A Bit of Difference (14 page)

Marriages in government circles are like Nollywood scripts to Deola. Lagos is still captivated by the news of a minister who has been in every administration, military and civilian, since the Second Republic, doing nothing useful and getting richer. The newspaper reports accuse him of sleeping with his daughter-in-law. Deola doesn't doubt he is capable of having an affair with his daughter-in-law, but she can't believe the manner in which the reports relay the details, showing the same photograph of the woman in question, with a hair weave and deep cleavage, and referring to her as “the delectable thirty-four-year-old.”

The supervisor changes the music to what initially sounds like another samba number, but turns out to be a catchy gospel song. A customer, who is eating a takeaway meal that resembles chicken piri piri, begins to sing along to the chorus, “The best, is yet, to come! The best, the best is yet to come!”

Ivie reaches for her bottle of Coca-Cola and mumbles, “They've started.”

Ivie attends a Pentecostal church, but she dislikes pious displays. She was previously with another church, “Church of Curses,” as she now calls it. She might have joined because of her infertility problems, but the pastor told her someone had put a demonic lock on her womb, so she left.

The woman continues to sing, “Today is the first day of the best days of your life! Today is the first day of the best days of your life!”

Nigerians are usually tone-deaf, but her voice is beautiful.

She gets higher and higher, “You ain't, seen nothing! You ain't seen nothing yet! You ain't, seen nothing! You ain't seen nothing yet!”

Deola browses through a magazine,
Metropolis,
crammed with photographs of camera-ready people. “Celebrities on the Red Carpet,” the heading reads. They are TV personalities, Nollywood actors, musicians and singers, carrying on as if Lagos is Los Angeles.

“So there are no normal couples here,” she says.

The Coca-Cola deepens Ivie's voice. “My dear, everyone is sleeping around.”

Ivie also mixes with the financial circle in Lagos that is concentric with the government circle in Abuja. She says single women party in Nigeria. They may pray to get married and to have children, but they don't sit around waiting for God to deliver them. They share men. They don't deceive themselves as married women do. Are they better off? Deola thinks, as Ivie then demoralizes her with halfhearted gossip about couples who are either separated or divorced, husbands who beat their wives and wives who are having affairs. Some woman has just poured boiling water on her husband and no one knows why. The number of stories about widows who were said to be visiting their boyfriends when their husbands died is disturbing.

“So someone can't die without his wife being maligned,” she says. “What scares me the most,” Ivie says, “is that you don't even know

what people die of these days.”

“
Na wa
for Naija marriages,” Deola says.

Ivie is her paternal cousin. Ivie's mother is her favorite aunt who ended up with a man from Benin City who beat her. He beat her so hard she would run into the street to escape him. She relocated to Port Harcourt, where she married an elderly polygamist.

When they were younger, Deola saw Ivie as her out-of-town cousin who was funny but forward. Ivie would order Deola around and Deola, herself a little bully, would tell Ivie, “You're not my leader.” They became close when Ivie got a job at Trust Bank during her national service year. They stayed in the chalet and went to work together. They also went to parties together. Ivie looked like a model. Miniskirts and leggings were in, and invariably, guys would approach Deola and ask, “Who is that?”

But Ivie had no time for Ikoyi guys, especially the Aways. She thought they were immature and trying to impress her, “disturbing her with their nonsense,” as she would say. She had so much parochial pride. Omorege came along and he was a little older. He was a managing director of a finance house, which went bankrupt. The rumor was that he cleaned out his clients, though he denied this. Ivie fell in love with him and no one in the Bello family could believe it. Barely a few months in Lagos, and she was carrying on with a married man, who then disappeared to London for about a year, abandoning his wife and triplets to avoid facing charges under a failed bank decree. For a while Ivie was the bad girl of the family, but now everyone seems to have forgiven her.

It takes two hours to braid her hair and she drives Deola home afterward. Deola wants Ivie around so she can avoid having the marriage talk with her mother.

Is it her imagination, or has she been hopping from one luxury car to another here in deprived Africa? Ivie's is also fairly new, a BMW, which Ivie says is nothing compared to the cars some of her colleagues have.

“It's all show in this place,” she says. “We're all caught up.”

“Naijas in England are like that,” Deola says. “They're even worse in America.”

“Don't trust what you see,” Ivie says. “A Nigerian may not have a kobo to his name and you will never know.”

It is not whether people here can afford luxury cars; it is the state of the roads. Ivie has to drive on the sidewalk at one point. Only an army tanker could survive the potholes along the way.

“But aren't people doing well in business?” Deola asks. “All I hear is that people are doing well in business.”

“Don't let anyone fool you,” Ivie says. “There is no real business here. All we have is oil money circulating in our economy. The whole banking sector is running on laundered money. The whole of Nigeria is.”

Ivie is the corporate relations director of her bank. Deola has heard that Victoria Island is sinking. She has had nightmares of hurricanes submerging the island, neighboring Lekki Peninsula and Ikoyi, along with their overvalued properties and inhabitants.

z

Tonight they get home and Deola's mother is fussing about the canopies she has rented. She is sure it is going to rain on Sunday. Deola is never indulgent whenever her mother is like this, working everyone up about problems that may not occur. Her mother's ability to get attention in any given room and have everyone consoling her is astonishing.

“The canopies are going up on Saturday,” her mother says. “I should have rented a hall instead and had it indoors, given my guests lunch and be finished with it. I don't know why I didn't think of that before. They will tear up my grass. The rain falls for one second in this place and your heels just sink in.”

“Don't worry, Aunty,” Ivie says. “It won't rain, by God's grace.”

“I hope not,” her mother says to Ivie. “I have my gardener coming in tomorrow. But surely, one shouldn't pray for no rain.”

“It didn't rain on the day of Uncle's funeral,” Ivie says.

“Oh, it did,” her mother says. “That morning and that night, remember? We were spared in the afternoon. This time of the year is no good for any type of outdoor function. Remember Jaiye got married this time of the year and it rained so heavily?”

“It didn't rain that much,” Deola says.

“I remember,” Ivie says.

“You remember? We couldn't get out of church that morning, and the ushers with the umbrellas. We were all wet. We had the reception at that restaurant on the lagoon.”

Deola's mother is intentionally ignoring Deola and as for Ivie, this is typical of her. She grovels to her elders. Deola remains silent as her mother goes on about the likelihood of rain, but she snaps when the subject turns to her trip to Abuja the next morning.

“It's in and out with this one,” her mother says.

“I have work to do,” Deola says.

“She comes in on Sunday,” her mother says. “Now, she's off to Abuja.”

Ivie laughs. “Aunty, Aunty!”

“In and out. That's your cousin. She comes home and moves straight into a hotel.”

“You don't have a driver,” Deola says.

“You could have borrowed your brother's driver,” her mother says.

“He needs his driver and I had to e-mail my boss. You don't have e-mail.”

“She will be back on Friday,” her mother says to Ivie. “On Sunday, after the memorial, she takes off again.”

Deola shrugs. Her mother stayed home and raised children. Now, she controls shares. She dresses up for meetings at Trust Bank, walks into the boardroom and everyone stands up and calls her “Madam.”

“If you're going to Abuja,” her mother says, “you might want to check up on your father's land to see what has become of it. The government has given us a certain amount of time to fence it; otherwise they will seize it.”

“I won't have time,” Deola says.

“You might want to make time,” her mother says. “The land is worth a considerable amount, as you well know.”

z

They eat shrimp curry and coconut rice for dinner. Ivie drives Deola back to the hotel. There Deola e-mails Kate to say she has reviewed Dr. Sokoya's NGO and will be in Abuja tomorrow. She has two scam messages in her inbox, which she is sure came from an Internet café somewhere in Lagos.

In the foyer, she passes the receptionist, who asks, “Is everything okay, madam?”

“Yes,” she says.

“You're still checking out tomorrow?”

“I am. Thank you for taking care of me.”

