The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  ‘That’s all right, I should have reminded you to switch off the phone . . . but we were just about done anyway.’ He switched off the digital recorder as I took the call. Lynn sounded cross.

  ‘Thanks for standing me up!’

  ‘It’s still on,’ I said. ‘I’ll be there in fifteen.’

  ‘Don’t bother, I’ve already done lunch. Can you e-mail the story?’

  ‘Well, I’ve got some ideas,’ I began.

  ‘Ideas won’t cut it, Humphrey Chow; you’ve got a day to deliver six thousand words to Phil. They go to press on Wednesday, and they hit the streets on Friday. I did warn you about the pressure.’

  I was listening to a dead phone. Lynn had never hung up on me before. I glanced at my watch and did a double take.

  Dr. Borha was smiling privately as Ram Gupta returned. He was still carrying his file. ‘So how did that go?’

  ‘Very well indeed,’ muttered Dr. Borha. ‘I haven’t seen a better hypnosis subject . . .’

  ‘You haven’t?’ I said in some confusion. I had lost an hour—and all certainty as to whether I was going or coming.

  For answer, Dr. Borha rewound a few seconds of tape and played it back. My voice issued from the digital recorder in a monotone that curled my toes. Then my phone rang so convincingly that I reached for my waist again, before I realised that it was ringing on the tape. Dr. Borha thumbed off the digital recorder. ‘Plenty happened.’

  My throat constricted. I felt tugged towards a past I had escaped, a past of turmoil. I wanted to get out of that room, and I knew I was never going to put myself in this situation again, whatever the conditions of my bail.

  Gupta stretched out his hand for the microcassette, but Dr. Borha had other ideas. He slipped it into his shirt pocket and hefted his case. ‘There’s plenty here, like I said, but first off, I’ve got to determine whether we were listening to Humphrey Chow’s memories or to Humphrey Chow the storyteller.’

  ‘I’ll figure that out for myself,’ said Gupta, stepping forward. ‘That’s what I learned in detective school.’

  ‘Let me finish what I learned in medical school,’ insisted Dr. Borha, following me towards the door. ‘This is still a work in progress; his referents are psychometrically incoherent. This material falls short of forensic standards; I’ll finish my own investigations, Sergeant. I’ll call you tomorrow.’

  I left the police station with the doctor on my heels. My jaw was set. I showed him my wrist watch. ‘Your hour is spent. Haven’t you noticed?’

  ‘You intrigue me, Humphrey Chow,’ he said. ‘I owe you an apology for your lunch with your girlfriend . . .’

  ‘I’m married. That was my IMX agent, Lynn.’

  We were standing outside the Green Man pub. A scruffy blackboard on the pavement proudly announced two eight-ounce steaks, and spuds, for a fiver. He looked from the board to me. ‘Tell you what, I’ll buy you lunch.’

  ‘I’m not hungry. Goodbye, Dr. Borha.’ I turned to go, and he pulled out the microcassette from his pocket.

  ‘You have an amazing story here, Humphrey Chow. To my mind, more interesting than what you had in the first issue of Balding Wolf.’

  I stopped dead. He had got me; and from the look in his eyes, he knew it.

  ‘I’m not saying another word today.’

  ‘As it happens’—he laughed—‘I’m in a garrulous mood myself. This lunch is on me, and I promise, you won’t be getting a bill for this hour!’

  He pushed through the door of the pub, presumptuously assuming that I would follow. He led the way through the bar proper into the dimly lit interior, where five gnarled oak tables were set for four and a cloying spice of tobacco hung in the air. He plunked his case down by a table in the corner and shrugged out of his jacket. On nearby tables, a smattering of diners watched a football match on a muted screen. ‘I’ll order,’ he offered. ‘Steak for you? Beer?’

  I sat down gingerly. I didn’t mind a steak, but I certainly minded a rich psychoanalyst acting like a pimply, hard-up youth on a first date. I glanced at the menu. ‘I’ll have the risotto and cream,’ I said casually, picking the most expensive item, which was barely fifteen pounds anyway, ‘but I’ll have the king prawn entrée as well.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘And a beer?’

  ‘Any good champagne will do.’

