The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  I cannot lie.

  I go outside. I don’t know, but I will just walk around the poultry shed. All of them are died now, my chickens. Apart from the few that I leave to stroll the compound and feed themselves. Just to keep me company. Is not difficult, or sad, even, killing the rest. Killing chickens is a thing of which I did everyday. And is better for them to die at once, instead of them to suffer. If I don’t wake up, the worst thing for me is to know that my chickens will suffer and die in their cage.

  Like the Menai in their town.

  Is funny that after singing hundreds upon hundreds of other people’s calamity, nobody will sing my own. This life of a thing. I walk around the compound slowly. Maybe this is how a chicken feels, walking round his cage, waiting for Christmas, or Easter. I don’t go behind the poultry shed. There is a strong smell now, from all the crates upon crates of eggs I couldn’t sell, that have now spoiled. That particular smell, that smell of rotten eggs, even me I can’t stand it. That’s the thing . . . when your customers have die even before your chickens . . . that particular sadness is very hard to bear. I arrange the chairs in the yard.

  This life of a thing.

  I go back to my front room. I am jealousing Daudi, how he died with his family. My whole family is now in the circle of ancestorMenai and I hungry to go there. But to hurry there before the time GodMenai whispers in your ear is taboo. Is to jump the wadigulf of death, and miss the other side.

  I have to wait.

  So I sit down in my cane chair.

  I wait.

  DAVID BALSAM

  Chad Republic | 11th April, 2005

  The best part of his days were the sunrises. Opening his eyes to a tangerine sun suddenly at his feet, with nothing between him and the early warmth but a horizon of sand and sky. The worst part was usually the moment afterwards when he asked himself what he was doing there in the middle of the largest desert in the world, putting his life on the line to bury a man who was not yet dead.

  And yet, there was something about the honesty of this loneliness, out there in the Sahara, where nobody was going to stop by and visit, compared with his life in the midst of millions of Londoners, where, if he stayed home for months on end, nobody was going to stop by and visit. He liked what he learned about himself in the deafening silence of the large bedroom in which he nightly watched the moon walk the sky.

  He was now into the second chapter of his monograph on the Menai, but it shamed him that he could not be honest with Tobin and his Mata about his true motivations, how much more with his future readers. He wished he had the forthrightness of a Conrad Risborough who confessed his superstitions head-on. He remembered his twenty-five-year-old “pull yourself together” speech to the late peer, and sighed.

  He sat up. He had slept outside his tent as usual, and he saw that Tobin had beaten him to the gas fire by the truck and was returning with two cups of coffee. He studied the other man as he approached. They had been three days into the trip when he figured, from the drugs Tobin was taking regularly, that he was also a victim of the Trevi inoculations. David wished he could ask the direct question. He took the coffee gratefully. ‘How are you? Keeping up?’

  ‘Holding it together. You?’

  ‘Doing okay.’

  And with those meaningless words, they swept important issues under gruff manhood and regrouped around the map on which they had managed to plot their journey. It was still lying open from the night before. They had spent days map-making with Mata Nimito, pairing their topographic survey maps with the Mata’s ‘historysongs.’ In the library of his mind, the map to the Field of Stones had not been filed in one volume. Sometimes he would recite an hour-long historysong for the clues in the geographical stanza at the end of it. And then there were the interminable translations from English to Menai and back . . . yet they had done it in the end. All the place-names the Mata described had disappeared; and where they had not, they had moved; and where they had not moved, they had changed names. Still, there were enough clues on the ground and stars in the sky to orient the Mata’s description of a migration path that crisscrossed the Sahara.

  The Mata claimed a precise location north of Khartoum, Sudan, for a Field of Stones that he had never seen. It would not have been so bad if they were finally making a straightforward safari to the X that was supposed to mark the spot, but no. The Mata was like some gregarious corpse on the way to the grave who wanted to say hi to some homies on the way home.

  They were now making tracks for one such nostalgic stopover: the Keep of Njakara.