“You're welcome. I was worried that something was wrong.”

Deola thought she had a smile on her face. The receptionist was probably worried that she was annoyed about the bartender, who was on the computer, surfing the Internet before she got online. She was busy thinking of her conversation with Ivie on the way here. Ivie asked her to be more understanding, as her mother was upset at having lost the love of her life. Deola thought that was typical of Ivie, to completely romanticize a tense family situation, then she conceded for a moment. Then she went back to seeing her mother as a manipulator, taking any opportunity to interfere in her life.

She can't bear her mother's disappointment. Her mother's enduring disappointment. She wants to distance herself from it. She doesn't even want to rebel against it because it might end up defining her, if it hasn't already.

The young businessman is in the lounge, speaking French on his cell phone.

“
Oui, oui
,” he says. “
D'accord
.”

She can't understand what he says after that, but she enjoys listening to him. He is probably in marketing or some other trendy job.

She is suspicious of the term “brain drain,” which she first heard at LSE. For her, it was a polite alternative for people who might want to say “Go back to Africa.” She has always thought there are enough brains in Africa, at least in Lagos. People who may not do much for the common good, but they achieve so much for themselves. She runs into old friends, most of whom are married with children, and marvels at their accomplishments—lawyers who are jewelry designers on the side, doctors who just happen to be manufacturing beauty creams, accountants who produce Nollywood films. They make the opportunities overseas look like a joke.

In her room, she recalls her father's reaction when she resigned from Trust Bank after Ivie did. “You as well?” her father asked, as if Ivie's behavior and hers were on par. Then he concluded, “You children are too flighty.”

Her mother called her friends and told them Deola was going back to England. She gave every relative that came to the house a full report. Aunty Bisi stepped in to mediate telling her, “Stay, stay,” until Deola finally said, “Oh, come on, you people. I'm going to join an accountancy firm, not a pop group.”

They treated her as if she were still in boarding school and at home on vacation. But she was twenty-two and still living at home. Even if her parents approved of her moving out and renting a flat, she couldn't afford to rent in any decent part of Lagos. On her salary, her options were to find a sugar daddy or hustle for a government contract, which would probably not be awarded without a sexual favor. That was not the Nigeria her parents returned to, a Nigeria where they were feted just because they were graduates and offered jobs with housing and car allowances. She had all that at Trust Bank, but she couldn't sustain herself with an out of control inflation rate to contend with, so what was the point of staying? What sort of privilege was it to live off her parents?

Some of her colleagues found her decision to leave Trust Bank predictable. It confirmed what they thought of her: pampered and sheltered. What was all this talk about independence? Why couldn't she just ask her father to pay for an MBA? Then, after she left, circumstances changed for a minority of them. Their salaries became higher than hers in England, despite an exchange rate that was unfavorable to them. They climbed out of the recession and up the corporate ladder and the longer she stayed in England, the more difficult it was to return and compete with them. She held on to her independence there, even as her independence began to look more like loneliness.

Her father wanted her to work for Trust Bank after she qualified as an accountant, but she was reluctant to: her colleagues would never give her credit as the chairman's daughter. “I don't know why you care,” her father said. “There isn't a single one of them who wouldn't want to be in your position.”

His family was farm folk. He grew up with a hoe in his hand. He bragged about how he would walk miles to get to school, wearing
hand-me-down plimsolls and carrying books on his head. He had two khaki uniforms to his name. When he washed one, he wore the other. His parents couldn't read or write but they managed to send him to Durham University. He left for England on a cargo ship. He was not interested in starting a practice when he returned to Nigeria as a qualified accountant. He worked for United Africa Company and acquired shares in foreign companies during the indigenization era in the seventies. He went into banking when that sector was privatized in the eighties. He told her he was a millionaire when the value of the naira to the pound was one to one. He was badly hit by the devaluation of the naira, but he recovered by capitalizing on foreign exchange deals. He might have sensed what she didn't know at the time, that she was unwittingly in competition with him. She wanted more than he could offer.