The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  ‘I was depressed and broke, all right? Anyway, I just wanted to check out my options, really. I already knew some painless ways to die, but I googled enjoyable and ended up on a website recruiting suicide bombers.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have put “enjoyable” and “suicide bomb” in the same sentence.’

  ‘Well, they were paying ten thousand quid for a suicide bomber.’ He patted his clothes, searching for something. ‘That’s plenty of enjoyment right there.’

  ‘What is this website? Who are these people?’

  ‘What! Who! Give me a break! It’s just another NGO attracting more funding than they can spend. They’ve been in the suicide bombing business for years. They’ve blown up all their permanent staff—apart from the top dogs of course . . .’

  ‘Since when did terrorist squads become NGOs?’

  ‘Don’t be simplistic. Not all suicide bombers are terrorists. This NGO is at the cutting edge of the anti–global warming lobby.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Their carbon-footprint reduction strategy is depopulation. It’s a more aggressive variation of Planned Parenthood. Not saying I buy their politics, mark you, but that’s the law for you, audi alteram partem.’

  He finally found his wallet after searching the multiple pockets on his combat trousers. He opened it. Although bereft of currency notes, he had to negotiate a drift of VAT receipts and ATM slips to extricate a weathered A4 flyer folded several times over. ‘They had a backlog of volunteers. Had to wait months and months for my slot . . .’

  ‘A queue?’ Every time Dalminda opened his mouth he seemed to take another flight of fancy. The only thing that kept his story rooted in real life, and me listening as well, was the weight of his bomb. ‘That is, a queue of people wanting to kill themselves?’

  ‘I know how it sounds,’ he conceded, ‘but their conditions of service are out of this world.’

  I was silent. I supposed he was now mocking me recklessly, but I knew that Lynn would go into raptures at the direction of our conversation. I wondered how it would look if I produced my Dictaphone.

  ‘I’ll tell you one of their recruitment stories: so this fellow and his family had been oppressed and exploited for generations. His—’

  ‘How? Was he detained without trial? Were they tortured and deported—?’

  ‘No.’ He had laid the matted sheet on the counter, and his tongue crept out from the corner of his mouth as he applied himself to the task of opening it up without ripping it.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘They were poor.’

  He was not looking, and I rolled my eyes. Halfway to the ceiling, they were snagged by the eyes of an old major in a portrait, a whiskered fellow who looked every inch as bewildered as I was at the goings-on in his short let.

  ‘Anyway, he was married with seven children, all under ten years old, and then he had to get prostrate cancer as well.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So this chap had three months to live when he stumbled on the website and signed on. Guess what. He blew himself up two months before he was due to die anyway, but his widow now gets a monthly pension; his kids are on scholarship. They now have a chance to break out of the oppression, the exploita—’

  ‘How many kids do you have?’

  He shrugged. ‘None, yet.’

  ‘Are you married?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘So what will you do with ten thousand pounds when you’re dead?’

  Smugly, he said, ‘I’ve spent it already.’

  ‘You’ve lost me.’

  ‘You can take your money a month in advance before blowing yourself up in a crowd.’ He pushed the sheet across to me. ‘I have to make sure a journalist gets this after the blast. Can you send it out for me?’

  I looked at the tattered flyer. It was issued by an ineptly named Radical Suicide Society of Global Warming Justice Phenomena. The first ten lines were an inane sort of propaganda, but my eyes fell on the bottom two lines, which were handwritten. It was the address of the corner shop down the street. It had a courtyard covered by what was probably the only CCTV camera in the village, and I had taken to parking my car there every night for the past two weeks. I folded the flyer quickly.

  My insurance specifically excluded explosions—and the car financing was so new I hadn’t started repaying it.

  ‘Um . . .’

  ‘You’ve got to be quick, though; there are many cash-strapped suicide squads that go around claiming the bombs of other NGOs—’

  ‘Can we stop calling them NGOs?’

  ‘Choose any newspaper or TV station of your choice—you can make yourself a bob or two, you know?’

  ‘You look like you’re over your depression,’ I said brusquely. ‘Why don’t you just dump the bomb in the sea and split. The world is a big place; they’ll never find you.’

  ‘They have this Deposit-Security Programme. You should read it . . .’

