A Bit of Difference Page 4

God again, Della thinks. Is this a habit, an affectation or a fear of life? Whatever it is, it releases a puerile desire in her to upstage Sub by declaring she is a nonbeliever.

  “In Lagos?” Sub asks.

  “One is in Lagos, the other is in Abuja. Nothing special, but my father’s five-year memorial will coincide and at least I can be with my family for that.”

  “How are they?” Subu asks.

  “Fine.”

  “Still with the bank?”

  “Still with the bank.”

  Deola’s mother lives in Lagos, as do her brother, Lanre, and sister, Jaiye. Her father was a founder and chairman of Trust Bank, Nigeria. Her mother owns shares in the bank. Lanre is deputy managing director of the bank. Jaiye is a doctor and her practice has a retainership with the bank. Her family has survived without her father, but it might not have without the bank.

  She asks about Subu’s mother, who is also widowed and lives in Lagos.

  “My mother is well,” Subu says. “Harassing me as usual.”

  “Still?”

  The pressure to marry is relentless. Being single is like trying to convince a heckling audience your act is worth seeing. Subu could be the chairman of her bank and her mother would say, “But she could be married with children.” Subu could be the prime minister of England and her mother would still say, “But she could be married with children.”

  Deola worked as an account officer for Trust Bank after she graduated from LSE, during her national service year and the year after. Her mother tells her to come home for good, to work for the bank, by which she means Deola ought to find a man to settle down with. She drops hints like, “I saw this fellow and his wife. She’s expecting again,” or “I saw so-and-so. They have another one on the way.”

  “My family wants me to come home for Christmas,” Subu says.

  “Will you?”

  “Naija? Naija is too tough. No water, no light. Armed robbers all over the place and people demanding money. I told my mother to come here instead. I will send her money for a ticket. Let her come here and relax.”

  Subu, too, has a British passport. She refers to Nigeria as home, but she never goes back. She sends money home to her family and her mother stays with her whenever she is in London, sometimes for months. Nigeria, for her, is a place to escape from.

  “Are you going home for Africa Beat?” she asks.

  “Africa Beat is based in South Africa.”

  “Why? When you have a Naija spokesman?”

  “They have a high rate of infection there.”

  “More than us?”

  “We’re getting there, small by small.”

  Subu shakes her head. “People should just abstain.”

  Deola resists raising her eyes. She suspects Subu has had more lovers in her church family than she has ever had dates in her secular circles. Subu’s ex-boyfriend was a deacon and Deola was curious to know what he’d done wrong, since he was so Christianly. All Subu would say about that was that she’d reported him to God, after which Subu decided she was going to be a virgin all over again, declaring, “My body is my temple,” with a smile, as if she were not quite taking her abstinence seriously.

  “As for Dára,” Subu says, “They practically worship him in this place.”

  “He’s done well for himself,” Deola says.

  “He has, but please, what streets of Lagos is he singing about? His parents are lecturers.”

  “They are?”

  “At Lagos State University. He was going there before he found his way here. He was not an area boy.”

  “He wasn’t?”

  “At least that is what I heard. I’m glad he’s made it, but he should stop telling lies about his background, and these oyinbos don’t seem to be able to see through him.”

  “Maybe they don’t want to,” Deola says.

  She never bothered to question Dára’s story, except to note that he didn’t call himself an area boy; he said he was a street child.

  “He’s on tour in the States soon, isn’t he?” Subu asks.

  “So I hear.”

  “They’ve been making a lot of noise about him. I don’t understand it.”

  “He’s definitely over-hyped.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “I’m administrative staff. We don’t meet anyone.”

  She has not met any of LINK’s benefactors and won’t have cause to meet their beneficiaries unless a fieldwork review is necessary.

  “So people need him to tell them to give money?”

  “Apparently.”

  “I’m sure there will be an ABC concert.” “And ABC T-shirts and ABC CDs.”

  “Of course the concert will be held in South Africa.”

  “Where else?”

  “And of course they will invite Mandela.”

