The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  ‘How’s Grace . . . when can I see her?’

  ‘She’s no longer on your visitor’s list.’ He lifted me with the assistance of the nurse as he examined me. He spoke as he worked. ‘Not very gentlemanly of you, Humphrey, to attack the messenger?’

  ‘I lost it . . . I’m sorry.’

  He came around my bed, stooping until he was at face level. ‘Open up.’ I did, and he checked the mobility of my jaw.

  ‘Will I live?’

  ‘You got off easy, Humphrey, just a concussion and a few minor lacerations. But with your history, we are watching that bump on your head. Dr. Asian Borha wasn’t so lucky . . .’

  He went on for another few minutes before I found a pause. ‘Can I call my agent, Shaun Jones?’

  ‘Do you have a number? We’ll give him a call tomorrow . . .’

  ‘Tonight! Please . . .’

  His brows climbed upwards. ‘It’s eight p.m.’

  ‘I feel like I’ve been sleeping for days.’

  He shrugged. ‘I’ll see what your minders have to say about that.’

  ZANDA ATTURK

  London | 12th April, 2005

  The heating had gone off. We got over our pride and huddled together for warmth. She sighed wearily. ‘You know that bomb in the pub?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Remember that couple with the child? It was in the man’s briefcase.’

  ‘Likely, but how can you be sure?’

  She put a photo envelope in my hand. ‘I wanted a photograph of you and your brother, so I had this one printed.’

  I glanced at the photo I held, with my thumb over my own face.

  Humphrey was sitting across the table from the bearded man whose face had been in the papers. He was grinning so vitally, it was hard to believe he was dead. In the lower background of the picture was the briefcase carried in by the man in the street.

  ‘They must have followed us into the pub. They clearly mistook Humphrey for you.’

  I was silent. I didn’t thank her for putting my thoughts into words. Death and destruction had followed me all the way from Kreektown to London.

  ‘Our government didn’t do this,’ she said. ‘Was there a Pitani video?’

  ‘I . . . can’t remember.’

  ‘For our sake, please remember,’ she whispered. ‘They don’t want a trial for you. We’ll all be safer once the video is published.’

  I nodded. She tried to take back the picture, but I held onto it. She prised it away gently and held it up to me. The lenses had caught the tortured expression on my face.

  ‘You were going to strangle him?’ There was no condemnation in her eyes, just curiosity.

  ‘Of course not!’

  She shrugged. ‘So I said to myself: If Badu wants to kill someone, he will, eventually. So I thought I should get to know Humphrey before he died. So I talked to him.’

  I sat up. ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes, when you went into the toilet.’ She laughed. ‘“You should be a model, not a paparazza,” that’s what he said to me. You didn’t mistake me for a model that first time we met, Zanda. Did you?’

  I bit my lips, remembering how I had mistaken her for a prostitute. The differences between identical twin brothers were emerging: the one put his foot in his mouth, the other had a knack for unforgettable first lines. She stared at the photograph for ages. Then, starting at my face, she tore it in two, and then in bits. ‘My biological mother . . . had this veil of secrecy over her life,’ she said bitterly. ‘Small things, big things . . . when she died, I found her diaries were written in code! Two years with Ma’Calico’s changed me. I want no secrets between us, Zanda. Please. I’ll forgive anything, but don’t keep secrets from me.’

  I nodded.

  She held my face, forcing me to look at her. Her brows were knit, worried. ‘He’s your twin. I’d be excited. I’d be . . .’ she paused. A shadow passed over her face as the hypocrisy hit her, and she let me go. She sighed and sat back. ‘I suppose it either happens or it doesn’t. I didn’t love my birth mother either. Didn’t shed a tear when she died . . .’ She sniffed. ‘With Ma’Calico, I . . .’

  I held her closer. ‘I know. I don’t feel . . . negative about him. Anymore.’

  ‘You still find it hard to say his name, though. No, I understand.’ She got up tiredly. She measured a smile to reassure. ‘I won’t judge you,’ she said.

  Yet I felt judged, condemned.

