The Grand Scheme of Things by Warona Jay

Author:Warona Jay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: FOOTNOTE
Published: 2024-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

xiv

An Ideal World

March 2018

“Look who’s here! If it isn’t Baby Suga herself!”

“Morning, peasant.” I strolled into the BABBLE office on a Monday, pain au chocolat and coffee in hand.

“Every day I ask myself why you’re still here.” My desk neighbour Franki sighed, spinning her chair to face me as I sat down. “You know damn well you could be in Dubai right now.”

“With their human rights record? Never.”

“Point is, you could be anywhere but here. If I had a meal ticket like you, I would.”

“You may find it hard to believe, but true love can prevail!”

“Not in this economy.”

“We’re working at a feminist publication. Where is your integrity, Frances Gao?”

“She comes and goes as she pleases,” she said with a shrug, and I laughed in response. The banter between us was seamless and easy, and from the moment I started working here it had been this way. Like a moth to a flame, I was drawn to her. It was a relief to finally have something to show for myself in the form of a nine-to-five, but even more of a relief that it was something I enjoyed, and with people I could tolerate.

A week after Blue and I broke up, she came to my house in Woolwich to bring me an IKEA bag of all the stuff I had left at hers. I found myself bawling in my room as I sifted through it. Not only had I broken her heart, but I had broken my own. I thought back to the times when I’d shut her out, afraid of how she’d see me if she knew what I genuinely thought of my chances at success. How I hid the play from her in the hopes that I could keep the evil eye at bay, or how I failed to tell her about the moniker changes. I wondered if patience and faith would have taken me just as far, with Blue championing me all the way through. In an ideal world, they would have. But the world isn’t ideal—not for everyone. In a less-than-ideal world, we make less-than-ideal compromises.

It was safe to say that a fair number of the people in my life were left scratching their heads at my new “relationship.” When Nick found out, he was confused, but he wasn’t nosy enough to investigate any further. He was the type of person to ask a question and just smile and nod at the answer, however out of left field it might be. My mother’s initial reaction was, “Ao! Ke monna wa lekgoa, ga se mosadi! Waitseee!” which translates roughly to, Wow, so you’re in love with an Englishman now! I didn’t see that coming, but hey, at least you’re not a homosexual anymore! I can tell the family back home you’re less of a disappointment! I’m being a little hyperbolic, but you get the gist.

Even Lydia was taken aback. But seeing as she was a working-class Northerner, I guess it made sense. If there was anything we had in common, it was how far removed the upper-middle-class life was to us.

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