* * *
‘ARE YOU okay?’ Amana asked.
‘I’m fine,’ I lied. I was haunted by the call, tempted to call back to mend fences, but I didn’t. Since my flight from Kreektown in 1998 I had lived a clear emotional strategy: never to let people in who would wreck me when they left. I had seen Tobin’s face. He was one of the short-lived Menai. I was a stopover on his way home. I sat still and let him go on alone.
I watched Amana carefully. She was Sontik and had received the news of the Nanga’s death with a groan, but I saw no personal grief there, nothing in her mien to suggest that she had just received news of her father’s death. I toyed with the temptation of telling her what Dr. Maleek had shared with me, but something caused me to keep that strange secret to myself.
* * *
10:20 p.m.
The TV fell silent, and we ate dinner in the dark as we held back yet another coin from the gluttonous meter. We were homesick in a visceral way. The Internet radio was set to the Voice of Nigeria, and we sieved the flood of opinion for scraps of hard news: there were outbreaks of violence in Ubesia and a few cars had been burnt, but there was no sustained rioting.
I probed her gently. ‘Are you sorry he’s gone?’
‘Who?’
‘Your Nanga.’
‘I barely knew him: I’m not your typical Sontik. I was raised up north, lived there all my life. I’ve only been in Sontik State for the last two years.’
‘You did meet him . . .’
‘Just that once, when I served him at Ma’Calico’s. It was the oddest thing, though.’
‘You spent quite some time with him, as I recall.’
She smiled, remembering. ‘He was a curious old man! Really frail, but he couldn’t stop asking questions!’
‘What kind of stuff did he ask?’
‘Oh, all sorts. Politics mostly—did I think we should secede? What would it take to solve the roughboys problem?—that sort of thing.’ A small smile appeared on her face. ‘But he also wanted to know if I like kentu soup . . . and I never had someone ask me so much about my mother . . .’ She laughed embarrassedly,
‘What?’
‘I don’t know, he might have been a dirty old man, if he wasn’t so ill! He was very tactile—he held my hand after the handshake and didn’t let go.’ She fell silent. ‘This is the worst time for him to die.’
‘Why?’
‘He alone had the authority to keep the Sontik in Nigeria.’
‘And you? Do you support secession?’
She raised her right hand and flexed her digits, murmuring with playful thoughtfulness, ‘Tricky. Should the thumb stay on the palm? Hmm . . .’
* * *
WE SURFED the Internet gloomily for Nigerian news. The country was getting more than her fair share of coverage, thanks to the downed plane, a dead traditional ruler, and a restive delta. ‘There’s going to be trouble,’ she sighed, ‘mark my words.’ She gathered up the scraps of our dinner and carried them out to the bin. I hesitated a moment longer, then took my phone out to the balcony and called Dr. Maleek. I got an answering machine and left my telephone and address and asked him to get in touch. I began to kick myself as soon as I ended the call.
She fell asleep. There was nothing else to do then but to read Tobin Rani’s letter, after all. It was only a few pages long, but once I started it I realised I would get no sleep that night.
TOBIN RANI
Ubesia | 2nd February, 2005
My Dear Son,
I am writing this in case I don’t live long enough—or find the courage—to tell it.
I remember this as if it happened yesterday: I was in Dundee, studying for my PhD. I was also running advocacy for Menai culture and prospecting a twin city for Kreektown . . . but that PhD, that was the main thing.
It started in Umunede, sixty-nine kilometres from Kreektown: six Lassa fever cases at the General Hospital. By the following week it hit Illah and Patani. By the weekend there were five dead patients and ten new cases. By the time it reached Ubesia, it was all over CNN. The BBC’s correspondent in Benin City was flown out by air ambulance with the fever. Seventy dead patients within three weeks! By that time it was officially an epidemic. There was one thing I couldn’t do, and that was sit in front of the TV in Dundee. My spirit was in Kreektown so my body followed.
