by Sefi Atta
When the word spread that I was a Nigerian, Rupert, a senior editor who called himself “Woopert,” told me he grew up in Rhodesia.
“Ah, Zimbabwe,” I said, raising my forefinger, in case he had forgotten about their independence.
“No,” he said. “Wodesia”
I could have resented him for that, but I suspected that, like me, Rupert had secrets to hide. He talked a lot about his roommate, Sebastian, and I noticed how much he laughed around Steve, a manager from another department.
Steve actually looked like Steve McQueen, except his teeth were more even, like a row of TicTacs. “Finally,”he said, flashing them at me when we first met, “some class around here.” I too was reduced to laughs. He was Irish, engaged to Penny, a manager in my department; Penny, who tossed her blonde hair this way and that as she walked up and down the corridor, clip, clop, in her navy pumps. She was an Oxford graduate. She spoke French and German. She never spoke to me. I eavesdropped whenever she talked to Cath about her wedding plans. She and Steve were getting married in St. Lucia in six weeks and she was on a diet until then. To me she was slim enough, even though her calves were a little bit thick like an English girl’s.
It took me about a month to get fed up of buzzing the door open for these people and connecting their phone calls. I was not qualified for the job. I yawned too much and forgot to tend Cath’s orchids. Once, the water in the vase developed an odor, like socks soaked for a week. More than once, I was about to make an announcement and had to think twice because I couldn’t remember what to say. Whenever clients came in, I gave them fake smiles. I couldn’t be bothered to offer tea or coffee. It wasn’t just the job that bored me; it was the whole experience of working in London, the whole one. I couldn’t quite explain, but if life after graduation was the old conveyor belt, then every day in London seemed built to specification.
Not that London was perfect. One morning on the Victoria line, someone abandoned a parcel and the line was shut down. The tubes and stations were evacuated for bomb experts. Commuters had to find alternative routes. An American executive flung his leather portfolio on the platform and cried out, “Aw, for fawk’s sake!” No one paid him any mind. The IRA was suspected; they had detonated a bomb at Victoria station before. This time, no explosives were found. The Victoria line was reopened.
In Lagos, a bomb would have to explode in people’s faces before they changed their daily itineraries. The normal routine was chaos: no light, no water and no use complaining. We’d had three military coups in seven years; one of them had failed. Our latest dictator was calling himself president of Nigeria and our constitution was not yet in place. That never stopped the people. They had just come out in thousands to vote in the local elections.
Every day in Lagos was defective. When I worked for the Nigerian Stock Exchange, a simple task like leaving the house became a nightmare because some taxi driver would have parked his car across the entrance of my parents’ driveway. My mother would say, “Kai, these people, always one thing or another with them.” My father would thank God he had retired. I would have to beg the taxi driver to give me my right of way. On my way to work, there was always a breakdown on the bridge to Lagos Island, or on the narrow streets in the city center. Cars would maneuver around the broken-down molue, or danfo, or kabukabu, whether or not it meant running street hawkers off the roadside and crushing their feet.
In London, even my beef on rye sandwiches were regular. I knew exactly how much change I would get after I’d paid for them. I expected the beef to be a bit wiry and was already used to the sting of the horseradish in my sinuses. In Lagos, the restaurant I ate lunch in had a menu with dishes like beef stroganoff and shepherd’s pie. It was the same dish, bits of beef drowning in peppery stew. I wouldn’t even have minded had their prices not kept going up. I’d challenge the waiters each time, “This is not a stroganoff.” “This is not shepherd’s pie.” They’d shrug and answer, “Sistah, that is how it is in Lagos, oh.”
