The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  Adevo had also given me the phone number of a certain Frederick Eghwrudjakpor. He had been the smartest hustler in Warri in the ’80s, but the city became too small for him. He was now making waves in London.

  I had options.

  HUMPHREY CHOW

  London | 24th March, 2005

  I felt strange in the wheelchair. I was strong enough to walk, but they insisted on wheeling me everywhere. I sat in a pokey office in the research centre. The attendant had withdrawn, leaving me alone with Dr. Greenstone.

  He seemed reluctant to start. I got up nervously. ‘I can leave today, right?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Greenstone. ‘You’re fine. You’ve been fine for days, we just had to keep you under observation. The good news is that the trial will continue.’

  That was his good news, but I didn’t say that. I had been busy writing, and come Monday, Lynn had brought my contract with Phil Begg for signing, so it wasn’t a total waste of time. There was a rack of vials and bottles on a wall. I recognised a row of Proxtigen, the drug that had caused so much drama.

  ‘Mr. Chow,’ he said, and I turned to look at him. ‘Your results checked out pretty much until we ran your genome profile. I am afraid there is a problem at gene level.’

  ‘What problem?’

  ‘A mutation. An extra chromosome. You probably don’t need to worry about this—your average DNA carries some three billion components. You can pack in quite a few mutations that won’t get in the way of a healthy life.’ He shrugged. ‘You’re twenty-five years old and have done well enough so far. I’d advise you to give drug trials a miss from now on, though.’ He grinned. ‘We’ve sent a note of this hypersensitivity to your NHS surgery. Otherwise,’ he shrugged again, ‘continue your life as normal.’

  ‘What caused the mutation?’

  ‘There’s the ten-quid question, isn’t it?’

  I could see that his attention was now downstairs, at his drug trial.

  ‘We don’t have your parents’ histories. It could be anything, really. Mutations can be spontaneous, they can be induced by teratogens . . .’ He walked to the door ahead of me.

  Without reflection, I took a bottle of Proxtigen and pushed it slowly down my jeans pocket. It was almost like taking a bottle of shampoo as a memento from a hotel washroom.

  I did not ask him what a teratogen was. My medical history since childhood had made me something of an Internet medical researcher.

  * * *

  2:00 p.m.

  I sat in my car and shut my eyes. The feast of memory was over. I opened my laptop and read what I had written.

  Tobin Rani confessed to killing Yan Chow, and went to jail for it. He lied. Previously, my recollection of Yan Chow’s death had come mostly from the Social Services file I had read. Now, an authentic memory flowered in my mind, as dense and detailed as a movie image.

  I had opened the door for an angry immigrant of Chinese extraction. He had just arrived from Shanghai, the long way, at the end of a six-year-old dream to join his wife. He was tired and hungry, and his mood did not improve when he discovered an African in Mum’s bedroom. He was small-bodied but his rage was monumental, and he was getting the better of the fight with the African, who had taught me songs and funnies in a strange language—until, that is, I sank a kitchen knife in Yan Chow’s back.

  It was a twelve-year-old’s stab at preserving the happiest of his many families, but it was a grown-up world, and Mr. Chow died before the ambulance arrived. Miss Chow hung herself before the police arrived. And the African took the fall and did the time.

  That was it, then, the grave of my happiness. I had known it in my bones, even if I didn’t remember it in my conscious mind. He had probably gone in for life, leaving me to get on with mine as best as I could, untainted by the calumny of a murder. But I knew, now.

  Now, I knew.

  * * *

  I CLOSED the laptop. I couldn’t own the memory anymore, but I had written it when it was raw. That was enough. A drizzle had started as I arrived at the prisons. I tried to get a prisoner’s number for their visitor’s booking form and ran into the first hurdle: they did not have a Tobin Rani on their books.

  There was a change of duty as I left, and the new desk officer, an older man, frowned at my enquiry slip. ‘What’s with this? This bloke’s been gone three years and suddenly everybody’s asking for him!’