  He grinned. ‘I can see you’re used to dining well, Humphrey Chow, but this is a humble pub. Perhaps a house wine?’

  That was probably when I relaxed. We had a passable meal, if it was possible to do passable with a divorce on the horizon, a cross agent on my case, and no story for my deadline. Dr. Borha was as garrulous as he had promised, becoming even more so after three pints of Stella Artois. I had seen that trick before, and I knew he was probably more in control of his faculties than he let on. I stuck severely to my glass of wine and ate my risotto mincingly.

  Eventually, the plates were cleared away; he took a deep breath and put the microcassette on the table.

  ‘Can I have a listen?’ I asked tightly.

  ‘Not now,’ he said, waving a hand to take in the diners on the other tables.

  ‘Well, was there anything . . . ?’

  ‘Incriminating? Perhaps potentially. But it depends on whether you take the contents of this tape as gospel truth or as the product of a novelist’s subconscious. That’s where further investigations come in. And I need you to trust me, to open up to me . . .’

  ‘You promised,’ I warned. ‘You said you’d do the talking.’

  He laughed, raising his hands in surrender as he sat back. ‘Fine, but I was just filling the vacuum. You’ve shown a singular lack of interest in me.’

  ‘I guess I was being polite,’ I conceded. ‘Where were you from, originally?’

  ‘I’m Trinidadian,’ he said. He took a sip, showing me the bottom of his glass. ‘Although I have travelled widely in Africa. About Ivory Coast—’

  ‘I’ve never been there.’

  ‘I think you should listen to this, Humphrey,’ he said abruptly, opening up his doctor’s case to pull out the digital recorder. He slotted in the cassette and passed it to me. ‘Go on. The toilet has thick enough walls. I’ll wait.’

  I took the machine, but I didn’t rise. The memory of the voice I had heard in Gupta’s office returned, and a strange fear filled me. ‘I don’t want to listen to it in a pub toilet. I don’t even want to listen to it in your clinic. I want to listen to it in the privacy of my own rooms.’

  He hesitated for a beat. ‘That’s fine,’ he said, taking me completely by surprise. ‘You’re my patient, and while I won’t lie to the police, my ultimate loyalties are to you, not the police. I do have one condition, though.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We must get to the bottom of this. You have these strong screen memories that you use to shield traumatic histories, but your medical records suggest organic triggers for your condition at genome level. Call my secretary and make an appointment. Is that a deal?’

  ‘Sure.’ I hesitated. ‘Do you have a diagnosis? My last psychiatrist said—’

  ‘I read her notes,’ he said arrogantly. ‘Don’t bother with her opinion.’

  ‘And you?’

  He shrugged. ‘Early days. The categories of dysfunction are never closed, but for a working diagnosis, I’d plunk you into the dissociative fugue box. Ever heard of that?’

  Dissociative fugue. I shook my head.

  ‘Google it,’ he advised. ‘It’s usually less stressful if you can put a name to your condition.’

  ‘Is it curable?’

  ‘God, I don’t know, I’m not in the DNA uncrimping business. But’—he rubbed his hands together gleefully—‘I’ll get richer finding out.’

  I laughed in spite of myself.

  * * *

  I HURRIED home from my meeting with Dr. Asian Borha to listen to the tape. Within the hour I was inside the small flat.

  Grace was long gone, of course. The breakup itself had been sophisticated.
After our row at the police station, she had checked herself into her mother’s clinic because she was having panic attacks, brought on, she said, by a fear of what I could let into the house while she slept. The improbable Dalminda Roco had become an invisible presence between us. When the week in the clinic was up, she moved back into her mother’s house. The moving truck came later. We did not even have an argument about breaking up.

  Our flat was in Putney Village, above a pub called the Cricketers Arms. I wasn’t hungry when I got home, but I buttered some toast while I sorted my mail. I binned the junk mail and left the bills unopened. I opened one letter, bearing the crest of the House of Commons, after I made and drank a mug of soup. It was the second summons to appear at the Sub-Committee on the Pharmaceutical Industries. The invitation to testify had started arriving after my near-death experience at the drug trial.

