I had to go to Kreektown.
Reluctantly, I tore up the resignation and went to Dr. Ologbon’s office. No confrontation, I reminded myself, sinking into a chair. I waited while Mercy flounced in and out to air her killer red shoes/red jacket combination and other gossipy colleagues toed and froed, faking errands in the boss’s office . . . and all I could think was, why me? By the time his office was finally empty and he turned to me, it finally dawned on me, and my resolution collapsed. ‘This is why you picked me up from prison!’
Dr. Ologbon’s eyes narrowed. He was a smallish, balding man whose surviving hair was an unrealistic shade of black, considering the grey hairs on the back of his fingers. He did not cut a strong image, and he rarely got in the last word, but he was the kind of man that got on well in Abuja’s civil service: he knew his job, knew the right people, and knew how to write memos with a combination of obsequiousness and cunning—which his ministers finally understood once they left office and were writing statements at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. ‘What are you talking about?’ he asked, rapping a Biro nervously on his tabletop.
‘With my prison record, I’m the only person in this office who can’t afford to resign!’
‘You’ve got this all wrong,’ he said, walking to the door.
‘Why else would Personnel have cleared a jailbird for a civil service post? Akpan resigned over this posting. Everyone else threatened to; that was the only reason why you were at the prison gate.’
He shut the door quietly. We were still visible to the rest of the office, but we could speak privately. It was an odd kind of privacy. To encourage me to keep my voice down, he took the visitor’s seat a foot away from me. He folded his hands and stared, trying his silly silent-chastisement thing.
Dr. Ologbon could have done a little more to keep me out of jail in the first place, like the small matter of a character reference my lawyer had asked for, to attack the circumstantial evidence that had put me away. I had gone to jail for foolishness, not for crime: back then I had been struggling financially. My mother’s cancer treatments had thrown my rent into arrears. The cancer had gone into remission, but then, so had my finances. The office had turned down my desperate loan application. Then I stepped out one morning for my regular jog to find a heavy envelope containing eight hundred thousand naira by my door, with a note: ‘This is from God, for your rent.’
Now, I was no fool: God would have bought me the house rather than clear my rent arrears and would certainly have done better for stationery than a Post-it note.
Practically all my friends knew about my rent crisis, but none of them had the spare cash—or the modesty to have given it anonymously. By the next morning, I was no nearer to explaining the mystery, so when the caretaker’s walking stick came banging on my door I just muttered, ‘Thank you God,’ and paid the Shylock off.
Stupidly, I bragged about my miraculous deliverance to my half-dozen friends in the office. A week or so later, when I opened the door for my morning jog it was to let in some large men crowding the landing. They turned out to be CID investigators pursuing some missing money at the DRCD. They were working on an anonymous tip-off and wanted to search my house. Payday was still three days away, and (not being silly enough to produce God’s Post-it note) I couldn’t explain the fresh rent receipt.
I became the prime suspect in the case of DRCD’s missing millions. When I tried to narrow down the people who could have tipped off the CID and came up with the same half-dozen possibilities, I knew it was time to change my friends.
But that lesson came too late to keep me from jail and cost me a full year to learn.
‘Is this how you thank me for promoting you—and giving you a raise?’ he said finally. He was aiming for the jocular tone, but he wasn’t quite there yet.
I had noticed the promotion. They couldn’t very well have posted a clerical officer to do Old Ira’s job, so I was now Acting Research Supervisor with allowances to match. ‘I’d rather be a living clerk than a dead supervisor.’
He sobered. ‘You have nothing to fear, Amana; we’ve succeeded in getting a police post opened on the same street with the DRCD station. The roughboys have been tamed. You’ll have a mobile phone and a radio. You’ll be safer in the DRCD house in Kreektown than in your hostel in Abuja.’
‘Ira was kidnapped on fieldwork. Do I get an armed police bodyguard on fieldwork?’
He blinked rapidly. ‘I’m sure you can sort out the details with the Kreektown Police, Amana.’
