A Bit of Difference (7 page)

He rubs his chin. “Nigeria is not
my
home.”

“It's home for me.”

“Good luck to you. I haven't been back in so long I'd probably catch dengue fever the moment I set foot in that country.”

“More like malaria.”

“Nigerians, ye savages.”

“Your head is not correct,” she says.

This slips out and for a while, her remorse shuts her up. Bandele has been hospitalized for depression once before, but even at his lowest he was never incoherent. He also appeared physically fit, yet his depression was often so crippling he couldn't get out of bed. Now, he says it is manageable. He calls psychiatric patients “schizoids.” If she protests, he says, “What?”

His flat is in a state when they get there—not abnormally so. There is dirty laundry in his living room, a clutter of plates in his sink and a saucer with cigarette butts. He writes in longhand and uses a computer, but he has never learned to type properly. He has papers all over the floor, some crumpled up in balls. He writes everywhere as if he is addicted, in notebooks he carries, on paper napkins in restaurants and on cinema stubs in the dark. He goes to Pimlico Library to borrow books and to his local Sainsbury's to buy frozen meals. He heats them in his oven because he doesn't have a microwave. His flat smells of lasagna and cigarette fumes.

“Does the writing help?” she asks.

“Help what?” he says, throwing his keys on a chair.

Her hands are in her pockets. “I mean in expressing yourself.”

“It's not about expressing myself.”

“What is it about, then?”

“I just don't want to feel so worthless anymore.”

“You're not worthless, Bandele.”

“I am.”

“Don't say that.”

“But I am.”

“No, you're not. You're working and it's not like having a job you absolutely loathe.”

He searches the floor. “I absolutely loathe writing.”

“You do?”

“Of course I do and I loathe publishing even more.”

“Still?”

“Mm, I have an intimate knowledge of its ugly side.”

Again, the dodgy American accent. He can't imitate, but he has an astonishing ability to recall quotes. For her, quoting is like picking flowers instead of admiring them.

“Baldwin again?” she asks.

“You've got that right, sister. Have you read any of his books?”

“
Go Tell It on the Mountain
, and the Beale Street one. The one with the pregnant woman.”

“What did you think of them?”

“I liked them.”

He staggers backward. “Liked?”

“You and Baldwin today.”

He raises his hands. “I'm having a séance with him.”

“I thought you didn't believe in all that.”

He was an existentialist when last she asked. She cannot tell if he is erratic or just working himself up into a creative mood. She wants to find out if he is under stress from writing again and if he has a new girlfriend. She would like to ask about his medication and his social worker. She prefers to give him an excuse, any excuse, to leave and drive back home.

“It's a mess here, isn't it?” he asks, looking at the floor.

“It's fine,” she says.

“No, really, it's a mess.”

“It's fine.”

“Just say it is and I'll clean up.”

“I'll help.”

As they tidy up, she tells herself not to worry about him. Every Nigerian she knows abroad is to some degree broken.

“I don't write to express myself,” he says, picking up papers. “If I need to express myself, I'd sooner take a shit on one of these.”

“I only asked,” she says.

z

Bandele has never held a job. He had one after
Sidestep
was published because he wasn't earning much in royalties, but he fell out with his manager within a week. He said he couldn't possibly take orders from a yob like her, quit, then had trouble drafting his second novel. His agent stopped returning his calls. He went to her office and whatever happened there led to his hospitalization. His parents came from Nigeria to visit him. He called his father a fucking kleptocrat and his mother a mercenary cunt. They flew back to Nigeria as soon as he was discharged from hospital.

That was when Deola returned to work in London. She was on a tourist visa. She was applying for accountancy jobs, the only jobs for which she could apply for a work permit, and she called Bandele at his parents' house in Belgravia. She was catching up with friends and finding out who else was around. He kept her on the phone for hours telling her what happened. “It was brutal, brutal in there,” he said. “Dickensian and the nurses looked as if they were men dressed in drag.” He said his father had given him six months to find somewhere else to live. It was easy for her to blame his father. The man was too Nigerian, she decided.

