Читать книгу A Bit of Difference - Sefi Atta - Страница 7

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 programme 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 grey 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 mobile 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 centre to study for her exams and take breaks at Café Gigi. Now, the centre 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 worktop 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 sofa, 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.

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 grey 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 bad,’ 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 traveller 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.

‘I can’t bear to listen to their views on this stupid war and I hate the way they keep saying “I rack” and “I ran”. At least try and get the name right if you’re going to bomb another country to smithereens’.

At the beginning of the Falklands War Deola thought the word was ‘Forklands’. She was in her A-level year in England and was of the impression that only members of the Green Party and Save the Whales got upset about wars. Weirdos, basically.

This war is different. Everyone she knows in London is outraged. Everyone wants to win the debate, which has become a separate war. Strangers are co-opting her as an ally, including a drunken man who was seated next to her on the tube. He tapped a headline and said, stinking of beer, ‘We have no business being over there.’ Lines must also have been drawn because she has not met a person who is for the war. Not one. They might not even exist. They might be on CNN to rile up viewers and raise ratings for all she knows. But she is sometimes convinced, watching the dissenters, that this is their chance to make like rebels, now that the backlash is not as severe as it was when their opposition could perhaps have had some effect.

Kate slaps the table. ‘Anyway, your trip to Nigeria.’

‘Yes?’

‘Think you’ll be ready in a couple of weeks?’

‘Sure.’

The Nigerian programmes are not pressing enough to warrant Kate’s change to a brisk tone, but Deola plays along. The timing was her idea. She asked to go in the week of her father’s memorial, without revealing why.

Her father died five years ago. She was the last in her family to find out. He was playing golf when he became dizzy. His friends rushed him to hospital. They didn’t know he had high blood pressure. Her mother called to say he’d suffered a stroke. She got on the next flight to Lagos, but her father died before her plane arrived. She would have liked to have a sign that he had died, a white dove, anything as she flew over the Atlantic and the Sahara. Nothing. Not even an intuitive feeling, unless she could count the unrelenting pain in her stomach, which she couldn’t suppress by repeating prayers.

‘So where are we?’ Kate asks. ‘How long do you think you might need over there?’

‘A week at most.’

‘Is that all?’

Deola nods. She intends to finish her work in a couple of days and spend the rest of the time with her family.

‘Good,’ Kate says. ‘So here is their correspondence, lit and stats. Their presentation is not very polished, but I understand printing is a problem over there. Plus, it’s not about their presentation, really. I’m more interested in their accounts and the rest of it.’

Kate is brilliant with statistics, but she has no clue about accounting. Debit this, credit that, as she calls it.

‘Would you like me to visit their sites?’ Deola asks.

‘No. We’re just at the preliminary phase. I will have to go there at some point, but that’ll be much later, after I’m over this.’ Kate pats her belly.

‘It’s best you don’t travel until then,’ Deola says.

‘I don’t mind the travelling. I just don’t need to be falling sick again.’

‘Malaria is the one to watch out for in Nigeria.’

‘So I’ve heard. I’ve also heard the pills make you psychotic. I think I would rather have malaria.’

‘You wouldn’t,’ Deola says.

She has had malaria many times. The new strains are resistant to treatment.

‘Mind you,’ Kate says. ‘Toxoplasmosis was no picnic. Here, take a look.’

‘I’ll come round,’ Deola says getting up.

Kate pushes the papers towards her. ‘No need.’

‘It’s okay,’ Deola insists.

She assumes Kate is being decent as usual. Kate is hands-on about being decent. Kate dug out her Nigerian NGO files when Dára agreed to be the spokesperson of Africa Beat. Graham was against violating their policy of giving priority to countries with a history of fiscal dependability. Kate had to persuade him.

Deola walks to Kate’s side of the desk to look at the correspondence.

Kate covers her mouth and mumbles, ‘Hell.’

‘Are you all right?’ Deola asks.

Kate stands up, face contorted, and rushes out of the office.

Now, Deola feels foolish as she sniffs her shirt for perfume. Kate’s office smells vaguely of snacks with Asian spices that will linger on her all day. She waits for Kate to return, wondering if she would be better off leaving. Kate walks in wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

‘Sorry about that,’ she says.

‘Was it my perfume?’

Kate shakes her head. ‘Not to worry. Anything sets me off. It’s awful. I can’t wait until this is over. I’m going mad. I had a huge tantrum this morning and upset everyone at home. You know why?’

‘Why?’

‘Toothpaste.’

‘Toothpaste?’

‘Yes! Toothpaste! Someone left the cap off!’

‘I should leave you alone,’ Deola says.

‘I’ll be fine,’ Kate says, sitting down.

‘No, no. I’d better go. Can I take those with me?’ She points at the papers. ‘I’ll bring them back when I’m through.’

‘Yeth, pleathe,’ Kate says, attempting to smile.

Kate has a habit of lapsing into a lisp whenever she asks for favours.

Deola takes the correspondence to her office, which is next door to Kate’s. The carpet is the same throughout the office, greyish blue. Her window is clouded on the outside and there is dust permanently stuck on her white blinds. She has ‘in’ and ‘out’ trays on her desk and a matching organizer for her pens and pencils. There is no other indication that she intends to remain here. She doesn’t even have a calendar yet.

She leafs through the brochure of the NGO that supports widows, WIN – Widows In Need. It was established in 1992. The print is blotchy and uneven in parts. The tabulation lines in the appendix are shaky and she comes across a statistic at the bottom: the average age of the widows is thirty-nine, her age.

Great, she thinks, pulling a face.

For the rest of the morning, she revises her report on the Delhi trip and drafts an audit programme for Africa Beat. Then she makes notes about her pending trip to Nigeria, listing the information she needs to request, contacts she has to make and when. She reads the literature on WIN, which is somewhat unfocused and suggests that women of childbearing age have the highest risk of HIV infection. The director, Rita Nwachukwu, is a former midwife.

Graham comes to work looking quite pink. He is back from Guatemala. His bald patch is shinier. Deola only remarks on the weight he has lost. He offers doughnuts to everyone in the office in his usual defiant manner.

‘’Ere,’ he says to her.

