A Bit of Difference (3 page)

Deola reaches for her wine glass and almost says the word “actually,” but she stops herself this
time. Actually, the tongue jolt. Actually, the herald of assertions. She could insist that America is torn apart by the war and she could easily challenge Anne's assumption that the rest of the world is incapable of transgressions.

“I expect people in England are more open-minded,” Anne says.

“England? I'm not so sure.”

“I guess it would be more obvious to you living there. But that's why we are in such a mess over here, and it's a question of being able to reorient
yourself. That's all it takes.”

“A little reorientation,” Deola says, the rim of her glass between her lips.

“You know?” Anne says. “If there is one thing this job teaches you, it's
that. You can't get caught up in your own… whatever it is. Not in a world where people starve.”

“No,” Deola murmurs.

It is just as well she hesitated. She finishes her wine; so does Anne. A waiter approaches their table with dessert menus. Anne says she really shouldn't and opts for a black coffee. Deola has the passion fruit crème brûlée and asks for fresh raspberries on top.

Actually

A
n incident on her flight back to London reminds her of something that happened a month ago during her first trip for LINK.

She was in Delhi to audit a charity for children. She stayed at the Crowne Plaza hotel and had enough time on her last day to ride in a rickshaw and visit Janpath Market with the program director, who later drove her to the airport. She had just joined the departure line when she saw an American ahead of her, who was wearing—of all garbs—a cream linen suit and a panama. The American grabbed an Indian man, who was edging his way to the line, by the shoulders and steered him away. “No-oo,” he said, as if he were speaking to his son. The Indian man went to the back of the line without saying a
word. A moment later, a couple of Americans walked up. One was complaining, loud enough for everyone to hear, that he was going to miss his flight, and the man in the panama stepped back so they could get ahead of him.

What happens on her way to London is that she is again standing in line, this time to board her plane out of Atlanta, when a man cuts ahead of her. He is tanned with gray sideburns and is dressed in a navy jacket and striped shirt—executive-looking and clutching a John Grisham novel. She is three passengers from the flight attendant, a black American woman, who is checking boarding
passes. When it is her turn, the flight attendant looks at her, looks at the man, who is still not in line, and takes his boarding pass first.

She is tempted to snatch her stub from the flight attendant, but she doesn't. She eyes the man once she gets on the plane, but he is too busy pushing his hand luggage into an overhead compartment to notice. She brushes past him before he sits. She is loath to say an incident so trivial amounted to discrimination—it wasn't that straightforward, was it?—but she thinks it anyway.

Only after the plane takes off and levels out is she able to reason that it might have been an innocent oversight. Then she remembers her conversation with Anne the previous night, which remained one-sided. Anne paid attention whenever she spoke and seemed eager to hear her opinions. Why couldn't she be more responsive to her? Was it that learned lack of trust? That resistance to being misinterpreted and diminished? Hardly, she decides. She was merely being expedient.

She sleeps most of the flight to London. It is Saturday morning when she arrives and the rain is a light spray. On the Gatwick Express she shuts her eyes while enjoying the motion and identifies the languages that people on cell phones are speaking. There's French, Igbo and Portuguese. London is like the Tower of Babel these days. Still, she prefers it to the London she moved to in the eighties, despite the latent resentment she observes when people quicken their pace past a group of rowdy Pakistani teenagers or the Romanian mothers who beg.

She also detects some guilt, that aftertaste of the sumptuous meal that was empire. England is overrun with immigrants: African and Eastern European children they granted asylum are leading gangs, Islamic clerics are bragging about their rights and the English can barely open their mouths to talk.

Nigerians can never be that sorry for their transgressions, so sorry that they can't say to immigrants, “Carry your trouble and go.” Nigerians made beggars out of child refugees from Niger and impregnated their mothers. Nigerians kicked out Ghanaians when Ghanaians became too efficient, taking over jobs Nigerians couldn't do, and named a laundry bag after the mass exodus: the Ghana Must Go bag. Nigerians aren't even sorry about the civil war. They are still blaming that on the British.