  HUMPHREY CHOW

  London | 12th April, 2005

  He was in my room before 9:00 p.m., a young Glaswegian with a shock of red hair and a permanently dishevelled air. He had a box of chocolates, which he carried with some embarrassment. I reached for it. ‘Relax, Shaun, it’s okay to be happy; I didn’t die!’

  ‘That’s the point.’ He winced, hunching his shoulders and hanging onto the box. ‘It’s a gift for my girlfriend’s birthday. There was no one outside to leave it with. Sorry.’

  ‘Oh. I hear you’re stuck with me.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, setting his chocs safely on my bedside locker. ‘Lynn’s a wee bit indisposed.’

  ‘What’s the state of play with Balding Wolf?’

  ‘You had till today.’ He spread his hands and said, ‘But don’t worry about it, I’ll find you something.’

  I nodded. I knew that whatever he found me had to be less trouble than a box of chocolates. ‘I have a story,’ I said.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘On my laptop. I just have to clean it up and e-mail it overnight—if I can find a signal. Can you push the deadline by some hours? ’

  He looked around dubiously. ‘Where’s your laptop?’

  ‘At home in Putney. You could pick it up and be back here in, what . . . ? Thirty minutes?’

  He looked at his watch. ‘I don’t know . . .’

  ‘I hate to drag your books down from the beginning . . . and I’m sorry about your girlfriend, but once they run another writer from this issue, my twelve-tale deal is dead . . .’

  That decided him. ‘I’ll call Phil. Where’s your key?’

  I pressed the bell for the nurse. She brought the box of personal effects from the clothes that had been cut off my body. I gave Shaun the keys and my address and he left. After the nurse carried off the box and I was alone again, I opened the bottle of capsules I had sneaked from right under their noses.

  Something was taking shape in my mind, some sort of dynamic for the crisis of an imagination that had seized up too many years ago. Either I had no imagination worthy of a writer or my constipated memory had clogged up the pores of my mind. I had to boil out that memory, write it out of me.

  While Dalminda and his bombs had stayed in the realms of hallucinations, I could always drop my writerly pretensions and find another job. But with bombs going off around me, I no longer had a choice in the matter. Dr. Borha’s death had closed the hypnotic door to my memory. I now had to give it a boost any which way. It was a dangerous path, and my heartbeat quickened, just to contemplate it. Yet I was in a hospital ward and there was no safer place to attempt what I was about to do. I simply had to know who was after me, before they got to me. Bamou’s story and a liberated imagination that could write other stories would be a bonus, really. I selected two capsules of Proxtigen and waited.

  Shaun was back within the hour, with my laptop and a pack of CDs. His chocolates were gone, and he was considerably more at ease. ‘I can wait and pick it up,’ he offered.

  I shook my head. ‘Still a few T’s to cross, I’m afraid,’ I told him. ‘I’ll leave it for you at the reception. Say, seven a.m. tomorrow?’

  ‘You wish.’ Said the nurse who had come in with him, ‘You’re not crossing any T’s on my watch.’ She stowed my laptop in a wall cabinet. He grinned as she shooed him out. Shaun had brought a few more things from my flat: a toilet bag and a change of clothes. He was not going to be a bad agent after all. I let the ward quieten down for the night; then I sat up gingerly. Slowly, I let my feet take my weight. I rolled my dri
p stand across to my laptop and carried it back to the bed, where I hid it under the duvet. I took a deep breath and swallowed the capsules with a glass of water, then lay back.

  It was 10:00 p.m.

  IN AUGUST 2002, I started a new job in the prison. I was a newly wedded twenty-two-year-old in my eighth year in Cote d’Ivoire. On the night shift, I heard a song in a strange language that cost me my peace of mind. By some linguistic osmosis, I seemed to understand the words of the lyrics without knowing anything of the language of the song. Night after night, as I stood there at my sentry post in the prison yard, the same voice floated his love song to his mother from the silence of the darkened prison block. Haunting and unforgettable. As I listened, the strange language flowered in my mind, growing in lexis, in idiom.

  One night, I followed the voice into the prison block and found him by the window in his cell, serenading a clear night sky.

  Ejue Ma’Bamou

  atuemi ga ju

  ejue, ejue gaju eni . . .

