspapers that were always to be found in the glove compartment of his Subaru. Ten articles I’d read, then we’d go over the new words and fill the crossword. Always something in there for you to learn, he’d say. When I finished reading to him and skimmed the sports section and saw nothing on Ronaldo, I requested money to repair my shoes.

‘What shoes?’

‘My school shoes.’

‘Has school started?’

‘No, it’s starting the other week, on Monday.’

‘Which class are you, again?’

‘Primary Four.’

My shoes weren’t torn but I needed some money. Mother never gave us any. The first thing I thought to buy were Jahlia’s pancakes. Jahlia was the last shopkeeper in the row of metallic canteens at the upper end of the street. As I was leaving her canteen, I suddenly thought of those transparent balloons. Jahlia must’ve had the entire chromatic spectrum, but none of those balloons devoid of colour. By the day’s end, I had established that it was the same with every other merchant. So I figured those balloons must’ve been so popular they had run out of stock. For good reason, though; beyond being stretchy and transparent, they didn’t even burst on contact with grass.

I sneaked into Fatima’s gate that evening. She was surprised to see me. I said Mother was out of town. I asked her about the balloons.

‘Oh, those? They’re very rare. You’d have to go all the way to Kenya.’

She was busy sorting through the braids on her head, feet up on the wall. I couldn’t stay long. As I was passing by her DVD rack, my left foot kicked something and I heard the clinking of coins. There were maybe twenty coins spilled onto the tiled floor. Fatima saw me staring ravenously at them and said I could take them home.

‘You’re serious?’

‘Yeah, why not?’

‘Aren’t they your savings?’

She laughed at me. My pockets were bulging with metal that evening. As I stepped down from the couch in the living room, everybody heard the clinking of coins.

‘Some money,’ said Amoo.

‘I don’t have.’

‘Why are you selfish? Give your sister a coin, you won’t die,’ said Mother.

I dug into my right pocket, feeling around for a two-hundred-shilling coin. I switched to the left pocket. Mother squinted at me.

‘You have how much?’

‘I – I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know? Come and I see.’

She felt my pockets and looked up at me in disbelief.

‘This money, who gave it to you?’

In three minutes, Mother, Amoo, my elder sister Halima and I were inside the red-bricked fence.

‘Stop giving my child money,’ Mother yelled at Fatima. ‘What do you want from my son? Why don’t you go back where you came from? Give birth to your own children, you polytechnic whore.’

‘I’d rather be a polytechnic whore than an illiterate jobless saint,’ Fatima stated, matter-of-factly.

‘What? What did you say to me?’

‘You heard me. I said you’re illiterate and jobless. Are you going to deny it?’

A silence fell over the compound. The other tenants were witnessing. Mother jeered, looked around, then jeered again. She instructed Halima to take Amoo and I home. A quarter of an hour later, she joined us. The sandal from her right foot was missing, and her lesu was muddied.

‘Halima, go fetch my sandal from that whore’s porch. The two of you, what I’ll do to you heaven only knows should you ever go inside that fence again,’ Mother said.

‘Mother, is it true that you’re illiterate?’ Amoo suddenly asked at dinner.

Halima stared at our little sister, as though prompting her to take the words back. I stared into my own plate.

‘No, it’s not,’ responded Mother, three forks later.

‘Okay, so Fatima was lying, right?’ Amoo added.

‘You believe that foolish colonised head of hers?’ Mother countered.

She was looking at all three of us, one after the other. Halima rose to go to the kitchen.

‘Who else wants water?’ she called out over her shoulder.

‘Me, me, me!’ Amoo exclaimed.

We spent most of the rest of dinner in silence. I didn’t know what, but something had shrunk inside of Mother. I’d never seen her like that. And then it started falling into place, everything. She had never, ever helped us with our homework, Amoo and I. She always delegated the role to Halima, so we’d learned not to ask. Halima was in secondary school, leagues above us and she wasn’t always in the mood to concern herself with trivialities. Mood aside, she had studied the old curriculum, and claimed she knew nothing about the new. But my sister always had the answers if there was something in it for her, like if she needed her shoes polished. And you couldn’t keep homework that was due the next morning for a father that came home on select Saturdays. Lying in my bed – the top bunk above Amoo’s – that night, it also dawned on me that I’d never heard Mother speaking English, not even at the parent-teacher meetings.

The next day, Sunday, Mother asked me to do something I hadn’t done in a while.

‘Musa?’ she called, standing in my bedroom doorway.

‘Yes, Mother?’

‘How’re you doing?’

She was smiling at me.

‘I’m fine, why?’