She takes a taxi from Victoria Station. Her flat in Willesden Green is walking distance from the tube. The Jubilee line is partly why she bought here. Initially, Willesden Green did not appeal to her, coming from her parents' flat in Westminster. The pavements were filthy with litter, cigarette butts, spit and dust. But there was a black hair salon and a cosmetics shop that sold products for black hair, containing ingredients like hemp and placenta. There were also a few Halal butchers and a West Indian shop where she could buy yams, plantains and cherry peppers. On Saturdays, she would walk to the library center to study for her exams and take breaks at Café Gigi. Now, the center has Belle Vue Cinema and the pavements are cleaner. Occasionally, she sees other Nigerians at the minicab office and the African textile shops, which can be comforting.

The woman she bought the flat from had a cat. She didn't find out until she moved in that there were cat hairs embedded in the carpet. At night, they tickled her nose. She was so besotted with her new property that she got on her knees and scrubbed the hairs away with a brush. She loves her bathroom the most because it is the warmest room. Nothing is more depressing to her than a cold bathroom, especially in the winter. Her bedroom has a draft; so does her kitchen. She will only walk on the linoleum floor in her fluffy slippers, and the sink tap drools. Her yellow Formica countertop is stained. The fanciest feature in the flat is the staircase that descends into the sitting room. She made the mistake of buying IKEA furniture, which is beginning to fall apart, but her mortgage is almost paid and her flat has more than doubled in value.

Her walls welcome her. She sits on her couch, facing her window. There are no messages on her phone. Later in the afternoon, she warms up her Peugeot 205 and drives to Somerfield to stock up on food. The car park is full. She thought Somerfield was huge until she saw American superstores like Wal-Mart, but the quality is better at Somerfield, she thinks, picking up a packet of
bacon. That unbeatable English quality, even when it comes to the correct proportion of pork meat to streak of fat.

z

On Monday morning she wakes up with menstrual cramps. They have worsened since she went off the pill a year ago. Her stomach is bloated and the bacon she eats doesn't help. She takes a couple of Panadols with her orange juice, knowing that she shouldn't, and goes to work by tube. Her stop is Wembley Park station. She crosses Bridge Road and begins her long walk past Wembley Stadium and Mama Calabar, a Nigerian restaurant. Sometimes she hops on buses instead of walking and on cold wet days she drives in. The weather is warm for a change. LINK is on the second floor of an office block, which Kate Meade once described as a rabbit warren. This morning Kate is lamenting about dust in the ducts. They worsen her allergies during the summer and she is also trying to cope with nausea.

“Even the smell of my deodorant makes my stomach turn,” she says.

“Gosh,” Deola says.

“I blame Pam,” Kate says, with an air of spite. “The last time
she
was pregnant, I got pregnant. Now,
she's
away on maternity leave and I'm pregnant again. Keep away from Pam, I tell you.”

Deola shakes her head in sympathy. Kate is in that crazy hormonal phase.

“What did you think of Atlanta?” she asks, sitting behind her desk.

Kate's fringe has grown so long it covers her brows. Her glasses are steel-rimmed and round. Forlorn is the only way to describe her. Behind her is a gray filing cabinet, on top of which are piles of yellow clasp envelopes and a framed close-up photograph of her daughter cuddling the cat that gave her toxoplasmosis.

“It wasn't bad,” she says.

“It's a funny city, isn't it?”

“A little.”

“It's Southern, yet it's not. I don't expect you had much time to see it.”

“Not much.”

Kate grew up in Liverpool, which is noticeable whenever she says a word like “much.”

“Everything is enormous there,” Kate says. “The buildings, the roads.”

“Wal-Mart.”

“Their cars! Did you see the size of the trucks they drive over there?”

“I did.”

Kate spreads her arms. “It's
incredible. You have these huge trucks and there's always a little woman at the wheel.”

“Always little women,” Deola says.

