A Bit of Difference. Sefi Atta
Tess. What if you get another big role?’
Tessa bites her scone. ‘Mm, mm. The … roles … aren’t … there any more.’
‘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 unsavoury.
‘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.’
‘I know we’ve been brainwashed,’ Tessa says, reading her skeptical expression. ‘It’s biological. I don’t want to wait until I have fossils for eggs.’
‘Please don’t mention eggs around here.’
‘Why not?’
‘There’s no hope for mine.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling.’
‘Seriously. There’s no one in London.’
‘What do you mean? There’s someone. There’s someone else.’
A group of Japanese tourists are walking past. One stops to take a photograph with his Canon camera.
How to begin? Deola thinks. The closest she got to talking to Tessa about race was telling Tessa she danced well, considering. Tessa, of course, thought Deola was a fantastic dancer. Deola didn’t dance that well, just better than other girls in school, who danced out of rhythm. Tessa got curious about the word ‘oyinbo’, having overheard other Nigerians using it and it was awkward for Deola to confess it meant white, Westerner, Westernized, foreign. Tessa blushed. The British won’t have any of that, stirring up stuff.
‘You must have had an image of what your prince looked like when you were a girl,’ Deola says.
‘I’m sure I did,’ Tessa says.
‘Well, mine was no Englishman.’
Tessa laughs. ‘What?’
‘I want to be with a Nigerian.’
‘Oh, don’t be daft.’
‘It’s a preference.’
‘Don’t be daft, darling. Who ends up with her prince anyway?’
Deola gesticulates. ‘It’s about … having a shared history.’
In her college days, who wanted to be the odd one with the oyinbo boyfriend at a party, explaining to him, ‘Yes, yes, we like our music this loud. No, no, we don’t make conversation, we just dance’?
You were either pathetic or lost if you were with an oyinbo boy. She never went out with any in school. She had crushes. There was the golden-haired American tennis player and the Welsh rugby player with bowlegs. Tessa went out with a pimply pseudo-intellectual who walked around with a paisley scarf wrapped around his neck. He seemed harmless enough until he spread a rumour that Tessa stuck her tongue so far down his throat she practically extracted his tonsils.
In a way, Deola was glad she was saved from that nonsense: who fancies whom and who got off with whom. Boys called her ‘mate’ and slapped her on the back. They might have wanted to hug her, but it was safer if she were one of the lads. Sometimes they introduced her to a Nigerian boy who came to their school for an away game. They would endorse him as ‘good fun’, mispronounce his name (‘Addy Babby Lolly’) and no matter how unattractive she found him, they would grin at him, and her, as if expecting them to copulate.
She concentrated on studying for her O levels. At the end of term, while Tessa was busy getting upset over some boy who’d slow-danced with some other girl at the school disco, Deola was looking forward to travelling home. She knew she wasn’t going to be overlooked for much longer. On the last day of term, they shared a bottle of scrumpy on Glastonbury Tor.
She was specific when she started dating and she still is. Her men must taste and smell as if they were raised on the same diet and make the same tonal sounds. Similarity on all fronts is essential. She won’t even be with a Nigerian like Bandele, who might end up asking her, ‘Pardon?’
‘What’s wrong with a different history?’ Tessa asks. ‘What’s wrong with two histories?’
‘Nothing, if they really are shared.’
‘Come on. That is so … I’m sorry. I’m not precious that way. I’m just not.’
Tessa’s father is Scottish. Her mother’s family emigrated from Italy. She has an uncle on her father’s side whom she calls a disgusting old fart because he complains about his new neighbours who are Pakistani, spies on them from behind his curtains and once called the police to say he suspected them of terrorist activities. Before Peter, she dated a Trinidadian artist who looked Chinese, then a French merchant wanker, as she called him after they broke up. Tessa would not know what it means to be nationalistic about love. She thinks it’s racist to talk about race. She is unapologetically prejudiced against actors, though. Her first boyfriend was one. He was in his forties, and married. They met in bedsits for years. She swore she would never get married after she broke up with him.
‘What if I said that to you?’ she asks, blushing. ‘What if I said that about Nigerian men?’
‘It’s not the same,’ Deola says.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s not. You don’t live in Nigeria, for a start. Imagine if you did.’
‘Why?’
‘Just imagine you lived there in a community of expats for years. You know how you’re not sure about moving to Australia? That is my whole life here.’
‘It’s not like you haven’t had time to adjust! You went to school here!’
‘You have no idea what it was like for me in school.’
The man at the next table glances at them. His nose is bulbous and the skin on his neck droops from his chin. Tessa’s moment of anger subsides.
‘Does being a redhead child actress come close?’ she mumbles, as she eats the other half of her scone.
‘It’s not the same,’ Deola says.
Tessa’s hair is not the same shade of red as it was. It is darker now, less orange. She is going grey, so she dyes it. As a girl, she was in adverts for lemonade