The eighty thousand for that Thursday's session Agnes had put together in a way she had never used before, half of it from her sister-in-law, who had been setting it aside for the boy's exercise book, the rest from two mornings at the market, where she had sold off what was left from the other season; on the threshold she stopped, bent down, laced her shoes, which out on the road she kept unlaced.

She sat down at number two and pushed her sleeve up until the elbow was bare, then turned it once more, which was not needed (for the fistula one turn is always enough), and laid her arm on the armrest.

The door opened on a girl Agnes had never seen, thin inside a good dress, holding a plastic folder of documents, and whoever puts on the good dress to come here arrived from outside that morning. She stayed standing against the wall and asked no one for anything; Agnes pointed her to the free chair beside her own recliner, with two fingers, saying nothing, the way one points at something that already belongs to the room; the girl did not sit down, nor did she say why she stayed on her feet.

The machines were three, and three they had been every Thursday since dialysis was done in Hoima; but until February, when one of them stopped or when the Thursday names came to be more than the available arms, there was the road to Kampala, the Mulago, a hundred and fifty thousand a session instead of eighty thousand, the night coach, somebody's cousin who put you up; there was an afterwards; for seven months no one had gone there any more. There was no afterwards: there was that Thursday, inside that room, with the light coming from the high window and the noise of the three machines, which Agnes could tell apart with her eyes shut, number two above them all, "the one that sings."

The bag of the woman at number three was on the free chair, and Agnes took it, put it under the chair, made the place, without anyone having asked her to.

Then, leaning towards the woman in the next recliner, in a low voice, she asked who that one was: she did not ask her, who was standing two metres away, she asked the neighbour, or rather she asked the neighbour because a question put to your neighbour obliges no one to answer for herself; the neighbour told her in the third person, in the voice kept for someone who has been in the room less than an hour: arrived this morning "from outside," "she's worse," and in the private places it starts at two hundred and fifty thousand and goes up to four hundred and fifty thousand, so the private places do not exist.

A missed session is paid for in the four days that come after, in the ankles before the breath.

Agnes offered: she offered the girl the chair a second time, she offered the woman at number one half an hour of her own time if the machine ran late, she offered whoever was looking towards the corner her turn at the water fountain, she offered the technician, who had asked her for nothing, to leave him the recliner clean. Number two was running empty, which is the sound it makes when no one is connected yet, "and if this morning it had been you coming in from outside, with the folder in your hand"; Agnes's left hand was on the edge of her own sleeve, and had been still there for a while.

The technician crossed the room with the bag of solution in his hand, stopped at number two, hung the bag on the hook above Agnes's head and began to set up the line without turning towards anyone, the connector, the clamp that opens with two fingers, the forceps that hangs on the side of the machine; the three Thursday names had been the same for seven months (he had last read them in February), and it was while pulling the line the right way round, without lifting his eyes from his hands, that he said: "I don't move the slots. The day I start, whoever shouts runs this place."

Then he left the line set up and hanging, without connecting anything; the girl against the wall came away half a step. No one spoke for the length of one turn of the pump.

Agnes had her arm on the armrest already, the sleeve turned twice above the elbow, the fistula bare, her left hand on the edge, still there; in seven months inside that room she had never asked for anything, she had always been the first to offer, "as long as you give, you're here," while now the man who held the list was waiting for her, with the clamp open between two fingers.

She said it to the technician, not to the girl: "Thursday is mine. Leave it written down." Her voice came out lower than she had meant it to, and so she said it again, so that he would hear her. Her left hand did not come down. The technician closed the clamp.

The technician connected her, pressed twice with his thumb above the point where the needle went in, opened the line. The blood started off down the tube, dark in the first stretch, then all of one colour as far as the machine.

The room said nothing. The woman in the next recliner bent down, took her own bag from the place Agnes had made for her, put it back where it had been before, under the chair, with the handle turned towards the wall, without looking that way.

Agnes held her arm still. Above the elbow, where the cloth had been turned twice, the skin carried the double mark of the fold, one line paler and one redder, the kind of mark that by evening is already gone, that the next Thursday comes back to the same place on the arm.

The girl was still against the wall, the folder of documents held in both hands at the height of her belt, her shoulders resting on the wall painted halfway up. Between her and Agnes, the free chair.

Number two began to sing.