A Bit of Difference. Sefi Atta
looks like mosquito netting dotted with lights. Behind them is a fire with meat rotating on spits. The waiters wear red scarves around their necks and walk over once in a while with a leg of lamb, pork roast, filet mignon, scallops, shrimp and chicken wrapped in bacon. The bacon is more fatty than Deola is used to.
‘But we can’t decide who gets pregnant,’ Anne says. ‘So wouldn’t that be perfect if one of us wakes up and boom?’
Deola has finished eating her salad, but she picks at the remnants of her grilled peppers and mushrooms as the thought of artificial insemination diminishes her appetite. Or perhaps it is the realization that she might one day have to consider the procedure, if she remains single for much longer.
This is an unexpected connection to Anne, but she won’t talk about her own urge to nest, which has preoccupied her lately. Anne might regard what she has to say with anthropological curiosity: the African woman’s perspective.
‘There’s always adoption,’ she says, wondering if this is appropriate.
‘I did think of that,’ Anne says. ‘You get on a plane and go to a country that is war-torn or struggling with an epidemic and see so many orphans, so many of them. But at the end of the day, you have to have the humility to say to yourself, “Maybe I am not the person to raise this kid. Maybe America is not the place to raise him or her.” You have to ask yourself these questions.’
‘You must,’ Deola says, crossing her arms, as if to brace herself for more of Anne’s rectitude.
‘It’s that mindset,’ Anne says. ‘Our way is best, everyone else be damned, the world revolves around us. But I think when you travel widely enough, you quickly begin to realize it don’t, don’t you think?’
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.
An 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 programme 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 grey 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 mobile 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 centre to study for her exams and take breaks at Café Gigi. Now, the centre 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 worktop 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