  ‘Perhaps you can give me a summary.’

  ‘It’s genius. They checked me into this clinic and put me under. They put a chip the size of a grain of rice inside me. Its biodegradable battery is invisible to X-rays and guaranteed to run for one year. Using me as an antenna, it broadcasts my location to their hub from anywhere I am in the world.’ He studied his fingernails, ‘They know I’m standing in your kitchen right now.’

  ‘Why don’t you take it out?’ I asked, not liking the pitch of my voice. I had a sudden vision of a chip-seeking missile crashing through the window.

  He ran his hand through his hair. ‘That’s the point. It could be in my bladder or my scalp. I have no idea.’

  ‘If I were you,’ I said, trying to provoke some common sense in the youth in front of me, ‘no one could force me to detonate a suicide bomb. Think about it: the worst they can do is kill you . . .’

  ‘Their Suicide Enforcement Team is—’

  ‘Please!’ I snapped. Even Lynn would not swallow that.

  ‘Without that they’d be broke now, Mister Chew,’ he explained patiently. ‘People would just take their money and run. I know I would.’

  ‘Chow?’ I suggested sarcastically. It was the simplest of names.

  ‘Thanks, but I’m full.’

  ‘Humphrey Chow!’

  ‘That’s what I said, God. It’s just a bloody name. Their S.E. teams abduct runaways and . . .’ He hesitated before going on. ‘I’ll spare you the details, but personally I’d rather go with a bang than a saw.’

  ‘Are you . . .’ I cleared my throat. ‘Are you still within your month of grace?’

  He shook his head. ‘I ran out of time and money yesterday, and they’ve e-mailed me the red notice. An S.E. team could be here tomorrow. I can run, but I can’t hide—unless I’m arrested. I’ll be safe enough in Her Majesty’s Prisons.’ He paused. ‘Either that or I bomb the corner shop.’

  ‘I can call the police for you,’ I offered.

  ‘That’s kind of you, but this country is too damned soft. I have no prior convictions, and the best I’ll get for breaking and entering will be community service.’ He glared. ‘This is your fault! Any other man who finds a bearded stranger in his bed would have thrown a punch, at the very least! There’d have been a major fracas yesterday—aggravated assault and battery, possibly with grievous bodily harm. By now I should have been enjoying police protection!’ He sneered. ‘Tea in bed!’

  The image of the chip-seeking missile had receded somewhat. In its place flared a new vision of bearded Suicide Enforcers abducting us . . . torture chambers in a dark dungeon . . . and offbeat short stories flapping inside my head like possessed bats seeking escape, but my sawn-off arms were bandaged stumps that ended at the elbows. I looked wildly around the room. ‘You could break something expensive. You could . . .’

  He shook his head. ‘Property damage is strictly small beans. With my law school tragedy I’ll probably get a suspended sentence or a month in the can. What’s that? I need a year in prison. They can’t track me after that. I’d rather go wi
th a bang today than—’

  ‘Does it have to be the corner shop? Never heard of a suicide bomber taking out a corner shop.’

  He paused. ‘Are you suggesting a Tesco? Whose side are you on anyway?’

  ‘Why this particular shop? It’s out in the middle of nowhere . . .’

  He scowled. ‘The owner was rude yesterday. Said I stank of fried chicken. I’ll show her fried chicken!’

  ‘That’s hardly an offence worthy of the death sentence . . .’

  ‘She’s the nearest person I have a grudge against . . . unless—’ He broke off and eyed me speculatively.

  ‘Oh, come on!’

  He shrugged magnanimously and turned for the door, ‘Au revoir, then. I’ll hang around for five or six customers and—’

  ‘I normally park my car outside the shop,’ I said casually. ‘It’s normally the safest place in the neighbourhood. Joyriders . . .’

  He turned slowly, venting a diseased talent for melodrama. ‘Your car? How can you think of a car at a time like this?’

  ‘You dare to preach to me? You are blowing up corner shops for cash!’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’ he asked, reaching for his cord. ‘Should I blow myself up here?’

  I watched his hand silently.

