by Sefi Atta
Lost him where? she thought.
The Davises restricted Seyi’s funeral to family members. No one else was allowed to attend—not his godparents, not their friends, not even his friends from Saint Greg’s. Lanre was bedridden. He had a concussion and black eyes. Her parents went several times to pay their condolences at the Davises’ house, but their steward would open their door dressed in a white uniform and say, “Master and Madam are resting.”
Seyi’s funeral caused a scandal in Lagos that summer. After the obituaries and tears, people began to abuse his father in private. They said he was too English. He didn’t know how to mourn properly. Her father saw him on the golf course practicing his swing. Her mother bumped into Mrs. Davis at Moloney Supermarket and was finally able to speak to her.
Deola’s mother banned her from the club for the rest of the summer, so she didn’t know if Bandele went there or not, but the holiday ended and Bandele must have gone back to Harrow. She still didn’t know how to react to Seyi’s death, so she wrote a poem dedicated to him and buried it by the pawpaw tree in the backyard.
She didn’t see Bandele again until she was in her final year in university. She met him at a black-tie dinner in Pall Mall. A mutual friend had her twenty-first birthday at a gentleman’s club there. The gentlemen looked like retired generals and diplomats. She spotted Bandele taking his surroundings a little too seriously and looking rather like a penguin. She asked him, “Aren’t you Bandele Davis?” He said, “I am, and who might you be?”
He was with a blonde with puffy taffeta sleeves. Deola was with Tosan, who suggested to the blonde that if she really enjoyed lover’s rock, she ought to try a fantastic club in Hackney called the All Nations Club. Deola asked Bandele what he was studying. He said he was not in university; he was writing a novel. “A real one?” she exclaimed, thinking she didn’t know one Nigerian student who was writing books or bypassing university. “The question is, are novels real?” he asked, lifting his hand.
Tosan was so convinced he was gay.
z
On Saturday evening, she arrives late at the bookshop. She has driven around Covent Garden trying to find a parking spot, and it has turned cold enough to wear a jacket. She rubs her bare arms as she hurries toward the entrance. There are globes and travel maps in the window. Indoors is a café where the reading is advertised on a poster. A few people from the reading are there: a woman with long frizzy hair, another with a gray ponytail and a navy wrap, and a man with a comb-over. The rest look half Deola’s age. They have dreadlocks and braids and are dressed in hip-hop clothes, ethnic prints and black. There is a lot of black (individualists always look as if they are in mourning). She stands out in her tracksuit; so does Bandele in his prim shirt and tie. His haircut belongs on an older face. He has a mischievous expression, but his eyes are subdued. It took him a while to find the right medication for his depression. One dried up his mouth and another bloated him up. They all make him lethargic. Most days he doesn’t get up until noon.
“What’s this?” he asks, patting his chest. “You’re…”
“Don’t start,” Deola says.
She is wearing a new padded bra. A woman approaches him with a copy of Sidestep. She has a nose ring and her lips are thick with gloss.
“Sorry,” she says, wrinkling her brows.
“My pleasure,” he says.
He autographs his novel on the nearest table, shakes her hand and returns. Deola predicts he is about to make a rude comment and she is right.
“Let’s go,” he mumbles. “I can’t take much more of this.”
A group of people has formed a bottleneck by the door. She enjoys the close contact and mix of scents, but Bandele grips her hand until they are outside, where he breathes out.
“Was it that bad?” she asks.
“You have no idea. I’m sitting there pretending to listen to their inane discussion.”
“About?”
“About being marginalized and pigeonholed. Then some writer, whom I’ve never heard of before, starts yelling at me during my question-and-answer session.”
“Why?”
“Something about Coetzee’s Disgrace.”
“What about Coetzee’s Disgrace?”
“Oh, who cares? Coetzee’s a finer writer than that dipstick can ever hope to be. What does he know? He writes the same postcolonial crap the rest of them write, and not very well, I might add.”
Deola laughs. “Isn’t our entire existence as Africans postcolonial?”