There is sugar in his beard. Deola takes a doughnut and is careful to bite gently so the strawberry jam won’t leak on her shirt. They are in that section of the corridor between his office, hers and Kate’s. Kate walks out of her office and Graham presents the doughnuts to her.

Kate flops her wrists. ‘Get those away from me.’

Kate is a vegetarian and she practises yoga. She worries about gaining weight.

‘Go on,’ Graham growls.

‘You slob,’ Kate says, brushing the sugar out of his beard with her fingers.

Kate and Graham flirt incessantly. In private, Kate tells him off for eating junk food and he calls Kate an ‘eejit’ if she mislays reports. Today, Kate barely taps his arm after she cleans up his beard and he cries out, ‘Ow! Did you see that, Delia?’

‘I saw nothing,’ Deola says, stepping back into her office.

He sometimes slips up and calls her Delia. He also talks about his morning commutes in present tense, saying, ‘I’m driving down the street,’ while she is thinking, No, you’re not. You’re standing right here talking to me.

She overhears Kate saying, ‘Graham, don’t!’

This is another workplace symbiosis that amuses her, married employees seeking attention from each other, even when they are ill-matched. She has encountered other prototypes at LINK. They have their smiling woman who takes collections for birthdays and their peculiar man who looks bemused at every request, as if he alone in the world makes sense. There must be others like herself, walking around wondering if all their years of education should end in a dreary office, but they must be equally as skilled at putting on façades.

Later in the day, Graham tells her he is flying off to Paris for a conference. Deola hasn’t been to Paris in years. The last time she was there, she was in university. It was during the Easter holidays and she stayed with her cousin, Ndidi, whose mother worked for UNESCO. She travelled overnight from Dover to Calais by Hoverspeed. It was freezing and there were drunken passengers on board singing football songs. Ndidi met her at Gare du Nord and took her to her aunt’s house in Neuilly. Ndidi had a Mohican haircut and had just bought herself a black leather jacket; Deola was in a red miniskirt, fishnet tights and thigh-high boots. How stylish they thought they were, kissing each other twice, and they laughed so hard that holiday that she peed in a chair at a crêperie.

Why hasn’t she been back to Paris, she asks herself as she leaves the office in the evening. At first, the Schengen visa put her off. For a Nigerian it was a byzantine application process if ever there was one. She got her British passport, then the Eurostar train began to run, then the terrorists started with their threats. She waited until she was sure they wouldn’t blow up the Channel Tunnel. Now she has no one to travel with. No one who is enough fun. Ndidi lives in Rome and works for a UN agency. She is married to an Italian guy and they have twin girls. Ndidi doesn’t even have time to talk on the phone any more.

This week feels especially long and Deola is relieved when the weekend starts. She is lying on her sofa in her pyjamas on Saturday morning, watching a programme on BBC2 with hosts who are as animated as cartoon characters. They talk about the latest hip-hop dance and after a while she changes to Channel 4, which is showing a reality experiment on beauty. Her TV remote is on the carpet by a glass with orange juice sediment and a side plate with the remnants of her bacon sandwich. She is relishing the taste of acid and salt in her mouth when her doorbell rings. The ding is loud, but the dong is broken and drops like a thud.

There is no intercom system in her block. From her window she can see pollarded trees, green rubbish bins and dwarf gates. A high hedge separates her block from the next, which has a collection of gnomes in its front garden. Across the road is a white Audi A3 parked by a postbox.

It is Subu, who lives in Maida Vale. She and Subu trained in the same accountancy firm. Subu started off in management consultancy while she was in audit. Now Subu is a vice president of an investment bank and travels to places like Silicon Valley and Shanghai. Subu’s job has something to do with derivatives. Deola, for all her accountancy training and business experience, still doesn’t understand what derivatives are, and she cannot imagine how Subu, who is a born-again Christian, copes as an investment banker. Subu won’t swear or go out for a drink. She believes that angels have wings and Heaven and Hell are physical locations. She tells her colleagues they will end up in Hell if they don’t accept Christ as their lord and saviour. Her colleagues seem to accept her as she is, though. They call her ‘Shoe Boo’, as if she were a puppy or computer game.

Deola toys with the idea of not answering her door as she goes downstairs. Just before she travelled to Atlanta, she and Subu got into such a heated exchange over the bombing of Baghdad she swore she wouldn’t speak to Subu until Subu was willing to admit the war couldn’t be justified on religious grounds.

‘You’re back?’ Subu asks.

‘I am,’ Deola says.

‘Since when?’

‘Last Saturday. One minute.’

Deola checks the mail on the ledge in the hallway. There is no mail for her, mostly junk and bills for her neighbours, a group of young women who live on the ground floor. They might be South African or Australian. She hasn’t been able to identify their accents and has not bothered to ask where they are from. They say hello whenever she sees them in the hallway.

‘Why didn’t you call?’ Subu asks.

Since she gave her life to Christ Subu has had an authoritative air. It is almost as if she became Christ’s wife on that day. She no longer wears makeup because she is born-again, but she won’t be seen without a hair weave.

‘I had too much to do,’ Deola says.

She reaches her landing before Subu makes a move, so she waits as Subu lugs her tote bag up the stairs. It is the size of a Ghana Must Go bag. Subu spends thousands of pounds on designer accessories. Her wardrobe is a shrine to Gucci and Prada.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ Subu says.

Subu’s voice is thick and slow. She will not alter the pace of her voice or her accent for anyone, not even at work, which is commendable. She will keep repeating herself until she is understood and businesspeople are quick to catch on whenever big money is involved. As she once said, ‘They don’t try their “Pardon? Pardon?” with the Japanese.’

‘It’s all right,’ Deola says. ‘I was just watching television.’

She reminds herself to be patient as Subu catches up with her. They easily get into rows about abortion, homosexuality, Darwin and Harry Potter.

Subu sits on her couch. ‘You’re enjoying travelling around the globe like this.’

‘Please,’ Deola says. ‘I was only there for two days.’

‘What were you doing?’

Deola shortens her answer so as not to be boring. LINK wants to standardize their audits internationally. She had to study the Atlanta office’s programme and write one. It will be incorporated in a manual and translated into other languages.

‘To keep things uniform,’ Subu says, forming a circle with her fingers.

‘Otherwise, they would normally send me somewhere remote.’

