A Bit of Difference

by Sefi Atta

  Aunty Simi’s daughter has always worked for her husband, who owns one of the top law practices in Lagos. He recently received the key to the city of London, opening many more important doors.

  Deola’s mother is preoccupied with her crab leg. Deola knows she is behind this inquiry. They are the women her mother kept up to date when she left Trust Bank, her mother’s childhood friends. They are not always united. Sometimes they get competitive, especially over their looks. Her mother often boasts about not having wrinkles, Aunty Yinka’s face is pulled back as tight as a drum and Aunty Simi looks like a walking lesson for abecedarians in her designer accessories with LV, interlinked C’s and inverted F’s.

  Aunty Theresa, who has been rather quiet because every time she speaks, the rest talk over her, says, “It’s your heritage, my dear. Your heritage. You don’t turn your back on your heritage.”

  She is the only one at the table wearing a dress. She married an Englishman, whose family didn’t accept her, despite the fact that she’d attended Oxford University, so she got a divorce and returned to Nigeria in the sixties. A sherry—rather than champagne—socialist in those days, her enunciation is still so impressive that no one understands a word she is saying, which is why they talk over her.

  “My father,” she says, and Deola makes out the words “fought for our independence,” “us pioneer professionals,” and “our children to come back home and follow in our footsteps,” as the others drown her out with their chatter.

  Aunty Theresa’s father, Francisco Blanco, was a renowned nationalist. He was a lawyer-turned-politician like Bandele’s grandfather, Sir Cecil Adeyemi Davis, who opposed the movement on the grounds that Nigeria was not mature enough for self-governance, thereby earning himself a knighthood. Francisco Blanco, meantime, was branded a communist by the colonials during the Cold War. Not one of his fellow Nigerians defended him for fear they might be hunted down and blacklisted in the spirit of McCarthyism.

  Why anyone would want to follow in the footsteps of a man whose life demonstrated how Nigeria turns its back on its people to kiss the arses of foreign powers is beyond Deola. She is waiting to see what the future holds for Nigerians, now that the government seems to be puckering up behind the Chinese.

  “How is your prime minister these days?” Aunty Theresa asks. “Still standing shoulder to shoulder with the Americans?”

  Aunty Fadeke hisses. “Shoulder to shoulder.”

  “Foolish man,” Aunty Simi says.

  “God will deal with that Bush fellow,” Aunty Yinka says.

  “Well, well,” Aunty Fadeke says.

  Deola walks away bemused. First, that her mother’s friends are this fired up about the war in Iraq and second, that they are still trying to persuade her to come home. But this is their way. Nigeria is where they are called “Madam” and treated with respect. They pass on their sense of entitlement to their children through estates. They are Nigerian Tories. Aunty Simi and her husband have houses all over Ikoyi. Aunty Yinka has a block of flats on Victoria Island in addition to her house on Lekki Peninsula. Aunty Theresa, who ought to know better, lives in Yaba on a street named after her grandfather, Senhor Blanco. He was one of the finest masons in Lagos and built houses with stables and orchards. But these days, slums border Blanco Street. After Oxford, Aunty Theresa joined the Colonial Service, then Ministry of Education, and would have been the permanent secretary had she not fallen out with the British, whom she called “Cockneys in feathered helmets,” and with the First Republic, whom she called “an old baba’s club.” She was retired by the next military regime, reinstated by the one after and finally resigned when she had to work with a Hausa education minister who said the South had too many schools for its own good. She called him “uncouth and myopic” and his response was that her resignation was timely, and hopefully, she would now go and sit down quietly and collect her pension, instead of speaking big English all over the place.

  Perhaps this is the trouble, Deola thinks. Their contemporaries are dying; their society has been replaced by one they could call vulgar. Their network of contacts has been demolished. Semi-illiterates are running the country, which they see slipping out of their grip and they are hanging on to whatever they can—their children mostly. Now they have to deal with people they diapered, CEOs, pastors, managing directors, attorneys general, senators and governors, whom they refer to as boys and girls. Even if they are wealthy, Nigeria does not belong to them anymore.