  I have not always been this timid. One winter when I was fourteen, I attempted the murder of a Queen’s Counsel. I had found his name in a Hackney Social Services cabinet into which I had broken in search of the identity of my natural parents. Louis Raven, QC, retired, had signed me into care, and he seemed chief suspect for the role of Bolting Dad. I traced him to his golf club on Rounds Street. I watched him all day, following him four blocks to Poplar, where he lunched with three suits. Afterwards, we both walked back to the club; the one was well-fed, the other—following twelve anonymous paces behind—very, very, hungry. He drank till late. That afternoon when I went to confront my father I did not have a plan. By that evening, I had come to picture how different my life might have been, and it became quite clear what I had to do. I suppose the hunger was a factor. I didn’t even have enough money for a knife—I slipped one off the shelf of a hardware store on Poplar East. When he left his club it was 7:00 p.m. and dark, and as he dumped his golf clubs in the boot, I approached. As he opened his Porsche he felt the point of my knife in his side and drove thirty minutes, talking all the way. He was a barrister, all right: eight inches from a painful death and he couldn’t stop talking. I guess that blade kind of inspired him into the performance of his life. He slowed down along Old Kent Road, and I stepped out of the car. He still has the £7.89 knife that I got for free—and the contents of the wallet that he spilled desperately into my lap. Sometimes I wonder whether he was just a gifted liar or whether my arrival in the maternity with Negroid features truly had dissolved the marriage of his Caucasian clients, my ‘legal’ parents, Felix and Laura Fraser. I’ve never bothered to look for them. They can go to Hell—along with the adulterer who supplied my Negroid genes.

  ZANDA ATTURK

  Kreektown | 15th March, 2005

  I got lost on my way back, which was ridiculous because I had spent the first eighteen years of my life in Kreektown. I was thinking too hard on my future, or the lack of it, and when the horse stopped moving I realised he was knee-deep in a swamp. I spent the next few minutes kicking and cursing, but the animal was quite frozen with fear. So I climbed down into the viscous mud myself, and the horse turned readily enough to follow me. We finally gained solid ground, the horse and I and the stink between us. The light was beginning to fail. As the shadows lengthened in the forest, my fear grew.

  I heard the village called Kreektown before I saw it and followed the highlife music that led me to Ntupong’s Joint, the only saloon left in the village square. It was a dramatic village surrounded by an encroaching forest. One moment I was under the canopy of trees, the next I was walking down a street of mostly empty homes where the industry of barefoot life moved in sync with the economy of mobile phones. One moment I was dragging my horse down the footpath, past a length of python curing on a grill, the next I was in a depleted village square, two hundred metres across. The earth under me was packed hard enough for cars. The roads were wide enough for cars, but all around Kreektown, the mechanicals that proliferated were motorbikes. I crossed the square where a noisy generator powered a football viewing centre. Next door, a motorbike repairer was hard at work.

  The joint was just across the square. Recently, I had watched Kiri Ntupong’s TV testimony at the Justice Omakasa Enquiry into the Menai Inoculation. Despite my straits, I couldn’t help smiling at the prospect of seeing the old man after so many years.

  He had died the week before.

  I stood in the doorway, a little stunned at the news. I did not recognise the large woman who was now weeping all over again. There were only four patrons in the large parlour. Wedged around a table, they were locked in an intense game of cards. We shook hands solemnly, and one of them, a garrulous raconteur, gave me his business card. He was bearded and defiant with it. I looked at the card, puzzled. ‘Hameed . . . are you supposed to do this?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Give people cards saying you’re a secret service agent?’

  ‘Don’t worry yourself about that. What about my boss that posted me to a village as small as this? Am I supposed to pretend to be a farmer or what?’

  I turned the card over. ‘This is not very . . . secret.’

  ‘Is the best way,’ he assured me. ‘Do you know how many oil worker kidnapping cases I’ve solved from this very chair?’ His companions nodded their corroboration as they watched him deal the pack. ‘So if you hear any coup plots or secession talk, just call my Nokia, there’s cool money there for you, eh?’ He yelled, ‘Woman! Ntupong don chop im own life finish! Wey my peppersoup?’

  She wiped her tears brightly. ‘Is coming, my oga!’

  He gave me a ‘one Nigeria’ sign, a twining index and middle finger, and returned to his game.

