A Bit of Difference. Sefi Atta
‘It’s okay,’ Deola insists.
She assumes Kate is being decent as usual. Kate is hands-on about being decent. Kate dug out her Nigerian NGO files when Dára agreed to be the spokesperson of Africa Beat. Graham was against violating their policy of giving priority to countries with a history of fiscal dependability. Kate had to persuade him.
Deola walks to Kate’s side of the desk to look at the correspondence.
Kate covers her mouth and mumbles, ‘Hell.’
‘Are you all right?’ Deola asks.
Kate stands up, face contorted, and rushes out of the office.
Now, Deola feels foolish as she sniffs her shirt for perfume. Kate’s office smells vaguely of snacks with Asian spices that will linger on her all day. She waits for Kate to return, wondering if she would be better off leaving. Kate walks in wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
‘Sorry about that,’ she says.
‘Was it my perfume?’
Kate shakes her head. ‘Not to worry. Anything sets me off. It’s awful. I can’t wait until this is over. I’m going mad. I had a huge tantrum this morning and upset everyone at home. You know why?’
‘Why?’
‘Toothpaste.’
‘Toothpaste?’
‘Yes! Toothpaste! Someone left the cap off!’
‘I should leave you alone,’ Deola says.
‘I’ll be fine,’ Kate says, sitting down.
‘No, no. I’d better go. Can I take those with me?’ She points at the papers. ‘I’ll bring them back when I’m through.’
‘Yeth, pleathe,’ Kate says, attempting to smile.
Kate has a habit of lapsing into a lisp whenever she asks for favours.
Deola takes the correspondence to her office, which is next door to Kate’s. The carpet is the same throughout the office, greyish blue. Her window is clouded on the outside and there is dust permanently stuck on her white blinds. She has ‘in’ and ‘out’ trays on her desk and a matching organizer for her pens and pencils. There is no other indication that she intends to remain here. She doesn’t even have a calendar yet.
She leafs through the brochure of the NGO that supports widows, WIN – Widows In Need. It was established in 1992. The print is blotchy and uneven in parts. The tabulation lines in the appendix are shaky and she comes across a statistic at the bottom: the average age of the widows is thirty-nine, her age.
Great, she thinks, pulling a face.
For the rest of the morning, she revises her report on the Delhi trip and drafts an audit programme for Africa Beat. Then she makes notes about her pending trip to Nigeria, listing the information she needs to request, contacts she has to make and when. She reads the literature on WIN, which is somewhat unfocused and suggests that women of childbearing age have the highest risk of HIV infection. The director, Rita Nwachukwu, is a former midwife.
Graham comes to work looking quite pink. He is back from Guatemala. His bald patch is shinier. Deola only remarks on the weight he has lost. He offers doughnuts to everyone in the office in his usual defiant manner.
‘’Ere,’ he says to her.
There is sugar in his beard. Deola takes a doughnut and is careful to bite gently so the strawberry jam won’t leak on her shirt. They are in that section of the corridor between his office, hers and Kate’s. Kate walks out of her office and Graham presents the doughnuts to her.
Kate flops her wrists. ‘Get those away from me.’
Kate is a vegetarian and she practises yoga. She worries about gaining weight.
‘Go on,’ Graham growls.
‘You slob,’ Kate says, brushing the sugar out of his beard with her fingers.
Kate and Graham flirt incessantly. In private, Kate tells him off for eating junk food and he calls Kate an ‘eejit’ if she mislays reports. Today, Kate barely taps his arm after she cleans up his beard and he cries out, ‘Ow! Did you see that, Delia?’
‘I saw nothing,’ Deola says, stepping back into her office.
He sometimes slips up and calls her Delia. He also talks about his morning commutes in present tense, saying, ‘I’m driving down the street,’ while she is thinking, No, you’re not. You’re standing right here talking to me.
She overhears Kate saying, ‘Graham, don’t!’
This is another workplace symbiosis that amuses her, married employees seeking attention from each other, even when they are ill-matched. She has encountered other prototypes at LINK. They have their smiling woman who takes collections for birthdays and their peculiar man who looks bemused at every request, as if he alone in the world makes sense. There must be others like herself, walking around wondering if all their years of education should end in a dreary office, but they must be equally as skilled at putting on façades.
Later in the day, Graham tells her he is flying off to Paris for a conference. Deola hasn’t been to Paris in years. The last time she was there, she was in university. It was during the Easter holidays and she stayed with her cousin, Ndidi, whose mother worked for UNESCO. She travelled overnight from Dover to Calais by Hoverspeed. It was freezing and there were drunken passengers on board singing football songs. Ndidi met her at Gare du Nord and took her to her aunt’s house in Neuilly. Ndidi had a Mohican haircut and had just bought herself a black leather jacket; Deola was in a red miniskirt, fishnet tights and thigh-high boots. How stylish they thought they were, kissing each other twice, and they laughed so hard that holiday that she peed in a chair at a crêperie.
Why hasn’t she been back to Paris, she asks herself as she leaves the office in the evening. At first, the Schengen visa put her off. For a Nigerian it was a byzantine application process if ever there was one. She got her British passport, then the Eurostar train began to run, then the terrorists started with their threats. She waited until she was sure they wouldn’t blow up the Channel Tunnel. Now she has no one to travel with. No one who is enough fun. Ndidi lives in Rome and works for a UN agency. She is married to an Italian guy and they have twin girls. Ndidi doesn’t even have time to talk on the phone any more.
This week feels especially long and Deola is relieved when the weekend starts. She is lying on her sofa in her pyjamas on Saturday morning, watching a programme on BBC2 with hosts who are as animated as cartoon characters. They talk about the latest hip-hop dance and after a while she changes to Channel 4, which is showing a reality experiment on beauty. Her TV remote is on the carpet by a glass with orange juice sediment and a side plate with the remnants of her bacon sandwich. She is relishing the taste of acid and salt in her mouth when her doorbell rings. The ding is loud, but the dong is broken and drops like a thud.
There is no intercom system in her block. From her window she can see pollarded trees, green rubbish bins and dwarf gates. A high hedge separates her block from the next, which has a collection of gnomes in its front garden. Across the road is a white Audi A3 parked by a postbox.
It is Subu, who lives in Maida Vale. She and Subu trained in the same accountancy firm. Subu started off in management consultancy while she was in audit. Now Subu is a vice president of an investment bank and travels to places like Silicon Valley and Shanghai. Subu’s job has something to do with derivatives. Deola, for all her accountancy training and business experience, still doesn’t understand what derivatives are, and she cannot imagine how Subu, who is a born-again Christian, copes as an investment banker. Subu won’t swear or go out for a drink. She believes that angels have wings and Heaven and Hell are physical locations. She tells her colleagues they will end up in Hell if they don’t accept Christ as their lord and saviour. Her colleagues seem to accept her as she is, though. They call her ‘Shoe Boo’, as if she were a puppy or computer game.
Deola