At first when he began to call in the following weeks, it didn’t bother her that he said little, that he was simply content to let her speak. She told him things she couldn’t tell Uzomma to avoid being teased that she was strange, or soulless, or both—her shaming dependence on her uncle, her desire to get a part-time job in summer. It didn’t bother her, too, that they didn’t text each other. She grew accustomed to the rhythms of his world, the hums and whirrs and thuds that seeped through the phone. “I work in a design agency,” he once said. And one night when she called him in the Grad Bar, “Hey, I’m heading home. I’ll call you when I get there.” She didn’t ask where home was. This was England. She would accept things that she ordinarily wouldn’t accept. She wanted to ask if he was married, but the fear of his reply silenced her. She didn’t recall him wearing a wedding ring, which didn’t mean anything since most married men she knew wore no rings. It might have been much worse, even. Something she couldn’t handle. That he had immigration troubles. That he was a fraudster on the run from Interpol. That he was a marine spirit who emerged from the lake to save her. He was hiding something, she knew, but she didn’t want to be presumptuous. Dafe would talk when he wanted to talk. This thrilled her most, the inevitability of it.
Her uncle sent a large allowance. She bought a burgundy wrap dress in H&M, had her eyebrows threaded by a stern Middle Eastern woman, tried on a lace plunge bra in Ann Summers.
“I bet this sits just right on you,” the petite girl behind the counter said.
Lipe recognized her tone—that of the adulating salesperson. Still, the compliment pleased her so she hunted for more. “Yes, but the cups make my breasts look small.”
The petite girl made a little sound, a blend of a hum and a laugh, and handed Lipe a fuchsia shopping bag. “I wouldn’t worry about that if I were you.”
Lipe walked out of the mall to London Street where she stood outside GAP, marvelling at the low rise jeans in the display window. Nearby a spray-tanned man in a top hat and a beige overcoat started playing a fiddle. She made her way through the crowd that gathered and the pigeons that hopped along the pavement, down a lane she had never noticed before, and having nothing more to do, went to Cinema City and saw a subtitled French movie with baffling shots. It occurred to her that Dafe might like it. She pictured him slouched so low in the next seat that it seemed empty, turning now and then to whisper to her, his lips bumping into her cheek because he somehow missed her ear.
She tried on the lace plunge bra again in her room, peering into the mirror above the sink, examining her breasts to see what the store assistant saw. Dafe’s face sprang into imagined detail—the scant brows, the slanting eyes. A sudden and shocking desire seized up between her thighs.
Before a seminar that afternoon, she called him in the hallway.
“I was just thinking of you,” he said. “What were you doing while I was thinking of you?”
Lipe faltered. She’d only wanted to hear his voice, but suddenly felt shy.
“Shopping for clothes.”
“I can imagine. You’d look good without anything. In anything, I mean.”
His meaning was very clear. It lanced through her body, stoking her earlier desire.
“What did you buy?” he asked. “A nightie? Panties?
” “Someone is extending the handshake far past the elbow.”
“Oh, come on. Tell me.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, laughing, although she knew exactly what he meant.
“Your new panties. What colour are they?”
She lowered her voice. “Red.”
He drew out a groan. She ended the call and fled to her seat. She should have mentioned an unusual colour. Teal. Turquoise. Tangerine. She should have been louder, bolder. Across the table Uzomma stared at her, unblinking. As they left the seminar room, she said, “Lipe, I hope there is no problem.”
“No. Why?”
“You acted funny after that call. Was it a family member?”
Lipe kept on walking, but Uzomma paced her steps with hers so that she slowed down, from irritation more than submission. “No. Just a friend of a friend,” Lipe said.
* * *
Lipe leaned out of the kitchen window to watch her first snow. The whitening landscape deepened her disappointment. She hadn’t seen Dafe again. She hadn’t bumped into him anywhere. Not even in Asian Bazaar where Nigerian and Sudanese men crept up to her and murmured, “Hey baby,” as she searched through filmy bags of ugu in the freezer. In Lagos, friends would have introduced her to another man. A man in Banking or Telecoms who would buy her expensive gifts and expect to fuck her of course.
After her arrival in England, she had kept up with the happenings at home, exchanging frantic BlackBerry messages about the colleague whose boyfriend bought her a new car, a pretentious girl whose wedding appeared on Bella Naija, the secondary school classmate in her second marriage. She soon grew weary of the glaring superficiality, of the stories made up with only ego at stake, creating a contest she no longer cared about winning. She cancelled her BlackBerry subscription, claiming to be laden with school work. Now here was Dafe, the first man in a long time who made her feel she deserved to win. Dafe, to whom it seemed things were given without him having to ask. It was this, his easy sense of entitlement, that held her back from suggesting they meet again. The very idea of asking him out brought a whirl of nausea to her throat. She willed him to say what she wanted him to say. She would ignore his calls to make him pine. Only whenever her phone rang, and she heard his soft, “Hey you,” something lurched under her skin and the shell of her resolve cracked.
What she wanted to hear became a new obsession. She sifted his words. “I’ll call you tomorrow evening,” meant he would be with another woman throughout the day. “I’m in the pub with my guys,” meant he didn’t want his so-called guys to know of her existence. And when he asked, late in February, if she was free on Saturday night, she was so preoccupied with her search for other meanings that she missed the question. It took a repetition for her to say yes. A muted yes to mask her eagerness. But in the Cuban restaurant with chesterfield sofas, her voice was anything but muted as a rumba band played on the podium. Dafe wore a sleek black blazer, his hair close-shaven, his chin sprouting a goatee. They had burritos and tortilla chips, she doing her best to keep her lip gloss intact, he gazing at her in a way that made no attempt to be discreet.
“Why do you keep doing that?” she asked. “What?”
She mimicked his expression.
He laughed quietly. “Only serial killers do that.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
“Apart from the fact that I’m not a serial killer? Yes.”
She sipped her strawberry daiquiri to calm herself. She wondered, if she were to pull down her panties, how he would react, what he would say. She hadn’t even worn the lace plunge bra. It made bumpy patterns on her burgundy wrap dress.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked.