She set down her martini glass. “Nothing. Tell me about your job. What exactly do you do in that hotshot agency?”
“I wouldn’t call it a hotshot agency. I design logos, websites, virtual stores, that sort of thing.”
“Have you always wanted to be a graphic artist or is it too much of a cliché for me to ask?”
“Actually it isn’t. As a child the idea of bringing things to life intrigued me.” He jerked his head from right to left, as though warding off something. “I don’t want to romanticize things. How about you? Have you found a solution to third world poverty?”
“Haha. Very funny. That expression third world itself is misleading. How can China be a third world country because they have no freedom of the press and a second world country because they’re a rising global power?”
“I like this serious side of you.” He took her hand in his, sunk a finger into her palm. It was light enough to be spontaneous, yet it brought a glaze to her mind, a dampening to her façade. Now that he was actually with her, the questions that haunted her turned disruptive.
“I saw this movie the other day,” she said, slipping her hand out of his. “It’s confusing but I know it will win many awards.”
“What’s it called?”
“I don’t remember. Some French name.”
He took his time replying, and in the slight crease framing his mouth, she saw a sign that she didn’t quite measure up.
“I think it’s the new Michael Haneke film,” he said. “His work has a subtle depth many art-house productions lack.”
She didn’t know who Michael Haneke was. She glanced at the podium, certain he sensed her bewilderment. The rumba band had stopped playing. A few diners cheered and clapped.
Dafe sighed. “And here I was thinking everyone else wanted them to shut up.” He laughed and then she joined in, relieved that at least they could laugh at the same thing.
“This is me asking you if your uncle and your boyfriend would harass me if they suddenly walked in,” he said.
“My uncle won’t harass you.”
He made a mock show of studying her. “What kind of a boyfriend doesn’t mind if his girlfriend has dinner with another man?”
“A non-existent one.”
“Aha! The oracle hath spoketh.”
“If only I thought of myself in such grand terms. The thing is that relationships in Lagos are very transactional. It’s as if everybody is with somebody only because they want sex, money, and gifts.”
He smiled. “Don’t we all?”
They sat in silence, an easy silence, nothing like the one that struck whenever she strolled in Riverside, or studied in the topmost floor of the library, or stepped inside her room after a three hour seminar. A bow-tied waiter brought the bill. Dafe gave him a Visa card before she could open her purse. “You did that on purpose,” she said when the waiter left.
“Did what? This?” Dafe tapped the table. At the restaurant door, he threw out a hand in a playful sweeping gesture. “After you, young lady.”
The streets were slick and silent, hills of snow lining the sidewalk, someone dressed all in white hurrying past like a spectre. They waited at the bus stop, a curvy woman smoking in a corner, the amber glow of her cigarette flaring in the dark.
“I have a joint in my pocket,” Dafe said. “Care for a drag?”
She stopped, taken aback. “No, thanks. I don’t smoke.”
“Do you have anything against cigarettes or is it weed in particular you dislike?”
“I don’t have anything against both of them. I just don’t want to inhale secondhand smoke and get lung cancer or…” Her voice trailed off as he laughed his quiet laugh again.
“Lipe, I’m just pulling your legs,” he said.
There was, after that, a moment of them staring at one another. As the 25A pulled up he leaned in and kissed her, their tongues meeting fully, her thighs going slack. He pulled away first. She rode back to campus alone, turning to glimpse him standing by a Barclays poster, gloved hands half inside his trouser pockets.
* * *
Google threw up a list of design agencies. Lipe sat at her study table, clasping a mug of green tea, opening site after site. She dallied on one with a bright orange background, scanning the ‘Our Team’ page for details of Dafe, a photo or bio neither of which she found. Feeling somewhat squashed, she sent him a text: So I’m sitting here with this cup of tea and worrying that I’ve become more British than the British. She felt a pleasant shock when he replied, only minutes later: Something tells me there’s still hope for you. I had a good time the other night by the way. And thus began a sport of texting, her phone beeping in the Campus Kitchen or in a lecture theatre, clumsy flirting that made her smile to herself, Uzomma watching with an eerily straight face. There were no texts at night. He did not say why and she did not ask why. The unspoken took on the shape of a thorn, itching to prick her and release the fullness she bore like a medal.
“There must be over a thousand bunnies in this school,” she told him on the phone one evening. “Yesterday two of them scared me on Chancellor’s Drive.”
“Did you try to catch them?” he asked. “I succeeded once. Roasted the poor thing over a fire.”
“Dafe! Please tell me you’re not serious.” “I’m not serious.”
“I hear you. It’s against the law anyway. Almost everything is against the law in this country. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be arrested for not thanking the driver before I get off the bus. I can’t imagine thanking a danfo driver in Lagos. He’ll so abuse me.”
“I know, right? When I first came here I didn’t understand why people trekked with such glee. I told my cousin and the idiot said, ‘They’re not trekking; they’re walking.’”
“It’s true. In Nigeria the heat alone makes it impossible to call it anything but trekking,” It stunned her that he’d spoken so openly about himself. She lay flat on the bed, legs raised and crossed, before asking, “So when was this?”
“When was what?”
“When did you come to England?” “Seven years ago.”
The ease of the reply emboldened her. “So where is here? Where do you live?”
A pause. “Is this an interrogation?”
“Maybe. Don’t you think I deserve some answers?”
Another pause.
“Are you married?” she asked, hating the stilted words in her mouth.