  Deola ends up near the chalet, which is actually a one-bedroom bungalow with a kitchenette and bathroom. Lanre is smoking on the veranda and still checking text messages. She sits next to him.

  “You’d better not be messing around,” she says.

  He slips his phone back into his pocket. “It’s my colleague, man. She is stressed.”

  “For what reason?”

  “She’s having marital problems.”

  “Can’t she consult a priest?”

  Lanre does not smoke in front of his sons. The smell makes Deola nauseous. From her new position, she has a view of both canopies.

  “I hate women,” she says. “What is she texting you for? I hate that. And I’ve just been accosted by that group over there.”

  “What did they do?”

  “‘When are you coming home?’ ‘Shouldn’t you be thinking of settling down?’”

  “They’re miserable. Don’t listen to them.”

  “I mean, who wants anyone to come home when the rest of the country is praying for a way out? And imagine talking to me as if I’m still in school. And Mummy just sat there pretending she didn’t know what was going on. It was like the Coalition of the Willing.”

  He slaps the cement surface as he laughs. “Don’t kill me.”

  “No, cigarettes will do that.”

  She has nagged Lanre about smoking and drinking since her father’s death. He pulls his cigarette out of his mouth.

  “Every bad habit I have, I picked up in this house.”

  “I swear. The whole country is full of boozers. Just look at them. Who would even have been standing there, if Aunty Bisi didn’t ask me to ‘chaperone’ them?”

  “Pity her. She has to sleep with an eighty-year-old man who takes Viagra.”

  “He does?”

  “Of course.”

  Lanre drops his cigarette butt on the ground and crushes it with his shoe. He was always more astute. Perhaps Aunty Bisi’s husband does need enhancement. He is in his eighties, and Aunty Bisi was the one who gave Jaiye this advice before her wedding: “A woman should be a whore in her bedroom and a whore in her kitchen.”

  In her heyday Aunty Bisi was at every owambe party in Lagos, gyrating in front of Sunny Adé until she abandoned Sunny for Shina Peters. That was how she met her husband. She was dancing to Shina’s band at his son’s fortieth birthday bash. He walked up to her and sprayed her with dollar notes. Despite his two wives, who were less gregarious, he was demanding of Aunty Bisi’s attention, insisting that she cook for him and travel overseas with him until Aunty Bisi, who at first was flattered and enjoyed hobnobbing with him, began to seem more like a hospice caretaker than a paramour.

  Lanre assesses her mother’s friends dispassionately: Aunty Theresa has probably been celibate since her divorce. He can’t imagine any Nigerian man putting up with her phonetics. Aunty Simi has a middle-aged son who can’t get up in the morning without sniffing cocaine. He was caught pilfering from his father, whose law practice he was meant to take over. His father disowned him. Aunty Simi pays his rent and provides him with spending money, so he won’t go around begging. Aunty Yinka left her husband because he lacked ambition. She had an affair with a government minister in the First Republic and with a state governor in the Second Republic, both of whom were married men. She was finally made an ambassador during the last military regime. Now she is retired.

  All those years, Deola overheard her mother talking on the phone about the men Aunty Yinka was “involved with” and hailing her “five times
a girl” and “a self-made woman.” She never bothered to question that. She was however able to figure out, while eavesdropping on her parents’ conversation, that Aunty Fadeke’s ex-husband threw Aunty Fadeke out and moved in her younger sister, whom he was molesting. What her mother said was, “Folabi was tampering with that girl, and Fadeke knew. She can’t pretend she didn’t know.”

  Deola wished she’d had the courage to confront her mother’s friends about their insistence on marriage and coming home. She is still fuming when Lanre receives another text message. He takes his phone out of his pocket.

  “She’s texting you again?”

  He reads the message. “It’s Mama Eno.”

  Eno is no longer “A Taste of Honey” to him.

  “Your wife is texting you and she’s here?”

  “She wants to know where I am.”