‘Like Burundi.’

Deola nods. She need not pretend her job is as glamorous as Subu’s. She admires Subu’s business savvy. She was not as motivated as Subu was during their accountancy training. Subu was promoted to manager after she was made redundant. Subu was first to buy a flat.

‘What’s going on, Shoe Boo?’ she asks.

‘I thought I should check up on you.’

‘Have you decided on the flat?’

‘I’ve left it in God’s hands.’

God? Deola thinks. Doesn’t He have more important things to worry about than a speculative property investment in Shanghai? She was raised around Christian and Muslim relatives and celebrated Easter, Christmas and Eid ul-Fitr. In university, she dabbled in transcendental meditation and Quaker prayer meetings. She would have joined the Church of Scientology just to see what they had to offer if they hadn’t asked her to fill out a questionnaire. Subu was brought up in the Celestial Church of Christ. As a child, she wore white gowns and buried curses in the ground. Subu is now a member of an American Pentecostal church in London. It is democratic in the sense that anyone can be a pastor, and capitalistic in the sense that her pastor encourages his congregation to be prosperous. She attends single-women fellowships and prays that God will use her as a conduit. Deola finds it hard to take Subu’s church seriously, particularly as she grew up with Subu’s pastor and remembers him with a Jheri curl, dancing to the Gap Band’s ‘Oops Upside Your Head’. But she has seen how well Subu has done in her career and once in a while is tempted to join. Most of the time, it seems like a moral obligation to avoid churches like that, but perhaps God doesn’t give a hoot about hypocrisy or squandering of tithes. Perhaps all He really does care about is that He is loved, honoured and obeyed.

‘What are you doing this weekend?’ she asks.

Subu hisses. ‘I don’t know, but there is this car show.’

Subu’s ideal weekend outing is to the electronic shops on Tottenham Court Road. She gets excited about gadgets and machinery like digital cameras and surround-sound systems.

‘I was even at a funeral yesterday,’ she says.

‘Whose?’

‘One man in our church.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘They say it was his liver.’

‘Hah? Any kids?’

‘Three.’

‘Three.’

‘All under the age of ten.’

‘Please tell me his wife was working.’

‘I heard she was catering. I don’t know them very well.’

There is a Nigerian crowd in London that Deola is not part of. People who came in the nineties when the naira-to-pound exchange rate plunged. They came to work, not to study or to get professional training. They settled in Lewisham, Peckham, Balham and any other ‘-ham’ they could transform into a mini-Lagos. Through her church family, Subu gets invited to their owambe functions, where they dress up in aso ebi, play juju music, spray money and eat jollof rice and fried goat meat.

Deola finds it odd that Nigerians go to funerals as if they are social occasions that anyone can gate-crash – they just show up, look sad and leave. She has been to three funerals, all three in Nigeria. The first was her grandfather’s. Her mother had to pin her head tie in place. She was that young. The second was for a governor of her secondary school, Queen’s College. Her headmistress asked for class representatives and she put her hand up. The funeral was at Ikoyi Cemetery and she attended it in her Sunday uniform and beret. It was terribly hot and people arrived by the busload. The third was her father’s funeral at Victoria Court Cemetery and his was just as crowded. Her relatives forced her to dance at the reception following his funeral, but she didn’t think that at sixty-seven he was old enough for her to celebrate his life.

‘I’m going home soon,’ she says.

‘Anything?’ Subu asks.

‘I’m going for work. They want me to look at a couple of NGOs.’

‘Thank God,’ Subu says.

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

‘In Lagos?’ Subu 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 any more. 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.’

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–right-wing rows any more. 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 neighbours 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 rumour. There were rumours 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, mouldy English public house as much as Tosan 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 it was called) 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 labelled 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.

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 arse beginning to sag or is it just the way she is standing? It looks uncertain, like an uncertain arse 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.’

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 labour 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 games room. 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, 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.’

Lost him where? she thought.

The Davises restricted Seyi’s funeral to family members. No one else was allowed to attend – not his godparents, not their friends, not even his friends from Saint Greg’s. Lanre was bedridden. He had a concussion and black eyes. Her parents went several times to pay their condolences at the Davises’ house, but their steward would open their door dressed in a white uniform and say, ‘Master and Madam are resting.’

Seyi’s funeral caused a scandal in Lagos that summer. After the obituaries and tears, people began to abuse his father in private. They said he was too English. He didn’t know how to mourn properly. Her father saw him on the golf course practising his swing. Her mother bumped into Mrs Davis at Moloney Supermarket and was finally able to speak to her.

Deola’s mother banned her from the club for the rest of the summer, so she didn’t know if Bandele went there or not, but the holiday ended and Bandele must have gone back to Harrow. She still didn’t know how to react to Seyi’s death, so she wrote a poem dedicated to him and buried it by the pawpaw tree in the backyard.

She didn’t see Bandele again until she was in her final year in university. She met him at a black-tie dinner in Pall Mall. A mutual friend had her twenty-first birthday at a gentleman’s club there. The gentlemen looked like retired generals and diplomats. She spotted Bandele taking his surroundings a little too seriously and looking rather like a penguin. She asked him, ‘Aren’t you Bandele Davis?’ He said, ‘I am, and who might you be?’

He was with a blonde with puffy taffeta sleeves. Deola was with Tosan, who suggested to the blonde that if she really enjoyed lover’s rock, she ought to try a fantastic club in Hackney called the All Nations Club. Deola asked Bandele what he was studying. He said he was not in university; he was writing a novel. ‘A real one?’ she exclaimed, thinking she didn’t know one Nigerian student who was writing books or bypassing university. ‘The question is, are novels real?’ he asked, lifting his hand.

Tosan was so convinced he was gay.

On Saturday evening, she arrives late at the bookshop. She has driven around Covent Garden trying to find a parking spot, and it has turned cold enough to wear a jacket. She rubs her bare arms as she hurries towards the entrance. There are globes and travel maps in the window. Indoors is a café where the reading is advertised on a poster. Were these people at the reading? There is a woman with long frizzy hair, another with a grey ponytail and a navy wrap, and a man with a comb-over. The rest look half Deola’s age. They have dreadlocks and braids and are dressed in hip-hop clothes, ethnic prints and black. There is a lot of black (individualists always look as if they are in mourning). She stands out in her tracksuit; so does Bandele in his prim shirt and tie. His haircut belongs on an older face. He has a mischievous expression, but his eyes are subdued. It took him a while to find the right medication for his depression. One dried up his mouth and another bloated him up. They all make him lethargic. Most days he doesn’t get up until noon.

