A Bit of Difference (6 page)

“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.”

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 practicing 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.

z

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 toward the entrance. There are globes and travel maps in the window. Indoors is a café where the reading is advertised on a poster. A few people from the reading are there: a woman with long frizzy hair, another with a gray 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 color 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 theater 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 center 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?”