  David thought it was a good thing he was growing a beard, for he could no longer recognise himself.

  HUMPHREY CHOW

  London | 11th April, 2005

  I woke up between two policemen in a hospital ward and caused a minor commotion just by opening my eyes. I asked the time of a nurse, who didn’t seem qualified to look at her watch. Instead she fled to fetch a doctor, whose voice sounded like a prescription to calm bomb-blast victims.

  I was stretched out, and a dull pain throbbed in my back. I could see my limbs splayed before me, but I had not tried to move them and had no idea whether they still worked. I had no idea who had tried to kill me, whether it was the real Dalminda or the Scottish ghost version. The thought that filled me with dread was the possibility that I had missed Phil’s deadline and lost my twelve-tale deal.

  ‘What day is it?’ I asked the doctor, not recognising my own voice.

  ‘You were very lucky, Mr. Chow,’ said the calm voice. A nettle stung my right arm. At least that part was still alive. ‘Don’t bother about clocks and calendars just now, just focus on getting well . . .’ Then he faded away.

  ZANDA ATTURK

  London | 12th April, 2005

  We knew right away that the bomb at the Cricketers Arms had been meant for me: clearly the British took rewards more seriously than Nigerians. We changed lodgings right away and holed up in a dingy block in East London. The street was clogged with black bin bags. The landlord, who lived on-premises, offered to take my rent in marijuana and was miffed when I passed. We did nothing but play cards and follow the bomb story on TV. Two patrons had died from the blast, but Humphrey was not on the list. On that day after the blast, a list of three critically ill people was released. He was not on that list either. We didn’t dare go looking for him for fear of setting off another bomb. The brotherly reunion wasn’t cancelled after all; it was on hold. Yet we had only a few more days before we ran out of money. We couldn’t stay holed up forever.

  I made the call to Adevo’s contact and, that evening, went over to see him. It was a council flat near Elephant and Castle. There was a whiff of urine in the elevator. It didn’t look like the residence of a man who, according to Adevo’s description, was taking London by storm.

  ‘Are you Frederick Eghwrudjak—’ I began, doubtfully.

  ‘Freddie Jacks, Freddie Jacks,’ he said irritably. He was fortyish and sported a walking stick with a silver head. He did not let me into his flat. We talked on the balcony of his fifth-floor apartment, which had poetic graffiti running across the walls. Next door was a boarded-up flat in which a breathy clandestine transaction was in progress. He was balding, but his beard and what hair remained on his head were dreadlocked. He wore a tracksuit and bounced from foot to foot, as though we were chatting in a boxing ring.

  ‘Yeah, man,’ he said without preamble. ‘I’m breaking a Felixstowe container this night. They’re packing right now; are you in or out?’

  ‘What are you packing?’ I asked. He had a mostly Cockney accent, but when he got excited it betrayed a strong Urhobo undertone.

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Stuff. Yer a curious chappie, innit?’

  ‘Adevo said I could trust you.’

  ‘Everybody knows Freddie Jacks,’ he said, ‘but it’s rude, man. You don’t go asking people what’s in their containers.’

  I paused. ‘How much?’

  He stopped bouncing and stared.

  I glanced around
. ‘What?’

  ‘How much?’ he repeated incredulously. ‘Brotherman! Ah been in this business twenty years, man, nobody never started by asking Freddie Jacks how much. You gotta watch ya greed, man; it ain’t cool to be greedy in this business.’

  I told him I would think about it. As the transaction next door reached an orgasmic conclusion, he took my photograph and ‘Nelson Ogunde’s’ details. We shook hands, and he promised to call me about other job offers the next day.

  * * *

  WHAT WAS real was Amana. She was the anchor I had wanted, but responsibility for her now weighed on my conscience. I had ended her old life, and she was an outlaw on my account. I didn’t know how long I could go before I went off the rails again. If I sleepwalked in this land I would be caught on camera before I went a dozen paces. Badu would not thrive long here. I had to get a job, tighten the loose nuts in my head, and set up proper house with Amana . . . the interminable corridors of normalcy stretched out before me, bland, pedestrian, featureless.

