Free A Bit of Difference by Sefi Atta

her to see the High Priestess, Nina Simone, at Ronnie Scott’s?
    â€œYou know who I’d really love to play?” Tessa says.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œPiaf. But I’m too tall to play her. She was tiny, Piaf.”
    Tessa as Édith Piaf doesn’t surprise Deola as much as Tessa as a housewife. Tessa gave Peter an ultimatum before he agreed to get married. He is six years younger than Tessa and his father is not pleased about that. Peter’s mother died of melanoma when he was a boy and he and his father are more like brothers. They get drunk together, which Tessa at first thought was sweet. Now she says it’s unsavory.
    â€œWhat made you change your mind?” Deola asks.
    Tessa wipes her fingers on a napkin. “About?”
    â€œYou know.”
    â€œI’m ready,” Tessa says. “I want the husband, the kids, the whole lot.”
    Deola thinks of the clapping and skipping games she learned as a girl and chants like “When will you marry? This year, next year” and “First comes love, then comes marriage.”
    â€œI know we’ve been brainwashed,” Tessa says, reading her skeptical expression. “It’s biological. I don’t want to wait until I have fossils for eggs.”
    â€œPlease don’t mention eggs around here.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œThere’s no hope for mine.”
    â€œDon’t be silly, darling.”
    â€œSeriously. There’s no one in London.”
    â€œWhat do you mean? There’s someone. There’s someone else.”
    A group of Japanese tourists are walking past. One stops to take a photograph with his Canon camera.
    How to begin? Deola thinks. The closest she got to talking to Tessa about race was telling Tessa she danced well, considering. Tessa, of course, thought Deola was a fantastic dancer. Deola didn’t dance that well, just better than other girls in school, who danced out of rhythm. Tessa got curious about the word “ oyinbo, ” having overheard other Nigerians using it and it was awkward for Deola to confess it meant
white, Westerner, Westernized,, foreign. Tessa blushed. The British won’t have any of that, stirring up stuff.
    â€œYou must have had an image of what your prince looked like when you were a girl,” Deola says.
    â€œI’m sure I did,” Tessa says.
    â€œWell, mine was no Englishman.”
    Tessa laughs. “What?”
    â€œI want to be with a Nigerian.”
    â€œOh, don’t be daft.”
    â€œIt’s a preference.”
    â€œDon’t be daft, darling. Who ends up with her prince anyway?”
    Deola gesticulates. “It’s about… having a shared history.”
    In her college days, who wanted to be the odd one with the oyinbo boyfriend at a party, explaining to him, “Yes, yes, we like our music this loud. No, no, we don’t make conversation, we just dance”?
    You were either pathetic or lost if you were with an oyinbo boy. She never went out with any in school. She had crushes. There was the
golden-haired American tennis player and the Welsh rugby player with bowlegs. Tessa went out with a pimply pseudo-intellectual who walked around with a paisley scarf wrapped around his neck. He seemed harmless enough until he spread a rumor that Tessa stuck her tongue so far down his throat she practically extracted his tonsils.
    In a way, Deola was glad she was saved from that nonsense: who fancies whom and who got off with whom. Boys called her “mate” and slapped her on the back. They might have wanted to hug her, but it was safer if she were one of the lads. Sometimes they introduced her to a Nigerian boy who came to their school for an away game. They would endorse him as “good fun,” mispronounce his name (“Addy Babby Lolly”) and no matter how unattractive she found him, they would grin at him, and her, as if expecting them to copulate.
    She concentrated on studying for her O