A Bit of Difference (19 page)

“Is this how you will both be in that house?” she asks.

“Yes, until I kick him out. The house is in my name. At least Daddy made sure of that.”

z

They get home and the Sunday service in the church next door is over. As they supervise the catering staff and rearrange the seating plans, the guests begin to arrive, led by her mother. Soon there is barely any space on the road for cars to get past. Horns go off. People step out of their cars, shake out their trouser legs and dust their clothes down self-importantly. There are about a hundred of them, family and friends.

They ignore the seating plans. Her mother's close friends are the most difficult to manage. They want to sit together and ask that two tables be moved to form one, which becomes the longest table under the canopies.

“Where is the wine?” Aunty Fadeke asks. “Bring the wine. Make sure the table is steady first. We don't want the wine to topple over.”

Deola has always liked her because she looks as if she is smiling even when she is not. She squeezes into her chair while the others laugh at her.

“Fadeke, girl!”

“What?” she says. “Remi? Where is Remi? Deola, where is your mother?”

“She is in the kitchen,” Deola says.

“Get her over here. Tell her we have reserved the head of the table for her. She sits at the head today.”

“Yes, Aunty.”

None of them is a blood relation. They ask for more crabs and shrimp, and more wine. She can't pass their table without someone calling out, “Psst, darling. More wine. Yes, more wine. Preferably red.”

Her mother sits at the head of the table, having taken off her head tie and replaced her shoes with slippers. They congratulate her on the catering.

“Rem, Rem, wonderful job.”

“It took a lot of planning,” her mother says. “And I didn't have a driver at my disposal.”

“The crab is tasty. Very tasty.”

“And the shrimp.”

“Fluffy rice.”

“Hm.”

Their empty crab and shrimp shells pile up on their plates. Their napkins are stained with lipstick and stew.

“Remi,” Aunty Fadeke says. “You are disappointing me. How can you forget your namesake on a day like this?”

“What namesake?” Deola's mother asks.

“Rémy Martin, of course! Who else?”

“It's true,” Deola's mother says. “Where is the brandy? There ought to be brandy floating around somewhere.”

She is deliberately hoarding her spirits. She knows her friends drink like military men.

Deola strays to the next table. Aunty Bisi is taking care of the real relatives and the in-laws like Eno's mother, who are seated there. As usual, Eno's mother is overlooked. Aunty Bisi gave her special treatment by fixing her a tidier plate and saying a token, “Hope it's not too peppery for you.”

People on the table don't speak to Eno's mother unless she speaks to them. Her presence may well hinder their conversation because they are not speaking to one another either. She sits there and finishes her food nonetheless. Normally, she would be on the expatriate table with family friends who have now left Nigeria and returned to London, Milan and Hong Kong to spend their retirement years. No more of their mince pies, panettone and steamed dumplings for Christmas. Their wives were honorary aunts: Aunty Jean, Aunty Sophia, Aunty Mrs. Wong (Deola didn't know her name). Their husbands were either with multinational companies or working independently as entrepreneurs.

The catering staff is coping well with the guests' demands, but Aunty Bisi insists on waiting tables.

“You have to chaperone your mother's table,” she says to Deola. “You have to chaperone them. You're not chaperoning them enough. Where is Jaiye?”

Jaiye is in the house with her children. Prof spilled apple juice on Lulu's dress and Lulu threw a fit. Deola heads back to her mother's table to find out what else they need. They seem happy enough, which may be due to the wine they have consumed.

Aunty Simi, who wears Chanel sunshades that cover half her face, asks, “So, Deola, my dear, any plans to come home?”

“No plans yet, Aunty,” Deola says, skirting the table.

“Why not?” Aunty Yinka asks. “You're not getting any younger. You have to start thinking about it soon.”

Aunty Yinka wears an emerald and diamond ring as big as her knuckle. Her friends call her “Mappin and Webb.”

“Why should she come home?” Aunty Fadeke asks, knowing Deola is partial to her. “She is getting along fine where she is. Why should she suffer like the rest of us? Do you have a job waiting for her here?”