‘What’s this?’ he asks, patting his chest. ‘You’re …’

‘Don’t start,’ Deola says.

She is wearing a new padded bra. A woman approaches him with a copy of Sidestep. She has a nose ring and her lips are thick with gloss.

‘Sorry,’ she says, wrinkling her brows.

‘My pleasure,’ he says.

He autographs his novel on the nearest table, shakes her hand and returns. Deola predicts he is about to make a rude comment and she is right.

‘Let’s go,’ he mumbles. ‘I can’t take much more of this.’

A group of people has formed a bottleneck by the door. She enjoys the close contact and mix of scents, but Bandele grips her hand until they are outside, where he breathes out.

‘Was it that bad?’ she asks.

‘You have no idea. I’m sitting there pretending to listen to their inane discussion.’

‘About?’

‘About being marginalized and pigeonholed. Then some writer, whom I’ve never heard of before, starts yelling at me during my question-and-answer session.’

‘Why?’

‘Something about Coetzee’s Disgrace.’

‘What about Coetzee’s Disgrace?’

‘Oh, who cares? Coetzee’s a finer writer than that dipstick can ever hope to be. What does he know? He writes the same postcolonial crap the rest of them write, and not very well, I might add.’

Deola laughs. ‘Isn’t our entire existence as Africans postcolonial?’

‘They should give it a rest, the whole lot of them. Africa should be called the Sob Continent the way they carry on. It’s all gloom and doom from them, and the women are worse, all that false angst. Honestly, and if I hear another poet in a headwrap bragging about the size of her ample bottom or likening her skin to the colour of a nighttime beverage, I don’t know what I will do.’

He is a Coetzee enthusiast. Sidestep was about a nineteen-year-old Nigerian who slept around. She found it funny and sweet. He never denied it was autobiographical and the women in the novel were skinny blondes with AA-cup bras. They wore ballet flats and had names like Felicity and Camilla.

‘What a waste of time,’ he says, as they approach her Peugeot. ‘I should never have come. That’s why I’ve never liked going to these black things.’

‘Black things?’

‘Black events. They always degenerate into pity parties.’

‘Where do you want to go now?’ she asks, shaking her head.

‘Home.’

‘Home?’

‘If you don’t mind. I’m worn out.’

She paid for two hours’ parking, but she is used to him changing plans.

They pass a man who is shouting out theatre shows in an Italian accent: ‘Lion Keeng!’

The Lion King posters have African faces covered in tribal paint. The street is teeming with cars and people. There are cafés and shops on either side.

Bandele lives in a council flat in Pimlico. His estate has a community centre and launderette. He was in Brixton temporarily, but he threw a tantrum and demanded to be moved. He told his social worker he was only familiar with Belgravia and black people scared him, which was true, but his social worker just assumed he was showing signs of paranoia.

‘How’s the job going?’ he asks.

‘Not bad,’ Deola says, turning into Charing Cross Road.

‘So you’re doing charity work.’

‘No, I work for a charity.’

‘In Brent.’

‘Wembley, actually.’

He sighs. ‘Why Wembley?’

‘What’s wrong with Wembley?’

‘It’s zone four!’

‘It’s an easy commute for me.’

‘I’m just saying. With your qualifications, you ought to be working right here in the city for … for Rothschild or something.’

‘Rothschild is not an accountancy firm.’

‘Saatchi and Saatchi, then.’

‘Saatchi and Saatchi is not an accountancy firm. And who says they would employ me?’

‘Come on. You’re selling yourself short. You’re always selling yourself short. Stop selling yourself short. Of course they would employ you. Of course they would. With your background?’

‘What background?’ Deola says, stepping on her accelerator, instead of admitting she is aware of how mediocre her career is. She is heading in the direction of Trafalgar Square.

‘Calm down,’ he says. ‘I’m just saying. You ought to aim higher. You’re too self-effacing. You go for a job like that and you’ll end up leaving. It’s the same way you found yourself working with a bunch of yobs wherever.’

‘Holborn. A consultancy firm in Holborn.’

‘With NHS clients in Wolverhampton.’

She slaps his hand down. She can’t tell him anything.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.’

‘Hm.’

‘May I smoke?’

‘No.’

‘Out of your window, I mean.’

‘I said no.’

He rubs his forehead. ‘God, you’re such an old fanny. So what is it then, you struggle with the world of commerce and industry or the world of commerce and industry struggles with you?’ His American accent is dodgy.

‘Who are you quoting now?’ she asks.

‘Baldwin.’

‘What did Baldwin have to say about that?’

‘He didn’t ask you the question.’

He is also a James Baldwin enthusiast, but he considers Baldwin’s experiences American, unlike his, which he might describe as aristocratic English because his grandfather was knighted by the Queen. His snobbishness is exasperating. Everyone is a yob to him. He won’t accept that racism exists in England. ‘It’s just an excuse for the West Indian immies not to work,’ he once said. ‘Class is everything over here.’

‘My job is not bad,’ she says. ‘I get to travel. I’ve just come back from the States. Before that I was in India.’

‘India?’

‘Yes, and I’m going home in a week.’

From the little she saw of Delhi, it was cleaner and better organized than Lagos, but there were similarities, like the crowded markets and the occasional spectacle of someone defecating in public.

‘Where is home?’ Bandele asks.

‘Where else?’

He rubs his chin. ‘Nigeria is not my home.’

‘It’s home for me.’

‘Good luck to you. I haven’t been back in so long I’d probably catch dengue fever the moment I set foot in that country.’

‘More like malaria.’

‘Nigerians, ye savages.’

‘Your head is not correct,’ she says.

This slips out and for a while her remorse shuts her up. Bandele has been hospitalized for depression once before, but even at his lowest he was never incoherent. He also appeared physically fit, yet his depression was often so crippling he couldn’t get out of bed. Now, he says it is manageable. He calls psychiatric patients ‘schizoids’. If she protests, he says, ‘What?’