“They should give it a rest, the whole lot of them. Africa should be called the Sob Continent the way they carry on. It’s all gloom and doom from them, and the women are worse, all that false angst. Honestly, and if I hear another poet in a headwrap bragging about the size of her ample bottom or likening her skin to the color of a nighttime beverage, I don’t know what I will do.”
He is a Coetzee enthusiast. Sidestep was about a nineteen-year-old Nigerian who slept around. She found it funny and sweet. He never denied it was autobiographical and the women in the novel were skinny blondes with AA-cup bras. They wore ballet flats and had names like Felicity and Camilla.
“What a waste of time,” he says, as they approach her Peugeot. “I should never have come. That’s why I’ve never liked going to these black things.”
“Black things?”
“Black events. They always degenerate into pity parties.”
“Where do you want to go now?” she asks, shaking her head.
“Home.”
“Home?”
“If you don’t mind. I’m worn out.”
She paid for two hours’ parking, but she is used to him changing plans.
They pass a man who is shouting out theater shows in an Italian accent: “Lion Keeng!”
The Lion King posters have African faces covered in tribal paint. The street is teeming with cars and people. There are cafés and shops on either side.
Bandele lives in a council flat in Pimlico. His estate has a community center and launderette. He was in Brixton temporarily, but he threw a tantrum and demanded to be moved. He told his social worker he was only familiar with Belgravia and black people scared him, which was true, but his social worker just assumed he was showing signs of paranoia.
“How’s the job going?” he asks.
“Not bad,” Deola says, turning into Charing Cross Road.
“So you’re doing charity work.”
“No, I work for a charity.”
“In Brent.”
“Wembley, actually.”
He sighs. “Why Wembley?”
“What’s wrong with Wembley?”
“It’s zone four!”
“It’s an easy commute for me.”
“I’m just saying. With your qualifications, you ought to be working right here in the city for… for Rothschild or something.”
“Rothschild is not an accountancy firm.”
“Saatchi and Saatchi, then.”
“Saatchi and Saatchi is not an accountancy firm. And who says they would employ me?”
“Come on. You’re selling yourself short. You’re always selling yourself short. Stop selling yourself short. Of course they would employ you. Of course they would. With your background?”
“What background?” Deola says, stepping on her accelerator, instead of admitting she is aware of how mediocre her career is. She is heading in the direction of Trafalgar Square.
“Calm down,” he says. “I’m just saying. You ought to aim higher. You’re too self-effacing. You go for a job like that and you’ll end up leaving. It’s the same way you found yourself working with a bunch of yobs wherever.”
“Holborn. A consultancy firm in Holborn.”
“With NHS clients in Wolverhampton.”
She slaps his hand down. She can’t tell him anything.
“Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean for it to come out that way.”
“Hm.”
“May I smoke?”
“No.”
/>
“Out of your window, I mean.”
“I said no.”
He rubs his forehead. “God, you’re such an old fanny. So what is it then, you struggle with the world of commerce and industry or the world of commerce and industry struggles with you?” His American accent is dodgy.
“Who are you quoting now?” she asks.
“Baldwin.”
“What did Baldwin have to say about that?”
“He didn’t ask you the question.”
He is also a James Baldwin enthusiast, but he considers Baldwin’s experiences American, unlike his, which he might describe as aristocratic English because his grandfather was knighted by the Queen. His snobbishness is exasperating. Everyone is a yob to him. He won’t accept that racism exists in England. “It’s just an excuse for the West Indian immies not to work,” he once said. “Class is everything over here.”
“My job is not bad,” she says. “I get to travel. I’ve just come back from the States. Before that I was in India.”
“India?”
“Yes, and I’m going home in a week.”
From the little she saw of Delhi, it was cleaner and better organized than Lagos, but there were similarities, like the crowded markets and the occasional spectacle of someone defecating in public.
“Where is home?” Bandele asks.
“Where else?”
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 expressi
on 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?”