‘Eh, can’t a mother ask after her son’s well-being in peace?’

‘Yes, she can.’

‘Anyway, I need your help.’

I sat up on the bed.

‘Do you have some nails?’

She was leaning sheepishly against the doorframe now.

‘No, but maybe I can get some. Why?’

‘Take this knife.’

She drew a small knife from around her waist.

‘You want me to puncture Father’s tyre?’

‘No, not one tyre. Two tyres.’

‘Why, Mother?’

‘I’ll get you some money this coming week.’

I looked away from her, pretending I didn’t care about the money.

‘Okay, but what has he done this time?’

‘It’s none of your business.’

‘How much money will I get, though?’

‘Oh God, you boy. Who taught you the ways of a merchant? You don’t trust your mother?’

‘All right. So, I’m doing it now?’

‘Yeah, please do it now. Two tyres of your choice. But he can’t find out, Musa. You know I’ll kill you.’

‘Okay, Mother.’

I didn’t have any current issues with Father, so puncturing his car tyres felt traitorous. Doing so always stalled him long enough for Mother to resolve whatever issues she’d have with him. He’d get into the car to leave and he’d instantly notice the flat tyre, and Sundays were no time to catch a mechanic on their job, so that usually bought us an extra night – Sunday night. Two hissing tyres and a buried knife later, I prayed to God to convince Mother to pay me my money. For many previous debts, she had ended up reminding me that I was getting all my meals for free.

When Mother drove off with Father on Monday morning, she came back in the afternoon and declared that she had got herself a job. I suspected that it had everything to do with the punctured tyres. Sunday night must’ve been all the time she had needed to negotiate herself out of housewifery. I felt good about it, that I had been of immense utility. What the job meant was that she couldn’t stay home all day every day anymore. A thousand warnings were issued and we were reminded of our playing boundaries: Fatima’s gate to the North, Makumbi’s dogs roaming his farmland to the East and Jjaja Reagan’s watchful eyes from her porch – a position that she never seemed to leave – to the South.

The new school term meant that the boys and I could finally resume playing football after classes. We played in our uniforms or shirtless. We’d get home late to grumbling siblings and belligerent mothers, but it was a fair price to pay to keep the dream alive. It was the universal dream. Cristiano Ronaldo earned more money in one week than the best engineer or lawyer did in one year. The boys knew that and I knew it, too. If we could play for Manchester United someday, we could retire our mothers immediately. We could drop out of school, and then maybe buy the school and turn it into a poultry farm. The boys envisaged that and I did, too. I had a few other reasons as well, the kind you don’t pass along to the boys over lunch. If I became a professional footballer, I’d have enough money to get my teeth fitted with braces. My overbite was noticeable to everybody but my parents.

Sloping down to the football field on the first afternoon, the boys ahead of me were stopping in their tracks, one by one. And then I saw it; yellow-stripped saloon cars, road signs, demarcated lanes, adults dressed for any occasion but sport. The greedy school administration had leased the football field to a driving school. The headmistress, she said of the matter the next day that it was temporary and that our patience would be appreciated. Nobody had it in them to ask the million-dollar question: how temporary? Still, we played the beautiful game. Once owners of the place, now we encroached on the edge of the field. We used bricks for goalposts and made smaller teams of five, playing ten-minute matches in rotation. Whenever the ball strayed into a vehicle’s path, it would take the rest of the afternoon to retrieve it; our new landlords were the sort to be pleaded with. We were driven off often, told to go play elsewhere, but we had no elsewhere to go. When we started washing their cars for free just so we could examine their interiors, the driving school people said, hey, why not share the field, it’s a win-win. By the third week of the school term, we had swapped our bricks for traffic cones and stray footballs were being returned immediately. The flanks of the field had become our territory and we had gotten an unlikely audience; adults. Who knew who might’ve been watching as you pulled off the Jay-Jay Okocha turn?

It was a harmonious arrangement. Then one Thursday, Pinto, a boy from the class below me, was napping in the shadow cast by one of the cars. Some old lady – a student of the driving school, no doubt – mustn’t have seen him there, or maybe she mistook the reverse gear for the forward one, because she ran over his legs. My team was on the sidelines when we heard the screaming. We rushed to the scene at once. There sat a dazed Pinto, clutching the underside of his limp legs, the pale yellowish-white of his fragmented femur sharply contrasting with the crimson of blood, a steady stream of which was flowing over his trembling fingers and into the grass. For weeks, I didn’t sleep too well. Mother took notice, but I wasn’t talking to her, not until she paid me my money for puncturing Father’s tyres. The boys were all devastated by Pinto’s misfortune, because how early in a life to retire from football, and how gruesome a manner in which to do it. He didn’t come back to school, and the headmistress banned us from playing football on the field ever again.