  Deola laughs. “If we can get him.”

  She would rather not say anymore. Most Nigerians she knows abuse celebrities involved in African charities. They accuse them of looking for attention or knighthoods. If they talk about the plight of Africa, they are sanctimonious. If they adopt African children, they are closet child molesters. She has heard all the arguments: Charities portray Africans as starving and diseased. Western countries ought to give Africa trade and debt relief, not aid. The drug companies should reduce the cost of their medications. The churches ought to shut the hell up with their message of abstinence and start distributing condoms. Africa T-shirts are just designer wear for the socially conscious.

  Africa Beat gets funding from churches and pharmaceutical companies. Their posters of Africa can be simplistic, but so is most advertising, Deola believes. Her experiences may also be negated, but Africa does suffer, unduly, unnecessarily, and if all she has to cope with is the occasional embarrassment about how Africans are portrayed, then she is fortunate.

  “What’s going on, Shoe Boo?” she asks again.

  Subu shrugs. “We’re fine, we’re here.”

  z

  Today they have little to say to each other. They seem to have exhausted their friendship now that they don’t have their simple left-wing–rightwing rows anymore. Deola is thankful when Subu leaves. There is a melancholy about Subu and she is aware how contagious it can be.

  When she was a student at LSE, she went out every weekend and how ridiculously young she and her friends were, living in their parents’ flats, running up their parents’ phone bills and driving cars their parents had bought them. They spent their pocket money on memberships at nightclubs like Stringfellows and L’Equipe Anglaise so they could get past bouncers, and threw raucous parties after midnight until their neighbors called the police.

  Nigerian boys carried on like little polygamists, juggling their serious girlfriends and chicks on the side. Well-brought-up Nigerian girls were essentially housewives-in-training. They dressed and behaved more mature than they were, cooked for their boyfriends and didn’t party much. Useless girls slept around. A guy had to rape a girl before he was considered that useless and even then someone would still go out with him and attribute his reputation to rumor. There were rumors about cocaine habits, beatings and experimental buggery. The guys eventually got married.

  None of her boyfriends counted until Tosan, whom she met during her accountancy training. He graduated as an architect at the beginning of the post-Thatcher redundancies and couldn’t find a job. He shared a flat with some friends in Camden and cycled around, even in the winter. Deola was working in the city and studying for her exams. After she bought her flat, Tosan spent weekends with her. He cooked and cleaned up. He had her listening to francophone African music and reading Kundera novels. He owed her money for plays they’d seen, like Hamlet with Judi Dench and Daniel Day-Lewis and Burn This with Juliet Stevenson and John Malkovich. He smoked marijuana and she didn’t. She told him he had to do that at his own place. She also drew the line at going to the pub.

  She had never met a Nigerian who enjoyed a rundown, dirty, smelly, moldy English public house as much as To
san did. She didn’t go to pubs with him because they would end up not speaking. She embarrassed him whenever she checked her wine glasses for lipstick stains. Tosan went to pubs on his own, but he also needed company. He talked a lot, too much. He was always going on about arts and culture and punctuated everything he said with a “You know wha’ I mean?” Sometimes she wanted to say, “Actually, I don’t.” Other times, she just wanted him to be quiet. She barely had time for him while she was studying for her final exams and that was probably when he began to look around.

  He got a job in Watford and began to stink of honey. He left traces of it on her couch and in her bed. The smell terrified her. She accidentally traced it to a Boots counter. It was a lotion for dry skin and Tosan never used lotion. That was a joke between them: his legs and arms looked as if he’d been carrying cement. Of course he denied he was sleeping with someone else and she chose to believe him, but they fought. They fought when he arrived late on Saturday nights and when he left early on Sundays, supposedly to play football in Hyde Park: Nigerians versus Iranians. Mostly they fought over the money he still owed her. “Where is my money for bloody Burn This?” she would ask. Or, “Where is my money for frigging Hamlet?” One night he said, “Stop shouting. You’re always shouting. There is no need to shout.” So she punched him. She never believed she had a right to hit a man with impunity and she didn’t stop him when he walked out. The next day she donated the Kundera novels he’d lent her to charity and threw out his soukous, kwassa kwassa (or whatever music) cassette tapes.