London was predictable in a different way, in a ding-dong sort of way, like Big Ben making all that noise that impressed hardly anyone but tourists; a way that was causing me to spend the money I was earning as a receptionist. For instance, I would walk into Selfridges at lunchtime, like a zombie, and emerge with shopping bags, just like that. That was London’s fault. London also made me call Remi after work, at home, and spend so long chatting to her that I tore up my parents’ telephone bill—rather than hide it—after I’d paid it. London made me go to nightclubs and dance until I was almost deaf, and I couldn’t even leave London to travel within Europe, because without a work permit, not one embassy would grant me a visa, not even the Belgians.
“It’s rubbish here,” I told my father during a half-hour international call that I made home. “I don’t think I can survive more than three years of working in this place.”
I was thinking about returning to Nigeria after my accountancy training. How interesting would accounting be anyway? Debit this, credit that. I wanted to have a profession, but Thatcher had buggered up the economy before she resigned. I would probably be laid off as soon as I qualified. Management had no obligation to retain trainees. They had a bottom-heavy corporate structure. Only the best and blue-eyed would rise up their precious pyramid towards partnership heaven.
“That’s the trouble with you,” my father said, meaning my entire generation of Nigerians. “You’re shallow. Everything has to be fast, fast, easy, easy. In my day, I got to London and there was no question of coming and going.”
There was no means. He had left Nigeria at the end of the 1950s, wearing what he called his coat and trousers and carrying a portmanteau. He boarded a cargo ship that sailed to Liverpool. The journey lasted two weeks. Rain met him at Liverpool docks and then he took a train to London to find his elder brother in the fog.
“At least,” I said, “you had a country to go back to.”
Nigeria was independent by the time he had graduated. BOAC was already flying to and fro. He came home in the 1960s with a law degree. The colonialists were leaving the civil service and the Ministry of Justice offered him a job that came with housing, servants’ quarters and a car. Before the Civil War he was already working as a federal judge. Now, an oil boom and recession later, Nigeria was being structurally adjusted and instead of being concerned, our president was busy bragging that Nigeria defied the laws of supply and demand, because there was no logical reason why the economy hadn’t collapsed.
“But you had a normal job here, didn’t you?” my father countered. “With a normal salary, and you ran right back to England, didn’t you?”
He wouldn’t let me forget. I had landed the job at the Stock Exchange because he knew the director. My duties had entailed taking minutes. I took them on the trading floor, which was basically a boardroom where stockbrokers, all men in suits, shouted out their bids. In a busy trading session there were two dozen brokers tops.
The market was small. Investors did not speculate or buy and sell. They held on to their stocks and shares for dear life. I also took minutes at the annual general meetings of multinational companies, and at every meeting I could guarantee the directors would be expatriates, the chairman would be a Nigerian—Chief Baba So-and-So—wearing a lavish brocade agbada. He would have no dividends to declare and there would be one shareholder, a Nigerian known as Prof, who would stand up to object, waving the scrap of paper on which he’d scribbled his calculation of the company’s price-earnings ratio.
With the salary I’d earned at the Stock Exchange I had three choices: live with my parents, live in a hovel, or find a sugar daddy. Of course I chose to return to London. Of course I did.
“It’s rubbish here,” I repeated.
“You can’t just say it’s rubbish,” my father said. “You have to give things time. Stick with that job, you hear me? Take pride in it. Develop a work ethic.”
I asked to speak to my mother. The receptionist job was a temporary-to-permanent one. I had no intention of
leaving it until I joined Price Waterhouse. At the current exchange rate of the pound to the naira, I was earning more than I ever had in my life.
One afternoon like so, I thought sod it, I will eat my roast beef on rye sandwich at my workstation for a change. Cath was off sick. She’d coughed so hard the day before her eyes filled with tears and her face turned red. “I’m coming down with something,” she’d kept whispering into her handkerchief. To me, it sounded like a smoker’s cough.
I smuggled my sandwich bag into my satchel and positioned my satchel on the carpet between my legs where I could easily reach for it. Somehow, my sandwich, now illicit, was much tastier. Perhaps that was the secret to Lagos life after all: the general unlawfulness of the place. I’d barely taken two nibbles from the corner of my rye bread when Steve McQueen came along. I sat up and buzzed him through the door. He smiled and really, for an Irish lad, his teeth were most African.
