by Sefi Atta
z
After she says goodbye to Tessa, she walks to her Peugeot and sits in it for a while. She is familiar with the street. There is a school, which is closed for the weekend, and a small park surrounded by trees. The Thames is not too far away, looking like Darjeeling tea. It is cold inside her Peugeot. She could drive off and from now on pretend she doesn’t know a damn thing. If Helen never mentions that they met, how would Bandele find out? But what good will come out of pretending? What kind of friendship would that be?
She decides to call Bandele on her cell phone.
“He-llo,” he says, clearing his throat, as if he has just woken up.
“Hello, my love. Are you at home?”
“Yes.”
“I’m round the corner. I was thinking of dropping by.”
He yawns. “Sure.”
“In five minutes?”
“No probs.”
She walks back to his block with her arms folded, twists her ankle as she crosses the road and catches a whiff of stale urine as she walks into the estate. Bandele’s flat is on the other side of the courtyard, overlooking a green house. The smell of cigarettes assaults her when he opens his door. She is conscious of each swallow. He wears jeans that look as if he has slept in them and his shirt is unbuttoned. He doesn’t have a single chest hair. His sitting room is tidier this time, but he still has papers on the floor, and a pile on his center table. He sits on a chair and puts his feet on the table as she tells him she was at Helen’s flat and why.
“Wedding dresses,” he says, rubbing his uncombed head. “Sounds like fun.”
“I was surprised she knows you.”
“She’s all right, Helen.”
Deola heartbeat jumps. “She also said she knows Charlie.”
“Who?”
“Charlie? Charles?”
“Oh, Charlie. Yeah, they both work in theater.”
“She gave me the impression you’re a couple.”
He laughs. “What, Helen and I?”
“No, you and Charlie.”
He lowers his feet to the ground and reaches for a box of cigarettes by the pile of papers. “What, you think I’m bent or something?”
She thought she would know. In Nigeria, he sounded effeminate to her, but when she came to school in England, she discovered his accent was posh. He has a rude, boyish walk. It is hard to keep up with him because he moves too fast, unless he is feeling lethargic. He is not exactly well turned out. At home he can be a slob. He is spiteful in a way that most men are not. The last time she had spiteful friends, she was a teenager, but she attributes his spitefulness to frustration with his illness. She imagined his relationships didn’t last long. He didn’t talk about his relationships anyway. He was more guarded about them than he was about his writings. She thought he was embarrassed about his penchant for skinny blondes.
“I never thought you were.”
“What, a poofter?”
He lights up and the fumes nauseate her. He is being childish.
“You don’t have to pretend with me. That’s all I came to say.”
He studies his cigarette. “Now that you’ve said it.”
“You said I could come over.”
“I didn’t know you were coming here to recapitulate gossip.”
“You’re in a good mood today.”
“Actually, I was, until a certain nosy cow wandered in. Come to think of it, you’re more like a hen than a cow. It’s nag, nag, nag from you, and I’m not sure why I’m hearing from you more than usual. What’s happening to Ola, then? Missing him, are we?”
She gets up, snatches a piece of paper from the pile on the table and hits him.
“Miserable prick!”
He ducks. “Ow!”
“Don’t you ever speak to me like that!”
“You’re fucking nuts!”
“Is getting knocked up by a man I slept with for one night self-righteous? Is having to get tested for diseases after a one-night stand self-fucking-righteous? I came here to tell you I’m sorry you had to pretend to me. I can’t imagine…” Her voice trembles. “I can’t imagine having to pretend I’m not in love with someone. What is wrong with you?”
She wipes her tears with the back of her hand. Why can’t she control her emotions? Are her hormones already acting up?
“Don’t you start,” Bandele says, stubbing out his cigarette in a saucer. “Don’t you dare start. I should be the one bloody crying. Wish it were that easy for me. Wish it were so easy that all I have to do is pretend I’m not in love. It’s my bloody secret I’ve held for years, not yours. You can’t just barge in here and expect me to share it with you.”
