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 toys with the idea of not answering her door as she goes downstairs. Just before she travelled to Atlanta, she and Subu got into such a heated exchange over the bombing of Baghdad she swore she wouldn’t speak to Subu until Subu was willing to admit the war couldn’t be justified on religious grounds.
‘You’re back?’ Subu asks.
‘I am,’ Deola says.
‘Since when?’
‘Last Saturday. One minute.’
Deola checks the mail on the ledge in the hallway. There is no mail for her, mostly junk and bills for her neighbours, a group of young women who live on the ground floor. They might be South African or Australian. She hasn’t been able to identify their accents and has not bothered to ask where they are from. They say hello whenever she sees them in the hallway.
‘Why didn’t you call?’ Subu asks.
Since she gave her life to Christ Subu has had an authoritative air. It is almost as if she became Christ’s wife on that day. She no longer wears makeup because she is born-again, but she won’t be seen without a hair weave.
‘I had too much to do,’ Deola says.
She reaches her landing before Subu makes a move, so she waits as Subu lugs her tote bag up the stairs. It is the size of a Ghana Must Go bag. Subu spends thousands of pounds on designer accessories. Her wardrobe is a shrine to Gucci and Prada.
‘I hope I’m not disturbing you,’ Subu says.
Subu’s voice is thick and slow. She will not alter the pace of her voice or her accent for anyone, not even at work, which is commendable. She will keep repeating herself until she is understood and businesspeople are quick to catch on whenever big money is involved. As she once said, ‘They don’t try their “Pardon? Pardon?” with the Japanese.’
‘It’s all right,’ Deola says. ‘I was just watching television.’
She reminds herself to be patient as Subu catches up with her. They easily get into rows about abortion, homosexuality, Darwin and Harry Potter.
Subu sits on her couch. ‘You’re enjoying travelling around the globe like this.’
‘Please,’ Deola says. ‘I was only there for two days.’
‘What were you doing?’
Deola shortens her answer so as not to be boring. LINK wants to standardize their audits internationally. She had to study the Atlanta office’s programme and write one. It will be incorporated in a manual and translated into