His flat is in a state when they get there – not abnormally so. There is dirty laundry in his living room, a clutter of plates in his sink and a saucer with cigarette butts. He works in longhand and writes it up on a computer, but he has never learned to type properly. He has paper all over the floor, sometimes crumpled up in balls. He writes everywhere as if he is addicted, in notebooks he carries, on paper napkins in restaurants and on cinema stubs in the dark. He goes to Pimlico Library to borrow books and to his local Sainsbury’s to buy frozen meals. He heats them in his oven because he doesn’t have a microwave. His flat smells of lasagna and cigarette fumes.

‘Does the writing help?’ she asks.

‘Help what?’ he says, throwing his keys on a chair.

Her hands are in her pockets. ‘I mean in expressing yourself.’

‘It’s not about expressing myself.’

‘What is it about, then?’

‘I just don’t want to feel so worthless any more.’

‘You’re not worthless, Bandele.’

‘I am.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘But I am.’

‘No, you’re not. You’re working and it’s not like having a job you absolutely loathe.’

He searches the floor. ‘I absolutely loathe writing.’

‘You do?’

‘Of course I do and I loathe publishing even more.’

‘Still?’

‘Mm, I have an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.’

Again, the dodgy American accent. He can’t imitate, but he has an astonishing ability to recall quotes. For her, quoting is like picking flowers instead of admiring them.

‘Baldwin again?’ she asks.

‘You’ve got that right, sister. Have you read any of his books?’

‘Go Tell It on the Mountain, and the Beale Street one. The one with the pregnant woman.’

‘What did you think of them?’

‘I liked them.’

He staggers backward. ‘Liked?’

‘You and Baldwin today.’

He raises his hands. ‘I’m having a séance with him.’

‘I thought you didn’t believe in all that.’

He was an existentialist when last she asked. She cannot tell if he is erratic or just working himself up into a creative mood. She wants to find out if he is under stress from writing again and if he has a new girlfriend. She would like to ask about his medication and his social worker. But more than that she’d rather just excuse herself and leave because she can’t cope with what he might tell her.

‘It’s a mess here, isn’t it?’ he asks, looking at the floor.

‘It’s fine,’ she says.

‘No, really, it’s a mess.’

‘It’s fine.’

‘Just say it is and I’ll clean up.’

‘I’ll help.’

As they tidy up, she tells herself not to worry about him. Every Nigerian she knows abroad is to some degree broken.

‘I don’t write to express myself,’ he says, picking up papers. ‘If I need to express myself, I’d sooner take a shit on one of these.’

‘I only asked,’ she says.

Bandele has never held a job. He had one after Sidestep was published because he wasn’t earning much in royalties, but he fell out with his manager within a week. He said he couldn’t possibly take orders from a yob like her, quit, then had trouble drafting his second novel. His agent stopped returning his calls. He went to her office and whatever happened there led to his hospitalization. His parents came from Nigeria to visit him. He called his father a fucking kleptocrat and his mother a mercenary cunt. They flew back to Nigeria as soon as he was discharged from hospital.

That was when Deola returned to work in London. She was on a tourist visa. She was applying for accountancy jobs, the only jobs for which she could apply for a work permit, and she called Bandele at his parents’ house in Belgravia. She was catching up with friends and finding out who else was around. He kept her on the phone for hours telling her what happened. ‘It was brutal, brutal in there,’ he said. ‘Dickensian and the nurses looked as if they were men dressed in drag.’ He said his father had given him six months to find somewhere else to live. It was easy for her to blame his father. The man was too Nigerian, she decided.

Bandele’s father went to Cambridge and Bandele was expected to go there, but instead he wrote the novel. His father never mentioned the novel, as if doing so might prove Bandele right. After Bandele moved to Pimlico, he invited her to the Tate Gallery for exhibitions: David Hockney, Francis Bacon, someone or other. She persuaded him to come to Brixton for a Fela concert at the Academy. Tosan didn’t care if he tagged along. He was so sure Bandele was gay. In fact, he thought that was the cause of Bandele’s breakdown, while her friends referred to Bandele as ‘the bobo who went mad because he couldn’t accept the fact that he was black’. It got worse if she ever tried to defend him.

Over the years she has discovered that Bandele tells just enough of the truth to get sympathy. His father is known as a thieving politician, for instance, but he is a well-respected one, as they all are. His father may also have disciplined his children with a cane, but no more than the average Nigerian parent did. Sometimes she can’t tell Bandele’s natural grandiosity from the symptoms of his illness. He has since learned to live with the black people on his council estate, but she no longer blames his family for giving up on him. The cunt business was just the beginning. He called his sisters (who were known for buying the affections of guys who were far better looking than they were) ugly whores. She keeps in touch with him by phone, but she can go for months without seeing him. His ridicule of Nigerians is hard to take, and she once attributed it to the sort of self-loathing that only an English public school can impart on a young, impressionable foreign mind.

Overall, she finds Bandele testy, but his talk about schooling and artistic expression prompts her to call Tessa during the week. Tessa Muir, or Tessa the Thespian, as she used to call her when they were roommates in boarding school. Sometimes it was Tess of the d’Urbervilles. This was during O levels, when Tessa, like Bandele, didn’t have the normal preoccupations like choosing what A levels to study or going to university. Tessa later left boarding school for a tutorial college in London so she could audition for acting roles. She didn’t actually get any roles, or A levels, but it was fabulous.

The last time Deola saw Tessa on stage, Tessa was playing Lily St Regis in Annie. She sang ‘Easy Street’. Tessa does voiceover work now. Once in a while Deola recognizes her voice in an advert, when Tessa is not sounding like someone else. It brings her back to when they were fifteen-year-old girls.

School was in Somerset, and their boarding house was in Glastonbury. They had a housemaster with hair full of Brylcreem who peeked through keyholes to check if girls were misbehaving and a housemistress who was too vacuous to understand the implications of this, but she made the best apple crumbles ever. A bus shuttled students to and fro. Deola’s classes had ten students at most, compared to the thirty-odd girls she was used to at Queen’s College. There were boys in her class and no school uniform, which meant she had to think about what to wear in the mornings: skirt or trousers, cardigan or sweater, penny loafers or boots. She had a Marks & Spencer duffle coat and her mother’s old Burberry trench coat, both of which she found frumpy.