  The words slipped like eels into my mind. My memory writhed in the dark, translating them . . . ‘Ma’Bamou, eyewitness to my birth, bear witness to my grief . . .’ I understood the language but nothing else! Not the name of it, not the first idea how and where I learned it. When he turned around, I was unprepared for the sight of the bearded giant, some twenty years older than I was but as vulnerable as a teenager.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Bamou Geya.’

  ‘What language was that?’

  ‘Menai!’ laughed his fellow prisoners.

  I was on the prison’s censors team and took to calling Bamou into the post room for mail queries. The first time, I dumbfounded him by speaking to him in Menai, and he burst into speech of such speed and passion that it was impossible to follow him.

  Since I could speak the language, he began to send and receive his mail in Menai. He only ever wrote to a sister called Rubi, in Kreektown, Nigeria. There was nothing to take issue with in his letters—I could barely read Menai, to be fair—but the prison was more interested in what might be smuggled in the post than what the letters had to say. I took that opportunity to see him regularly to learn his story.

  He was a widower whose wife had died in childbirth, and he had three years left on his fifteen-year sentence. In those weeks that I got to know him, I grew a kinship with that Menai man, which came not just from a private, shared tongue but also from his story and the story of his endangered ethnic nation.

  In 1990 he was working for a CITES project breeding the rare white-naped mangabey monkeys for reintroduction into the wild. The parallel between his people’s fate and that of the animals had drawn him to the work of the Convention. The white-naped mangabeys were a special case: the beautiful humanoid primates had been sighted in only two locations in the world. The project had advertised for an intern, and he needed to earn some money after his commonwealth-funded course in Ottawa. He was in the Primate Camp that evening when news of the Topless Procession came through on the radio. One of the six dead children was his daughter, Felimpe.

  It was the loss of daughter, the disconnect between the care and expense invested in monkeys and the world’s indifference to the extinction of his ethnic nation that drove him into a five-minute fit of madness with a handy machete. He would spend the rest of his life ruing the death of those two dozen mangabeys in his frenzied slaughter.

  His remorse counted for nothing. He was sentenced to fifteen years in jail. It was difficult for me to reconcile the convict of the slaughter of protected monkeys with the gentle giant in the Abidjan prison. Yet the real tragedy of his life was the subterfuge that he practised on his parents. In the month he was due to finish his internship and return to Kreektown, he had started his jail sentence and swore his sister, Rubi, to secrecy. It was far preferable to him that his parents thought him a cad who had forgotten them than that they suffered vicariously with him throughout his jail term.

  We mostly spoke Menai. Or rather, he mostly taught me, for my knowledge turned out to be quite rudimentary. We were never able to figure out how I could have learnt the language. Even then, I knew there were pages of my life that were missing. The more time I spent with Bamou, the more I fretted about those pages, about that earlier home in which I had learnt Menai. My parents could not help. They were elderly Ivoriens who had chosen to give a troubled teenager another start in life when they decided to retire home to Abidjan. They knew nothing of my earlier adoption history.

  His remorse had been so total that he had never mentioned the provocation of his dead daughter and dying nation, either to the lawyer who defended him or to the court that sentenced him. I brought his story to the attention of the Commandant. It was a very short campaign. He had some time off due to him anyway, and soon after I first met him, his release was scheduled in a matter of weeks. It was a heady achievement for a young prison officer on his first job.

  OUR LAST day together had been busy for me. I had several convicts to see, but I scheduled Bamou for last, as usual, so that I could spend some extra time with him. We were alone in the office. I usually would read his letters first, but that day, I didn’t. While I cleared my desk, he read a few lines and then let out a roar that was more buffalo than man. He rose, threw my heavy desk across the room with a sweep of the hand, and charged at the far wall, head lowered like a battering ram!

  That was my last clear memory from that life. My friend, Bamou, the pleasant Menai who did not have a single enemy in the world—bar the ghosts of his hapless mangabeys—went from a man looking forward to his release within the fortnight to a convulsing body, bleeding from head fractures as he died on my office floor. I remember my spastic hands picking up the letter, seeking an explanation for the horror I had just witnessed . . . but my mind was already fleeing, again. It was Dr. Borha’s trauma-triggered dissociative fugue all over again. I fled the scene of Bamou’s death into another darkness, never finding out what inspired his terrible suicide.

