A Bit of Difference (11 page)

They were the Ikoyi crowd and those who were in school abroad were “Aways.” There was some resentment and contempt for them, but she never thought they should be held in awe as they sometimes were. She still doesn't because she has seen their ineptitude rather than elitism. They have access to the best Nigeria can offer, the best education and professional training the world over. Yet they can't get the country to function, or even preserve their little havens, like Ikoyi, which keeps on deteriorating.

Of the Ikoyi crowd, she is one of the few living abroad. The rest fly in and out and educate their children overseas. In the summer, they go on family holidays to get away from the rain. Dubai is the latest destination because Nigerians love to shop. They say things are bad in Nigeria, but there is money in the oil industry despite the grand larceny that goes on. There is money in the telecommunications and banking industries. There is money in the churches and non-governmental organizations. There is money for those who own their own professional practices. And for those who do not care to go through the normal apprenticeships or be burdened with public accountability, there are political positions in the Third Republic.

z

The hotel is a guesthouse. Its sense of intimacy remains intact despite its conversion into separate suites. It has modern stone walls and hardwood floors, a gym, a bar and an outside swimming pool. She can visualize a family living here, walking up and down the stairs and sitting at the dining table to eat. The other guests she sees in the lounge are diverse: there is a couple, Belgian most likely, who have adopted a Nigerian girl. The girl could pass for a boy. She wears denim shorts and her hair is shaved. There is an elderly black American woman who looks like an artist. She is dressed in a tie-dyed
boubou
and her hands are stained with paint. A young Nigerian guy, probably on a business trip, talks on his cell phone while keeping an eye on his laptop. At the reception, a Hausa man checks out. An
oyinbo
woman with bleached hair accompanies him. She is dressed in a short, tight dress. Jaiye says she is a call girl.

After Deola checks in, Jaiye says she has to go back and pick up her children before returning home. She doesn't want to get caught in the traffic to the mainland. Deola sits with Lanre in the lounge and they get into a childish argument when he comments on his wife's weight.

“Eno's just getting fatter and fatter.”

“What is wrong with you?”

“But she is.”

“Why are you so wicked to the woman?”

“She's not taking care of herself.”

“Isn't she taking care of your children?”

“Wait until you see how fat she is.”

“Look at your stomach!”

“It's the fish and chips she keeps feeding me!”

“Isn't fish and chips what you wanted?”

Lanre denies it, but Deola remembers how he and Seyi went crazy for the girls with foreign blood: half English, half Jamaican, half bloody Cameroonian.

Eno's mother is English. Her father, a pediatrician, died when Eno was young and her mother remained in Nigeria. Eno was raised on fish and chips.

“She can't cook, man,” Lanre says. “And she never uses enough pepper.”

Deola sighs. “Let's change the topic. I don't want to hear any more of this.”

These clashes with her brother are inevitable. So also is his way of calling her “man,” as if she is an honorary one and ought to side with him. It is discomforting to be in a hotel with a man. The staff avert their eyes as if she is guilty of impropriety.

Lanre says Trust Bank is planning another share offer and advises Deola to buy more shares. The value keeps rising and the bank declares a dividend every year. She asks about Summit Bank, Nigeria, which has recently collapsed.

“Their directors were using the bank vault as their personal stash of cash,” Lanre says.

“Their auditors must have known.”

“Auditors,” he says dismissively.

He tells her Summit Bank was heavy with unsecured loans and buckling under bad debts as its directors misappropriated funds. Deola's threshold of morality drops. You cannot complain about corruption in Nigeria, she thinks. You dare not. Members of your family are corrupt, some of your best friends are corrupt. The only people who claim they are not corrupt have not had an opportunity to be corrupt, which is why they complain. They feel cheated in the midst of all the corruption around them.

When she worked for Trust Bank, she would get anxious about some of the bank's clients, which included corrupt politicians and dictators. She would ask her father, “But isn't he…?” unable to finish her question, “one of the biggest thieves in Nigeria?” And her father would answer, “This is business. There is no such thing as clean money.”