I pursed my lips. It was a novel experience for me, fear as a physical tremor running through me.
‘One day you’re going to look back to this day, and you’re going to recognise it as the biggest opportunity anyone ever gave you.’
‘I’m too young for the opportunity of heaven—’
‘Shall we get serious here? A station manager role is one that you’d normally have to wait another ten years to qualify for. Focus on that.’
I clamped my teeth as the fear became anger, and I focused instead on the single reason why I could not rise up that moment, like Akpan had done months earlier, and leave the job. ‘When will the external audit report be ready, sir?’
He sighed, recognising my total capitulation. I understood his relief: I had seen my personnel file. They still fear the rebel who mobilised fellow students to shut down their uni and sack their corrupt vice chancellor. But people grew up. I left uni with a third-class degree rather than the second-class upper I worked for. I can never register for a PhD in this country, but my old VC is still a prof—and was appointed a VC elsewhere. Rage had to be systematic, not instinctual. ‘I’ve known audit queries that dragged on for years,’ he said, pushing the black case across to me. ‘Your Kreektown paperwork. Questionnaire pads, manuals, and briefing folders, everything you need. You’ve got your job. Focus on that.’
‘I don’t do questionnaires, sir,’ I said, wondering how far I could risk insubordination.
He grinned. ‘I cleared it with the director-general. Run your station how you like it.’
I concealed my shock by going through the bag as he lined up the requisition dockets for my signature.
‘Just deliver the annual report within a fortnight,’ he ordered.
‘How can I . . . ?’
‘Ira hired a local as a cultural aide to help him drill down into local dialects and cultures. Find a translator who knows his way around, and I’ll put him on the sessional payroll. Okay?’
I signed for my allowances, and in minutes we were heading across Abuja to the Federal Secretariat, for the obligatory pep talk with the director-general. It was only my second time in the DG’s office, and I prepared myself for the magnetic insincerity of his presence.
He met us at the door, which made it unnecessary to sit down, as he made a brief variant of his Christmas Party speech: ‘Our cultures will not survive, Miss Udama. Not in their present form, and maybe not at all. In a hundred years, these soulless, bastard urban streets will be all we have left. We must scour the land, capturing, photographing, and documenting culture for posterity. We’re not interested in how it was, we’re not historians, or how it should be, we’re not futurists; our business is with how it is. Today. That’s the sacred role of the Department of Research and Cultural Documentation, and you’ve been called to the front line. Congratulations, Amana.’
It was over in minutes. How different it had been two years earlier when I first entered his office. I had been touring Nasarawa in central Nigeria, administering oral literature questionnaires to the indigenes. It was a low-literacy neighbourhood, and although I found many willing respondents, I had to fill in each questionnaire personally. By 10:00 a.m. that morning, I was ready to climb the nearest telephone mast. And jump. In a sense, it was self-preservation, really: I could have gone crazy, had I continued to do the job by the book. Instead, I met the most incredible beard I ever saw. He agreed to do a questionnaire, and I recorded him as DRCD’s Sample NAS2393, but his first re
sponses hinted at far more valuable anecdotes on oral literature than any report that had come out of our bureau. I knew that the flesh and blood of his story would tell the DRCD more about orature in Nasarawa than the skeletal statistics from another hundred samples. So I let him talk . . .
Back in my hotel room, I was in serious trouble: I was a hundred questionnaires short of my target. So I did the only thing I could have and entered Beard’s story across the DRCD 090 grid normally reserved for questionnaire results.
My report caused a small crisis at our head office. Dr. Ologbon treated it as dereliction of duty and sent off a photocopy to Personnel for the attention of the disciplinary panel. Personnel interpreted it as a resignation. They were familiar with the genre: when Idris won the lottery, instead of his regular weekly report, he’d had his nine-year-old daughter copy her homework onto the DRCD 090 grid form. To further confuse matters, the Apo Health Directorate claimed jurisdiction, interpreting the form as a transparent plea for psychiatric intervention.