  I knew it would drive me crazy.

  I walked on.

  HUMPHREY CHOW

  London | 12th April, 2005

  When I woke again, Grace was standing there, in a dress I did not know, and she was holding my hand. A picky resentment flared, then, that I had to take a bomb in the back to bring her to my side. I began to pull my hand away childishly. Then a thought occurred to me. ‘Where’s Dr. Borha?’ I asked her.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said tragically, ‘but don’t worry, Mum has agreed to . . .’

  My two hands were working well then, because they seemed able and willing to grapple. She fell back, jolted, as policemen and skittish nurses held me down, waiting for the sedative to kick in.

  I do not think there will be a reconciliation, after all.

  ZANDA ATTURK

  London | 12th April, 2005

  She stared at me.

  ‘You’re not saying anything,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ she replied eventually.

  ‘You could say, “That’s a great idea, dear—”’

  ‘Let me get this straight: someone is trying to kill you and you want to get a job flipping burgers? I thought we should see Humphrey, start a political movement—’

  ‘We’ve got to be realistic here—’

  ‘Realistic? You’re Badu.’

  ‘Only when I’m crazy. We’re two illegal immigrants, that’s what we are . . .’

  ‘I can’t just turn my back. They killed my mum. This is personal. You started a revolution and you ran out. Give us leadership, Zanda! I trusted you, I loved you!’

  I looked at her bleakly. ‘Loved?’

  She took a deep breath and looked out of our bed-and-breakfast window. ‘Story of my life,’ she muttered. ‘I like a record, I buy it, and I play it till the sound of it disgusts me,’ she hissed.

  ‘Disgusts?’

  She tried not to laugh and gave up. ‘You’re a glutton for punishment, aren’t you?’ She kissed me, but I didn’t blink, and she sighed. ‘I don’t know, Zanda, I’ve never loved before. When you start flipping burgers tomorrow, I don’t know how I’ll feel.’

  ‘It’s not that long since you were serving beers at . . .’ I bit back my words, but the reference to Ma’Calico didn’t bring on the blues as I feared.

  She laughed shortly. ‘Okay, so I sell beer for my mama beer parlour, so therefore? This na your papa house? What am I supposed to feel when my own Badu starts flipping burgers?’

  A sullen silence reigned. I looked around the room. The walls were thinner than my room at Ma’Calico’s, the floors creaked with every shift of weight. When other tenants used the toilet, we had to raise the volume of the TV to drown out the sound of their business. There was no help for the smell of it. And at forty-five pounds a night, we’d be broke in days. There was a mouse in the couch that didn’t realise I was paying the rent—and that it was supposed to do the fleeing when our paths crossed. I had to start flipping burgers the next day so we could stay in a place like this . . . ‘You could feel grateful,’ I said through gritted teeth. I walked out.

  * * *

  IT WAS too cold to go far, and I had left without my jacket. She brought it to me, on the bench across the road. I pulled it on wordlessly. It was technically spring, but we were miserably cold. We sat silently. In days we had grown grey, like our clothes, like the weather, like the country. We watched the swirling leaves and passing boots in the light of streetlamps. ‘I’ll say I’m sorry if you’ll say you’re sorry,’ she offered.

  I clenched my teeth on my mirth. She had a sheaf of papers under her arm. The game wasn’t over. This was the Queen’s Gambit Deferred. ‘Don’t be. You said what you felt. I like that.’

  She opened up her papers anyway. They were printouts of Nigerian dailies, which she had downloaded from the Internet in the library. One of them was a story on the Badu movement. ‘So who leads them?’ Asked Amana, ‘What’s a revolution without its leader?’