At the height of the epidemic, seventeen people were dying daily. Medical teams were coming from all over the world. Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontières . . . The World Health Organisation was there, helping the Ministry of Health. Field camps were going up all over the place. That was how Felix Fraser came into the picture.
He was the head of a volunteer medical team from Trevi Biotics Ltd. They camped out in Kreektown Square. He came in, set up camp, and went off to a more virulent outbreak in Congo, leaving his wife to run the camp. By the time I arrived, the epidemic was at its height. The ironic thing was, Kreektown never suffered a single Lassa fever case. The virulence of the virus was scary: in the epidemic phase, one in two infected people would die. That was an outcome we were not prepared to risk. Trevi was administering a Lassa fever vaccine. GodMenai! The things you realise from hindsight! I arrived and jumped right into the action. You are Menai, and you know how this thing is. I was not a volunteer, I was Menai. I was there with Trevi, doing the public information, the infection control, isolation precautions, everything. And when the vials arrived, my son, I also helped to administer them.
Laura Fraser was the lab tech who ran the site in the absence of her husband. She was as diametrically opposite to Felix as it was possible to be and still remain one species. She was female and he was male. She had six GCEs and he was a professor of biochemistry. She was twenty-five to his fifty, tall and blonde to his grey and balding. She pined for company the way he pined for the sagacious loneliness of a book-lined study—and the only cement I could find for their three-year-old, childless marriage was his wealth. For Felix Fraser owned 6 percent of the stock of Trevi Biotics Ltd., which made him a millionaire many times over, and Laura Fraser loved all the things that wealth could do. And then, of course, there was her addiction to his custom drug.
Proximity to death impairs judgement. Our affair lasted a night, ending there on the bed of our first love-making. She had a post-sex routine that involved a drug of her biochemist husband’s invention. They called it XP9. I told her I was not into drugs, whether experimental or otherwise, and she laughed and said I was, now: I’d taken the vaccine, a trial drug probably more dangerous than her own fix.
I ran back to the project office and looked with new eyes at the consent form that I got every Menai to sign. Something happens to small print in the thick of an epidemic, doesn’t it? The details tend to disappear . . . but it was there on the back of the cards: it was a trial vaccine with a long slate of potential side-effects. I returned to Laura. She was over her high and tried to play down her words. I travelled to the WHO base in Lagos. I read the literature. There were no known vaccines for Lassa fever. I went to the Health Ministry in Ubesia and the Federal Ministry in Lagos. No one could track down authorisations for the trial vaccine Trevi had injected into the Menai. In the heat of an epidemic it seemed bad manners to ask too many questions when people were dying so quickly. At any rate the health hierarchy did not like my questions. The epidemic was over and things had to move along.
I began to pray.
At first, it seemed that GodMenai had heard my prayers. The epidemic blew over. Not a single Menai had sickened. Not a single soul had died. But things had soured between Laura and me. In another week the camp was broken up. Trevi Biotics went on to another African trouble spot to play with their bag of tricks, and my professors hauled me back to school to my books. I celebrated my twenty-seventh birthday in The Orchid, Dundee, on the first of November, 1980. You were born on the fourth. I got the call out of the blue from Laura. She was in hospital in Sudan. I had not spoken with her since she left Kreektown.
Her babies had arrived six wee
ks early, she wept, and they were too dark to be her husband’s.
I was shattered. Didn’t know what to do. But she had a plan. She didn’t want to lose her marriage, and two black sons would certainly do that. She had made arrangements for two death certificates. I was to come and get you and your brother, and she would fly on to London with her lies and your death certificates, to meet her husband.
I did not hesitate. Between leaving my sons to be adopted by strangers, and taking them, there was no real choice. I left my studies once again, but I made one mistake: I flew to Sudan through Nigeria. Tume’s wife, Malian, had a still-birth a week earlier. They did not hesitate to come with me. It was too late. When we walked into the hospital Laura was red with rage: her husband had just been there.