  ZANDA ATTURK

  London | 13th April, 2005

  We were next in line to be served at the fish ’n chips shop. ‘A bag of chips and four sausages,’ she said.

  The vendor looked askance. ‘Say what?’

  ‘A bag of chips and four sausages!’ chipped in a voice from behind us.

  He served us tentatively.

  ‘You want some gravy on them?’ he asked.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ she asked me.

  ‘I think he’s asking if we want gravy,’ I said.

  She shook her head, and we went off with our food. She was vexed. ‘I don’t think I’m going to like this country. It’s the same language but I’m needing interpreters.’

  * * *

  WE FOUND a park bench to eat on.

  ‘There’s no future in this, you know?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘False papers, flipping burgers.’

  I was silent for a beat. I had taken my passport, NI card, and CV into the employment office. The consultant’s brows had risen as she examined the fake documents. She had done a double take at the NI card and had taken it to her boss in the glass cubicle behind. I had watched them doubling over with laughter and hurried out while they were still incapacitated. That was the end of the road for ‘Nelson Ogunde’ and his papers. So much for Freddie Jacks’s expertise in alternative documentation.

  ‘It’s a bridge,’ I said doggedly.

  ‘A bridge to nowhere, Zanda. They’ve tried to kill you, so you can ask for asylum. What have we got to lose?’

  I stared at her. ‘How do you figure that out? They try to kill me and therefore I can ask for asylum? By GodMenai, I’m a wanted terrorist!’

  ‘Remember Umaru Dikko?’ she asked. ‘Back in eighty-four, he was wanted for corruption in Nigeria. Our government tried to smuggle him out of London in a diplomatic crate and failed.’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘So they finally brought a repatriation request, and the UK rejected it. He’s still living in L
ondon right now.’

  ‘Badu’s different. Corruption is a different ball game from terrorism.’

  ‘We didn’t blow up a pub, Zanda. They are the terrorists now.’

  I looked at her speculatively. ‘You get some really weird ideas.’

  She punched my arm. ‘You are soooo timid! I wish I could talk to Badu!’

  * * *

  4:00 p.m.

  We walked home. I knew she had something on her mind. ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘Humphrey,’ she said quietly. She stopped and looked at me.

  ‘I was thinking the same thing. Tomorrow?’

  She nodded. We held hands and walked on. She watched young people milling about. ‘Things are even worse here,’ she said solemnly, crumpling her can and tossing it into the trash. ‘Most of their youths, they also got fake vaccines.’

  ‘How so?’

  She nodded at a group of teenagers with trousers halfway down their buttocks, hips swinging violently in the latest fashion, as though to some unheard music. ‘Meningitis, much worse than ours.’

  I stared at her. It was sometimes difficult to know when she was clowning.

  * * *

  6:10 p.m.

  Freddie Jacks phoned. He said he had a job for a smart young man who didn’t ask too many questions. It would take an hour or two and there would be a few hundred pounds at the end of the day for the smart young man.

  I told him I had just one question, and he hung up the phone.

  Amana listened solemnly as I recounted our conversation.

  ‘Probably a few years in jail, as well, for the smart young man,’ she sniffed.

  * * *

  9:45 p.m.

  The world was suddenly full of exploding bombs. That night, listening to the BBC world service, we picked up news of Nanga Saul Bentiy’s death. He had died the day before at his palace in Ubesia. The breaking news, however, was about the plane carrying Sonia Obu, the first lady of Sontik State, which had crashed soon after takeoff in the federal capital, Abuja. Witnesses had reported an explosion, but there was no news yet on casualties. We remembered the Palaver edition Amana had brought to Cameroon, and a black disquiet filled our room. For the first time in days, my thoughts jerked guiltily to the Mata. I found Tobin’s envelope and called his number. When I got a recorded message, I called yet another number. This time I got David Balsam. He passed the phone to Tobin, who said the Mata was in one of his trances. I was unprepared for Tobin’s effusive warmth or for the chill that followed when I told him I had not yet read his letter. He hung up. I was silent for a while.