She was fresh from a boarding school in Nigeria, where girls stuck their bottoms out and walked around with Clearasil on their faces. Now, she was sharing a house with girls who flipped their hair from side to side and ran around with Nair on their legs. She found them just as funny to observe. Tessa came from a drama school with her own special antics, which quickly earned her a reputation for being a weirdo. The only girl weirder than Tessa was a Californian who wore an ankle bracelet and said, ‘Far out, man,’ and sniffed her spray deodorant.

First thing in the morning, Deola would be lying in bed, tucked under her duvet, reluctant to brave the cold. She slept near the heater. Outside it was invariably dark. Tessa would get up early to avoid the shower rush. After her shower, Tessa would strut into the dormitory, grab her hairbrush and start singing some annoying chorus from a musical, like ‘Um diddle diddle diddle, um diddle ay,’ and Deola would shout, ‘Will you shush?’

They were both in the drama society and Tessa had major roles in the school productions of Guys and Dolls and The Importance of Being Earnest that year. At Queen’s College, Deola was in the drama society. She once played Hamlet in the ‘To be or not to be’ scene. In England, she always ended up with female or black roles and usually as an extra. One night in their dormitory, she thought she’d show off her acting skills to Tessa and recited the ‘The ’squire has got spunk in him’ scene from She Stoops to Conquer. Tessa laughed until she drooled. The trembling nasal voice Deola used became a voice of reason of sorts.

They couldn’t agree on what music to play. Deola had a stash of cassettes, most of which were badly dubbed from soul LPs and labelled ‘Mixed Grill’. Occasionally, Radio One played a song with a dance beat, like ‘Funkin’ For Jamaica’; otherwise, she had to tune into Radio Luxembourg. Tessa was into bands like Led Zep and Pink Floyd. Deola had never heard of them before and Tessa did not know who Teddy Pendergrass or George Benson were. In the end, they didn’t agree to take turns to play their music; they just enjoyed whatever was on and that was how Deola learned that those obscure choruses from her childhood, like ‘Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday’ and ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, were from songs by the Stones and the Beatles. She’d grown up believing they were Nigerian folk songs.

She calls Tessa and they arrange to meet for tea on Sunday in a café off Haymarket. They sit by the window, which is thick enough to reduce the noise of the traffic to a hum. The café is cozy. There are mirrors on the walls and Deola can see her profile as well as the back of her head. The tea is overpriced and the sugar is caramelized, as if to compensate. She eats a cheese danish as Tessa butters a scone and slaps on strawberry jam. Tessa’s red hair is pulled back with a black band. She has a slightly crooked nose that makes her look striking. Her dark denim jacket contrasts with her pale freckly skin. She wears a ruby cabochon ring on her middle finger; it is too loose for her ring finger. She has been engaged to Peter for several months now and they are yet to set a wedding date.

‘The trouble is,’ Tessa says, ‘we can’t decide where to live. It’s either Pete moves here or I move to Australia, right? So Pete doesn’t like the climate here and you know I can’t stand the heat. But I really don’t have to live here to work and Pete can basically live anywhere.’

‘So?’

‘So it’s unsettling. It’s such a long way away, Australia. Such a long way from home. He will build me a studio, though, if we move there, so I can work.’

Tessa and Peter live in a mews in Notting Hill Gate. Peter buys houses in London with a business partner, fixes them up and sells them. He left school at seventeen, wanting to be a wildlife photographer, and travelled throughout Asia taking carpentry and building jobs to sustain himself.

‘They have that huge theatre, don’t they?’ Deola asks.

‘Which one?’

‘The one at Sydney Harbour.’

‘Yes, the opera house.’

‘Australia,’ Deola says. ‘My neighbours downstairs are from Australia.’

Tessa puts her teacup down. ‘Are they?’

‘I think so. Stay here, Tess. What if you get another big role?’

Tessa bites her scone. ‘Mm, mm. The … roles … aren’t … there any more.’

‘You got Annie.’

‘Yes … but that was ages ago.’

‘So?’

‘So in a couple of years I’ll be old enough to play Miss Hannigan.’

‘Remember when you were Adelaide?’

‘Adelaide,’ Tessa says, unenergetically.

She misses being on stage. She has had more luck in festivals than in the West End. She eventually turned to BBC radio and the voiceover work came out of that. A review said her singing voice was ‘soulful’, and Deola secretly took credit for that. Who exposed her to soul music? Who took her to see the High Priestess, Nina Simone, at Ronnie Scott’s?

‘You know who I’d really love to play?’ Tessa says.

‘Who?’

‘Piaf. But I’m too tall to play her. She was tiny, Piaf.’

Tessa as Édith Piaf doesn’t surprise Deola as much as Tessa as a housewife. Tessa gave Peter an ultimatum before he agreed to get married. He is six years younger than Tessa and his father is not pleased about that. Peter’s mother died of melanoma when he was a boy and he and his father are more like brothers. They get drunk together, which Tessa at first thought was sweet. Now she says it’s unsavoury.

‘What made you change your mind?’ Deola asks.

Tessa wipes her fingers on a napkin. ‘About?’

‘You know.’

‘I’m ready,’ Tessa says. ‘I want the husband, the kids, the whole lot.’

Deola thinks of the clapping and skipping games she learned as a girl and chants like ‘When will you marry? This year, next year’ and ‘First comes love, then comes marriage.’

‘I know we’ve been brainwashed,’ Tessa says, reading her skeptical expression. ‘It’s biological. I don’t want to wait until I have fossils for eggs.’

‘Please don’t mention eggs around here.’

‘Why not?’

‘There’s no hope for mine.’

‘Don’t be silly, darling.’

‘Seriously. There’s no one in London.’

‘What do you mean? There’s someone. There’s someone else.’

A group of Japanese tourists are walking past. One stops to take a photograph with his Canon camera.

How to begin? Deola thinks. The closest she got to talking to Tessa about race was telling Tessa she danced well, considering. Tessa, of course, thought Deola was a fantastic dancer. Deola didn’t dance that well, just better than other girls in school, who danced out of rhythm. Tessa got curious about the word ‘oyinbo’, having overheard other Nigerians using it and it was awkward for Deola to confess it meant white, Westerner, Westernized, foreign. Tessa blushed. The British won’t have any of that, stirring up stuff.