  I turned. ‘Everybody?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Humphrey Chow, short story writer.’

  ‘Don’t give a damn if you’re a long story writer,’ he said genially. ‘What’s your relationship to this fella?’

  ‘He’s my, sort of, foster father.’

  He hesitated and turned to the younger warden. ‘Oi, take him up to the guvnor.’

  The ‘guvnor’ was considerably more forthcoming. He did not refer to his computer, or to the folder on his desk, as he spoke to me. ‘He was a pretty straightforward case: he got a fifteen-year sentence, got time off, did ten, got out. Probably still in Nigeria now.’

  ‘Why Nigeria?’

  He looked at me curiously. ‘If he’s your foster father you should know he held Nigerian nationality, shouldn’t you? It’s standard procedure: a convict like him is put on a flight home after his sentence, courtesy Her Majesty.’

  ‘I see.’ I looked at my nails. ‘The officer downstairs said everyone was looking for Tobin these days.’

  ‘I don’t know about “everyone,”’ he said, finally opening the file, ‘but this man will certainly be interested in speaking to you.’ He took a card from the folder and brought it around his desk.

  ‘Professor M. J. Reid.’

  ‘Yes, he’s an archaeologist from Bristol Uni. Two months ago, one of his students got carried away in a nightclub. He spent a month as our guest. The first night, he was shaking the bars all night. Seems he recognised some of the graffiti on the walls from his lecture notes. Next morning, he finally got to make a call, and this prof was down here like a shot. I let him make a cell visit, and there’s been five more university dons coming and going—with cameras and notebooks.’

  ‘What does this have to do with Tobin Rani?’

  ‘I’ve had to track down the last few occupants of that cell. There’s a consensus that it first appeared on that wall after Tobin’s occupancy. That was when the mirror first went up.’

  ‘What was this graffiti? What was so special about it?’

  He leaned over and pulled out a couple of pictures from the file. He put them in my hands. It was a photograph of hieroglyphs on a wall. Most of the hieroglyphs had been painted over, but there was a square in lighter paint that had line after line of the close-lined script. I recognised it immediately. Tobin had had notebooks full of the stuff.

  He was watching me carefully. ‘Have you seen it before?’

  I shook my head carefully, reluctant to be drawn into all the excitement over stick figures on a wall. ‘And this has been on the wall for three years, at least?’

  ‘Yes. The mirror was being replaced; that’s how the student noticed it.’

  A pause developed, and I rose slowly. ‘Thank you,’ I said sincerely. I was at a loose end. I had been prepared to confess to a thirteen-year-old murder to free a convict, but it was a little too late for that now. There was still the little matter of clearing his name, but I definitely wasn’t going to Nigeria to do that. I was free to be happy.

  ‘Give the prof a call, will you?’ he urged as he walked me to his door.

  ‘I will,’ I lied.

  While I waited to be let out, I dropped the card in a nearby bin. Seconds afterwards, the administrator hurried over with an open diary. ‘I found his private mobile number. Gimme the card; I’ll copy it out for you.’

  I checked my pockets with rising embarrassment. Then a gate detail leaned over the bin and retrieved Professor Reid’s card with two supercilious fingernails. The guvnor’s face frosted over. He snatched the card and stalked off.

  I walked to my c
ar. I’m free to be happy, I told myself.

  I had not spoken to Grace since I went into the lab. It seemed a marriage by terse text messages just then and she knew nothing of my little excitement. I would normally have phoned, but this time I had waited, perversely, for her to call first. I remembered how we had first met in the reception of an elderly psychiatrist closing for the weekend:

  ‘Not sure I can squeeze you in today, handsome. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I don’t remember anything from my last few years . . . the last I . . .’

  ‘You look good for another fifty, young man, why bother about the last few?’

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Listen, Grace here has just been stood up—’

  ‘Mum!’

  ‘—take her for a drink, and if by Monday you’re still worried about history, I’ll see you at eleven thirty. Deal?’