  I binned it as well. I was about to pull out the vacuum cleaner for the crumbs on the kitchen floor when it struck me: I was dodging the confrontation with the voice on the tape.

  Reluctantly I went to the flare in the corridor that the estate agent had described as ‘the lounge,’ where I had left the digital recorder. I sat before it. All that was left was for me to press the Play button, but the memory of that voice released a weight of fear that paralysed me. I was still in that funk when the doorbell rang. It was Lynn.

  ‘I thought you were mad at me.’

  ‘I still am.’ She smiled. ‘But I got a call from a Dr. Asian Borha, who said he was worried about you. That made two of us.’ She pushed past me. ‘Have you listened to the tape?’

  ‘I was just about to, actually.’

  She stood in the middle of the tiny lounge. Her black bag was slung across a shoulder, strap held captive in both hands. She had picked up Grace a couple of times but had never been in the flat before. She had eyes only for the digital recorder on the stool. ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’

  ‘Let me get your coat . . .’

  ‘Thanks, but I’m not stopping long.’

  ‘I . . .’ I hesitated. I supposed some small talk was in order. ‘Won’t you sit down? Do you want a cup of tea?’

  She picked up the machine and pressed the Play button. Dr. Asian Borha’s dreamy voice filled the room, coaxing, cajoling. Just to hear it again made my knees weak, and I hurried into the kitchen and out of earshot to make some tea. I took my time. When I returned with two Chinese teas I was relieved to find Lynn still awake and alert. A strident male voice was now talking. I vaguely recognized myself, but I also knew it was not me. It was a different voice, a voice that belonged to a man who could, should his wife arrive at a marriage counsellor’s with a boyfriend, throw them both though a window. Lynn was sitting down, and she reached for her teacup wordlessly.

  I listened from the door.

  * * *

  WHEN THE tape finally ran out there was a dread silence in the room. I put down my cold cup of tea by the digital recorder and sat beside her. Eventually the silence became more unbearable than the prospect that my voice would break if I spoke. I cleared my throat. ‘That was your phone call, by the way. Cut me off in full flood. So what do you think?’

  ‘What happened when Bamou hit the wall? Did he . . . die?’

  I was blank. Listening to the tape had not rekindled any memories. I could not own the narration as personal history, could not picture myself as the narrator in the uniform of a prison warder. I could not see the prison, could not picture Bamou beyond a young, anguished face . . . The recording had told a stranger’s story, so I did what I always did when people asked me what happened to characters at the end of my stories. I smiled and shrugged.

  ‘I’m worried about you, Humphrey Chow.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s as “edgy” as “Reluctant Bomber”?’

  ‘Come on, Humphrey’—there was irritation in her voice—‘this is not a story. This is your life we’re talking about!’

  I shrugged again. ‘Blank was basically my life, as well. We could change the names around, like before, just to be sure.’

  Lynn stared at me. I looked away. She spoke quietly, intensely: ‘Humphrey, this is no joke any longer. Did you hear your voice?—Did you hear your voices? What’s going on inside you, Humphrey? You’re a writer, you’re supposed to imagine things, not live them.’

  ‘This is my imagination in, kind of, overdrive.’

  ‘You’re no dramatist,’ she insisted. ‘I’ve never heard you do anything this sustained with your voice. You were doing characters!’

  ‘Then again, hypnosis does things to you . . . you lose your inhibitions, that sort of thing. Have you ever been hypnotised, Lynn?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither. But I’m glad I was today. I think Phil will like it.’

  ‘You really want to write this up for Phil?’

  ‘. . . if you think it’s, kind of, strong enough . . .’

  ‘Were you involved in this plot to . . . kill the endangered monkeys?’

  I thought before answering. ‘Don’t think so.’

  ‘You still have twenty hours to the deadline . . .’ She squeezed my shoulder. ‘We can’t risk publishing another story that brings Interpol, the UK and the Ivory Coast police down on you. I’ll call Dr. Borha and tell him you’re fine. Yeah?’

  She walked towards the door as a slow panic seized me. I dried my hands. ‘So, what are you doing tonight?’