  I skimmed the story. A judge had arrived in court to find details of a bribe he had taken in the case before him pasted all over the courtroom. Copies of the poster were folded into pamphlets and fastened under the wipers of cars in the court’s car park. He had stayed away from court for a week, but when he finally appeared, it was to peals of laughter. He had resigned ahead of his disciplinary hearing. Another reluctant judicial enquiry was under way. ‘They’re doing very well without Badu,’ I said. ‘All communism wanted of Karl Marx was the push of Das Kapital.’

  ‘Well, see where it landed them,’ she snapped.

  I left her on the bench and went back to our room.

  HUMPHREY CHOW

  London | 12th April, 2005

  Next time I came up, the drapes were drawn, but the gloom of the ward suited me fine. They must have shot vials of black ink into my veins because my mood was sooty as sin. Ram Gupta was sleeping in the chair beside me. His head was lolling, practically touching his shoulder, and a string of saliva extended halfway down to his lapel. The two policemen at the door were gone. In their place was a screen on which was pinned a dozen colourful get-well cards.

  His newspaper had slipped down his lap, but I reached it easily. It was the day after, and the bomb blast at the Cricketers Arms was still front-page news. I was fifteen minutes into the newspaper when the door opened softly and a man I had never seen before entered, carrying two paper cups of coffee. Ram Gupta came awake grumpily, sitting up when he saw me.

  ‘About time, too,’ he grumbled, wiping his lips. ‘Never saw a man who slept so much.’ He took back his newspaper.

  ‘Did he die immediately?’ My voice sounded hollow to my ears.

  ‘Yes.’ He pulled his chair forward. He took a coffee from the other man, who went over to the other side of my bed. Gupta looked tired and unshaven. ‘We’ve lost too much time, Humphrey. Give me names. Who could have done this thing? They clearly don’t share your loyalty.’

  ‘I don’t know them. I can give you a good description though . . .’

  The other man pulled out two pencil sketches, accurate enough artists’ impressions of the murderous team, less the baby. He held them out to me. His feet were two feet apart. His coffee hand was held at chest level, and his head projected two inches behind the rest of his body. I almost looked around for the movie camera. ‘We don’t need a description. We have thousands of these in circulation,’ he said. ‘What I want from you are names. We have witnesses who saw you chasing after the woman. Did you recognise her? Did she give you a warning? What’s the deal?’

  ‘I chased after her,’ I said wearily, ‘because they left the briefcase.’

  ‘The bomb.’

  ‘I didn’t know that then.’

  ‘So why did you run away just before it exploded?’

  I stared. I decided to become too ill to answer questions.

  ‘This is my colleague Rob Dawes,’ said Gupta. I could sense the tension between the two. ‘Rob is a member of the Internati
onal Terrorism Contact Unit based in Seattle . . .’

  ‘I’m director of the ITCU,’ clarified Rob, ‘and we suspect Dalminda’s cell is trying to silence you, to stop more revelations about them. Your “Reluctant Suicide” story, by the way, ruined years of detective work.’ He waved the sketches, maybe to keep my drowsy eyes open.

  But I let them close anyway. I had a right to be ill after taking a bomb in the back.

  Rob said, ‘I have a team of memory experts on the way . . .’

  The door opened again, and a nurse pushed in a trolley, followed by an elderly doctor in a sports jacket. His face was lined and creased, and the smell of tobacco went ahead of him and hung around when he left.

  ‘Today is a done deal,’ he wheezed. ‘You’ve got more questions? Tomorrow is another day.’

  ‘Fine,’ grumbled Gupta as the nurse pushed my finger into a sleeve and took my readings.

  ‘We’ll be here at seven tomorrow,’ said Rob.

  The doctor grinned. ‘The cleaner is here at seven, the nurses are finished at nine, and you can come at ten, how’s that?’

  The American locked eyes with the doctor for a moment, then yielded with ill grace, following Gupta out of the room. When the door had shut behind them, the doctor turned to me, as I gagged on his large tablets. ‘So how’s the wife-beater today?’