A wave of tiredness threatens her. At work, she plays up her English accent—speaking phonetics, as Nigerians call it—so that people might not assume she lacks intelligence. Speaking phonetics is instinctive now, but only performers enjoy mimicking. Performers and apes.

“Everything is enormous in America,” Kate says. “Everything except, of course…”

Kate taps her temple. She has a master's degree in international relations and prides herself on being knowledgeable about what goes on in the Hague. She has never named her university, calls herself a grammar school girl, but she is quick to point out her husband went to Bedales and studied physics at Cambridge. He has a Ph. D. and has received grants for his research. He is an inventor. Kate is the second most frequent traveler in the office. Her trips are fieldwork related. Graham, the overall executive director, is more the photo-op guy. He attends conferences and summits and deals with the trustees. Kate stands in during his prolonged absences.

“I'm sorry,” Kate says. “I shouldn't have said that, but they can be a little thick across the pond.”

“No need to apologize,” Deola says.

She is amused whenever the English denigrate Americans. She attributes it to inverted admiration. In America, she was astonished to see how many of them were on television, teeth fixed and playing up their Englishness or speaking with American accents, acting so colonized.

“I can't bear to listen to their views on this stupid war and I hate the way they keep saying ‘I rack' and ‘I ran.' At least try and get the name right if you're going to bomb another country to smithereens.”

At the beginning of the Falklands War Deola thought the word was “Forklands.” She was in her A-level year in England and was of the impression that only members of the Green Party and Save the Whales got upset about
wars. Weirdos, basically.

This war is different. Everyone she knows in London is outraged. Everyone wants to win the debate, which has become a separate war. Strangers are co-opting her as an ally, including a drunken man who was seated next to her on the tube. He tapped a headline and said, stinking of beer, “
We
have no business being over there.” Enemy lines must also have been drawn because she has not met a person who is for the war. Not one. They might not even exist. They might be on CNN to rile up viewers and raise ratings for all she knows. But she is sometimes convinced, watching the dissenters, that this is their chance to make like rebels, now that the backlash is not as severe as it was when their opposition could perhaps have had some effect.

Kate slaps the table. “Anyway, your trip to Nigeria.”

“Yes?”

“Think you'll be ready in a couple of weeks?”

“Sure.”

The Nigerian programs are not pressing enough to warrant Kate's change to a brisk tone, but Deola plays along. The timing was her idea. She asked to go in the week of her father's memorial, without revealing why.

Her father died five years ago. She was the last in her family to find out. He was playing golf when he became dizzy. His friends rushed him to hospital. They didn't know he had high blood pressure. Her mother called to say he'd suffered a stroke. She got on the next flight to Lagos, but her father died before her plane arrived. She would have liked to have a sign that he had died, a white dove, anything as she flew over the Atlantic and the Sahara. Nothing. Not even an intuitive feeling, unless she could count the unrelenting pain in her stomach, which she couldn't suppress by repeating prayers.

“So where are we?” Kate asks. “How long do you think you might need over there?”

“A week at most.” “Is that all?”

Deola nods. She intends to finish her work in a couple of days and spend the rest of the time with her family.

“Good,” Kate says. “So here is their correspondence, lit and stats. Their presentation is not very polished, but I understand printing is a problem over there. Plus, it's not about their presentation, really. I'm more interested in their accounts and the rest of it.”

Kate is brilliant with statistics, but she has no clue about accounting. Debit this, credit that, as she calls it.

“Would you like me to visit their sites?” Deola asks.

“No. We're just at the preliminary phase. I will have to go there at some point, but that'll be much later, after I'm over this.” Kate pats her belly.

“It's best you don't travel until then,” Deola says.

“I don't mind the traveling. I just don't need to be falling sick again.”

“Malaria is the one to watch out for in Nigeria.”

“So I've heard. I've also heard the pills make you psychotic. I think I would rather have malaria.”

“You wouldn't,” Deola says.

She has had malaria many times. The new strains are resistant to treatment.