With little to do besides playing cards with Amoo after school, I soon turned my face to the forbidden North. Halima wasn’t in any way an approximation of a worthy vicegerent of Mother’s. Late afternoons, I’d sneak off into the red-bricked fence. In a handful of days, I’d established that Fatima was the queen of loose change. One afternoon, while lying down on her living room floor doing my homework, I asked her to help me spell ‘photosynthesis’. She recited it like it was the Lord’s Prayer. I was exhilarated. I asked her something else, and then something else. Many subsequent afternoons included the questionnaire session, and I loved the instantaneous answers.

Two weeks of washing Fatima’s utensils bought me my first proper football. It was a supermarket ball, a Jabulani replica, but I needed another two weeks to figure that out. Most of the boys from school lived far away from me, so I had to settle for playing with Reagan, the neighbourhood boy whose face was streamlined like a lizard’s. When the football got punctured and I took it to the cobbler two streets from us to have it sewed, he asked if it belonged to me.

‘Yes, it does,’ I said, handing him a five-hundred-shilling coin.

‘You love the game, son?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, there’s this free academy that opened up recently.’

‘Where?’

‘At the municipality. Right around that corner from Barclays.’

‘Okay. It’s really free?’

‘Yeah, just your parent’s consent and a pair of shoes.’

I stared into the distance, holding my waist.

‘What? Tough parents?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘Shoes? I can patch you a pair . . .’

I shook my head, turning to leave. The entire trek home I spent thinking about the free football academy. I had school, so Mother would never agree to it. The shoes, I could always find the shoes. But my mother, the woman would never say yes. And with that, I was in the market for a consenting parent.

‘And your mother?’ Fatima asked me, when I requested that she enrol me to the academy.

‘Of course she’ll say no.’

‘Why?’

‘She thinks school is everything.’

‘Maybe she’s right.’

‘But she didn’t even go to school.’

‘Don’t talk like that about your mother.’

‘But you’re the one that said so. You said she was illiterate.’

‘It’s because she insulted me first. I didn’t mean it at all.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘I’m not.’

It took some pestering for Fatima to enrol me in the football academy. They were very polished, the boys there. They had municipal attitudes: clean, restrained, sophisticated. And some of them were older: twelve, thirteen, fifteen even. I sat out the first two practice sessions because I didn’t have shoes. When the cobbler saw me coming his way, he wiped his forehead and stood up to greet me, like we were agemates, like I was an old friend. He presented me with a pair three sizes too big.

‘The owner hasn’t picked them in weeks,’ he said. ‘In fact, the boy goes to some boarding school whose name I forget. You can stuff the front with toilet tissue, though I think wearing two pairs of socks could do as well,’ he said.

‘I don’t have money, what should we do?’ I asked.

He looked me in the eyes, his facial features tightening.

‘Can you exchange them for my football?’

He squinted, weighing in.

‘It’s a Jabulani. Father came with it from –’

‘Son, I know. I know Jabulanis.’

We stood there facing each other, him sizing me up, and me taking in his unkempt white beard, wondering how old he must’ve been.

‘All right, son. I’ll just fit in new laces for you, eh?’

I ran home to fetch the football.

The training sessions were intense. It had been communicated that there were championships coming up. I’d joined late, so I needed to earn my place on the team. I was seeing very little of Mother and Halima and Amoo. I’d leave school at four o’clock and jog the kilometre to the academy. Anything to keep the dream alive. Nabongho, the thirteen-year-old boy with effortless dribbles, was selected to be the captain.

‘What number do you play?’ he asked me after a shooting session.

‘Ronaldo’s number.’

‘What number does Ronaldo play?’

‘In front.’

Nabongho burst into laughter.

‘He plays seven. Right-winger.’

‘Yeah, seven. That’s what I meant,’ I said. He looked down at my shoes. The boarding school boy’s shoes. I crossed one foot over the other.

‘Your left foot is better suited for the left wing, though.’

‘Yeah, maybe I could practise that.’

‘So, that woman you come with sometimes, she’s your sister or mother?’