‘You must have had an image of what your prince looked like when you were a girl,’ Deola says.

‘I’m sure I did,’ Tessa says.

‘Well, mine was no Englishman.’

Tessa laughs. ‘What?’

‘I want to be with a Nigerian.’

‘Oh, don’t be daft.’

‘It’s a preference.’

‘Don’t be daft, darling. Who ends up with her prince anyway?’

Deola gesticulates. ‘It’s about … having a shared history.’

In her college days, who wanted to be the odd one with the oyinbo boyfriend at a party, explaining to him, ‘Yes, yes, we like our music this loud. No, no, we don’t make conversation, we just dance’?

You were either pathetic or lost if you were with an oyinbo boy. She never went out with any in school. She had crushes. There was the golden-haired American tennis player and the Welsh rugby player with bowlegs. Tessa went out with a pimply pseudo-intellectual who walked around with a paisley scarf wrapped around his neck. He seemed harmless enough until he spread a rumour that Tessa stuck her tongue so far down his throat she practically extracted his tonsils.

In a way, Deola was glad she was saved from that nonsense: who fancies whom and who got off with whom. Boys called her ‘mate’ and slapped her on the back. They might have wanted to hug her, but it was safer if she were one of the lads. Sometimes they introduced her to a Nigerian boy who came to their school for an away game. They would endorse him as ‘good fun’, mispronounce his name (‘Addy Babby Lolly’) and no matter how unattractive she found him, they would grin at him, and her, as if expecting them to copulate.

She concentrated on studying for her O levels. At the end of term, while Tessa was busy getting upset over some boy who’d slow-danced with some other girl at the school disco, Deola was looking forward to travelling home. She knew she wasn’t going to be overlooked for much longer. On the last day of term, they shared a bottle of scrumpy on Glastonbury Tor.

She was specific when she started dating and she still is. Her men must taste and smell as if they were raised on the same diet and make the same tonal sounds. Similarity on all fronts is essential. She won’t even be with a Nigerian like Bandele, who might end up asking her, ‘Pardon?’

‘What’s wrong with a different history?’ Tessa asks. ‘What’s wrong with two histories?’

‘Nothing, if they really are shared.’

‘Come on. That is so … I’m sorry. I’m not precious that way. I’m just not.’

Tessa’s father is Scottish. Her mother’s family emigrated from Italy. She has an uncle on her father’s side whom she calls a disgusting old fart because he complains about his new neighbours who are Pakistani, spies on them from behind his curtains and once called the police to say he suspected them of terrorist activities. Before Peter, she dated a Trinidadian artist who looked Chinese, then a French merchant wanker, as she called him after they broke up. Tessa would not know what it means to be nationalistic about love. She thinks it’s racist to talk about race. She is unapologetically prejudiced against actors, though. Her first boyfriend was one. He was in his forties, and married. They met in bedsits for years. She swore she would never get married after she broke up with him.

‘What if I said that to you?’ she asks, blushing. ‘What if I said that about Nigerian men?’

‘It’s not the same,’ Deola says.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s not. You don’t live in Nigeria, for a start. Imagine if you did.’

‘Why?’

‘Just imagine you lived there in a community of expats for years. You know how you’re not sure about moving to Australia? That is my whole life here.’

‘It’s not like you haven’t had time to adjust! You went to school here!’

‘You have no idea what it was like for me in school.’

The man at the next table glances at them. His nose is bulbous and the skin on his neck droops from his chin. Tessa’s moment of anger subsides.

‘Does being a redhead child actress come close?’ she mumbles, as she eats the other half of her scone.

‘It’s not the same,’ Deola says.

Tessa’s hair is not the same shade of red as it was. It is darker now, less orange. She is going grey, so she dyes it. As a girl, she was in adverts for lemonade and toothpaste. Her teeth were perfect and her hair was coarse and curly. She envied child actresses like Patsy Kensit who had straight blonde hair. Actually, she hated Patsy Kensit. She wanted to be the girl in The Great Gatsby and people kept telling her she would make a wonderful Orphan Annie, whom she also hated. A West Indian woman at an audition suggested she use TCB conditioner to tame her hair and Tessa’s mother had to go all the way to Shepherd’s Bush to find some.

Tessa has had her hair blow-dried straight for auditions and worn wigs for roles. When they were roommates, Deola was amused that girls wanted cornrows after they watched the film Ten. She could either see it as a fashion trend or an insidious undoing. A boy who called her his mate asked if he could rub her Afro for good luck. She has had to get her hair chemically relaxed for interviews. A partner in her accountancy firm commented that her braids were unprofessional. Not once did she think her hair was the issue at hand.

‘I mean,’ Tessa says, dusting her hands, ‘all my life I haven’t been right for the roles I’ve wanted. If it’s not my hair, it’s my age. If it’s not my age, it’s my height. It’s been like that from the very beginning, rejection after rejection. Never mind what I said in school. I was such a little liar then.’

‘Weren’t we all?’

‘I actually thought you fitted in more than me.’

‘Me?’

‘You were a right little miss. “Would you please keep the noise down?” “Would you please not leave clothes strewn all over the floor?” I mean, what fifteen-year-old uses the word “strewn”?’

Deola steadies her teacup as she laughs. What she remembers is the careers adviser in their school telling her Africans were not intelligent enough to go to university and the drama teacher asking her to sing ‘Bingo bango bongo, we belong back in the jungle’ in an end-of-term musical, and trying to convince her that it was a satire.

Tessa did also have a reputation for lying. She said her parents had a mansion in Richmond. The mansion in Richmond turned out to be a semi-detached in Twickenham. She said she had to leave school because she was missing out on roles. Her mother was a music teacher and her father was a cellist. Tessa was on a scholarship. They withdrew her from boarding school because they feared she was losing her self-confidence. She was embarrassed about her upbringing, which she could claim was unusual until she met international students like Deola, who grew up overseas. ‘My life is so blah,’ she would say to Deola, or ‘I’m so pale. I wish I could swap skins with you.’

