Glory met Lará in front of a gray and black glass building in Shoreditch. Glory had studied Lará’s WhatsApp profile picture carefully on the bus, making sure that she’d recognize her childhood friend, but against the milling crowd of mostly white people, Lará would have stood out anyway. Her braids were piled onto the top of her head, studded with silver clasps and rings. She was wearing square, thick-rimmed glasses and her lips were a bright orange that matched the geometric print on her oversized shirt, stylishly unbuttoned and tucked into a pair of high-waisted, stonewashed jeans. She effortlessly fit in with the creative crowd that Shoreditch drew, and Glory felt drab and invisible in her signature monochrome athleisure. In LA she had adopted this style as she thought it spoke to the life of easy health and sophistication she wanted, but looking at Lará, absentmindedly checking her phone and playing with a loose braid, Glory felt she might have to update her look.
“Glory!” Lará exclaimed as Glory approached. Genuine joy lit up her face and Glory forgot her aesthetic misgivings and felt glad she had agreed to meet her old friend.
“Thanks so much for coming with me!” Lará said after they had exchanged a short obligatory hug. “I should have seen this exhibition weeks ago but just need to catch it before it closes.”
“No problem, is it here?” Glory asked, looking through the glass front of the building. She could see large white panels marked with black lines.
“Yeah, just around the side.”
Glory followed Lará to the entrance of the gallery.
“So is this for work, or?” Glory began, realizing that she didn’t actually know what Lará did.
“Kind of—well, just general inspiration really,” Lará said, smiling at the attendant who greeted them at the door.
“What do you do?” Glory asked, hating herself as soon as she finished asking the question.
“I’m a junior designer at a creative agency.”
“Oh, cool,” Glory said. “I used to work in marketing back in LA.”
“I never knew—would I recognize the agency?”
Glory felt the irrational pressure that came with unspoken competition—even though she was sure it wasn’t Lará’s intention.
“It was a boutique agency specializing in influencer partnerships and niche social media campaign activations.”
“That sounds interesting! I can’t wait to move somewhere smaller when I’ve got a bit more experience. Working in a big agency has its perks but it’s all a bit faceless and I get stuck with the boring projects.”
“Mmm.” Glory nodded, but the words “big agency” stuck in her head, and she realized that even if Lará dressed like a carefree art student who shopped at vintage stores and charity shops, she still had her life together in ways that Glory did not. Maybe she should try to get back to America and salvage whatever career she had left.
They were now at the entrance to the main hall of the gallery and Lará stopped to take out a small notebook and pencil from her bag. She began to carefully read the exhibition notes pasted on the white wall in black vinyl letters, pausing every now and again to scribble quick notes in her book. Glory skim-read the information then stopped in front of a TV mounted on the wall. A woman in white, the exposed parts of her body covered in white paint, kneeled next to a plastic bucket filled with what looked like black soot. She had a braided whip in her hand and crushed soot up and down its length before rising and approaching a blank canvas on a stand. After sizing up the rectangle, she drew back her arm and snapped the whip against the canvas with such force that the stand rocked back and forth. The muscles in the woman’s lean body rippled with the effort.
The sound and violence made Glory jump and gasp out loud. Lará glanced in her direction, her pencil frozen in the air.
“You OK?” she asked, and Glory swallowed, pushing her lips into a feeble smile.
“I think I just need some fresh air,” she said, as if they hadn’t only just entered the gallery. “I’ll wait for you outside,” Glory continued, as another thwack of the whip made her skin crawl.
Glory went back to the entrance, and leaned against one of the bollards that lined the street. From her position, she could watch Lará walking around the gallery, silent and studious, her face fixed in reverent concentration as she inspected sooty marks etched on each canvas. From here, Glory couldn’t hear the force of the whip colliding with the canvas or the grunt of the woman exerting herself so violently in the name of art. From here it was easier to forget what her mother had told her about her father and Hope.
When Lará emerged, she was still finishing off a written thought.
“Hope I didn’t take too long,” she said apologetically, dropping her notebook into her bag. Glory jumped at the word, thinking for a moment that Lará had read her thoughts.
“No, it’s fine. Did you get what you needed?”
“Yeah, the mark-making technique is incredibly interesting—like how brutal it is, but how delicate the results actually look. I guess, it’s kind of a metaphor for how we exist as black people in Britain, right? We were forced into this country’s history so violently—through slavery and colonialism—but they whitewash history, minimize our impact and instead we’re just these delicate black lines on a white landscape. Interesting and decorative in one sense, but also inconvenient and dirty in another.”
Lará stopped abruptly. “Sorry! You probably think that’s all waffle.”
“No, actually, that’s helpful. I don’t really get art like that, but you explained it really well. I can kinda see how it makes sense now.”
“You didn’t like it though?”
“It’s just . . . violent, innit. Like, to think that that’s how they used to whip slaves and stuff. Like that whip would be cutting into someone’s back, and children’s backs too.”
Glory shuddered, trying to shake off what she was feeling, the panic attack that was advancing on her.
“You want to go grab something to eat?” she asked hurriedly.
Lará looked up and down both ends of the street they were on.
“I’ve been craving Mexican food recently, but I dunno if there’s anywhere near here that serves it—wait, what? You don’t like Mexican food?”
Glory hadn’t realized her face had revealed her thoughts so plainly.
“Nah, it’s not that. I love Mexican food, but—argh, I’m gonna sound like a proper snob, but after eating the Mexican food they make in LA, I don’t think the food here is gonna cut it.”
Lará laughed, throwing her head back.
“I get it, that’s like after I went to India last year, I can’t eat Indian food anywhere else!”