He meant Fatima. I was no longer washing her utensils or mopping her house for money. Now she mostly paid me in correct answers and accompaniment to the academy. She wore fancy clothes and smelled exotic, and I realised that I liked to be seen with her in public. She would stand on the sidelines with Coach during the training sessions and they’d get so lost in conversation that the man, who often doubled as the referee, would forget to officiate. One day I heard Coach’s gravelly voice in Fatima’s living room as I took off my shoes to step onto her porch. So, I put my shoes back on and waited outside the gate like Fatima had told me to whenever she’d have a visitor. I waited like I had when it was Dan, like I had when it was Hassan, waited like I had when it was the electrician. She hadn’t told me to wait when it was Sumaiyah. Coach eventually stumbled out of the gate and walked up the road. He didn’t seem to have seen me.

‘Bye, Coach,’ I hollered, standing up.

He turned around.

‘Oh, bye,’ he managed, recognising me.

It was a little over a week to the championships when I made the first team. For that week, the last week of training, Coach said our presence would be required morning to evening. He said he understood that most of us had school, so he was going to need written consent from our parents. And so I was in the market yet again for a consenting parent. Permission for a week’s absence from school in the name of football wasn’t something I could ask of Mother, not unless I wanted to be punched. She might’ve been preoccupied with her new job now, but she was still very much a welterweight, and I was a feather at best. Father came home but I didn’t seek his consent, either. He always referred matters back to Mother. Fatima, she gave a firm no, said she wouldn’t be a willing accomplice in my truancy. I kept insisting, and then for the first time, she became angry.

‘You should go back home, why are you always bothering me?’ she yelled. ‘Shut the door behind you,’ she said, as I stepped out into the sunlight. I felt a lump forming in my throat and my eyes had watered by the time I was out on the street. She was right, Mother. Fatima was nothing but a selfish polytechnic whore. I swore to myself never to go to her place again.

On Monday, I wore my jersey underneath the school uniform. A safe distance from the prying eyes of my home street, I took off the uniform and stuffed it in my school bag. Coach was late, as always. He lined us up like we were scouts at a parade.

‘Where’s the written consent, boys?’ he asked. Of the seven boys he got to before me, two had to step out of the row. I bowed my head when he stepped up to me, his pot belly nudging my chest. The memory of Pinto clutching his limp legs filled my head. Coach reached for my chin, cranking my neck upright.

‘How is Fatima?’

‘Sh – she’s fine,’ I responded, taken aback.

‘That’s good, that’s good. You’ll send her my regards. You’ll tell her to reconsider.’

‘Reconsider what?’ I was almost whispering.

‘Oh, no, you just tell her that, she’ll understand, will you?’

I nodded spiritedly. And just like that, Coach moved on to Savio.

They were rigorous, the first four days. We kept training even as it poured down on Wednesday. I was swimming in my shoes because the paper I’d stuffed at the front to lodge my feet in place was soaked and had disintegrated. I cursed the cobbler. Thursday afternoon, Coach selected the starting team, assigning me the left wing. In the end, it hadn’t mattered that half the boys hadn’t gotten their parents’ consent; all sixteen of us were expected to feature on Friday. I was beaming the whole way home. Marching past the red gate, I came to a halt. I’d barely thought about Fatima that week.

‘Fatima, we’re playing the championships tomorrow.’

‘Oh, yeah? That’s nice. Where?’

‘The playground at Fairland High. You know that school –’

‘Yeah, I know it,’ she said, yawning.

‘Will you please come and watch me?’

‘Hmm . . . Are you even studying?’

‘Yeah, of course.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So, nowadays you do the homework all by yourself?’

‘Y – Yeah.’

It gave me away, the hesitation. Fatima sat upright.

‘Musa, I can’t come, you already know that.’

‘Why can’t you come? What if I wash your utensils the whole of next week?’

She scoffed.

‘I can’t –’

‘If you don’t come, then who will I play for?’

‘You’ve been playing for me? What about your friends?’

‘Those boys, we’re just teammates. Don’t you know you’re my only friend?’

She turned to look at me, and then back at her phone.

‘So, you’re coming, right?’

‘No, I’m sorry.’

For minutes, I said nothing.

‘By the way, Coach said you should reconsider.’

‘Reconsider what?’

‘I don’t know. He said you would understand.’

And then came Friday. Rising Stars Onduparaka Under 13s in the first match of the championships. The winner of that game would then play the winner of our game for the final. It was chilly outside, as though all the world’s wind had conspired to be in attendance. The football field, it was a heatmap of green and brown patches. Halfway through the first half, somebody tickled my ribs from the row behind and I looked back to see Fatima. She was smiling at me, lip gloss reflecting the green and brown turf. I shifted to the seat next to her.

‘Are you ready?’ she asked.

‘You said you weren’t coming,’ I replied.

‘Aren’t you happy to see me?’