Bandele's father went to Cambridge and Bandele was expected to go there, but instead, he wrote the novel. His father never mentioned the novel, as if doing so might prove Bandele right. After Bandele moved to Pimlico, he invited her to the Tate Gallery for exhibitions: David Hockney, Francis Bacon, someone or other. She persuaded him to come to Brixton for a Fela concert at the Academy. Tosan didn't care if he tagged along. He was so sure Bandele was gay. In fact, he thought that was the cause of Bandele's breakdown, while her friends referred to Bandele as “the
bobo
who went mad because he couldn't accept the fact that he was black.” It got worse if she ever tried to defend him.

Over the years she has discovered that Bandele tells just enough of the truth to get sympathy. His father is known as a thieving politician, for instance, but he is a well-respected one, as they all are. His father may also have disciplined his children with a cane, but no more than the average Nigerian parent did. Sometimes she can't tell Bandele's natural grandiosity from the symptoms of his illness. He has since learned to live with the black people in his council estate, but she no longer blames his family for giving up on him. The cunt business was just the beginning. He called his sisters (who were known for buying the affections of guys who were far better looking than they were) ugly whores. She keeps in touch with him by phone, but she can go for months without seeing him. His ridicule of Nigerians is hard to take, and she once attributed it to the sort of
self-loathing that only an English public school can impart on a young, impressionable foreign mind.

z

Overall, she finds Bandele testy, but his talk about schooling and artistic expression prompts her to call Tessa during the week. Tessa Muir, or Tessa the Thespian, as she used to call her when they were roommates in boarding school. Sometimes it was Tess of the d'Urbervilles. This was during O levels, when Tessa, like Bandele, didn't have the normal preoccupations like choosing what A levels to study or going to university. Tessa later left boarding school for a tutorial college in London so she could audition for acting roles. She didn't actually get any roles, or A levels, but it was fabulous.

The last time Deola saw Tessa on
stage, Tessa was playing Lily St. Regis in
Annie
. She sang “Easy Street.” Tessa does voiceover work now. Once in a while Deola recognizes her voice in an advert, when Tessa is not sounding like someone else. It brings her back to when they were fifteen-year-old girls.

School was in Somerset, and their boarding house was in Glastonbury. They had a housemaster with hair full of Brylcreem who peeked through keyholes to check if girls were misbehaving and a housemistress who was too vacuous to understand the implications of this, but she made the best apple crumbles ever. A bus shuttled students to and fro. Deola's classes had ten students at most, compared to the thirty-odd girls she was used to at Queen's College. There were boys in her class and no school uniform, which meant she had to think about what to wear in the mornings: skirt or trousers, cardigan or sweater, penny loafers or boots. She had a Marks & Spencer duffle coat and her mother's old Burberry trench coat, both of which she found frumpy.

She was fresh from a boarding school in Nigeria, where girls stuck their bottoms out and walked around with Clearasil on their faces. Now, she was sharing a house with girls who flipped their hair from side to side and ran around with Nair on their legs. She found them just as funny to observe. Tessa came from a drama school with her own special antics, which quickly earned her a reputation for being a weirdo. The only girl weirder than Tessa was a Californian who wore an ankle bracelet and said, “Far out, man,” and sniffed her spray deodorant.

First thing in the morning, Deola would be lying in bed, tucked under her duvet, reluctant to brave the cold. She slept near the heater. Outside it was invariably dark. Tessa would get up early to avoid the shower rush. After her
shower, Tessa would strut into the dormitory, grab her hairbrush and start singing some annoying chorus from a musical, like “Um diddle diddle diddle, um diddle ay,” and Deola would shout, “Will you shush?”

They were both in the drama society and Tessa had major roles in the school productions of
Guys and Dolls
and
The Importance of Being Earnest
that year. At Queen's College, Deola was in the drama society. She once played Hamlet in the “To be or not to be” scene. In England, she always ended up with female or black roles and usually as an extra. One night in their dormitory, she thought she'd show off her acting skills to Tessa and recited the “The 'squire has got spunk in him” scene from
She Stoops to Conquer
. Tessa laughed until she drooled. The trembling nasal voice Deola used became a voice of reason of sorts.