  He was sleeping with someone she knew. Not a close friend but it left her with a misplaced distrust, of which she was not proud, because it wasn’t proper to talk about the treachery of women. She ate a lot of jellybeans and played sad Sade songs. She saw Tosan again, at a party, and rather than admit what he’d done, he went on about sexuality, or was it Eros? Yes, it was. Eros was at the root of politics, religion and art, he said.

  She has since had other boyfriends. One was so passive she went as far as to shake his shoulders, pretending that she was joking and hoping she might get a reaction out of him. Another reminded her too much of her mother. On the first date, he was going on about looking for a woman who was marriage material. Another was a liar. Not even a serious liar. He lied about acquaintances and name-dropped people he didn’t know. It became awkward.

  These days, she no longer goes out on dates and she rarely gets an invitation. Her married friends throw parties for their children. The last time she was with a group of them was at a seventh-day ceremony. The couple, both Nigerian dentists, hired a rabbi to carry out their son’s circumcision because they couldn’t get one done at the hospital where he was born. The wife burst into tears and the husband made some suggestive comment, which Deola ignored for fear of being labeled a home wrecker.

  She wishes she had been more adventurous. For her, there will be no chance meetings in bars or sex with strangers. Within the social network to which she belongs, love is so contained, so predictable, and marriage might be as banal and unsatisfying as her career.

  z

  During the week, Bandele calls. She hasn’t heard from him in months. He either bombards her with phone calls or avoids her phone calls. She fondly refers to him as her grumpy writer friend. She is getting undressed when her phone rings. She stands before the mirror in her bedroom as she speaks to him, stripped down to her underwear, and pulls her stomach in.

  “My love,” she says.

  “Old Fanny,” he says.

  His voice is hopelessly public school. It sounds like one low rumble of thunder after another. She panics as she inspects her back view. Is her fanny beginning to sag or is it just the way she is standing? It looks uncertain, like an uncertain fanny asking, “When?” as if it won’t be long before she gets the answer everyone dreads, “Soon.”

  She tells him about her new job and he says he is trying to get published.

  “You are?”

  “It surprised me, too. ‘Never, again,’ remember? Now, I’m back to submitting work. And I’ve been short-listed for an African writers prize.”

  “Hey!”

  “No ‘hey.’ I don’t want to make a fuss or anything. You know, in case it doesn’t work out. It’s been a bit nerve-wracking. We’ve had all these readings lined up.”

  “You took part?”

  “I had no choice. The last one is on Saturday, near Calabash. Remember Calabash?”

  “Sure.”

  It was a restaurant at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden. She saw him read there when he published his first novel, Sidestep. He stuttered a lot, which was unusual for him. Readings made him nervous and back then he didn’t want to be associated with African writers.

  He says he found out about the competition through an online forum for Nigerian intellectuals, which he ended up leaving because they kept getting into tribal spats. He had not encountered Nigerians like them before: people who were capable of debating about Derrida and Foucault, but unable to contain their primal urges to clan up and wage war.

  “They were a vile bunch.”

  “Sounds like it. So where is this reading, then?”

  “A bookshop.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” she says.

  “Meet me afterwards,” he says. “These things can be tedious and it will be impossible to talk.”

  He gives her the address.

  “I’ll pick you up,” she says. “Let’s say nine? We can go somewhere. I want to hear what you’ve been up to. What were you short-listed for anyway?”

  “A novel. The first five thousand words. The winner gets ten thousand pounds and a book contract.”

  “Wow! What’s the title?”

  “Foreign Capitals.”

  “That’s a good one,” she says, though she is not sure.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. I can feel it. You will win.”

  “Thanks. I needed to hear that.”

