A Bit of Difference Read Online Free PDF

pencils. There is no other indication that she intends to remain here. She doesn’t even have a calendar yet.
    She leafs through the brochure of the NGO that supports widows, WIN—Women In Need. It was established in 1992. The print is blotchy and uneven in parts. The tabulation lines in the appendix are shaky and she comes across a statistic at the bottom: the average age of the widows is thirty-nine, her age.
    Great, she thinks, pulling a face.
    z
    For the rest of the morning, she revises her report on the Delhi trip and drafts an audit program for Africa Beat. Then she makes notes about her pending trip to Nigeria, listing the information she needs to request, contacts she has to make and when. She reads the literature on WIN, which is somewhat unfocused and suggests that women of childbearing age have the highest risk of HIV infection. The director, Rita Nwachukwu, is a former midwife.
    Graham comes to work looking quite pink. He is back from Guatemala. His bald patch is shinier. Deola only remarks on the weight he has lost. He offers donuts to everyone in the office in his usual defiant manner.
    â€œâ€™ere,” he says to her.
    There is sugar in his beard. Deola takes a donut and is careful to bite gently so the strawberry jam won’t leak on her shirt. They are in that section of the corridor between his office, hers and Kate’s. Kate walks out of her office and Graham presents the donuts to her.
    Kate flops her wrists. “Get those away from me.”
    Kate is a vegetarian and she practices yoga. She worries about gaining weight.
    â€œGo on,” Graham growls.
    â€œYou slob,” Kate says, brushing the sugar out of his beard with her fingers.
    Kate and Graham flirt incessantly. In private, Kate tells him off for eating junk food and he calls Kate an “eejit” if she mislays
reports. Today, Kate barely taps his arm after she cleans up his beard and he cries out, “Ow! Did you see that, Delia?”
    â€œI saw nothing,” Deola says, stepping back into her office.
    He sometimes slips up and calls her Delia. He also talks about his morning commutes in present tense, saying, “I’m driving down the street,” while she is thinking, No, you’re
not. You’re standing right here talking to me.
    She overhears Kate saying, “Graham, don’t!”
    This is another workplace symbiosis that amuses her, married employees seeking attention from each other, even when they are ill-matched. She has encountered other prototypes at LINK. They have their smiling woman who takes collections for birthdays and their peculiar man who looks bemused at every request, as if he alone in the world makes sense. There must be others like herself, walking around wondering if all their years of education should end in a dreary office, but they must be equally as skilled at putting on façades.
    Later in the day, Graham tells her he is flying off to Paris for a conference. Deola hasn’t been to Paris in years. The last time she was there, she was in university. It was during the Easter holidays and she stayed with her cousin, Ndidi, whose mother worked for UNESCO. She traveled overnight from Dover to Calais by Hoverspeed. It was freezing and there were drunken passengers on board singing football songs. Ndidi met her at Gare du Nord and took her to her aunt’s house in Neuilly. Ndidi had a Mohican haircut and had just bought herself a black leather jacket; Deola was in a red miniskirt, fishnet tights and thigh-high boots. How stylish they thought they were, kissing each other twice, and they laughed so hard that holiday that she peed in a chair at a crêperie.
    Why hasn’t she been back to Paris, she asks herself as she leaves the office in the
evening. At first, the Schengen visa put her off. For a Nigerian it was a byzantine application process if ever there was one. She got her British passport, then the Eurostar train began to run, then the terrorists