On Monday morning she wakes up with menstrual cramps. They have worsened since she went off the pill a year ago. Her stomach is bloated and the bacon she eats doesn’t help. She takes a couple of Panadols with her orange juice, knowing that she shouldn’t, and goes to work by tube. Her stop is Wembley Park Station. She crosses Bridge Road and begins her long walk past Wembley Stadium and Mama Calabar, a Nigerian restaurant. Sometimes she hops on buses instead of walking and on cold wet days she drives in. The weather is warm for a change. LINK is on the second floor of an office block, which Kate Meade once described as a rabbit warren. This morning Kate is lamenting about dust in the ducts. They worsen her allergies during the summer and she is also trying to cope with nausea.
‘Even the smell of my deodorant makes my stomach turn,’ she says.
‘Gosh,’ Deola says.
‘I blame Pam,’ Kate says, with an air of spite. ‘The last time she was pregnant, I got pregnant. Now, she’s away on maternity leave and I’m pregnant again. Keep away from Pam, I tell you.’
Deola shakes her head in sympathy. Kate is in that crazy hormonal phase.
‘What did you think of Atlanta?’ she asks, sitting behind her desk.
Kate’s fringe has grown so long it covers her brows. Her glasses are steel-rimmed and round. Forlorn is the only way to describe her. Behind her is a grey filing cabinet, on top of which are piles of yellow clasp envelopes and a framed close-up photograph of her daughter cuddling the cat that gave her toxoplasmosis.
‘It wasn’t bad,’ she says.
‘It’s a funny city, isn’t it?’
‘A little.’
‘It’s Southern, yet it’s not. I don’t expect you had much time to see it.’
‘Not much.’
Kate grew up in Liverpool, which is noticeable whenever she says a word like ‘much’.
‘Everything is enormous there,’ Kate says. ‘The buildings, the roads.’
‘Wal-Mart.’
‘Their cars! Did you see the size of the trucks they drive over there?’
‘I did.’
Kate spreads her arms. ‘It’s incredible. You have these huge trucks and there’s always a little woman at the wheel.’
‘Always little women,’ Deola says.
A wave of tiredness threatens her. At work, she plays up her English accent – speaking phonetics, as Nigerians call it – so that people might not assume she lacks intelligence. Speaking phonetics is instinctive now, but only performers enjoy mimicking. Performers and apes.
‘Everything is enormous in America,’ Kate says. ‘Everything except, of course …’
Kate taps her temple. She has a master’s degree in international relations and prides herself on being knowledgeable about what goes on in the Hague. She has never named her university, calls herself a grammar school girl, but she is quick to point out her husband went to Bedales and studied physics at Cambridge. He has a Ph.D. and has received grants for his research. He is an inventor. Kate is the second most frequent traveller in the office. Her trips are fieldwork related. Graham, the overall executive director, is more the photo-op guy. He attends conferences and summits and deals with the trustees. Kate stands in during his prolonged absences.
‘I’m sorry,’ Kate says. ‘I shouldn’t have said that, but they can be a little thick across the pond.’
‘No need to apologize,’ Deola says.
She is amused whenever the English denigrate Americans. She attributes it to inverted admiration. In America, she was astonished to see how many of them were on television, teeth fixed and playing up their Englishness or speaking with American accents, acting so colonized.
‘I can’t bear to listen to their views on this stupid war and I hate the way they keep saying “I rack” and “I ran”. At least try and get the name right if you’re going to bomb another country to smithereens’.
At the beginning of the Falklands War Deola thought the word was ‘Forklands’. She was in her A-level year in England and was of the impression that only members of the Green Party and Save the Whales got upset about wars. Weirdos, basically.
This war is different. Everyone she knows in London is outraged. Everyone wants to win the debate, which has become a separate war. Strangers are co-opting her as an ally, including a drunken man who was seated next to her on the tube. He tapped a headline and said, stinking of beer, ‘We have no business being over there.’ Lines must also have been drawn because she has not met a person who is for the war. Not one. They might not even exist. They might be on CNN to rile up viewers and raise ratings for all she knows. But she is sometimes convinced, watching the dissenters, that this is their chance to make like rebels, now that the backlash is not as severe as it was when their opposition could perhaps have had some effect.
Kate slaps the table. ‘Anyway, your trip to Nigeria.’
‘Yes?’
‘Think you’ll be ready in a couple of weeks?’
‘Sure.’
The Nigerian programmes are not pressing enough to warrant Kate’s change to a brisk tone, but Deola plays along. The timing was her idea. She asked to go in the week of her father’s memorial, without revealing why.
Her father died five years ago. She was the last in her family to find out. He was playing golf when he became dizzy. His friends rushed him to hospital. They didn’t know he had high blood pressure. Her mother called to say he’d suffered a stroke. She got on the next flight to Lagos, but her father died before her plane arrived. She would have liked to have a sign that he had died, a white dove, anything as she flew over the Atlantic and the Sahara. Nothing. Not even an intuitive feeling, unless she could count the unrelenting pain in her stomach, which she couldn’t suppress by repeating prayers.
‘So where are we?’ Kate asks. ‘How long do you think you might need over there?’
‘A week at most.’
‘Is that all?’
Deola nods. She intends to finish her work in a couple of days and spend the rest of the time with her family.
‘Good,’ Kate says. ‘So here is their correspondence, lit and stats. Their presentation is not very polished, but I understand printing is a problem over there. Plus, it’s not about their presentation, really. I’m more interested in their accounts and the rest of it.’
Kate is brilliant with statistics, but she has no clue about accounting. Debit this, credit that, as she calls it.
‘Would you like me to visit their sites?’ Deola asks.
‘No. We’re just at the preliminary phase. I will have to go there at some point, but that’ll be much later, after I’m over this.’ Kate pats her belly.
‘It’s best you don’t travel until then,’ Deola says.
‘I don’t mind the travelling. I just don’t need to be falling sick again.’
‘Malaria is the one to watch out for in Nigeria.’
‘So I’ve heard. I’ve also heard the pills make you psychotic. I think I would rather have malaria.’
‘You wouldn’t,’ Deola says.
She has had malaria many times. The new strains are resistant to treatment.
‘Mind you,’ Kate says. ‘Toxoplasmosis was no picnic. Here, take a look.’