asked, ‘Is Madam in, then?’ Deola said, ‘You mean my mother?’ He looked her up and down. ‘I thought you were the housegirl.’
Bandele had the same features as Seyi, but they were not nearly as symmetrical and he was shorter. Lanre later explained that he was Seyi’s younger brother who was sent off to an old-fashioned school in England called Harrow. Now he was so lost that even Seyi was ashamed of him. Deola did notice how Bandele hung around the expat crowd at Ikoyi Club. They called him ‘Daily Davis’. He called himself ‘Daily Davis’. His English accent made him effeminate, as far as she was concerned. He didn’t even recognize her after that day – the same way some expats couldn’t tell one Nigerian from another.
She turns off the hot water tap as she remembers the night Seyi Davis died. There was a film show at the club that night: James Bond. She was there with her friends. Seyi and Lanre left the rotunda early. It was raining and they had been drinking beer again. They went off to the Floating Bukka on the marina. After the film, the driver came for her. She got home and Lanre had not yet returned, which wasn’t a surprise. She ate the pork chops her mother had left in the warmer and went to bed. Her mother stayed up to watch April Love. She heard the theme song. It must have been eleven-thirty when the phone rang and her father answered it. It was Seyi’s father. He said Seyi and Lanre were in an accident on Kingsway Road, Lanre had lost consciousness and Seyi was lost. That was exactly how her father delivered the news: ‘Unfortunately, we have lost Seyi.’
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 practising 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.
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 towards the entrance. There are globes and travel maps in the window. Indoors is a café where the reading is advertised on a poster. Were these people at the reading? There is a woman with long frizzy hair, another with a grey 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 colour 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