  “Doesn’t she know?”

  He keys in a message and sends it. “Nope.”

  “Did you tell her?” Deola asks.

  “She’s on her way.”

  Deola sees Eno walking toward the chalet. Her brother is like a criminal on the run.

  “Is it worth the wahala?” she asks.

  “What wahala?”

  “Your wife is always keeping tabs on you.”

  “Is that my fault?”

  “You’re texting some other woman.”

  “She sent me a text. What am I supposed to do?”

  “Ignore it!”

  They begin to quarrel. Lanre raises his voice, having lost his composure.

  “Why do you and Jaiye keep harassing me?”

  “Who is harassing you?”

  “I support you!”

  “When? When?”

  “Didn’t I just? Didn’t I just?”

  “Okay, okay, what would you say if someone treats your sister badly? What will you say when Funsho treats Jaiye badly?”

  “I’ve never cheated on my wife!”

  “You did! Before you got married!”

  He laughs involuntarily. “All of you are crazy. How old was I when I met her? Boys play around. That’s what they do. Eno stayed. She decided to. Now she keeps going back to what I did over five hundred years ago.”

  Eno is closer, so Deola lowers her voice and so does he.

  “You had shows until you married her. Yes, you did. Yes, you did.”

  “So she shouldn’t trust me again for life?”

  “Why should she trust you when you’re texting another woman?”

  “What is wrong with that?”

  “Nothing, unless you’re betraying her.”

  “Who’s betraying anyone here?”

  Deola wriggles her fingers. “You and your little disappearing acts.”

  “I’m working! What are you talking about?”

  “Please,” she says.

  Lanre used to tell her that men couldn’t help but have shows and the sooner she accepted the fact, the less complicated her life would be.

  “I’m a busy man, you know,” he says, lifting a brow to remind her that he has another side to him, a mature, controlled side, where he makes important decisions and is respected by his subordinates.

  “How come you have time to text that woman, then?” Deola asks.

  “Would my wife trust me if I don’t?”

  “So why do it?”

  He hisses. “All of you are crazy, I swear, and you contradict yourselves. You support Jaiye and she treats her husband like shit.”

  “Funsho treats Jaiye badly.”

  “Jaiye is a brat.”

  “My sister is not a brat.”

  “You don’t say a word about Ivie and she’s sugary.”

  “My cousin is not sugary.”

  “She and that shady senator she is with.”

  “She’s been with him for years! She loves him!”

  “Would she love him if he were poor?”

  “Why should she love a poor man?”

  “What is it? What more do you want? I go to work and come back home. ”

  “You should. Your father did.”

  “Oh, so he never had another family before ours?”

  “That has nothing to do with this.”

  “How do you know he was faithful anyway?”

  “That has nothing to do with what we are talking about here.”

  “Every bad habit I have, I picked up in this house.”

  “Don’t give me that. Not today. Not today.”

  “Why not? You see? As usual, you started what you couldn’t finish.”

  She is tearful. Perhaps her father wasn’t always working late, but her father would not lower himself to sneak around as Lanre does.

  “Set an example for your sons,” she says. “It’s a different world they have come into.”

  Lanre’s voice is loud enough for Eno to hear. “Is your life perfect?”

  Eno approaches them laughing. “Why are you two always fighting?”

  No one fights in her family. They are huggers and kissers. Her brother cried at her wedding.

  “Don’t mind this one,” Lanre says. “She has nothing better to do.”

  He takes out another cigarette and lights up as Deola mopes.

  “What happened?” Eno asks.

  Deola mumbles, “I was just getting on his case for not talking sense into Funsho’s head.”

  “He can’t,” Eno says with a smile. “That would be like the pot calling the kettle black.”

  “Hey,” Lanre says. “Don’t start.”