  “See you soon.”

  z

  She takes a bath before she goes to bed. Her bathwater is lukewarm. She spreads her legs and arches her back. She has missed the weight and warmth of a man. Sometimes, she climaxes in her dreams and she looks at children differently, as if they could be hers. She brushes against her walls for contact.

  When she met Bandele, she couldn’t have imagined they would be friends. She had a crush on his elder brother, Seyi. Seyi was her brother Lanre’s friend. They were dayboys at Saint Gregory’s College when she was a boarder at Queen’s College. She overheard senior girls talking about them. They were cool Greg’s guys, heavy, dishy guys.

  The summer after Form Three, Seyi showed up at the house. He was gorgeous in his white uniform, tall, and he didn’t have those weak calves that Nigerian boys had. Even her mother was taken. “Such a lovely boy,” she said, “the Davis boy.” His nickname was “Shaft in Africa.” His father was a retired labor minister and his mother had a boutique at Federal Palace Hotel.

  That holiday, Seyi drove his mother’s old Mini around. He and Lanre would somehow squeeze themselves into it and find their way to Ikoyi Club to play squash and chase chicks. Seyi called Lanre “Whizzy,” after a song by a Greg’s band that landed a record deal with EMI. Lanre wasn’t allowed to drive and he always refused to give Deola a lift. “The driver will take you,” he would say. “Wait for the driver.”

  She would have to wait until the driver returned from whatever errand he was on. She would get to the club late in the afternoon and find Seyi and Lanre smoking and drinking beer in the rotunda. Lanre would stub out his cigarette, as if she were likely to tell on him, and Seyi would sit there looking amused and red-eyed.

  Seyi played in squash tournaments with middle-aged brigadiers. Sometimes she watched him play pool in the game section. Under-eighteens were not allowed in, but they bribed the waiters and during the day, anyone else who might report them was at work. Seyi would prowl around pool tables in his worn-out T-shirts and jeans. He drank beer from bottles and bent low to shoot
.

  He was just a boy and someone ought to have talked to him about drinking. Once he saw her at the newsagent and announced, “My sweetheart,” and hugged her. He was drunk again and she held him tightly, but that was as far as she went with him. He had a girlfriend called Tina, whose mother was Jamaican. Her hair reached her shoulders, so he and other guys made a fuss about her.

  Then one day, Bandele came to the house. “Is Lanre in?” he asked. No “please” and he pronounced Lanre’s name “Lanry.” He sounded completely English and all she knew about Nigerians who spoke that way was that they looked down on Nigerians who didn’t. “Lanre is not in,” she said. She was wearing jeans and a long T-shirt. Bandele asked, “Is Madam in, then?” Deola said, “You mean my mother?” He looked her up and down. “I thought you were the housegirl.”

  Bandele had the same features as Seyi’s, but they were not nearly as symmetrical and he was shorter. Lanre later explained that he was Seyi’s younger brother who was sent off to an old-fashioned school in England called Harrow. Now he was so lost that even Seyi was ashamed of him. Deola did notice how Bandele hung around the expat crowd at Ikoyi Club. They called him “Daily Davis.” He called himself “Daily Davis.” His English accent made him effeminate, as far as she was concerned. He didn’t even recognize her after that day—the same way some expats couldn’t tell one Nigerian from another.

  She turns off the hot water tap as she remembers the night Seyi Davis died. There was a film show at the club that night: James Bond. She was there with her friends. Seyi and Lanre left the rotunda early. It was raining and they had been drinking beer again. They went off to the Floating Bukka on the marina. After the film, the driver came for her. She got home and Lanre had not yet returned, which wasn’t a surprise. She ate the pork chops her mother had left in the warmer and went to bed. Her mother stayed up to watch April Love. She heard the theme song. It must have been eleven-thirty when the phone rang and her father answered it. It was Seyi’s father. He said Seyi and Lanre were in an accident on Kingsway Road, Lanre had lost consciousness and Seyi was lost. That was exactly how her father delivered the news: “Unfortunately, we have lost Seyi.”