  ZANDA ATTURK

  Limbe | 26th March, 2005

  I did not leave the market during the days but spent the daylight hours cooped up in the leather workshop in the rear. Come night, to avoid the moonlight-tales hour, I took long strolls.

  HUMPHREY CHOW

  London | 1st April, 2005

  On April 1, “Reluctant Bomber” appeared in the first issue of Balding Wolf. The magazine sold a respectable 140,000 copies, but four out of five newspapers panned it. The Herald Scotland called it a flaccid GQ, but most reviewers singled out my story for praise. Grace decided it was worth celebrating, on balance. That evening she cleared her diary, and we took in a concert at the Royal Festival Hall.

  Afterwards, when we found my car, there was a policeman examining its registration with a torch. ‘You will find it’s perfectly in order,’ I told him cheerfully, pulling out my keys.

  From the other side of the road, another policeman opened the rear door of his car. ‘You’ll find this faster, this time of night,’ he said, as we were escorted brusquely to the squad car.

  Grace’s mascara was running. She was mumbling something about it being just a bloody expense account.

  Kaiba tanimi ma sonke!

  I knew she was worrying about nothing. They had found out that I killed Mr. Chow. I was rubbery with relief. I wondered if this was how murderers felt when they were finally arrested with ancient killings on their consciences. Then the cuffs clicked shut on my wrists for the first time in my life.

  As Grace and I piled into the back of the police car, I was suddenly oppressed by the statistic of fifty-six deaths in police custody from the year before. Visions of black men like Michael Powell with mental health issues dying in the back of a police van . . . Roholiabu menta! Roholiabu menta!

  At the Charing Cross station, we were separated and I was fingerprinted, photographed, and issued receipts for everything in my pockets. Then I was issued a receipt for all my receipts and processed into a windowless police truck. We must have driven for hours, leaving traffic noises behind, and I was hopelessly disoriented. We could have been close to Scotland or crossed the Chunnel into France. Eventually, the doors opened and I found myself in an underground car park. I went through a warren of lifts and padded corridors with numbers rather than names on their doors.

  I was led into a table in a windowless lobby. After a minute, I realised that the sandwiches and soda were for me. It was probably a subtle form of torture: in the hours since my arrest and processing, no one had spoken to me. I ate perfunctorily, conscious that this was not exactly the postconcert dinner I had planned with Grace. I wondered where she was, how she was. Another short walk, and a security-coded door opened into what looked like a traditional interrogation room.

  My heart leaped with joy: someone to talk to at last!

  I found myself sitting across the table from a dark-haired woman who clasped her hands and tapped her thumbs patiently, one against the other, as she waited for me to settle in. ‘I’m Inspector Hannah,’ she said eventually. Her voice was deep, pleasant to listen to.

  ‘Humphrey Chow, short story writer.’

  ‘I am to inform you that your responses are being recorded, and that anything you say may be used in evidence against you in a court of law. If you want a lawyer . . .’

  ‘I don’t need a lawyer,’ I said.

  ‘Tea? Coffee?’

  I shook my head.

  * * *

  SHE HAD full eyebrows and lips that pursed often. Her thumbs kept tapping, suggesting their readiness to wait as long as it took for the truth. ‘Did you write the short story, “Reluctant Bomber,” in the current issue of Balding Wolf?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you personally write every word in the story?’

  ‘Not every word; there’s the editorial process. Word count. They wanted a six-thousand-word story, and my story was seven . . .’ I paused. The thumbnails were clicking neurotically.

  ‘Yes?’ Her voice was as kindly as ever.

  ‘So I had to cut. That’s where I got some help from Lynn . . . we had a deadline to hit.’

  ‘Who’s Lynn?’

  ‘Lynn Christie, my agent.’

  ‘What did she add?’

  ‘I’ll need to check my laptop to confirm.’

  She shrugged fluidly. ‘In a rough way—we can go into specifics later.’

