A Bit of Difference Read online

  She turns on the television and switches from one cable station to another. She clicks on one called the Lifetime Movie Network. The film showing is She Woke Up Pregnant and the subtitle reads: “A pregnancy for which she cannot account tears a woman’s family apart.” She turns to another station. Surprisingly, a Nigerian Pentecostal pastor is preaching. He is dressed in a white three-piece suit and his shoes are also white. His hair is gelled back and his skin is bleached.

  “Stay with me,” he says, coaxing his congregation. “Stay with me, now. I’m getting there. I’m getting there. Oh, y’all thought I was already there? Y’all thought I was through delivering my message this morning? I haven’t even got started! I haven’t even got started with y’all yet!”

  He ends with a wail and his congregation erupts in cheers. A man waves his Bible and a woman bends over and trembles.

  Deola smiles. Nigerians are everywhere.

  z

  Tonight, she dreams she has accidentally murdered Dára and deliberately buried his remains in her backyard and she alone knows the secret. The police are searching for him and the newspaper headlines are about his mysterious disappearance. The newspapers spin around as they do in 1950s black-and-white films until their headlines blur. She wakes up and tosses for hours.

  The next morning, she is still sleepy when she meets Anne in the lobby, but she tells Anne she is well rested. Anne grumbles about the price of her Starbucks latte on the way to the office and sips at intervals.

  “The problem is, I’m hooked on the stuff. And it’s not as if you can go cold turkey, because the temptation is everywhere.”

  “London has been taken over by Starbucks,” Deola says.

  She has heard some requests for a latte that are worth recording: “Grand-day capu-chin-know.”

  “That’s a shame,” Anne says. “I’ll be there next month and I know I won’t be able to help myself.”

  “Isn’t Rio having their launch next month?”

  “Yes. I’ll be there for that.”

  “Do they have Starbucks over there?”

  “I hope not.”

  The Atlanta office is also on Peachtree. People in the elevator glare at them as they hurry toward it—the usual disdain inhabitants of cramped spaces have, followed by a general shyness. They all look downward.

  The reception wall has the logo of the foundation’s network, two linked forefingers. The office is mostly open-plan space with workstations. Deola meets Susan and Linda, who are also auditors. Susan is a CPA who trained with an accountancy firm and Linda has a banking background.

  “Don’t you think she sounds British?” Anne asks them.

  “Well,” Susan says, “there’s some Nigerian there.”

  There is some Chinese in Susan’s voice. Her thick-rimmed glasses are stylish. Her jacket is too big for her and her slender fingers poke out of her sleeves.

  “I think she sounds British,” Anne says.

  “She sounds like herself,” Linda says.

  Her braids are thin and arranged into a neat donut shape on her crown.

  There is a Linda in every office, Deola thinks, who will not waste time showing a newcomer how much her boss annoys her. Why she remains with her boss is understandable. How she thinks she can get away with terrorizing her boss is another matter.

  “I should say English,” Anne says. “What does British mean anyway? It could be Irish or Welsh.”

  “I don’t think Ireland is part of Great Britain,” Susan says, blinking with each word.

  “Scottish, I mean,” Anne says.

  “I can’t understand the Glaswegian accent,” Deola says.

  “I couldn’t understand a word anyone said to me in Scotland,” Anne says. says.

  “They probably wouldn’t understand a word we say over here,” Linda

  Deola notices leaflets on “commercial sex workers” and is conscious of being between generations. Old enough to have witnessed some change in what is considered appropriate. Her colleagues walk her through their system and she reverts to her usual formality. They show her invoices, vouchers and printouts. It is not relevant that they are in the business of humanitarianism. There are debits and credits, checks and balances. Someone has to make sure they work and identify fraud risks, then make recommendations to the executive team.