It is incredible to her that anyone bothers to follow laws in Nigeria. They are optional. Lanre says the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is cracking down on corruption, but the Summit Bank directors have not been charged and their depositors and investors are still trying to recover their funds. He then drifts into the usual about how difficult life in Nigeria is and soon he, too, says he has to leave.

“Why are you running away?” she asks.

“Armed robbers,” he says.

“Is it that bad?”

“Are you joking? My colleague at work, they woke him and his wife up with machetes. Just last week, they were shooting down the road from me.”

“You'd better go,” she says.

z

She was partial to Lanre when she was a ten-year-old. His games were a change from “Red Rover” and “Not Last Night but the Night Before.” She shared his interest in superhuman heroes who battled evil and saved the world. He was Batman and she was Robin. He always had to be the one who jumped out of hiding places, shouting “
achtung,
” but she didn't mind falling down and playing dead for him. He thought she was tough for a girl— until she developed breasts. Then she became Triple Six and Moaner Lisa.

Lanre knew things: why planes flew longer in one direction and how fast piranhas could devour a human body. If he didn't feel like answering her questions, he would curve his arm and say, “Ask-ology is the science of asking questions.”

The summer after Seyi died in the car crash, Lanre began to surround himself with boys who were notorious for smoking marijuana. He was sixteen. Her parents had no clue. Lanre was smoking at home in his bedroom, out of the window and using towels to block the draft under his door. He was also sleeping and eating more than usual. Her father was at work for most of the day and if ever Lanre got into trouble, he would say, “Leave the boy alone. He's been through a lot.”

Lanre got suspended before the Christmas holiday, for sneaking out of school with friends, then during the following Easter break one of his friends ran down a motorcyclist. There was a court case, which was covered in the newspapers. Her father found out that the defendant in question was the same boy who kept showing up at their house, as if he had no parents to answer to, secretly bearing videos like
Emmanuelle
and
I Spit
on Your Grave
because he couldn't watch them on the Betamax in his house. He could recite every line of Dr. Fritz Fassbender's in
What's New Pussycat?
and of Popeye Doyle's in
The French Connection
.

Her father chased Lanre around the sitting room with a cane, warning him with each stroke, “I, must, not, see, any of those louts in this house again. I have given you a long rope and you will not hang me with it.”

“I'm depressed,” Lanre yelled.

“You are not depressed,” her father said. “You're stupid and I will kill you before you end up killing yourself or someone else.”

Her mother begged, “Sam, don't beat my son. Please, don't beat my son,” which was odd because only a few years ago, all Lanre needed to do was loiter in any part of the house and it was whack, whack, whack from her before she even asked, “What are you doing here?”

Lanre cried out, “I'm not a donkey,” gave her father a hind kick in the groin, and claimed it was a muscle spasm.

It wasn't funny then. Deola and Jaiye were in tears upstairs. They didn't speak to her father for days. Once he recovered, her father walloped Lanre for all the times he wanted to and didn't, walloped him in anticipation of more wrongdoings. He walloped Lanre so that he might not end up harming himself by drinking and driving, then he decided to send Lanre to school abroad for his A levels, to stop
him
from getting out of control.

Her father suggested that Deola go abroad for her O levels so that Lanre wouldn't be alone. Deola didn't mind, but Lanre was at Concord College in Shrewsbury and they hardly saw each other until the holidays, when they flew back to Lagos together on British Airways, usually not on speaking terms. Her father had them in separate schools intentionally, so they would learn to appreciate each other, which they did.

When Lanre turned seventeen, he was allowed to drive, but he was not allowed to go to Ikoyi Club without taking her. Perhaps her parents thought she might keep him in check, but she would sit with him and his new friends in the club rotunda as they drank beer and talked about girls: who was fat, who was loose and who got
bensched
. She joined in with them because she despised girls, who were turning against her. One cow who was at Roedean, where Jaiye later went to school, would walk up to her, tap her nose and say, “Powder.”

