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. But more than that she’d rather just excuse herself and leave because she can’t cope with what he might tell her.
‘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.
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 on 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.
Overall, she finds Bandele testy, but his talk about schooling and artistic expression 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?’
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