Finally Beard’s story went right up to the DG for a decision. That was my first time in his office. I’d expected a tongue-lashing, but instead he asked me a lot of strange questions. I told him what he probably wanted to hear: that my greatest desire was to end my career at his desk (well after his retirement, of course). He told me that when I got to sit in his chair I would see that although NAS2393 would give the department better insight into Nasarawa’s orature than all the other work my department had done that week, it was an inspirational approach that could only complement, never replace, the tried and trusted ‘perspirational’ questionnaires of DRCD.
‘You’re the one who applied for a compassionate salary advance?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I had said, hoping for a miracle. ‘It was for my mum’s hospital bills, but it was turned down.’
‘You won’t solve your financial crisis by writing stories on my DRCD 090 forms.’ He mused, with the many distracted nose palpations of the closet gold digger. ‘I’ll see what I can do for you.’
What he did was transfer me to the Accounts department. There were no provocative questionnaires on that beat, but I didn’t stay there too long. Within a month I had received my note from God and another couple of weeks afterwards I found myself filling out a questionnaire for the Ministry of Internal Affairs at Kuje Prison in Abuja.
* * *
5th February, 2002
I was feeling more upbeat in the morning. DRCD’s protocol office had printed my itinerary, which I broke as soon as I arrived at the Abuja Airport. Instead of the flight from Abuja to Ubesia, I boarded the first flight to Lagos. The plane arrived within the hour, and I caught a cab to the psychiatric hospital at Yaba. I left my bags with a friendly receptionist and joined a long queue to see Dr. Maleek.
His table was cluttered with files, but he had made enough room for two elbows and a cup of tea. There was a suspicion of aloofness in his eyes, a man used to putting distance between himself and the relentless stream of suffering in which he worked. ‘Where’s your card, young lady?’
I shook my head quietly. ‘I’m not a patient; my name is Amana Udama. It’s about my mother.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Evarina Udama. She lived in a tiny village near Abuja, but you used to be her doctor . . .’
His smile seemed to become warmer, less professional. When I didn’t continue, he asked, ‘How can I help you, Amana?’
‘It’s about . . . I need to talk about her . . .’
‘Do you have a letter from her?’
‘She’s dead.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He paused for a beat. ‘I am. But a doctor’s confidence isn’t released by his patient’s death.’
‘She was my mother. I . . . came all the way from Abuja . . .’
‘I hate to sound callous . . . Miss?’
I nodded.
‘Miss Udama, but it doesn’t matter where you came from. These rules have a purpose.’
‘The confidence is already broken. A medical report was sent from here to her doctor in Abuja. I was at home when the letter arrived, and I read it.’
‘Then you don’t need me.’
I rose. Suddenly he didn’t seem that warm anymore. ‘You’ll have to use the information in my mother’s file’—I knew I was sounding melodramatic, but I couldn’t help myself—‘whether you help me now, or when they carry me back here screaming and kicking!’
He smiled and offered me his complimentary card.
I ignored it and walked out, managing not to slam the door. Later, I was glad I didn’t. I was waiting for a taxi outside the hospital gate when a green-clad orderly I had noticed outside Dr. Maleek’s office hurried up to me.
* * *
12 noon
He took me to lunch in a Montgomery Road restaurant whose proprietress played the same Rex Lawson track all afternoon. He no longer looked indifferent or warm, merely tired. I was now sorry about my outburst, and rude exit, and spent the twenty minutes while I ate and he made small-talk trying to muster an apology. By the time I put down my fork I had given up the struggle. ‘Thanks for lunch,’ I said, instead. ‘I’m sorry to take you out of the hospital.’
‘It’s fine. I had to grab the opportunity to enjoy lunch with Evarina’s daughter—before she becomes my patient.’
I recognised another cue for an apology and sidestepped it swiftly. ‘You remembered my mother after so many years without looking up a file . . .’
He nodded. ‘She was a . . . special case—I’m still not discussing her, by the way, I’m discussing you. Did you have a good childhood? Stepfather?’