‘Of course I am,’ I admitted, smiling, radiating a newfound enthusiasm. With her watching, I reckoned I had everything to play for. Our match was against Yanga FC. The coin was tossed and we got the shirts, so Yanga FC played shirtless. One of their centre-backs had prominent ribs that on first glance made him vulnerable but that on contact deemed him invincible; it was a taut rib cage that felt like a breastplate against my shoulder. Both sides meant business and neither managed to score by fulltime. Savio took the first penalty and shot wide, but Nabongho salvaged us. I scored my penalty and ran to the touchline. I looked over to the bleachers where Fatima was seated. Her head was bowed, she must’ve been using her phone. I screamed her name, waving. She waved back. We had won 4:3 and were to face Rising Stars in the final.

Rising Stars, they were an ebbing tide that rocked our boat left and right. What those boys lacked in the way of sportsmanship, they more than made up for in their organisation. They communicated way better than we did. Barely ten minutes into the game, the referee suddenly blew the whistle. I looked over at him, like everybody else. He was pointing right at me and then signalling to the touchline, to Coach. And then I saw her, Mother. She was facing Coach, gesticulating furiously at him. He was trying to contain her, occasionally looking my way. I was transfixed. The referee reached me and uttered some words I couldn’t quite make out. At the touchline, fans were clustering around Coach and Mother.

‘Do you know her?’ Coach asked me, shielding me.

‘What do you mean does he know me? He’s my son!’ yelled Mother.

She was flailing her arms, making to pounce on me but Coach wrestled her back. The game had stopped. My ears, they were burning.

‘Madam, please relax,’ Coach was urging Mother.

‘Is he your son?’ she kept asking. ‘He should be in school, that stupid boy,’ she yelled. The referee came to help and the last of the players deserted the field.

‘Musa?’

Coach sounded like he was a kilometre away. I didn’t move an inch. I thought a good number of bodies were concealing me, but he just had to wade past four or five to get to me. Mother was with him, this time standing straight, her hands hanging freely on her sides, chest heaving.

‘Musa?’ she called.

‘Yes?’

‘Musa?’

‘Yes?’

‘Is that how you reply? Why are you not in school?’

I was gazing at her feet, bare on the grass, her toes dancing in a show of restraint.

‘Musa, your teacher says you’ve been absent from school this whole week. Is that true?’

‘Respond to your mother!’ somebody interjected from the crowd.

‘Musa, is it true?’

Mother was misty-eyed, lips quivering.

‘Who did you come with?’ she sobbed, stepping forward and grabbing my collar.

Coach tried to hold her back but Mother brushed him off. She yanked me forward and backward, and I grabbed her forearm to steady myself.

‘Who did you come with? Is it that whore Fatima? Answer me!’

‘Respond to your mother!’

She was dragging me out of the cocoon, bumping into bodies like they were invisible.

‘Who did you come with?’

She tightened her grip on my shirt, constricting my airway. Even with my gaze lowered, I could feel the number of eyeballs perforating me.

‘I’m so tired –’

‘I came with Fatima.’

I looked Mother straight in the face, for the first time. She nodded continuously, sighed, then let go of my shirt. I glanced in Fatima’s direction, and was surprised to see her still sitting there, oblivious. The glance lasted a split-second, but it was all the time Mother needed to locate Fatima. She turned and walked briskly in her direction. Perhaps Coach intervened, perhaps Mother stayed her hand; I didn’t stick around for any of it. All I did see was Fatima looking up from her phone, the black shadow of my mother enveloping her. I ran the whole way home, cold wind inflaming my eyes.

The next morning, Saturday morning, I sneaked off into the red gate, against my better judgement. I carried with me a heartfelt apology. Fatima’s front door was wide open. Her house was emptied of everything but her scent, that redolent polytechnic scent.

‘Do you know where Fatima moved to?’ I asked Mama Bbosa, the immediate neighbour.

‘Why the hell would I care?’ she asked. ‘She could’ve moved in with any of those men in her life, good riddance,’ she said. ‘What did you want?’ she cried after me as I rushed towards the gate, not bearing to look back. I hadn’t even told Fatima that I liked her, that I was hoping to marry her someday.

Later on, during the school holiday when I’d joined Facebook and I’d successfully gotten Ronaldo to accept my friend request and even text me back, and then discovered it was just some stupid boy with access to pixelated photographs of the footballing star because Ronaldo couldn’t possibly have spoken Luganda, I thought why not look up Fatima. But I only had a first name, and Facebook returned a thousand Fatimas, most of them white, none of them polytechnic.

Image © Pew Nguyen