  Eno pushes his shoulder. She often comes up with twee English expressions she picked up from her mother like, “I’ll have your guts for garters” or “Bob’s your uncle,” and Lanre might say to her, “You’re not having any guts for any garters” or “Bob is not my uncle.”

  z

  Deola leaves them at the chalet when she can no longer stand Lanre’s cigarette fumes. She does sympathize with him. She would find it impossible to stay married to someone who doesn’t trust her, and Lanre had a difficult time in his teens. He didn’t just get his knees dashed; Seyi’s death was a plummet. His experimentation with drugs would have followed regardless. So many boys at Ikoyi Club were doing that. They were drinking too much as well and learning they could get away with mistreating girls. They had highly esteemed fathers of dubious morality and were expected to follow in their father’s footsteps. How many of them discovered they had half-siblings they were not aware of? How many saw their mothers get beaten up? Didn’t someone once run into his father and a slutty newsreader in the game room? Wasn’t someone else’s father, a high court judge, sacked for taking bribes?

  She walks over to Ivie’s table, her heels sinking into the grass. Ivie is on her own drinking beer and watching other guests. Ivie enjoys a beer, but she won’t drink in the presence of her elders. She won’t walk around on the grass in her shoes either. They might get ruined.

  “How now?” Ivie says, without smiling.

  Ivie is withdrawn at family functions, almost as if they take her back to when she was regarded as the bad girl of the family. Her poise ages her.

  It is cool under the canopy. Someone has knocked a wine glass over and left a purple stain on the white tablecloth. Deola scratches it. She is worried about Lanre. She is worried about Jaiye, Ivie and everyone. If the statistics on HIV in Africa are applicable here, Ikoyi ought to be a cluster. Everyone in the garden ought to be dead.

  “Where’s Omorege?” she asks.

  Ivie nods in his direction. Omorege is at the relatives’ table with his brother Henry. Henry, too, is separated from his wife. He publishes a newspaper that defends the incumbent party, People’s Democratic Party, against its numerous critics. He is unobtrusive and quite the opposite of Omorege. Omorege has the connections and Henry gives him the publicity he needs. They live in Ikoyi with a sense of accomplishment, rather than trepidation, and revel in their children’s ignorance of adversity.

  “Did you call Wale?” Ivie asks.

  “I did,” Deola says.r />
  “What happened?”

  “We met.”

  “So?”

  “He’s not for me.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s not interested in anything serious.”

  Ivie rolls her eyes. “Trap the man. He doesn’t know what he is talking about.”

  Deola laughs. She would rather be alone for the rest of her life than resort to trapping any man into marriage. She resists checking her phone to see if Wale has called. She could easily fall in love with him under different circumstances and only if he would love her back. It is a choice to love a man, she thinks. Only after the choice has been made does love become hard to control.

  “When are you leaving?” Ivie asks.

  “At four-thirty.”

  “Who is taking you?”

  “Lanre’s driver.”

  “I envy you.”

  “Why?”

  “Over there, you can manage on your salary. You get your paycheck and take care of your bills and live comfortably. Over here, it’s one thing after another.”

  “But you get together here. We hardly get together over there. I can go for days without seeing anyone in London.”

  “That’s exactly what I want, peace and quiet. There are days I don’t want to see anyone in Lagos.”

  Ivie’s corporate relations work often lands her in the newspapers, whenever she is launching a new foundation or a charity project. Omorege’s political career puts her right in the tabloids, with women who are identified by the men they sleep with. They are too old to be called sugar babies, but they once were. Now they seem to have an insight into what prolongs relationships: sex and money. The rest, to them, is histrionic.

  “It’s true,” Deola says.

  In London, she doesn’t have peace, but she does have quiet.

  She sits with Ivie for a while, and later Ivie’s mother waylays her. Ivie’s mother has lived in Port Harcourt for so long her pidgin English is perfect and she is not capable of subtlety.

  “You,” she says. “You never born pikin?”

  Deola laughs. She loves her aunt, but she can’t take her seriously.

  “Aunty, Aunty,” she says.

  “No ‘Aunty, Aunty,’ me nothing,” Ivie’s mother says. “Make you just hurry up and born pikin. All this book wey you dey learn for London.”