Chimamanda Adichi - The Thing Around Your Neck

“Of course.” Kamara smiled again. Perhaps there might be time to go back down to the basement while Josh ate his dinner, perhaps Tracy would ask her to stay and she would call Tobechi and tell him there had been an emergency and she needed to take care of Josh overnight. The door that led to the basement opened. Kamara’s excitement brought a dull throbbing to her temples, and the throbbing intensified when Tracy appeared in her leggings and her paint-stained shirt. She hugged and kissed Josh. “Hey, you are my winner, buddy, my special winner.”

Kamara was pleased that Tracy did not kiss Neil, that they said “Hi, you” to each other as though they were brother and sister.

“Hey, Kamara,” Tracy said, and Kamara told herself that the reason Tracy seemed normal, not absolutely delighted to see her, was that she did not want Neil to know.

Tracy opened the fridge, took an apple, and sighed. “I’m so stuck. So stuck,” she said.

“It’ll be fine,” Neil murmured. And then, raising his voice so that Maren, in the den, would hear, he added, “You haven’t met Maren, have you?”

Neil introduced them. Maren extended her hand and Tracy took it.

“Are you wearing contacts?” Tracy asked.

“Contacts? No.”

“You have the most unusual eyes. Violet.” Tracy was still holding Maren’s hand.

“Oh. Thank you!” Maren giggled nervously.

“They really are violet.”

“Oh … yes, I think so.”

“Have you ever been an artist’s model?”

“Oh … no …” More giggles.

“You should think about it,” Tracy said.

She raised the apple to her lips and took a slow bite, her gaze never wavering from Maren’s face. Neil was watching them with an indulgent smile, and Kamara looked away. She sat down next to Josh and took a cookie from his plate.

The cabins all had thatch roofs. Names like Baboon Lodge and Porcupine Place were hand-painted beside the wooden doors that led out to cobblestone paths, and the windows were left open so that guests woke up to the rustling of the jacaranda leaves and the steady calming crash of the sea’s waves. The wicker trays held a selection of fine teas. At midmorning, discreet black maids made the bed, cleaned the elegant bathtub, vacuumed the carpet, and left wildflowers in handcrafted vases. Ujunwa found it odd that the African Writers Workshop was held here, at Jumping Monkey Hill, outside Cape Town. The name itself was incongruous, and the resort had the complacence of the well-fed about it, the kind of place where she imagined affluent foreign tourists would dart around taking pictures of lizards and then return home still mostly unaware that there were more black people than red-capped lizards in South Africa. Later, she would learn that Edward Campbell had chosen the resort; he had spent weekends there when he was a lecturer at the University of Cape Town years ago.

But she didn’t know this the afternoon Edward — an old man in a summer hat who smiled to show two front teeth the color of mildew — picked her up at the airport. He kissed her on both cheeks. He asked if she had had any trouble with her prepaid ticket in Lagos, if she minded waiting for the Ugandan whose flight would come soon, if she was hungry. He told her that his wife, Isabel, had already picked up most of the other workshop participants and that their friends Simon and Hermione, who had come with them from London as paid staff, were arranging a welcome lunch back at the resort. He and Ujunwa sat down on a bench in Arrivals. He balanced the sign with the Ugandan’s name on his shoulder and told her how humid Cape Town was at this time of the year, how pleased he was about the workshop arrangements. He lengthened his words. His accent was what the British called “posh,” the kind some rich Nigerians tried to mimic and ended up sounding unintentionally funny. Ujunwa wondered if he was the one who had selected her for the workshop. Probably not; it was the British Council that had made the call for entries and then selected the best.

Edward had moved a little and sat closer to her. He was asking what she did back home in Nigeria. Ujunwa faked a wide yawn and hoped he would stop talking. He repeated his question and asked whether she had taken leave from her job to attend the workshop. He was watching her intently. He could have been anything from sixty-five to ninety. She could not tell his age from his face; it was pleasant but unformed, as though God, having created him, had slapped him flat against a wall and smeared his features all over his face. She smiled vaguely and said that she had lost her job just before she left Lagos — a job in banking — and so there had been no need to take leave. She yawned again. He seemed keen to know more and she did not want to say more, and so when she looked up and saw the Ugandan walking toward them, she was relieved.

The Ugandan looked sleepy. He was in his early thirties, square-faced and dark-skinned, with uncombed hair that had tightened into kinky balls. He bowed as he shook Edward’s hand with both of his and then turned and mumbled a hello to Ujunwa. He sat in the front seat of the Renault. The drive to the resort was long, on roads haphazardly chiseled into steep hills, and Ujunwa worried that Edward was too old to drive so fast. She held her breath until they arrived at the cluster of thatch roofs and manicured paths. A smiling blond woman showed her to her cabin, Zebra Lair, which had a four-poster bed and linen that smelled of lavender. Ujunwa sat on the bed for a moment and then got up to unpack, looking out of the window from time to time to search the canopy of trees for lurking monkeys.

There were none, unfortunately, Edward told the participants later, as they ate lunch under pink umbrellas on the terrace, their tables pushed close to the railing so that they could look down at the turquoise sea. He pointed at each person and did the introductions. The white South African woman was from Durban, while the black man came from Johannesburg. The Tanzanian man came from Arusha, the Ugandan man from Entebbe, the Zimbabwean woman from Bulawayo, the Kenyan man from Nairobi, and the Senegalese woman, the youngest at twenty-three, had flown in from Paris, where she attended university.

Edward introduced Ujunwa last: “Ujunwa Ogundu is our Nigerian participant and she lives in Lagos.” Ujunwa looked around the table and wondered with whom she would get along. The Senegalese woman was the most promising, with the irreverent sparkle in her eyes and the Francophone accent and the streaks of silver in her fat dreadlocks. The Zimbabwean woman had longer, thinner dreadlocks, and the cowries in them clinked as she moved her head from side to side. She seemed hyper, overactive, and Ujunwa thought she might like her, but only the way she liked alcohol — in small amounts. The Kenyan and the Tanzanian looked ordinary, almost indistinguishable — tall men with wide foreheads who were wearing tattered beards and short-sleeved patterned shirts. She thought she would like them in the uninvested way that one likes nonthreatening people. She wasn’t sure about the South Africans: the white woman had a too-earnest face, humorless and free of makeup, and the black man looked patiently pious, like a Jehovah’s Witness who went from door to door and smiled when each was shut in his face. As for the Ugandan, Ujunwa had disliked him from the airport, and did so even more now because of his toadying answers to Edward’s questions, the way he leaned forward to speak only to Edward and ignored the other participants. They, in turn, said little to him. They all knew he was the winner of the last Lipton African Writers’ Prize, with an award of fifteen thousand pounds. They didn’t include him in the polite talk about their flights.