  I stepped back into the square and stared. The houses were familiar, but the faces were not. A decade had swept past like a century, and the last of the Menai were dispersed. I paused just outside the kamira, listening to the scary silence of the weavers’ guild house. I had grown up to the hypnotic chakata-chakata of the looms. I pushed the door open, and it fell, hingeless, into the abandoned yard. A sigh of dust rose regretfully. A goat stared from a sill. Several jamayas sat in a weavers’ circle, as though their owners were holding a guild meeting in an inner room and would soon return to the looms.

  I walked on. Strangers lived here now, had moved into the empty homes: Sonja’s shop was now Fati’s ‘International’ Stores, Solo’s Chemist was now a card recharge shop, and in Kreektown Square, instead of the Mata’s beloved Menai, all I could hear were snatches of pidgin English, a curse in Sontik, and an argument in Nnewi-accented Igbo. I stood in Kreektown Square, where I had dropped my shoeshine box on December 9, 1998, to catch the ferry to Onitsha and the world. I knew no one here, now.

  And no one knew me.

  Instead, there was new resentment in the Kreektown air. People came here because they had nowhere else to go. Across Sontik State there was talk of secession. Indigenes of the new Sontik Republic would, with all her oil, immediately rocket to the highest per capita income in Africa. But no one would think it, to judge from the wretched eyes that followed me as I led my lame horse towards Ma’Calico’s. A low-grade malice tinged the eyes that looked at me, who drove a twenty-year-old banger into town: I had another place to go after my business with the Kreektown smuggler. As I turned into Ma’Calico’s yard, I felt that jailhouse grudge sink into me.

  I couldn’t leave, either.

  It wasn’t an attack of conscience because I had abandoned my doomed hometown. It was the prospect of a police interrogation. Patrick and I shared a mutual dislike for each other, but I needed his job as much as he did the only Palaver journalist who had ever won a Reporter-of-the-Year award. I was a difficult j
ournalist to sack, despite my touted truancies, but after being conned by Korba Adevo, I was not going to be saved by all the awards in the Nigerian Union of Journalists.

  A young woman leaned against the doorway at Ma’Calico’s, eating an avocado. She was lean and angular. Her slow eyes followed me with a python’s lazy grace. I remembered her bruising brazenness from when I had passed through earlier. Now, she was also wearing blood-red lipstick. ‘You wan’ room?’ she asked with a winning smile. I supposed it was the pattern: thieves took their loot up to Adevo’s for cash and the locals tried to retain as much of the proceeds for the local economy as they could.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told her politely. ‘I don’t do prostitutes.’

  There was a momentary blankness, as though the sense of the words had eluded her at its first pass before boomeranging into the sacristy of her mind. Then she doubled over with the violence of a retch and laughed so hard that tears grew like translucent, animated tendrils down her cheeks. I watched her half-eaten avocado roll away in the dust. Thinking back, I suppose I was still in shock and thoughts that would normally have stopped at that were now popping through before I could rephrase them. Her blood-red fingernails gripped thighs that had locked on themselves, the way children often clamped their bladders while they rolled one more die of an addictive game. Her laughter was stirring in its nakedness—the way she laughed with everything she had. One knee found the ground, and then she was hanging onto the door handle, which was itself hanging on to the door by precarious screws.

  Briefly I wondered whether to catch her before the screws gave.

  Then the doorway filled up with the bored patrons of Ma’Calico’s bar, their bulbous glasses in their fists.

  ‘Wha’s that?’

  ‘Wha’s that?’

  ‘He . . . doesn’t . . . do . . . prostitutes . . . See as he dirty! Which prostitute go touch am so?’

  I led the horse into the backyard, away from the ensuing bray of laughter. As I tethered it, Ma’Calico strode into the yard with my deposit in her hand. I took a deep breath and exhaled. Kaska gai muga chamu ga choke. I was bemused. It was many years since I had begun to think in English, and here was a Menai idiom dropping unbidden into my mind. Had to be the proximity to the village. Beyond the low fence, my car sat patiently, beside a tyreless, rust-encrusted DAF truck that wasn’t going anywhere either. Ma’Calico stopped three metres from me. She sniffed and blinked rapidly. She did not share her patrons’ amusement.