Glory joined in with the laughter, but felt quietly disturbed by Lará. The shy and timid wallflower from their childhood had grown into this worldly and experienced woman who could explain modern art like she was giving directions to the train station. I can’t let her meet Julian, Glory thought, irrationally. If Glory’s projection of culture and sophistication impressed him, Lará would probably sweep him right off his feet.
“Shall we just go get a drink or something instead? Something light?” Lará asked when she had righted herself and stopped giggling.
“Yeah, sure,” Glory answered, thankful for the cheaper option and remembering her mother making àkàrà back at home. She wanted to return with enough appetite to eat it.
“How long were you in India for?” Glory asked as Lará led them to a nearby coffee shop.
“A couple months, it was a holiday masquerading as a research trip,” Lará said with a sly smile.
“What were you researching?”
Lará thought for a moment, twiddling her braid around her finger in a way that Glory was beginning to recognize as a cute tic.
“I really want to be a type designer—that’s what I actually want to specialize in—so I was looking at different types of scripts and writing systems while I was there. I was playing around with doing a Masters in type design and for my thesis I was gonna develop a specialist typeface for Yorùbá, one that’s more tailored to the tonal nature of the language and not based on the Latin script with all the diacritics.”
Glory nodded slowly, although she felt like she only understood half of what Lará had said.
“So you’re going to do a Masters?”
“Nah, too expensive. And I think I can effectively DIY it, but that also means that I have to ‘work my way up’ in the design world.”
Lará pushed her glasses up her nose and pulled a face.
“My mum would love it if I did a Masters,” Glory said as they took a seat in the café. “Well, she’d love it if I actually went back and finished my degree first.”
“What were you studying?” Lará asked, inspecting the menu on the wall.
“Business management. What did you study?”
“Graphic design.”
“Your mum actually let you do an art degree?” Glory asked, her impression of Lará turning from begrudging admiration to awe.
“Yeah, I know.” Lará chuckled. “No one can believe it, but it’s true. My ultra-Nigerian mother let me go to art school. What do you want to get? I’ll order for us.”
Glory made a few half-hearted objections and slowly reached for her purse, but, as she had hoped, Lará shook her head and headed toward the counter.
By the time Lará returned to the table with a tray of teas and gluten-free vegan biscuits, Glory’s assessment of her had completely changed. She needed friends and who better to have as a friend than Lará, someone who seemed to embody the self-assurance that Glory pretended to have, and someone who had managed to convince her Nigerian mother to study art as a full-blown, very expensive degree.
“Did I already ask you when you were going back to LA?” Lará said, nibbling the end of a biscuit.
“Um, I’m not going back,” Glory said brightly, cradling her cup in her hands and blowing into the fragrant tea.
“Oh, well, if you need a job here, I can see if anything’s going at my agency.”
“Thanks, but I don’t want to work in that industry any more. It’s not for me.” Glory averted her eyes from Lará’s. There was a lump caught in her throat and she was starting to feel emotional. How many times would she have to explain—and not really explain—this to people? Why did everyone care so much about what people did or didn’t do?
“Are you OK, Glory?” Lará asked gently, and to her horror, Glory felt a single tear slip loose and roll down her cheek.
“Shit!” she said, holding a hand to her face. “This is so stupid, I shouldn’t even be crying about that stupid job.”
Lará handed her a napkin.
“Did something happen? Is that why you don’t want to go back?”
“Office politics!” Glory tried to laugh, but the noise got trapped in her throat and came out as a strangled sound. “It was my own fault anyway.”
“What was?” Lará asked, refusing to remove her eyes from Glory.
“It’s so dumb and it’s my own fault really,” Glory repeated. “I made a very stupid decision to start dating one of my colleagues and when things ended, it got messy.”
“Messy how?”
“I really shouldn’t have gone out with him anyway, he was a complete dickhead—the warning signs were there! But then when we broke up I found out that he and a couple of his tech bros had, like, this rating system for all the women in the office they’d slept with. It was an actual spreadsheet on a company laptop!”
“Fuck!” Lará said under her breath. “Were you on it?”
Glory bit her lip and nodded. Everything about her had been rated out of ten, from her physical attributes to her position on the “freak” scale down to the quality of any nudes she had sent. Thankfully she had only sent Adam one picture, and it wasn’t technically a nude, so that had tanked that rating at the very least.
“Did you tell anyone?”
“Yeah, not my manager or anything, but someone else and they basically said that’s why I shouldn’t shit where I eat and that kicking up a fuss about it could jeopardize my job and my visa status and . . .” Glory let out a heavy sigh. “I thought that job was everything at the time. But then it turned into a nightmare.”
“You know you could have reported them to HR or something? I swear that’s sexual harassment at the very least. What the fuck?!”
“I could but—anyway, it’s done now. I’ve learned my lesson. Don’t shit where you eat, innit.”
Glory flashed Lará a sarcastic smile and gulped down some of the still-hot tea. Lará was shaking her head, breaking her biscuit into smaller chunks and eating them in quick succession.
“I’m so sorry, Glory.”
“No, it’s fine—”
“It’s not!”
“No, seriously. I feel better now that I’ve actually told someone. Everyone thinks I’m crazy for leaving LA, I’m sure. Your reaction reminds me that I’m not. That’s all I needed.”
Glory smiled across at Lará again, and this time it was a real smile.
“You’ve not told your mum or sister or anyone?”
“Hell no! First of all, my mum doesn’t know that I’ve even had sex and second, there are more pressing family dramas to attend to.”
“Yes, of course. Your dad.”
Glory stopped mid-sip, thinking that once again her mind was being read but realized that Lará was talking about Daddy’s death, not the fact that he was the reason she had believed her twin was dead for all these years.