  ‘How do you do that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sometimes you have this strong Oriental accent, sometimes it’s very East Midlands, just now it’s rather . . . African . . . just not as sustained as what you have on the tape’

  ‘I had these domineering foster parents . . .’

  ‘Usually people just blend their accents into one twang. You seem to have them all parcelled out.’

  ‘Children of immigrants often do.’ I smiled. ‘But I guess it’s open season on Humphrey Chow. Now it’s your turn to psychoanalyse me.’ I took the empty cups to the tiny kitchenette. I saw the grimace on my face from the reflection in a glass cabinet and stopped smiling.

  Something was going on, that much was obvious. A face had suddenly materialised in my mind, associated with the name Bamou. It settled there, intransigent, nonnegotiable, and at that moment I was exercising all my self-control not to turn around to see if he had materialised like a latter-day Dalminda. I placed the cups in the sink but made no move to wash them; instead I stood watching a grey squirrel at the root of a tree in the base of the garden. I couldn’t see a squirrel face, but there was a bobbing tail as expressive as any face, and I stood there, trying to draw the peace of the garden into my roiling life. Lynn’s footfalls stopped at the door of the kitchenette.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she said.

  She took two tentative steps, which brought her beside the sink. We had never been in as intimate a situation before. We stood shoulder to shoulder, and I noted that hers were a clear inch higher than mine.

  Grace and I often stood shoulder to shoulder at the sink. In the mornings when she came down on stockinged feet and we drank the first coffee and talked through the day ahead, it was usually a dead heat. For the last coffee of the day, when she stood in high heels from a party outing or a late day at the agency, hers were usually two or three inches higher. Lynn folded her arms and stared out through the window as well. She cleared her throat but said nothing.

  There was a long silence. I could see that she was building up to saying something, and the very effort of that buildup was stressing me. I was in the comfort zone of my flat. I had been through hypnosis, and depth charges were still going off in my mind. She was also a comfort zone, a person to be silent with, a surrogate everything, and she was building up to something else, and whatever it was, I didn’t like it already.

  ‘Humphrey, I can’t do this anymore.’

  ‘Do what?’ I tried a laugh. ‘Agent, friend, or shrink?’

  ‘I feel like I’m in a slow-motion car crash. I want out.’
/>   My mouth hung open for a beat. ‘I don’t understand; we’re doing well just now. You’ve waited . . .’

  ‘Not from where I’m standing, Humphrey.’ She took my hand, smiled. ‘I’m no shrink. So that’s sorted. But as an agent, I want to work with a writer, someone who creates a world from imagination . . . not from memory. What are you going to do when you run out of edgy . . . memories?’

  ‘I’m . . . exorcising my demons. Once my memory is sorted, my imagination . . .’

  ‘And as your friend, I don’t want you ever in a police interrogation like the last. I don’t want to sign off any more stories from your memory, Humphrey. Shaun has agreed to take on your account.’

  ‘Look, Lynn—’

  ‘I’ve made up my mind.’ She was suddenly speaking very fast, a cyclist pedalling uphill quickly to get through a hard patch. She was close enough for me to see the darting of her lazy left pupil, anxious enough not to consciously still it. She played with her scarf until it was looped once around her neck and round and around her wrists. Her bunched-up fists bounced in their scarf suspensions. ‘I’ve read that people with bad experiences with their natural mothers—’

  ‘I didn’t know my natural mother,’ I said hotly.

  ‘Exactly. That such people look for replacement mothers in close . . . female friends.’ She paused. ‘Well, I’m not, you know.’ There was probably more to say, but her jaw was clenched, and I had gotten the point anyway. She leaned forward and kissed me, not on the cheeks as was our wont, but full on the lips. It lingered, as though to atone for her curt words. She drew back and said, ‘Goodbye, Humphrey.’ Her voice was as cold as the kiss had been warm. Then she nodded and walked away.

  I listened to her footfalls and their final punctuation with the snap of a closed door.

  LYNN CHRISTIE

  London | 11th April, 2005

  I stopped at the entrance of his apartment block. I’d smoked my two sticks for the day, but I lit a cigarette anyway. I smoked it halfway through and crushed it into a bin. I entered the Cricketers Arms and ordered a gin I didn’t need either.