A Bit of Difference

by Sefi Atta

  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.”

  “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 rumor 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 hop, Deola was looking forward to traveling 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 the Glastonbury Tor.

  She was specifi
c 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 neighbors 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 gray, so she dyes it. As a girl, she was in adverts for lemonade and toothpaste. Her teeth were perfect and her hair was coarse and curly. She envied child actresses like Patsy Kensit who had straight blond hair. Actually, she hated Patsy Kensit. She wanted to be the girl in The Great Gatsby and people kept telling her she would make a wonderful Orphan Annie, whom she also hated. A West Indian woman at an audition suggested she use TCB conditioner to tame her hair and Tessa’s mother had to go all the way to Shepherd’s Bush to find some.

  Tessa has had her hair blow-dried straight for auditions and worn wigs for roles. When they were roommates, Deola was amused that girls wanted cornrows after they watch the film Ten. She could either see it as a fashion trend or an insidious undoing. A boy who called her his mate asked if he could rub her Afro for good luck. She has had to get her hair chemically relaxed for interviews. A partner in her accountancy firm commented that her braids were unprofessional. Not once did she think her hair was the issue at hand.

  “I mean,” Tessa says, dusting her hands, “all my life I haven’t been right for the roles I’ve wanted. If it’s not my hair, it’s my age. If it’s not my age, it’s my height. It’s been like that from the very beginning, rejection after rejection. Never mind what I said in school. I was such a little liar then.”

  “Weren’t we all?”

  “I actually thought you fit in more than me.”

  “Me?”

  “You were a right little miss. ‘Would you please keep the noise down?’ ‘Would you please not leave clothes strewn all over the floor?’ I mean, what fifteen-year-old uses the word ‘strewn’?”

  Deola steadies her teacup as she laughs. What she remembers is the career counselor in their school telling her Africans were not intelligent enough to go to university and the drama teacher asking her to sing “Bingo bango bongo, we belong back in the jungle” in an end-of-term musical, and trying to convince her that it was a satire.

  Tessa did also have a reputation for lying. She said her parents had a mansion in Richmond. The mansion in Richmond turned out to be a semi-detached in Twickenham. She said she had to leave school because she was missing out on roles. Her mother was a music teacher and her father was a cellist. Tessa was on a scholarship. They withdrew her from boarding school because they feared she was losing her self-confidence. She was embarrassed about her upbringing, which she could claim was unusual until she met international students like Deola, who grew up overseas. “My life is so blah,” she would say to Deola, or “I’m so pale. I wish I could swap skins with you.”

  Deola didn’t want to swap skins with Tessa, nor did she believe Tessa would consider it a fair exchange. She thought every boarding school had the same sorry array of international students and had seen them at their loneliest, sobbing over a mean comment someone had made. All of them were leveled by their desire to go home.

  “I’ve known you for so long,” Tessa says. “You have to be a bridesmaid.”

  “Of course.”

  “There will be fittings.”

  “I will be there for each one.”

  “Our colors might clash.”

  “That’s not fair, Muir.”

  “What? You started it. When will you be back from Nigeria?”

  “In a week.”

  “When would you like to be measured then, the Saturday after?”

  “Make it the Saturday after that. I usually need two weeks to recover.”

  Tessa makes a fist. “Do us a favor, if you meet someone over there…”

  “Um, I think it’s a little precarious for one-night stands.”

  “‘I think it’s a little precarious.’ See what I mean? It won’t kill you to have one before you die.”

  “Tessa.”

  “What will you do otherwise?” Tessa asks. “You might not get another chance if you’re so picky about your options here. What?”

  It is almost parental, the way Deola considers what she can bring up about her experiences as a Nigerian in England. Tessa would probably feel guilty, without realizing that Nigerians are as prejudiced as the English, and more snobbish. Nigerians, given any excuse, are ready to snub. Without provocation and even remorse. They snub one another, snub other Africans, other blacks and other races. Nigerians would snub aliens if they encountered them.

  The first time she was ever aware her race mattered, she was in Nigeria. She was in primary school and must have been about eight. She was taking ballet classes at another school for expatriate children. The girls in the class were mostly English, but there were Chinese, Lebanese and Indian girls as well. Deola was one of a few Nigerian girls. The ballet teacher was English. She walked around clapping in time to the music, and ordering, “Tuck your tails in,” as girls practiced pliés. She would pass the Nigerian girls and say, “I know it’s hard for some of you.” She would pass the other girls and say, “Good work!”

  The next time, Deola was fourteen and in a summer camp in Switzerland. She shared a room with a blonde girl from Connecticut who was always getting into trouble with counselors and calling her parents in tears. Deola was combing her hair with an Afro pick one night when the girl pointed at her and laughed. This surprised her because during the day, the same girl was constantly throwing her arms around a boy who looked like the youngest Jackson 5 brother, until he said she was so fat that if she jumped in the swimming pool, half the water would splash out. He was from Chicago. Deola, too, was infatuated with him. But one afternoon, they were at horseback-riding when he started dancing around her with his knees bent, flapping his arms like chicken wings and chanting, “Ooga shaka ooga shaka.”

  She went to boarding school in England a year later. In English class, she sat next to a boy who was forever cracking jokes. She
noticed how her classmates called him “Jacob,” wrinkling their noses, as if his surname were a cough syrup. She knew he was picked on for a reason neither he nor they may have been conscious of. Then one day, they were taking turns reading Look Back in Anger out loud, and he asked a question about “wogs” that she didn’t catch. “Now, now,” their English teacher said, with a smile. “We don’t say ‘wogs’ here. We say ‘Western Oriental gentlemen.’”

  None of these experiences are worth mentioning, Deola decides. They are laughable.

  “Want another scone?” she asks. “I think I’ll have another danish.”

  Tessa’s thirteen-year-old niece is a Dára fan. She is a fan of hip-hop in general and she does the hand signals and calls girls she doesn’t like “biatches.”

  “She is such a silly sweetheart,” Tessa says. “You just want to give her a clip around the ear. She says to me, ‘Can you ask your Nigerian friend to get me Dára’s autograph?’ So I ask her, ‘What do you see in him?’ And she says, ‘He’s gangsta.’ My brother and his wife are going spare. I told them not to worry. It’s like rock and roll, really, this whole hip-hop thing.”

  “Dára is not gangsta,” Deola says. “He’s just a college dropout.”

  “How funny. I can see what she sees in him, though.”

  “You can?”

  “Mm. There’s something about him. Something… very noble about his looks.”

  Deola doesn’t know what to say to this. The man at the next table with the bulbous nose looks noble to her, like a Roman emperor.

  “How’s your dad?” she asks.

  Tessa’s father is much older than her mother and he has Alzheimer’s. He can no longer play the cello.

  “Dad’s not doing well,” Tessa says. “That’s one reason why I have to make a decision about this wedding soon. Mum’s doing her best. It’s something to witness, something to aspire to, the love between them. I just hope Pete will be there for me if anything like that happens.”

  “He will,” Deola says, sincerely.