  As an audit trainee, she was indifferent to numbers, even after she followed their paper trails to assets and verified their existence. How connected could anyone be to bricks, sticks, vats and plastic parts? Her firm had a client who did PR for the Cannes Film Festival and it was the same experience working for them. With Africa Beat, the statistics on HIV ought to have an impact on her and they do, but only marginally. The numbers in the brochure are in decimals. They represent millions. The fractions are based on national populations. Deola knows the virus afflicts Africa more than any other continent, women more than men and the young more than the old. Her examination of the brochure is cursory. She has seen it before and it is the same whenever she watches the news. Expecting more would be like asking her to bury her head into a pile of dirt and willingly take a deep breath in.

  z

  Ali is a woman—or a Southern girl, as Anne refers to her. Her name is Alison. Deola doesn’t find out until later in the evening when Anne treats her to dinner at a Brazilian restaurant. Ali is from Biloxi, Mississippi, and she is a florist. Anne is from Buffalo, New York, and she used to be a teacher there. They don’t watch television.

  “We haven’t had one for… let’s see… five, six years now,” Anne says. “We read the newspapers and listen to NPR to keep up with what’s going on.”

  “I watch too much television,” Deola says.

  She chides herself for finding belated clues in Anne’s stubby fingernails as Anne gesticulates, so she brings up the title of the Lifetime Movie Network film.

  “I thought, this has got be a joke. She woke up pregnant?”

  “The networks in general don’t credit women with any intelligence,” Anne says. “Mothers especially.”

  “I can well imagine,” Deola says.

  Their table is under what looks like mosquito netting dotted with lights. Behind them is a fire with meat rotating on spits. The waiters wear red scarves around their necks and walk over once in a while with a leg of lamb, pork roast, filet mignon, scallops, shrimp and chicken wrapped in bacon. The bacon is more fatty than Deola is used to.

  “But we can’t decide who gets pregnant,” Anne says. “So wouldn’t that be perfect if one of us wakes up and boom?”

  Deola has finished eating her salad, but she picks at the remnants of her grilled peppers and mushrooms as the thought of artificial insemination diminishes her appetite. Or perhaps it is the realization that she might one day have to consider the procedure, if she remains single for much longer.

  This is an unexpected connection to Anne, but she won’t talk about her own urge to nest, which has preoccupied her lately. Anne might regard what she has to say with anthropological curiosity: the African woman’s perspective.

  “There’s always adoption,” she says, wondering if this is appropriate.

  “I did think of that,” Anne says. “You get on a plane and go to a country that is war-torn or struggling with an epidemic and see so many orphans, so many of them. But at the end of the day, you have to have the humility to say to yourself, ‘Maybe I am not the person to raise this kid. Maybe America is not the place to raise him or her.’You have to ask yourself these questions.”

  “You must,” Deola says, crossing her arms, as if to brace herself for more of Anne’s rectitude.

  “It’s that mindset,” Anne says. “Our way is best, everyone else be damned, the world revolves around us. But I think when you travel widely enough, you quickly begin to realize it don’t, don’t you think?”

  Deola reaches for her wine glass and almost says the word “actually,” but she stops herself this time. Actually, the tongue jolt. Actually, the herald of assertions. She could insist that Amer
ica is torn apart by the war and she could easily challenge Anne’s assumption that the rest of the world is incapable of transgressions.

  “I expect people in England are more open-minded,” Anne says.

  “England? I’m not so sure.”

  “I guess it would be more obvious to you living there. But that’s why we are in such a mess over here, and it’s a question of being able to reorient yourself. That’s all it takes.”

  “A little reorientation,” Deola says, the rim of her glass between her lips.

  “You know?” Anne says. “If there is one thing this job teaches you, it’s that. You can’t get caught up in your own… whatever it is. Not in a world where people starve.”

  “No,” Deola murmurs.

  It is just as well she hesitated. She finishes her wine; so does Anne. A waiter approaches their table with dessert menus. Anne says she really shouldn’t and opts for a black coffee. Deola has the passion fruit crème brûlée and asks for fresh raspberries on top.

  Actually

  An incident on her flight back to London reminds her of something that happened a month ago during her first trip for LINK.