They couldn't agree on what music to play. Deola had a stash of cassettes, most of which were badly dubbed from soul LPs and labeled “Mixed Grill.” Occasionally, Radio One played a song with a dance beat, like “Funkin' For Jamaica”; otherwise, she had to tune into Radio Luxembourg. Tessa was into bands like Led Zep and Pink Floyd. Deola had never heard of them before and Tessa did not know who Teddy Pendergrass or George Benson were. In the end, they didn't agree to take turns to play their music; they just enjoyed whatever was on and that was how Deola learned that those obscure choruses from her childhood, like “Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday” and “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” were from songs by the Stones and the Beatles. She'd grown up believing they were Nigerian folk songs.

z

She calls Tessa and they arrange to meet for tea on Sunday in a café off Haymarket. They sit by the window, which is thick enough to reduce the noise of the traffic to a hum. The café is cozy. There are mirrors on the walls and Deola can see her profile as well as the back of her head. The tea is overpriced and the sugar is caramelized, as if to compensate. She eats a cheese danish as Tessa butters a scone and slaps on strawberry jam. Tessa's red hair is pulled back with a black band. She has a slightly crooked nose that makes her look striking. Her dark denim jacket contrasts with her pale freckly skin. She wears a ruby cabochon ring on her middle finger; it is too loose for her ring finger. She has been engaged to Peter for several months now and they are yet to set a wedding date.

“The trouble is,” Tessa says, “we can't decide where to live. It's either Pete moves here or I move to Australia, right? So Pete doesn't like the climate here and you know I can't stand the heat. But I really don't have to live here to work and Pete can basically live anywhere.”

“So?”

“So it's unsettling. It's such a long way away, Australia. Such a long way from home. He will build me a studio, though, if we move there, so I can work.”

Tessa and Peter live in a mews in Notting Hill Gate. Peter buys houses in London with a business partner, fixes them up and sells them. He left school at seventeen, wanting to be a wildlife photographer, and traveled throughout Asia taking carpentry and building jobs to sustain himself.

“They have that huge theater, don't they?” Deola asks.

“Which one?”

“The one at Sydney Harbor.”

“Yes, the opera house.”

“Australia,” Deola says. “My neighbors downstairs are from Australia.”

Tessa puts her teacup down. “Are they?”

“I think so. Stay here, Tess. What if you get another big role?”

Tessa bites her scone. “Mm, mm. The… roles… aren't… there anymore.”

“You got
Annie
.”

“Yes… but that was ages ago.”

“So?”

“So in a couple of years I'll be old enough to play Miss Hannigan.”

“Remember when you were Adelaide?”

“Adelaide,” Tessa says, unenergetically.

She misses being on stage. She has had more luck in festivals than in the West End. She eventually turned to BBC radio and the voiceover work came out of that. A review said her singing voice was “soulful,” and Deola secretly took credit for that. Who exposed her to soul music? Who took her to see the High Priestess, Nina Simone, at Ronnie Scott's?

“You know who I'd really love to play?” Tessa says.

“Who?”

“Piaf. But I'm too tall to play her. She was tiny, Piaf.”

Tessa as Édith Piaf doesn't surprise Deola as much as Tessa as a housewife. Tessa gave Peter an ultimatum before he agreed to get married. He is six years younger than Tessa and his father is not pleased about that. Peter's mother died of melanoma when he was a boy and he and his father are more like brothers. They get drunk together, which Tessa at first thought was sweet. Now she says it's unsavory.

“What made you change your mind?” Deola asks.

Tessa wipes her fingers on a napkin. “About?”

“You know.”

“I'm ready,” Tessa says. “I want the husband, the kids, the whole lot.”

Deola thinks of the clapping and skipping games she learned as a girl and chants like “When will you marry? This year, next year” and “First comes love, then comes marriage.”