A Bit of Difference by Sefi Atta

yet returned, which wasn’t a surprise. She ate the pork chops her mother had left in the warmer and went to bed. Her mother stayed up to watch April Love . She heard the theme song. It must have been eleven-thirty when the phone rang and her father answered it. It was Seyi’s father. He said Seyi and Lanre were in an accident on Kingsway Road, Lanre had lost consciousness and Seyi was lost. That was exactly how her father delivered the news: “Unfortunately, we have lost Seyi.”
    Lost him where? she thought.
    The Davises restricted Seyi’s funeral to family members. No one else was allowed to attend—not his godparents, not their friends, not even his friends from Saint Greg’s. Lanre was bedridden. He had a concussion and black eyes. Her parents went several times to pay their condolences at the Davises’ house, but their steward would open their door dressed in a white uniform and say, “Master and Madam are resting.”
    Seyi’s funeral caused a scandal in Lagos that summer. After the obituaries and tears, people began to abuse his father in private. They said he was too English. He didn’t know how to mourn properly. Her father saw him on the golf course practicing his swing. Her mother bumped into Mrs. Davis at Moloney Supermarket and was finally able to speak to her.
    Deola’s mother banned her from the club for the rest of the summer, so she didn’t know if Bandele went there or not, but the holiday ended and Bandele must have gone back to Harrow. She still didn’t know how to react to Seyi’s death, so she wrote a poem dedicated to him and buried it by the pawpaw tree in the backyard.
    She didn’t see Bandele again until she was in her final year in university. She met him at a black-tie dinner in Pall Mall. A mutual friend had her twenty-first birthday at a gentleman’s club there. The gentlemen looked like retired generals and diplomats. She spotted Bandele taking his surroundings a little too seriously and looking rather like a penguin. She asked him, “Aren’t you Bandele Davis?” He said, “I am, and who might you be?”
    He was with a blonde with puffy taffeta sleeves. Deola was with Tosan, who suggested to the blonde that if she really enjoyed lover’s rock, she ought to try a fantastic club in Hackney called the All Nations Club. Deola asked Bandele what he was studying. He said he was not in university; he was writing a novel. “A real one?” she exclaimed, thinking she didn’t know one Nigerian student who was writing books or bypassing university. “The question is, are novels real?” he asked, lifting his hand.
    Tosan was so convinced he was gay.
    z
    On Saturday evening, she arrives late at the bookshop. She has driven around Covent Garden trying to find a parking spot, and it has turned cold enough to wear a jacket. She rubs her bare arms as she hurries toward the entrance. There are globes and travel maps in the window. Indoors is a café where the reading is advertised on a poster. A few people from the reading are there: a woman with long frizzy hair, another with a gray ponytail and a navy wrap, and a man with a comb-over. The rest look half Deola’s age. They have dreadlocks and braids and are dressed in hip-hop clothes, ethnic prints and black. There is a lot of black (individualists always look as if they are in mourning). She stands out in her tracksuit; so does Bandele in his prim shirt and tie. His haircut belongs on an older face. He has a mischievous expression, but his eyes are subdued. It took him a while to find the right medication for his depression. One dried up his mouth and another bloated him up. They all make him lethargic. Most days he doesn’t get up until noon.
    â€œWhat’s this?” he asks, patting his chest. “You’re…”
    â€œDon’t start,” Deola says.
    She is wearing a new padded bra. A woman approaches him with a copy