  She was in Delhi to audit a charity for children. She stayed at the Crowne Plaza hotel and had enough time on her last day to ride in a rickshaw and visit Janpath Market with the program director, who later drove her to the airport. She had just joined the departure line when she saw an American ahead of her, who was wearing—of all garbs—a cream linen suit and a panama. The American grabbed an Indian man, who was edging his way to the line, by the shoulders and steered him away. “No-oo,” he said, as if he were speaking to his son. The Indian man went to the back of the line without saying a word. A moment later, a couple of Americans walked up. One was complaining, loud enough for everyone to hear, that he was going to miss his flight, and the man in the panama stepped back so they could get ahead of him.

  What happens on her way to London is that she is again standing in line, this time to board her plane out of Atlanta, when a man cuts ahead of her. He is tanned with gray sideburns and is dressed in a navy jacket and striped shirt—executive-looking and clutching a John Grisham novel. She is three passengers from the flight attendant, a black American woman, who is checking boarding passes. When it is her turn, the flight attendant looks at her, looks at the man, who is still not in line, and takes his boarding pass first.

  She is tempted to snatch her stub from the flight attendant, but she doesn’t. She eyes the man once she gets on the plane, but he is too busy pushing his hand luggage into an overhead compartment to notice. She brushes past him before he sits. She is loath to say an incident so trivial amounted to discrimination—it wasn’t that straightforward, was it?—but she thinks it anyway.

  Only after the plane takes off and levels out is she able to reason that it might have been an innocent oversight. Then she remembers her conversation with Anne the previous night, which remained one-sided. Anne paid attention whenever she spoke and seemed eager to hear her opinions. Why couldn’t she be more responsive to her? Was it that learned lack of trust? That resistance to being misinterpreted and diminished? Hardly, she decides. She was merely being expedient.

  She sleeps most of the flight to London. It is Saturday morning when she arrives and the rain is a light spray. On the Gatwick Express she shuts her eyes while enjoying the motion and identifies the languages that people on cell phones are speaking. There’s French, Igbo and Portuguese. London is like the Tower of Babel these days. Still, she prefers it to the London she moved to in the eighties, despite the latent resentment she observes when people quicken their pace past a group of rowdy Pakistani teenagers or the Romanian mothers who beg.

  She also detects some guilt, that aftertaste of the sumptuous meal that was empire. England is overrun with immigrants: African and Eastern European children they granted asylum are leading gangs, Islamic clerics are bragging about their rights and the English can barely open their mouths to talk.

  Nigerians can never be that sorry for their transgressions, so sorry that they can’t say to immigrants, “Carry your trouble and go.” Nigerians made beggars out of child refugees from Niger and impregnated their mothers. Nigerians kicked out Ghanaians when Ghanaians became too efficient, taking over jobs Nigerians couldn’t do, and named a laundry bag after the mass exodus: the Ghana Must Go bag. Nigerians aren’t even sorry about the civil war. They are still blaming that on the British.

  She takes a taxi from Victoria Station. Her flat in Willesden Green is walking distance from the tube. The Jubilee line is partly why she bought here. Initially, Willesden Green did not appeal to her, coming from her parents’ flat in Westminster. The pavements were filthy with litter, cigarette butts, spit and dust. But there was a black hair salon and a cosmetics shop that sold products for black hair, containing ingredients like hemp and placenta. There were also a few Halal butchers and a West Indian shop where she could buy yams, plantains and cherry peppers. On Saturdays, she would walk to the library center to study for her exams and take breaks at Café Gigi. Now, the center has Belle Vue Cinema and the pavements are cleaner. Occasionally, she sees other Nigerians at the minicab office and the African textile shops, which can be comforting.

  The woman she bought the flat from had a cat. She didn’t find out until she moved in that there were cat hairs embedded in the carpet. At night, they tickled her nose. She was so besotted with her new property that she got on her knees and scrubbed the hairs away with a brush. She loves her bathroom the most because it is the warmest room. Nothing is more depressing to her than a cold bathroom, especially in the winter. Her bedroom has a draft; so does her kitchen. She will only walk on the linoleum floor in her fluffy slippers, and the sink tap drools. Her yellow Formica countertop is stained. The fanciest feature in the flat is the staircase that descends into the sitting room. She made the mistake of buying IKEA furniture, which is beginning to fall apart, but her mortgage is almost paid and her flat has more than doubled in value.