  ‘Well, this and that, really. Like cutting out my “then again’s.” She says I use them far too much. But I checked out the final version. It was my story. Sort of.’ I had clasped my own hands underneath the tabletop and tried to mimic her thumbnails; it was unsustainable. She had probably been practising for ages. She didn’t look that old, but it probably took years and years to make inspector, hundreds of interrogations, thousands even . . .

  Her head was cocked uncertainly. My thumbs froze under the table. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I . . . think I’ll have the coffee.’

  ‘Milk, sugar?’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She nodded. ‘So you take personal responsibility for every word in the story?’

  ‘The coffee . . .’

  ‘. . . is on its way.’

  Somewhere in the warren of corridors, then, was a room where my interrogation was being monitored, where a hospitality detail was pouring my cup as we spoke. Her thumbs were back to tapping, impatiently now. ‘Well?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Did anyone suggest the story to you?’

  I paused. It was always going to be a rather long pause. Fortunately the door opened at that moment and my beverage arrived by policeman. He placed a coffee at my elbow. I had asked for tea, but the aroma was suddenly so much more appealing than tea. I reached for it and lifted it slowly, breathing deeply and thinking desperately. Just what sort of a question was this, and how could I answer it truthfully? The truth was that Dalminda Roco had suggested the story to me. Or was that really the truth? Even so, it would be madness to own that to the paranoid police. But then again, it was also folly to lie to the machinery of justice. The cup was millimetres from my lips when it occurred to me that strong coffee was an excellent mask for a truth serum. I paused again and studied the coffee.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  I looked up. The thumbs were frozen five centimetres apart, and real worry was etched on Hannah’s face.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You don’t want the coffee anymore?’

  ‘I asked for tea.’

  Her eyebrows edged together and she touched a finger to her ear. ‘I seem to remember you said coffee.’

  ‘I said I wanted tea—you can play back your tape or something and check.’ I put down the cup. ‘Anyway, I don’t want anything anymore.’

  She deployed an indifferent shrug. ‘Did anyone suggest the story line?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And the characters? Did anyone suggest your characters to you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She picked up a pencil. ‘Who suggested what?’

  ‘Well, my agent suggested I should change Lynn to Bessie and Grace to Rebecca and Humphrey Chow to
G. G. Phipps.’

  She was scribbling as I spoke. ‘Why?’

  ‘Grace insisted that she didn’t break the nose of the thief, so Lynn suggested that I change everyone’s names so it would be clear that it was fiction.’

  She leaned forward. ‘So it was fact originally? The characters were real?’

  ‘Um . . . they are fictional characters inspired by real people.’

  ‘And Dalminda Roco?’

  I sipped some of my rejected coffee, to buy some thinking time. ‘What about Dalminda Roco?’

  ‘You didn’t change his name?’

  ‘He was already a fictional character. There was no need to change his name.’

  ‘Wasn’t he based on a real character, like the other characters in your story?’

  ‘Come on! Have you ever met a Dalminda? A Dalminda Roco?’

  ‘I’m asking the questions.’

  ‘No. He was a totally fictional character.’

  ‘Have you ever met a Dalminda? A Dalminda Roco?’

  I was in a panic. Inept crime was hopelessly outflanked by police wizardry. What manner of software had they wired into her ear? Why had she picked up on Dalminda? What did they know?’

  ‘I’ve never met a Dalminda Roco! I already said that!’

  ‘What if I told you that there is in fact a Dalminda Roco, who just so happens to be a terrorist like the hero of your story? As you have admitted, it is a rather unusual name.’

  I paused. This was dangerous territory, if only for my own mental health. When I finished writing my story in the kitchen of the Scottish holiday house I had looked up to find that the rucksack was gone. I had gone upstairs and there was no Dalminda either. No failed law-student suicide bomber. The story was done and the powerful inspiration was gone. Dalminda Roco was clearly an incendiary figment of the fevered imagination of a desperate writer. Or yet another psychotic episode in the life of Humphrey Chow. That was all it was, and that was all it had to be. She was bluffing—why on earth, I had not a clue, but she had to be bluffing. I shook my head. ‘I’d say that was completely impossible.’