“Try!”
“Fucking hell,” he says, rubbing his forehead. “You have no idea how much this takes out of me. You said when I first met you, I mistook you for a housegirl.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember that. I think of that holiday though, all the time. My parents, my sisters and Seyi. I fucking killed him, you know.”
She has never seen him this desolate and she examines his face, hoping she is mistaken. Surely, he could not have meant that literally.
“He caught me,” Bandele says. “I was with our steward in the boys’ quarters. We were not doing anything. He was laughing and I was laughing. You’re surprised? Well, there it is, a steward. He was nice. Nice to me. Seyi beat him up. He wouldn’t hit back. He just ran around trying to dodge Seyi, then Seyi cornered him by the barbed-wire fence. His uniform got caught in it. Seyi kept punching him. He ran away. My parents thought he had gone back to his village or something. Seyi threatened to tell my father, but he must have been scared of what my father would do to me. He was drinking a lot that summer. He was never a drinker. You really want to hear more?”
She cannot bear to hear about other people’s pain, especially people she cares about. She cannot believe that Bandele, the biggest snob she knows, loved a steward because the steward was nice to him.
In her house they were called houseboys. She can count the number of times she went to the boys’ quarters. It was in the backyard with the pawpaw tree and laundry lines. It had a communal kitchen, shower and latrine. The rooms had spring beds with thin mattresses. The staff that occupied them kept their transistor radios, plastic plates and aluminum cups on the cement floors. She either called out to them from the back door or pressed the electric bell in the dining room, which must have sounded like a death knell to them. Her mother had a silver bell that she tinkled until her wrists hurt. She said they were impossible to train, but they were highly skilled at pretending they couldn’t hear.
Most of her house help came from towns and villages outside Lagos. The houseboys, housegirls, nannies, cooks and drivers lived in the boys’ quarters, and the gardeners, washermen and watchmen lived elsewhere. Deola cuddled her nannies when she was a child and played soccer with houseboys. They were a daily source of amusement and exasperation, with their love affairs, rivalries and accusations of juju. She grew up and she became Miss Adeola to them, not “Aunty.” Her mother would not have any of that. “Aunty” was too personal. Nor would she have her daughters sneaking their dirty underwear into the laundry for the washerman when they hit puberty. That might give him a false impression of intimacy.
No Nigerian employer she knew cared why boys’ quarters were so called. They resented foreigners who came with their phony egalitarianism to mess up the order by being familiar with their houseboys and girls. It was normal to send them on errands and yell at them. Beating them was also acceptable, but sleeping with them was not. If ever she heard about a master sleeping with his housegirl, the question was not how he could do that to another human being, but why he would do that with someone who was not really considered human. What was worse for Seyi? The man was a steward, or the steward was a man?
“Was that why?” she asks. “Was that why you had that trouble later?”
“Who knows?” Bandele says.
“Why didn’t you just tell me you were ga
y?”
“You’re Nigerian.”
“Helen is Nigerian!”
“She’s not Nigerian like you!”
“I’m not Nigerian like that.”
“I wasn’t taking any chances. Nigeria… It was such an emotionally brutal place to grow up in.”
“More than here?”
“For me it was, having to endure all those false divisions. But I’ll tell you about that when I’m good and ready. Not before. Now, please, enough of this. It’s too early in the day for a confessional.”
She would never describe the division between the haves and have-nots in Nigeria as false. They are bona fide barriers.
Bandele attempts to smile. “Old Fanny. You should see the look on your face. So you’re preggers. How did that happen?”
“How do you think?”
“What will you do now that you’re damaged goods?”
“Go home.”
“Forever and ever?”
“Yes.”
“What about your job?”
“I’m going to resign. I’m beginning to have—what did Baldwin call it again? An intimate something or the other?”