Aunty Fadeke studied nursing with Deola's mother and she worked until she retired. Her pension barely covers her phone bills. She lost her youngest daughter a few years ago to breast cancer and her friends raised money for her plane tickets to London while her daughter was receiving treatment there.

“She has Trust Bank,” Aunty Simi says.

Aunty Simi's daughter has always worked for her husband, who owns one of the top law practices in Lagos. He recently received the key to the city of London, opening many more important doors.

Deola's mother is preoccupied with her crab leg. Deola knows she is behind this inquiry. They are the women her mother kept up to date when she left Trust Bank, her mother's childhood friends. They are not always united. Sometimes they get competitive, especially over their looks. Her mother often boasts about not having
wrinkles, Aunty Yinka's face is pulled back as tight as a drum and Aunty Simi looks like a walking lesson for abecedarians in her designer accessories with LV, interlinked C's and inverted F's.

Aunty Theresa, who has been rather quiet because every time she speaks, the rest talk over her, says, “It's your heritage, my dear. Your heritage. You don't turn your back on your heritage.”

She is the only one at the table wearing a dress. She married an Englishman, whose family didn't accept her, despite the fact that she'd attended Oxford University, so she got a divorce and returned to Nigeria in the sixties. A sherry—rather than champagne—socialist in those days, her enunciation is still so impressive that no one understands a word she is saying, which is why they talk over her.

“My father,” she says, and Deola makes out the words “fought for our independence,” “us pioneer professionals,” and “our children to come back home and follow in our footsteps,” as the others drown her out with their chatter.

Aunty Theresa's father, Francisco Blanco, was a renowned nationalist. He was a lawyer-turned-politician like Bandele's grandfather, Sir Cecil Adeyemi Davis, who opposed the movement on the grounds that Nigeria was not mature enough for self-governance, thereby earning himself a knighthood. Francisco Blanco, meantime, was branded a communist by the colonials during the Cold War. Not one of his fellow Nigerians defended him for fear they might be hunted down and blacklisted in the spirit of McCarthyism.

Why anyone would want to follow in the footsteps of a man whose life demonstrated how Nigeria turns its back on its people to kiss the arses of foreign powers is beyond Deola. She is waiting to see what the future holds for Nigerians, now that the government seems to be puckering up behind the Chinese.

“How is your prime minister these days?” Aunty Theresa asks. “Still standing shoulder to shoulder with the Americans?”

Aunty Fadeke hisses. “Shoulder to shoulder.”

“Foolish man,” Aunty Simi says.

“God will deal with that Bush fellow,” Aunty Yinka says.

“Well, well,” Aunty Fadeke says.

Deola walks away bemused. First, that her mother's friends are this fired up about the war in Iraq and second, that they are still trying to persuade her to come home. But this is their way. Nigeria is where they are called “Madam” and treated with respect. They pass on their sense of entitlement to their children through estates. They are Nigerian Tories. Aunty Simi and her husband have houses all over Ikoyi. Aunty Yinka has a block of flats on Victoria Island in addition to her house on Lekki Peninsula. Aunty Theresa, who ought to know better, lives in Yaba on a street named after her grandfather, Senhor Blanco. He was one of the finest masons in Lagos and built houses with stables and orchards. But these days, slums border Blanco Street. After
Oxford, Aunty Theresa joined the Colonial Service, then Ministry of Education, and would have been the permanent secretary had she not fallen out with the British, whom she called “Cockneys in feathered helmets,” and with the First Republic, whom she called “an old baba's club.” She was retired by the next military regime, reinstated by the one after and finally resigned when she had to work with a Hausa education minister who said the South had too many schools for its own good. She called him “uncouth and myopic” and his response was that her resignation was timely, and hopefully, she would now go and sit down quietly and collect her pension, instead of speaking big English all over the place.