I shook my head. ‘No father, whether real or step. My mother didn’t have much luck in the marriage pools. As for my childhood,’ I hesitated, ‘it’s over.’
He groomed his moustache. ‘She wasn’t a good mother?’
I shook my head. ‘But then again, I wasn’t a good child.’ I hesitated, ‘I finally understood, when I read the medical report and saw that she tried to kill me as a baby . . .’
Dr. Maleek sighed and ran his hand over his bald spot. He suddenly looked years older. ‘I was hoping you were bluffing about reading the report. But you have to understand, she was ill. It was involuntary, what she did. It’s like a mum having a heart attack and dropping her own child; she deserves pity, not hatred.’
‘You know a lot of medicine, Dr. Maleek, but you obviously don’t know women. My mother was no loony. The thing with my father didn’t work out, and I was a hindrance for the next eligible man to come along . . .’
‘And you are the woman expert, aren’t you? Diagnosing an event that happened when you were two days old.’
‘I’m analysing a woman I lived with all my life!’
‘She was suffering a well-documented medical condition!’
‘Oh, yes? Was she still suffering from it when she packed me off to boarding school, to get me out of her way? She had so many relationships—and none worked out. She forgot to pick me up on three holidays, but she never, ever made another mistake.’
‘Another mistake?’
‘I was her only child.’
‘Did it ever occur to you that she didn’t marry again because she didn’t want the pressure to have children . . . and that you didn’t have siblings because she was afraid of another breakdown?’
‘You’re not just her doctor; you’re her advocate as well.’
‘You force me into that role—by deciding to be her judge and jury as well. Look, since you’ve read the report, why did you want to see me?’
‘Will you now break your Hippocratic oath? Or is this just a rhetoric question?’
He smiled wanly. ‘Amana, I’ve been a doctor for thirty years. I am fifty-eight years old. I’ve got two years for every year of your life. First time I met you, you were small enough to sleep in that purse around your waist. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
‘You loved my mum too, didn’t you? She had that effect on men; they took her side every time. Her
only failure was my biological father.’
He gulped down the rest of his tonic water, spilling some on his coat. He put down the glass angrily and said, his voice cold and bitter as he slapped at his clothes, ‘Maybe you should register as a patient after all. I thought I’d have lunch with a success story and it turns out a busman’s holiday!’
I shut my eyes and struggled with my own anger. Temperamental was the most consistent adjective in my annual assessments at DRCD.
Eventually, he relented, pointing a finger at me. ‘Listen, your mother had postpartum depression with a major psychotic episode. From what you’re telling me, it had an impact on mother-child bonding.’
‘It certainly did.’
‘It happens. But she was ill. Not you. This doesn’t have to happen to you and your children. It’s difficult, but you must get over your bitterness toward her and get on with your life.’
I shrugged and said lightly, ‘I’m not bitter, just stating a cold fact.’
‘Look, what do you really want from me?’
‘She wrote me a letter, from her deathbed, asking me never to seek out my father or visit her hometown . . .’
‘About your father, I can’t . . .’
‘I don’t care about him,’ I said sharply. I bit my tongue. ‘I just want to know why she had this thing about her hometown. She’s Sontik, from Ubesia, but she’s never been there since I was born. Now, I’ve just been posted to Kreektown, which is just a few kilometres outside Ubesia . . .’
He stared. ‘You don’t care about your father, but you’re interested in a town?’
I opened my purse and pulled out a mirror and a small plastic tube of lipstick. ‘He rejected me, so that’s easy. I’m not one of those clingers who pine for fools that have rejected them . . .’
The bill arrived, and he pulled out his wallet and paid, again offering me his complimentary card, which I accepted this time. His voice was level, measured. ‘As it happens, fatherhood is one issue bigger than parent/doctor confidence. There was nothing about your father on the files, and I can’t tell you anything now, but in the near future . . . what’s so amusing?’
The Extinction of Menai Page 22