He banged the table. “Em, you’ll never guess what happened this morning. Thewildestthing.”
“Wilder than those people trying to walk through the wall nextto the secondhand bookshop last week?” Emma helped herself to a forkful of Nat’s broccoli. He never ate it. “Because that’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen. This term’s barely begun, and it’s already the weirdest one yet.”
“I can’t imagine how drunk they must have been. Their costumes were amazing, though, don’t you think? They almost looked real, the wings and hooves and all. Must have been an incredible fancy dress party.” He snorted. “I liked the one who asked if you wanted to bargain your hair for a month of good dreams.”
Emma shuddered and patted her hair. “I did not.”
Nat beamed. “Well, my thing today isfarwilder. The theatre just called. They’re recasting Tolstoy inThe Life of Tolstoy.The lead, Em! The director just found out that Atticus gave her chlamydia, apparently, so he’s out on his arse. Auditions tonight.”
“No!” said Emma. “Well, you should have got the part the first time round, anyway.”
Nat made her a bow over his broccoli. “This humble player dares to agree.”
Emma caught amused glances at their table. She sometimes wondered if the other café regulars found them an odd pairing. Nat so vibrant and dramatic, she so muted and practical. She might have thought so herself, once. Meeting her best friend had been a matter of pure chance. Or, as Nat liked to put it, the universe shoving two unlikely souls together for their own good.
In her first year, on her very first day at the University, Emma had tripped over a pair of impossibly long legs. They were stretched out behind a tree in the Gabriel College gardens. And because they were exactly, inconveniently placed where nobody would expect legs to be, both Emma and her bicycle had gone flying.
“That was not,” an unruffled voice had said, “what I expected you to do.”
Sharp eyes glinted behind wire-framed glasses. The hands that put his paperback aside were gentle, even pausing to put in a bookmark. The side part in his Afro was carefully straight.
“Well, you’re not the first and will not be the last to find me in the way of things. It is, alas”—a dramatic hand gesture—“my inescapable destiny.”
He stood, an operation not unlike a daddy longlegs trying to free itself from a pat of butter. Emma took the hand he offered to scramble up.
“Nat Oluwole. Not Nate. And if you call me Nathaniel, we will have strong words. Other than that, it’s generally a pleasure to make my acquaintance.” He picked up her bike and handed it to her.
Emma had felt the first real smile since she’d returned to England curve across her face.
Nat never ate a main course where dessert was available. His room was plastered with posters for obscure art-house films from the seventies. His father had risen to the highest echelons of that august British institution, the Church of England. But in the hushed corridors of power, over the clerical sherry parties and biscuits with parishioners, Femi Oluwole had found that to be Nigerian was to be considered too loud, too vivid. Too different. He had hushed his voice, banished even the stray Yoruba word from his vocabulary, filled his conversation with Wodehouse and Elgar. And he was surprised at how entirely he was then welcomed into the fold of insiders. To the bishop’s hat and the pulpit of Durham Cathedral. And so he had been anxious for his children to be as Englishas possible: boarding school, riding lessons, and a diet of toad-in-the-hole and roly-poly pudding. Nat’s extensive Nigerian family might have looked askance at the gangly youth in a Dickensian suit at family weddings, among a sea of cousins in agbadas or bright blazers. But the bishop gazed upon his two clever, well-connected children, who spoke only English and had never tasted jollof, and was satisfied he had made them safe.
Safe, however, was not a state Nat lived in comfortably. He had steadfastly hated every minute at Eton, fallen off every horse he had ever been put on, and, piece by piece, was trying to build himself a Nigerian education. An auntie slipped him some recipes on the side. And so, when he wasn’t rehearsing at the theatre, he was trying to teach himself to cook Yoruba food. The first time, he had looked at the recipe with a muttered “surely not,” then shaken his head and dumped in the prescribed whole pot of hot pepper. He and Emma had gone through a gallon of milk each to quench the fire in their throats, laughing and crying alternately. But now his okra jollof was legendary, and Emma’s spirits lifted when the scent of ewedu soup floated through the tower. Still, Emma would have eaten anything he put in front of her. It was so nice, finally, to have a real friend.
They had settled into a routine for their days that even their entry into second year had not shaken. And Tuesdays did not usually involve them turning right as they left the crypt café. Still less, heading over the Regent’s Bridge.
“Nat,whereare we going? We’ll end up at the University Library this way.”
“Wondered when you’d notice,” Nat said cheerfully. “Yes, Ineed to pick up some books, since it was cut off by the floods last week. I don’t know what you have against the place—”
“Never been. Don’t want to go.”
Nat whirled around. “What do you mean, you’ve never been to the Library?”
“I don’t see the point.”
“But that’s impossible. The set texts for your course—and extra reading—”
He looked quite ill.
“Why would I? I don’t actually read the books for my essays. It’s only law. I get some bits off Wikipedia and mash them up, and—” She sighed. “Well, if it’s not good, then it doesn’t matter. I am the dunce of the Law Department. They made a mistake when they let me in, one day they’ll find me out, and—”
“Nobody thinks they belong here,” Nat said, looping her arm through his. Leaves crunched beneath their feet, just beginning to turn. “It’s the great secret of this place. You spend the entire time waiting to be found out and sent home. And then you realize that everyone else was thinking the same thing all along.”
“You never,” Emma said.
“I always.” Nat groaned. “Could you live up to the bishop of Durham? When my father was here, he was a model young man. Beloved of the Theology Department. Head of a thousand serious societies. Forget telling him I’ve never set foot in the church youth group he recommended. The day he finds out I plan to abandon all serious professions to become an actor is the day his soul will crumple and die. I’ll never be able to face him. He’d be too kind and too disappointed.”
“You’ll tell him when you’re ready.”