It was a confusing time. Eno was a skinny girl in drainpipe jeans. She was in her final year at Holy Child College in Lagos. Lanre called her “A Taste of Honey” because she looked like the bassist in the band, but he was two-timing with her classmate, who, according to Jaiye, had such a terrible reputation her name was an adjective and a verb. Jaiye was a junior girl at Holy Child. Lanre would ask her and Deola to lie to Eno whenever Eno called. Deola noticed how her mother took pleasure in announcing, “Lanre,
one
of your girlfriends is on the phone,” and how his friends made comments like, “You know, Deola, you'd be all right, if you'd only just learn to shut up.”

They were not interested in her in that way. They called her “Small Girl” because she was a couple of years younger. She didn't socialize much with boys her age because their mothers would think she was loose. She tried to and one mother said, “Don't ever call this house again.” Another asked, “Why don't you wait for him to call you?”

She couldn't come to terms with why these mothers who had once patted her head now considered her a temptress, and she began to size up Lanre's friends who judged girls by their looks. One had a bottom as wide as the wings of a Boeing 747 and the other was as short as Tattoo on
Fantasy Island
. She stopped sitting with them and tried to form friendships with girls who were not vicious, but they were too goody-goody for her. They wouldn't even talk to boys. It was like belonging to the Scripture Union after a while, and she also lost patience with Eno, who stayed with Lanre even though he continued to two-time her—or have shows on the side, as he called it.

With Jaiye it was different. Deola didn't get along with Jaiye from the start. She bullied Jaiye. Her earliest memory of Jaiye was of her holding a stick with a piece of banana ice pop, crying, “It's not fair, you took the bigger half.” Jaiye was always crying and telling. On Sundays, Deola had to oil Jaiye's hair and she hated doing that. Jaiye would cry, “It's paining me,” and Deola would push her head. Jaiye would howl even louder, until her mother would come in and threaten to box Deola's ears or to throw her down the stairs.

She fought off other kids who called Jaiye names or tried to beat her up only because she considered that a personal affront. “You wounded my sister?” she would say smacking her chest. “I'll kill you!”

Jaiye grew up and began to preen and read magazines like
Vogue
and
Harpers & Queen
and Deola would order, “Read a book.” She thought Jaiye was in danger of becoming vain. She would call Jaiye “Popular J,” popular jingo, to tease her, and Jaiye would call her “Over Z,” overzealous, to retaliate.

Jaiye started going out with Funsho, and Funsho had several shows on the side. His excuse was that girls were constantly hounding him. Funsho was known as a fine boy at University of Lagos. Two of the hottest Unilag chicks had got into a physical fight over him. Jaiye would walk into parties and stare her rivals down. She married Funsho soon after she graduated from the medical school. Deola could have told her that was a bad idea, but she didn't want to be accused of being overzealous, or worse, jealous. Lanre wouldn't discuss the matter, and her mother immediately began to plan a wedding, though her father didn't approve of Funsho. “I don't think that boy is capable of kindness,” he once said.

Her father was capable of kindness. He would get her mother wet towels whenever she had headaches. He would shell her mother's pistachios and indulged her long-term infatuation with Harry Belafonte. “Your boyfriend is on television again,” he would say and her mother would squeal, “Ooh!”

Jaiye was Daddy's girl. He called her “Doc.” He was worried that her marriage to Funsho would not last. He gave them the house in Ikeja as a wedding present anyway, but he made sure the house was in Jaiye's name alone.

Funsho, at least in the beginning of his marriage to Jaiye, was capable of going out at night and not coming back until morning. Deola told Jaiye to speak up and Jaiye did, quoting her. “You see?” Funsho said. “That is why your sister is not married. Her mouth is too big for her own good.”

z

This evening, there is a pleasant smell in the foyer of the hotel, like meat pies baking in an oven. Deola takes a bath and changes into sweatpants before coming downstairs for dinner. The tables in the restaurant are laid out with screen-print cloth and several paintings by local artists hang on the walls.