  Her walls welcome her. She sits on her couch, facing her window. There are no messages on her phone. Later in the afternoon, she warms up her Peugeot 205 and drives to Somerfield to stock up on food. The car park is full. She thought Somerfield was huge until she saw American superstores like Wal-Mart, but the quality is better at Somerfield, she thinks, picking up a packet of bacon. That unbeatable English quality, even when it comes to the correct proportion of pork meat to streak of fat.

  z

  On Monday morning she wakes up with menstrual cramps. They have worsened since she went off the pill a year ago. Her stomach is bloated and the bacon she eats doesn’t help. She takes a couple of Panadols with her orange juice, knowing that she shouldn’t, and goes to work by tube. Her stop is Wembley Park station. She crosses Bridge Road and begins her long walk past Wembley Stadium and Mama Calabar, a Nigerian restaurant. Sometimes she hops on buses instead of walking and on cold wet days she drives in. The weather is warm for a change. LINK is on the second floor of an office block, which Kate Meade once described as a rabbit warren. This morning Kate is lamenting about dust in the ducts. They worsen her allergies during the summer and she is also trying to cope with nausea.

  “Even the smell of my deodorant makes my stomach turn,” she says.

  “Gosh,” Deola says.

  “I blame Pam,” Kate says, with an air of spite. “The last time she was pregnant, I got pregnant. Now, she’s away on maternity leave and I’m pregnant again. Keep away from Pam, I tell you.”

  Deola shakes her head in sympathy. Kate is in that crazy hormonal phase.

  “What did you think of Atlanta?” she asks, sitting behind her desk.

  Kate’s fringe has grown so long it covers her brows. Her glasses are steel-rimmed and round. Forlorn is the only way to describe her. Behind her is a gray filing cabinet, on top of which are piles of yellow clasp envelopes and a framed close-up photograph of her daughter cuddling the cat that gave her toxoplasmosis.

  “It wasn’t b
ad,” she says.

  “It’s a funny city, isn’t it?”

  “A little.”

  “It’s Southern, yet it’s not. I don’t expect you had much time to see it.”

  “Not much.”

  Kate grew up in Liverpool, which is noticeable whenever she says a word like “much.”

  “Everything is enormous there,” Kate says. “The buildings, the roads.”

  “Wal-Mart.”

  “Their cars! Did you see the size of the trucks they drive over there?”

  “I did.”

  Kate spreads her arms. “It’s incredible. You have these huge trucks and there’s always a little woman at the wheel.”

  “Always little women,” Deola says.

  A wave of tiredness threatens her. At work, she plays up her English accent—speaking phonetics, as Nigerians call it—so that people might not assume she lacks intelligence. Speaking phonetics is instinctive now, but only performers enjoy mimicking. Performers and apes.

  “Everything is enormous in America,” Kate says. “Everything except, of course…”

  Kate taps her temple. She has a master’s degree in international relations and prides herself on being knowledgeable about what goes on in the Hague. She has never named her university, calls herself a grammar school girl, but she is quick to point out her husband went to Bedales and studied physics at Cambridge. He has a Ph. D. and has received grants for his research. He is an inventor. Kate is the second most frequent traveler in the office. Her trips are fieldwork related. Graham, the overall executive director, is more the photo-op guy. He attends conferences and summits and deals with the trustees. Kate stands in during his prolonged absences.

  “I’m sorry,” Kate says. “I shouldn’t have said that, but they can be a little thick across the pond.”

  “No need to apologize,” Deola says.

  She is amused whenever the English denigrate Americans. She attributes it to inverted admiration. In America, she was astonished to see how many of them were on television, teeth fixed and playing up their Englishness or speaking with American accents, acting so colonized.