Sefi Atta - A Bit of Difference

Her hotel is on Peachtree, some ten minutes away from the Atlanta office. Anne will shuttle her there and back tomorrow. She thanks Anne for giving her a lift from the airport and arranges to meet her in the lobby the next morning. At the reception area, she joins the line and checks into a single room with a queen-sized bed. She inspects the room after putting her suitcase down. She prods and rubs the furniture and unclasps her bra. She needs to buy new underwear. She knows a Nigerian couple in Atlanta she could call, but she finds them enamoured with consumerism – cars, houses, shops and credit cards. They brag about living in America, as if they need to make Nigerians elsewhere feel they have lost out.

She turns on the television and switches from one cable station to another. She clicks on one called the Lifetime Movie Network. The film showing is She Woke Up Pregnant and the subtitle reads: ‘A pregnancy for which she cannot account tears a woman’s family apart.’ She turns to another station. Surprisingly, a Nigerian Pentecostal pastor is preaching. He is dressed in a white three-piece suit and his shoes are also white. His hair is gelled back and his skin is bleached.

‘Stay with me,’ he says, coaxing his congregation. ‘Stay with me, now. I’m getting there. I’m getting there. Oh, y’all thought I was already there? Y’all thought I was through delivering my message this morning? I haven’t even got started! I haven’t even got started with y’all yet!’

He ends with a wail and his congregation erupts in cheers. A man waves his Bible and a woman bends over and trembles.

Deola smiles. Nigerians are everywhere.

Tonight, she dreams she has accidentally murdered Dára and deliberately buried his remains in her backyard and she alone knows the secret. The police are searching for him and the newspaper headlines are about his mysterious disappearance. The newspapers spin around as they do in 1950s black-and-white films until their headlines blur. She wakes up and tosses for hours.

The next morning, she is still sleepy when she meets Anne in the lobby, but she tells Anne she is well rested. Anne grumbles about the price of her Starbucks latte on the way to the office and sips at intervals.

‘The problem is, I’m hooked on the stuff. And it’s not as if you can go cold turkey, because the temptation is everywhere.’

‘London has been taken over by Starbucks,’ Deola says.

She has heard some requests for a latte that are worth recording: ‘Grand-day capu-chin-know.’

‘That’s a shame,’ Anne says. ‘I’ll be there next month and I know I won’t be able to help myself.’

‘Isn’t Rio having their launch next month?’

‘Yes. I’ll be there for that.’

‘Do they have Starbucks over there?’

‘I hope not.’

The Atlanta office is also on Peachtree. People in the elevator glare at them as they hurry towards it – the usual disdain inhabitants of cramped spaces have, followed by a general shyness. They all look downward.

The reception wall has the logo of the foundation’s network, two linked forefingers. The office is mostly open-plan space with workstations. Deola meets Susan and Linda, who are also auditors. Susan is a CPA who trained with an accountancy firm and Linda has a banking background.

‘Don’t you think she sounds British?’ Anne asks them.

‘Well,’ Susan says, ‘there’s some Nigerian there.’

There is some Chinese in Susan’s voice. Her thick-rimmed glasses are stylish. Her jacket is too big for her and her slender fingers poke out of her sleeves.

‘I think she sounds British,’ Anne says.

‘She sounds like herself,’ Linda says.

Her braids are thin and arranged into a neat doughnut shape on her crown.

There is a Linda in every office, Deola thinks, who will not waste time showing a newcomer how much her boss annoys her. Why she remains with her boss is understandable. How she thinks she can get away with terrorizing her boss is another matter.

‘I should say English,’ Anne says. ‘What does British mean anyway? It could be Irish or Welsh.’

‘I don’t think Ireland is part of Great Britain,’ Susan says, blinking with each word.

‘Scottish, I mean,’ Anne says.

‘I can’t understand the Glaswegian accent,’ Deola says.

‘I couldn’t understand a word anyone said to me in Scotland,’ Anne says.

‘They probably wouldn’t understand a word we say over here,’ Linda says.

Deola notices leaflets on ‘commercial sex workers’ and is conscious of being between generations. Old enough to have witnessed some change in what is considered appropriate. Her colleagues walk her through their system and she reverts to her usual formality. They show her invoices, vouchers and printouts. It is not relevant that they are in the business of humanitarianism. There are debits and credits, checks and balances. Someone has to make sure they work and identify fraud risks, then make recommendations to the executive team.

As an audit trainee, she was indifferent to numbers, even after she followed their paper trails to assets and verified their existence. How connected could anyone be to bricks, sticks, vats and plastic parts? Her firm had a client who did PR for the Cannes Film Festival and it was the same experience working for them. With Africa Beat, the statistics on HIV ought to have an impact on her and they do, but only marginally. The numbers in the brochure are in decimals. They represent millions. The fractions are based on national populations. Deola knows the virus afflicts Africa more than any other continent, women more than men and the young more than the old. Her examination of the brochure is cursory. She has seen it before and it is the same whenever she watches the news. Expecting more would be like asking her to bury her head into a pile of dirt and willingly take a deep breath in.

Ali is a woman – or a Southern girl, as Anne refers to her. Her name is Alison. Deola doesn’t find out until later in the evening when Anne treats her to dinner at a Brazilian restaurant. Ali is from Biloxi, Mississippi, and she is a florist. Anne is from Buffalo, New York, and she used to be a teacher there. They don’t watch television.

‘We haven’t had one for … let’s see … five, six years now,’ Anne says. ‘We read the newspapers and listen to NPR to keep up with what’s going on.’

‘I watch too much television,’ Deola says.

She chides herself for finding belated clues in Anne’s stubby fingernails as Anne gesticulates, so she brings up the title of the Lifetime Movie Network film.

‘I thought, this has got be a joke. She woke up pregnant?’

‘The networks in general don’t credit women with any intelligence,’ Anne says. ‘Mothers especially.’

‘I can well imagine,’ Deola says.

Their table is under what looks like mosquito netting dotted with lights. Behind them is a fire with meat rotating on spits. The waiters wear red scarves around their necks and walk over once in a while with a leg of lamb, pork roast, filet mignon, scallops, shrimp and chicken wrapped in bacon. The bacon is more fatty than Deola is used to.

‘But we can’t decide who gets pregnant,’ Anne says. ‘So wouldn’t that be perfect if one of us wakes up and boom?’

Deola has finished eating her salad, but she picks at the remnants of her grilled peppers and mushrooms as the thought of artificial insemination diminishes her appetite. Or perhaps it is the realization that she might one day have to consider the procedure, if she remains single for much longer.

This is an unexpected connection to Anne, but she won’t talk about her own urge to nest, which has preoccupied her lately. Anne might regard what she has to say with anthropological curiosity: the African woman’s perspective.