LITMIR.BIZ

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never used lotion. That was a joke between them: his legs and arms looked as if he’d been carrying cement. Of course he denied he was sleeping with someone else and she chose to believe him, but they fought. They fought when he arrived late on Saturday nights and when he left early on Sundays, supposedly to play football in Hyde Park: Nigerians versus Iranians. Mostly they fought over the money he still owed her. ‘Where is my money for bloody Burn This?’ she would ask. Or, ‘Where is my money for frigging Hamlet?’ One night he said, ‘Stop shouting. You’re always shouting. There is no need to shout.’ So she punched him. She never believed she had a right to hit a man with impunity and she didn’t stop him when he walked out. The next day she donated the Kundera novels he’d lent her to charity and threw out his soukous, kwassa kwassa (or whatever it was called) cassette tapes.

      He was sleeping with someone she knew. Not a close friend but it left her with a misplaced distrust, of which she was not proud, because it wasn’t proper to talk about the treachery of women. She ate a lot of jellybeans and played sad Sade songs. She saw Tosan again, at a party, and rather than admit what he’d done, he went on about sexuality, or was it Eros? Yes, it was. Eros was at the root of politics, religion and art, he said.

      She has since had other boyfriends. One was so passive she went as far as to shake his shoulders, pretending that she was joking and hoping she might get a reaction out of him. Another reminded her too much of her mother. On the first date, he was going on about looking for a woman who was marriage material. Another was a liar. Not even a serious liar. He lied about acquaintances and name-dropped people he didn’t know. It became awkward.

      These days, she no longer goes out on dates and she rarely gets an invitation. Her married friends throw parties for their children. The last time she was with a group of them was at a seventh-day ceremony. The couple, both Nigerian dentists, hired a rabbi to carry out their son’s circumcision because they couldn’t get one done at the hospital where he was born. The wife burst into tears and the husband made some suggestive comment, which Deola ignored for fear of being labelled a home wrecker.

      She wishes she had been more adventurous. For her, there will be no chance meetings in bars or sex with strangers. Within the social network to which she belongs, love is so contained, so predictable, and marriage might be as banal and unsatisfying as her career.

      During the week, Bandele calls. She hasn’t heard from him in months. He either bombards her with phone calls or avoids her phone calls. She fondly refers to him as her grumpy writer friend. She is getting undressed when her phone rings. She stands before the mirror in her bedroom as she speaks to him, stripped down to her underwear, and pulls her stomach in.

      ‘My love,’ she says.

      ‘Old Fanny,’ he says.

      His voice is hopelessly public school. It sounds like one low rumble of thunder after another. She panics as she inspects her back view. Is her arse beginning to sag or is it just the way she is standing? It looks uncertain, like an uncertain arse asking, ‘When?’ as if it won’t be long before she gets the answer everyone dreads, ‘Soon.’

      She tells him about her new job and he says he is trying to get published.

      ‘You are?’

      ‘It surprised me, too. “Never, again”, remember? Now, I’m back to submitting work. And I’ve been short-listed for an African writers prize.’

      ‘Hey!’

      ‘No “hey”. I don’t want to make a fuss or anything. You know, in case it doesn’t work out. It’s been a bit nerve-wracking. We’ve had all these readings lined up.’

      ‘You took part?’

      ‘I had no choice. The last one is on Saturday, near Calabash. Remember Calabash?’

      ‘Sure.’

      It was a restaurant at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden. She saw him read there when he published his first novel, Sidestep. He stuttered a lot, which was unusual for him. Readings made him nervous and back then he didn’t want to be associated with African writers.

      He says he found out about the competition through an online forum for Nigerian intellectuals, which he ended up leaving because they kept getting into tribal spats. He had not encountered Nigerians like them before: people who were capable of debating about Derrida and Foucault, but unable to contain their primal urges to clan up and wage war.

      ‘They were a vile bunch.’

      ‘Sounds like it. So where is this reading, then?’

      ‘A bookshop.’

      ‘I’ll meet you there,’ she says.

      ‘Meet me afterwards,’ he says. ‘These things can be tedious and it will be impossible to talk.’

      He gives her the address.

      ‘I’ll pick you up,’ she says. ‘Let’s say nine? We can go somewhere. I want to hear what you’ve been up to. What were you short-listed for anyway?’

      ‘A novel. The first five thousand words. The winner gets ten thousand pounds and a book contract.’

      ‘Wow! What’s the title?’

      ‘Foreign Capitals.’

      ‘That’s a good one,’ she says, though she is not sure.

      ‘Yeah?’

      ‘Yes. I can feel it. You will win.’

      ‘Thanks. I needed to hear that.’

      ‘See you soon.’

      She takes a bath before she goes to bed. Her bathwater is lukewarm. She spreads her legs and arches her back. She has missed the weight and warmth of a man. Sometimes, she climaxes in her dreams and she looks at children differently, as if they could be hers. She brushes against her walls for contact.

      When she met Bandele, she couldn’t have imagined they would be friends. She had a crush on his elder brother, Seyi. Seyi was her brother Lanre’s friend. They were dayboys at Saint Gregory’s College when she was a boarder at Queen’s College. She overheard senior girls talking about them. They were cool Greg’s guys, heavy, dishy guys.

      The summer after Form Three, Seyi showed up at the house. He was gorgeous in his white uniform, tall, and he didn’t have those weak calves that Nigerian boys had. Even her mother was taken. ‘Such a lovely boy,’ she said, ‘the Davis boy.’ His nickname was ‘Shaft in Africa’. His father was a retired labour minister and his mother had a boutique at Federal Palace Hotel.

      That holiday, Seyi drove his mother’s old Mini around. He and Lanre would somehow squeeze themselves into it and find their way to Ikoyi Club to play squash and chase chicks. Seyi called Lanre ‘Whizzy’, after a song by a Greg’s band that landed a record deal with EMI. Lanre wasn’t allowed to drive and he always refused to give Deola a lift. ‘The driver will take you,’ he would say. ‘Wait for the driver.’

      She would have to wait until the driver returned from whatever errand he was on. She would get to the club late in the afternoon and find Seyi and Lanre smoking and drinking beer in the rotunda. Lanre would stub out his cigarette, as if she were likely to tell on him, and Seyi would sit there looking amused and red-eyed.

      Seyi played in squash tournaments with middle-aged brigadiers. Sometimes she watched him play pool in the games room. Under-eighteens were not allowed in, but they bribed the waiters and, during the day, anyone else who might report them was at work. Seyi would prowl around pool tables in his worn-out T-shirts and jeans. He drank beer from bottles and bent low to shoot.

      He was just a boy and someone ought to have talked to him about drinking. Once he saw her at the newsagent and announced, ‘My sweetheart,’ and hugged her. He was drunk again and she held him tightly, but that was as far as she went with him. He had a girlfriend called Tina, whose mother was Jamaican. Her hair reached her shoulders, so he and other guys made a fuss about her.

      Then one day, Bandele came

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