Deola didn’t want to swap skins with Tessa, nor did she believe Tessa would consider it a fair exchange. She thought every boarding school had the same sorry array of international students and had seen them at their loneliest, sobbing over a mean comment someone had made. All of them were levelled by their desire to go home.

‘I’ve known you for so long,’ Tessa says. ‘You have to be a bridesmaid.’

‘Of course.’

‘There will be fittings.’

‘I will be there for each one.’

‘Our colours might clash.’

‘That’s not fair, Muir.’

‘What? You started it. When will you be back from Nigeria?’

‘In a week.’

‘When would you like to be measured then, the Saturday after?’

‘Make it the Saturday after that. I usually need two weeks to recover.’

Tessa makes a fist. ‘Do us a favour, if you meet someone over there …’

‘Um, I think it’s a little precarious for one-night stands.’

‘“I think it’s a little precarious.” See what I mean? It won’t kill you to have one before you die.’

‘Tessa.’

‘What will you do otherwise?’ Tessa asks. ‘You might not get another chance if you’re so picky about your options here. What’s that look for?’

It is almost parental, the way Deola considers what she can bring up about her experiences as a Nigerian in England. Tessa would probably feel guilty, without realizing that Nigerians are as prejudiced as the English, and more snobbish. Nigerians, given any excuse, are ready to snub. Without provocation and even remorse. They snub one another, snub other Africans, other blacks and other races. Nigerians would snub aliens if they encountered them.

The first time she was ever aware her race mattered, she was in Nigeria. She was in primary school and must have been about eight. She was taking ballet classes at another school for expatriate children. The girls in the class were mostly English, but there were Chinese, Lebanese and Indian girls as well. Deola was one of a few Nigerian girls. The ballet teacher was English. She walked around clapping in time to the music, and ordering, ‘Tuck your tails in,’ as girls practised pliés. She would pass the Nigerian girls and say, ‘I know it’s hard for some of you.’ She would pass the other girls and say, ‘Good work!’

The next time, Deola was fourteen and in a summer camp in Switzerland. She shared a room with a blonde girl from Connecticut who was always getting into trouble with counselors and calling her parents in tears. Deola was combing her hair with an Afro pick one night when the girl pointed at her and laughed. This surprised her because during the day the same girl was constantly throwing her arms around a boy who looked like the youngest Jackson 5 brother, until he said she was so fat that if she jumped in the swimming pool, half the water would splash out. He was from Chicago. Deola, too, was infatuated with him. But one afternoon, they were at horseback-riding when he started dancing around her with his knees bent, flapping his arms like chicken wings and chanting, ‘Ooga shaka ooga shaka.’

She went to boarding school in England a year later. In English class, she sat next to a boy who was forever cracking jokes. She noticed how her classmates called him ‘Jacob’, wrinkling their noses, as if his surname were a cough syrup. She knew he was picked on for a reason neither he nor they may have been conscious of. Then one day, they were taking turns reading Look Back in Anger out loud, and he asked a question about ‘wogs’ that she didn’t catch. ‘Now, now,’ their English teacher said, with a smile. ‘We don’t say “wogs” here. We say “Western Oriental gentlemen”.’

None of these experiences are worth mentioning, Deola decides. They are laughable.

‘Want another scone?’ she asks. ‘I think I’ll have another danish.’

Tessa’s thirteen-year-old niece is a Dára fan. She is a fan of hip-hop in general and she does the hand signals and calls girls she doesn’t like ‘biatches’.

‘She is such a silly sweetheart,’ Tessa says. ‘You just want to give her a clip around the ear. She says to me, “Can you ask your Nigerian friend to get me Dára’s autograph?” So I ask her, “What do you see in him?” And she says, “He’s gangsta.” My brother and his wife are going spare. I told them not to worry. It’s like rock and roll, really, this whole hip-hop thing.’

‘Dára is not gangsta,’ Deola says. ‘He’s just a college dropout.’

‘How funny. I can see what she sees in him, though.’

‘You can?’

‘Mm. There’s something about him. Something … very noble about his looks.’

Deola doesn’t know what to say to this. The man at the next table with the bulbous nose looks noble to her, like a Roman emperor.

‘How’s your dad?’ she asks.

Tessa’s father is much older than her mother and he has Alzheimer’s. He can no longer play the cello.

‘Dad’s not doing well,’ Tessa says. ‘That’s one reason why I have to make a decision about this wedding soon. Mum’s doing her best. It’s something to witness, something to aspire to, the love between them. I just hope Pete will be there for me if anything like that happens.’

‘He will,’ Deola says, sincerely.

One night that week, she catches the end of a television interview with Dára and studies his face. He is not beautiful, but he may have crossover appeal: big eyes, a well-proportioned chin and a nose that doesn’t change shape when he speaks. His face is still as a mask. Could that be seen as nobility? He is talking about his debut CD.

‘The response,’ he says, ‘’as been amazing.’

His chest is pumped up and the watch on his wrist is as thick as a handcuff. His interviewer, Abi Okome, is also well known. How he resists looking at her breasts is a mystery. They are propped up like bread rolls on a platter.

‘In what way?’ she asks, smiling.

‘What way?’ Dára says.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Tell us how exactly.’

‘Well,’ Dára says. ‘People recognize you. You can’t just walk down the street any more. They call your name. At first, I was not sure ’ow to react, but I mean, I am sort of getting used to it now.’

His accent is a mixture of Cockney and Yoruba. He looks self-assured, but his smile ends and there is a moment when he lets out a giggle, as if he still can’t understand what the fuss is about.

‘So is England home for you now?’ Abi asks. ‘Because you’re originally from Nigeria and my family is originally from Nigeria.’

Her hair weave barely shifts when she tosses it back. She is an attractive woman and she has that essential smile, that big smile that shows a lot of personality.

‘Sure,’ Dára says. ‘England is ’ome for me now.’

Abi faces the camera. ‘And Sir Paul said it wouldn’t last! Give it up for hip-hop sensation Dára!’

Deola changes channels as the audience gives it up and woo-woos. England has changed. It’s a long way from finding her way to the only record shop in Soho that sold soul imports. It’s not just Nigerians; Black culture is everywhere now, but she is not satisfied. She turns off her television, mistaking her boredom and sense of unbelonging for an uncontrollable urge to sleep.