“An intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”
She sits down again. He does this, changes the conversation whenever he is the subject.
“What about your novel?” “I’m taking a break from it.”
“Why?”
“It’s driving me mad, or should I say madder. I’m having trouble with my Paris scenes. I can’t seem to get them right.”
His depiction of women in Sidestep was suspect: ballet flats and AA-cup bras. But he must like breasts. Why else does he keep making comments about hers?
“Take it easy,” she says. “You don’t want extra stress.”
“You should have thought of that before you charged at me. So you’re having a baby and you’re going back to Nigeria?”
“I made up my mind last night.”
“Knowing what the natives are like?”
“I’m not getting anywhere here and things are not so bad at home. At my age, my family will be happy for me, even my mother, once she’s recovered. It might be difficult for her for a while, what with people talking. It will be worse for me if they think I was desperate enough to trap a man. I’m proud, you know, so proud I turned my back on a whole nationality of men. Is Charlie English?”
“How many gay Nigerian men do you know called Charlie?”
She doesn’t know many gay Nigerian men, apart from a few who are supposed to have slept with a former dictator to get government contracts. She’s heard about three others, two of whom are married. Her mother told her about one she grew up with. “He was in the Boy Scouts,” her mother said. “All of them in the Boy Scouts had problems settling down.” Her father called gays “homosexualists.”
In a way, ignorance helps. Nigerians are not overly concerned so long as gays have the decency to marry and have children. The fundamentalists, both Christian and Muslim, are bound to consider homosexuality a heinous crime—she heard about a man up North who was sentenced to death by stoning under Sharia law and of course he was poor—but their attitudes are imported. It was the same when she was growing up. Once in a while at Ikoyi Club, she would hear that some guy or the other was a homo or a fag. Since she could not understand why anyone would say that unless they knew it was true, she believed the rumors. From then on the boy would be reduced to an orifice. Girls were more likely to be called nymphos than lesbos, but the only people who used words like that were in English boarding schools.
It is not as if Bandele can walk down a street in Pimlico holding Charlie’s hand.
“It can’t be easy here,” she says. “As a Nigerian.”
He shrugs. “Only when people aren’t aware of my pedigree.”
Pedigree. He and her mother.
“You think that matters? We’d be foolish to buy into that rubbish.”
“Who does?”
“Don’t you? Harrow this and Harrow that?”
“I hated Harrow! What are you talking about?”
“But you act as though going to a school like that gives you a leg up in life, and I’m not sure it does.”
“Well, I’m sure. I’ll have you know I’ve been stopped by the police before.”
She imagines him in Soho or somewhere, the police mistaking him for a rent boy.
“Not that,” he says. “I went for a walk in Belgravia. I’d not been there in a while. I just wanted to see the house. A policeman stopped me before I got there and questioned me. I said ‘I live here.’ He didn’t believe me. I called home. My parents were around. I was so sure they would deny I was their son, but they didn’t.”
Would his parents disown him if they knew he was gay or would they just pretend not to know?
He stretches. She wants to tell him he is brave and their friendship has not changed, but he will only accuse her of being trite.
“Are you tired?” she asks.
“A bit.”
He is crankier when he is tired. She walks to the back of his chair, puts her arm around him and holds her breath against his cigarette fumes. His stubble scratches her.
“You know, I quite liked the idea of having a grumpy writer friend, but I think having a gay grumpy writer friend is much cooler.”
“We won’t be friends for much longer if you make fatuous pronouncements like that.”
She laughs. He is too mean-spirited to be attractive, but he was always there as a last resort, someone to flirt with.
“I’ll leave you be,” she says.
He pats her hand. “You treat me like an invalid. I just hope having this baby will cure you of your need to mother me.”
“Misanthrope.”
“Can you blame me?”
“No. I have been pissed off with people for years.”
“You? What for?”
She takes a moment to think. It is not a confession she is proud of.