“Have you seen Penny?” he asked.
She was clip-clopping in the direction of the loos when last I saw her. Steve waited as I chewed under my palm. I’d lowered my sandwich as soon as I saw him. Now, I was diving and feeling around for my satchel so I could slip the sandwich back inside, at the same time rubbing my lips in case there was a trace of horseradish.
Penelope appeared. Her natural expression was a stare because she wore contact lenses. I imagined her taking a crap, as you’re supposed to in interview situations to calm your nerves.
“Ready?” she said to him.
“I was just asking about you,” he said.
He opened the door for her and she flung her hair over each shoulder, as if to declare, “He’s my fiancé. I’m his fiancée.”
It crossed my mind that she might have mistaken my furtive posture for a sexy one, which made me furious because I did fancy her fiancé, but I would never, ever flirt with him. I had my own boyfriend, sort of—Akin, who was an engineer. I’d known him when he was at Imperial College and now he was busy whining about the pittance he earned and living in Maida Vale. But I was not sure where our relationship was going because he had a tendency to be taciturn and he slept too much. Akin could sleep until noon, until a winter day turned dark. One Sunday, he slept until the Tate Gallery closed. The Saturday after, he slept until it was too late to catch a flick at Leicester Square. A Spike Lee Joint, too. I was still furious about that, but I called him anyway, when I finished my sandwich, to complain about Penny
“As if I would ever fancy her foolish fiancé,” I whispered.
“Hm,” he answered.
He was at work. I would have preferred to speak to Remi, but she was at home. If my call were traced to a private residence with a Nigerian name, I couldn’t lie my way out of that.
“I mean, you know these oyinbo guys and their bad teeth.”
“Hm.”
“I mean, bloody hell, it was obvious I was eating, not trying to seduce the geezer.”
“Hm.”
“Can’t you say something?”
“I told you,” he said stifling a yawn. “When you start working for them you will find out how crazy these oyinbos are.”
“Extremely,” I said.
That was the first time I broke the personal-calls rule and the next day, when Cath wanted to have a word with me— “Just a quick one,” she said—my heart did a somersault.
“Sure,” I said.
She was still coughing and had the same Pepé Le Pew ponytail, but she looked a little pale. I wondered if she was about to tell me she had a serious illness.
“Em,” she said. “I’ve only been away a day, and in my absence, it has been brought to my attention...”
I kept glancing at the switchboard, expecting the incoming-call lights to blink, hoping that she would note how efficient I was being.
“Look,” she said breaking into a smile. “I hear you’ve been having lunch at the switchboard, and I’m not trying to be funny or anything, but clients come in here, and it doesn’t look right, and we have journalists...”
Again she whispered the word “journalists,” and I had on what I hoped was a desperate expression now. I was sure she was about to sack me.
“And,” she said, pointing at the vase, “these are in such a sorry state.”
The orchids slumped over. I could have swiped them.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m not trying to be funny or anything. It’s just that—”
“It won’t happen again, Cath. I promise.”
Stupid orchids. I yanked them out of the vase by their necks and dumped them into the dustbin in the snack room. Then I ordered more loyal flowers: lilies. There were no smiles for the people at the office for the rest of the day—not for Neil when he called me “love,” and not a blink for Penny, or that Steve. He was probably IRA.
Again, I broke the personal-calls rule and telephoned Akin later in the day. He sounded as if I’d just woken him up, though he denied it.
“It’s that Penelope woman,” I ranted. “It must be her. She talks to Cath. She went behind my back, the sneaky...”
He sighed, and I imagined he was stretching.
“I thought you said you are not tired,” I said.
“I’m not.”
“But you’re yawning again.”
“I’m not.”
“Yes, you are!”
“No, I’m not.”
I went all quiet, just to make him nervous.