Perhaps this is the trouble, Deola thinks. Their contemporaries are dying; their society has been replaced by one they could call vulgar. Their network of contacts has been demolished. Semi-illiterates are running the country, which they see slipping out of their grip and they are hanging on to whatever they can—their children mostly. Now they have to deal with people they diapered, CEOs, pastors, managing directors, attorneys general, senators and governors, whom they refer to as boys and girls. Even if they are wealthy, Nigeria does not belong to them anymore.

Deola ends up near the chalet, which is actually a one-bedroom bungalow with a kitchenette and bathroom. Lanre is smoking on the veranda and still checking text messages. She sits next to him.

“You'd better not be messing around,” she says.

He slips his phone back into his pocket. “It's my colleague, man. She is stressed.”

“For what reason?”

“She's having marital problems.”

“Can't she consult a priest?”

Lanre does not smoke in front of his sons. The smell makes Deola nauseous. From her new position, she has a view of both canopies.

“I hate women,” she says. “What is she texting you for? I hate that. And I've just been accosted by that group over there.”

“What did they do?”

“‘When are you coming home?' ‘Shouldn't you be thinking of settling down?'”

“They're miserable. Don't listen to them.”

“I mean, who wants anyone to come home when the rest of the country is praying for a way out? And imagine talking to me as if I'm still in school. And Mummy just sat there pretending she didn't know what was going on. It was like the Coalition of the Willing.”

He slaps the cement surface as he laughs. “Don't kill me.”

“No, cigarettes will do that.”

She has nagged Lanre about smoking and drinking since her father's death. He pulls his cigarette out of his mouth.

“Every bad habit I have, I picked up in this house.”

“I swear. The whole country is full of boozers. Just look at them. Who would even have been standing there, if Aunty Bisi didn't ask me to ‘chaperone' them?”

“Pity her. She has to sleep with an eighty-year-old man who takes Viagra.”

“He does?”

“Of course.”

Lanre drops his cigarette butt on the ground and crushes it with his shoe. He was always more astute. Perhaps Aunty Bisi's husband does need enhancement. He is in his eighties, and Aunty Bisi was the one who gave Jaiye this advice before her wedding: “A woman should be a whore in her bedroom and a whore in her kitchen.”

In her heyday Aunty Bisi was at every
owambe
party in Lagos, gyrating in front of Sunny Adé until she abandoned Sunny for Shina Peters. That was how she met her husband. She was dancing to Shina's band at his son's fortieth birthday bash. He walked up to her and sprayed her with dollar notes. Despite his two wives, who were less gregarious, he was demanding of Aunty Bisi's attention, insisting that she cook for him and travel overseas with him until Aunty Bisi, who at first was flattered and enjoyed hobnobbing with him, began to seem more like a hospice caretaker than a paramour.

Lanre assesses her mother's friends dispassionately: Aunty Theresa has probably been celibate since her divorce. He can't imagine any Nigerian man putting up with her phonetics. Aunty Simi has a middle-aged son who can't get up in the morning without sniffing cocaine. He was caught pilfering from his father, whose law practice he was meant to take over. His father disowned him. Aunty Simi pays his rent and provides him with spending money, so he won't go around begging.
Aunty Yinka left her husband because he lacked ambition. She had an affair with a government minister in the First Republic and with a state governor in the Second Republic, both of whom were married men. She was finally made an ambassador during the last military regime. Now she is retired.

All those years, Deola overheard her mother talking on the phone about the men Aunty Yinka was “involved with” and hailing her “five times a girl” and “a self-made woman.” She never bothered to question that. She was however able to figure out, while eavesdropping on her parents' conversation, that Aunty Fadeke's ex-husband threw Aunty Fadeke out and moved in her younger sister, whom he was molesting. What her mother said was, “Folabi was tampering with that girl, and Fadeke knew. She can't pretend she didn't know.”

Deola wished she'd had the courage to confront her mother's friends about their insistence on marriage and coming home. She is still fuming when Lanre receives another text message. He takes his phone out of his pocket.

“She's texting you again?”

He reads the message. “It's Mama Eno.”

Eno is no longer “A Taste of Honey” to him.

“Your wife is texting you and she's here?”

“She wants to know where I am.”

“Doesn't she know?”