“I can’t live up to their expectations. Why should they live up to mine?”
z
Kate is more taken aback than Graham when she tells them she is leaving. They meet in Graham’s office this time. She and Kate are seated opposite Graham and his desk separates him from them. This was exactly how they conducted her interview before they offered her the job. During the interview, Graham asked why she wanted the job. Deola said she was looking for a job that meant something to her, which was true, but she never expected them to hire her after an answer like that. Graham was impressed she went to boarding school. She lied that she was on a sports scholarship. He asked what sport and she said, “Um, the javelin.” She would have added another sport, but she was not sure if it was the “shot put” or “short put.”
Graham’s office is full of souvenirs like clay bowls and carvings. She couldn’t stop looking at them during the interview and she was not sure if they calmed her down or put her off. Even back then, she knew Graham would prefer the most European of African countries, like South Africa and Kenya. She knew she would stand a better chance with him if she presented herself as an African in need. She also knew she did not want the job. Her hesitation over the “shot put” clarified that. She’d spoken English all her life and she was still confused about basic words. What was the point of speaking English? What was the point of working for an organization that hired Africans like herself, who, in the process of being refined, could no longer think for themselves?
As an auditor, she can cope with her clients’ habits. She doesn’t have to be with them for long. It is not the same with the people she has to see every day at work. She never thought she would grow fond of Kate and Graham, and now that she has told them she is leaving, she realizes she is. She tells them how much her trip to Nigeria woke her up to the fact that she misses home and she ought to go back for good instead of contributing to the brain drain. Even to her own ears she sounds fake and she is tired of rounding her vowels. Rounding her vowels hurts her mouth. She wonders what would happe
n if Nigerians refused to speak phonetics for one day. Would their worlds fall apart? Would they realize that it would be just as absurd for them, as Nigerians, to speak in Chinese accents to keep up with the direction in which the world was going?
“Is there anything we can do to make you change your mind?” Kate asks.
“Thanks,” Deola says, “I’ve thought long and hard about this and I’m so sorry to let you down, with the Africa Beat launch coming up and the business with Dára.”
Graham intends to drop Dára as a spokesperson. He predicts the charges against Dára will also be dropped and Kate is sure Dára’s popularity will increase. To Deola, he’s just another African who has been singled out for recognition and blown out of proportion. He may look as if he is being favored, but he is being used. So long as he continues to make money for the people who discovered him, they will worship him.
“Do you have something lined up in Nigeria?” Kate asks.
“Not right now.”
“If there’s anything we can do to support you, let us know. Graham? We may not be working with Dára anymore, but we have worked with Deola and we still can. Yeth?”
Graham blushes. “Well, let’s not make commitments we can’t keep. I’m sure Delia has the ways and means where she’s going.”
He is suspicious, as he was when she said the javelin was her sport. Does he sense that she is not to be trusted? Does he sense that she can sit comfortably with him, laugh with him, but what she has is an astounding indifference to his opinion that began when she first set eyes on him and heard the shutters of his mind click?
“I’d appreciate any help you can give,” she says.
She is within her six-month probation period, so she submits a letter of resignation giving two weeks’ notice. Back in her office, she makes an appointment to see her GP and decides on her order of phone calls. She will call Ivie first, then Wale, then Aunty Bisi, who is the only one qualified to break the news to her mother. It crosses her mind that she could lie that she was artificially inseminated, which would be easier to explain. She would rather her mother doesn’t think she is capable of having premarital sex, let alone around her father’s memorial. She also has a superstitious moment when she blames Kate and Anne for jinxing her by talking about pregnancy, but that passes. She gets back to the practical considerations. What will Lanre and Jaiye think? She hopes Jaiye won’t regard her as careless about sex and Lanre once said girls who got pregnant had the same dumb look about them. That was a while back and he may have just been trying to scare her, but as usual, his opinion stuck. It will be hard to tell Lanre and Jaiye. She is used to letting her mother down, but not her brother and sister.