“I’ve told you,” he mumbled, “oyinbos are crazy.”
“Bloody bonkers,” I yelled.
On my way home the tube reeked of damp hair and an odor I could only describe as suppressed disdain for others. It reminded me of Bovril and my boarding school days in Tunbridge Wells, with those oil heaters, boiled-wool blankets, and schoolgirls huddled together and smoking fags in the toilets, like little tarts, or college freshers puking up beer and lager mixed with cheese and onion, or salt and vinegar crisps. I was the only one screwing up my nose in that tube. The rest stared ahead as if we were in a ski lift somewhere on the Alps. At Green Park, one poor West Indian bloke rushed out of the tube singing “Un bel di.” His Walkman headphones pulled his dreadlocks back. His voice swelled and cracked, vying with the screeching wheels of a departing train.
I shifted to the spot where he had stood and eyed my fellow commuters: a woman with shadows under her eyes, a man with hairs growing out of his ears, his son who was picking snot from a nostril. Would I eventually go crazy working in London? English people could do that to a person, the way they were so two-faced. I’d seen them sneaking into Graham’s office to tell tales. The tits. What bugged me most was the way they ended up talking about their commutes in the present tense, as if they were commuting right there in his office: “So, I’m driving down the M1, right, and this Renault 5 swerves across and cuts me off...”
“Come to Lagos,” I would want to shout. “I’ll show you a commute.”
She kept trying to provoke me—Penelope. I swear. One morning, I was eating a jam doughnut for breakfast in the snack room before the switchboard opened. She walked in carrying a mug with a smiley and stood by the percolator. The percolator was gurgling and spitting. She sniffed with an air of superiority. It was hard to eat my doughnut with dignity. When I finished, I dusted the sugar from the corners of my mouth, and then she said to me, “That looked good.” I said, “Yeah,” and threw the doughnut bag into the dustbin. She ducked as if I’d aimed for her, even though she was not near the bin. “Funny,” she said. “For someone who eats so much, there’s nothing of you.” As if I’d begged her to go on her diet. She gave me such bad indigestion.
Another afternoon, I’d just come back from shopping. So what? And Cath, who usually stood in for me at the switchboard, was with guess who, and they went all quiet the way English people went all quiet after gossiping. “Is that from Hobbs?” Penny asked. “No,” I said, steering my shopping bag away from her, even though it was from Hobbs.
Penny thumbed Cath. “She’s always shopping, t
his one.”
Cath seemed distracted. “Just a mo,” she said. “I’ve got one last thing to do, then we can go.”
She went off to Graham’s office with telephone messages. I was left with Penny, who crossed her arms while I sat in my chair. Her diamond engagement ring sparkled. It was about half a carat. Wasn’t she satisfied? She also had Steve Presumably, she and Cath were going to talk about the wedding again, over lunch.
“Where d’you live?” she asked.
“Pimlico,” I said.
“Ooh,” she said.
That threw me. She had not automatically assumed I lived in a council flat, but I thought of my parents’ flat, with the stained carpet and velvet sofas my father had refused to replace since the seventies because he was so miserly. The place wasn’t “ooh.”
“It must be hard trying to save, working so near Oxford Street,” she said.
“Depends if you’re trying,” I said.
“You’ve been here a month, haven’t you?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Think you’ll stay on?”
“No, I’m joining an accountancy firm soon.”
“Really, which one?”
“PW.”
“Ooh. As a receptionist?”
“Audit trainee.”
“Don’t you need a degree for that?”
“I have a degree.”
“What in?”
“Economics.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“From?”
“LSE.”
An incoming line was blinking. I answered the call as Cath returned and they left for lunch. After I’d connected the call, I hung my head over the switchboard, feeling spent and not so intelligent anymore.
From then on I expected Cath to have a word with me over the lies I’d told on my CV. I also worried about the Home Office deporting me and a journalist finding out I was working in England illegally—only a bit. The thought of having no money to spend scared me more.