He had seen the boys on the bed beside her. He had not said much, had simply turned and walked out of the hospital, but her marriage was already on the ropes, and there was not much point in death certificates anymore. Yet, by then, Malian had carried you and had fallen in love. We tried to persuade Laura to stick to the plan, but she was afraid: he had seen two healthy children. Two death certificates would have been too suspicious. That evening she left the hospital with your brother. By the next day she was off to try to save her marriage.
It wasn’t that Laura loved you less, but she had a god: her XP9. And Felix was its high priest. That was why divorce was not an option for her. But she couldn’t save her marriage. In the end she lost Felix and started off on other drugs.
She overdosed in 1984. She’s buried in Kent.
And let me assure you, Zanda, it wasn’t that I loved you less, either, but Malian and Tume were the best apology I could make for the way you came into the world. Her breasts were primed for a suckling child. Their hearts were open too. And Tume was the Mata’s chosen one. That is royalty, as Menai counts it now.
Still, I was haunted by your brother, Humphrey.
I felt I had done my duty by you. But as for your brother . . . I could not sleep at night. Laura was in no state to raise a child. By then she bore me a grudge for breaking her marriage, so she cut me off, spitefully. Her husband had managed to leave her penniless, and in her state she could not keep a job. When she lost your brother to the care system, I did not have a clue. She knew I would have done anything to have him, and that was her way of hurting me.
You know how it is with us Menai. From birth we have that duty wired into us: get married, have children—and that as quickly as possible. But with us, it is not just the having of the children. There is no point in having children, if they are not nurtured into the way of the Menai. I was getting on, in my thirties, but it was different. I ended my PhD studies. There was no point any longer, you see. What was a degree to a dying man? I had fallen ill, and I knew then that Laura had told the truth.
I obsessed about Felix Fraser and Trevi . . . I followed his interventions around the world. He never went to another Lassa outbreak, but anywhere there was a meningitis epidemic, a yellow fever regression, an Ebola strike, he was there. I boned up on the background of Trevi Biotics. The definitive way the atomic bombs ended World War Two persuaded Britain that all weapons, however horrible, could be put to good use some day. After the war, biological and chemical weapons research continued, but it was a very expensive business, and the work of reconstruction was also tasking Britain’s resources. They decided to terminate weapons research and rely on the US for future BioChem needs under NATO and bilateral treaties.
But a complete break was undesirable. What to do?
By a series of invisible transactions, most of the BioChem heritage of the old R&D was transferred to private companies. Trevi is one of those inheritors. In return for the research assets inherited, the company was structured to act as an unofficial quick response arm for the Ministry of Defence. MoD contracts were discreetly funnelled through subcontracting arrangements, and Trevi maintained two faces. The stock exchange face developed and vended consumer drugs. The secret face conducted and tested pure research into offensive BioChem weapons and antidotes.
Especially antidotes. Antidotes are pretty critical, whether you are weaponising a biological or a chemical agent, or building a defensive shield against one.
So the vaccine that we got was the cutting edge of the invisible germ warfare. I did not know when I started to build a dossier, but suddenly I had one. Press cuttings, brochures, bios, commentaries . . . it grew into a portmanteau. I threw myself into the whole anti-war campaign, five years of my life, Zanda. I lost my Menai focus. I took on the big picture. I fought my disease, I fought my war . . .
Then the Menai started dying. People had started grumbling that the Menai Health Centre had not delivered a single child since 1980. Then they noticed a spike in nephritic cases. We started dying in 1985. Ugom was the first to go, nine years old, the son of Farmer Utoma and his wife, Megani. He had the worst stammer in Kreektown—but when he sang? When Ugom sang, his stammer held its breath and even angels stopped to listen. 1990 was the year that six children died in a day. That was the year of Ma’Bamou’s Topless Procession, which put Menai on the world stage.
Then the test results arrived. Scientists were flown in from all over the world. We were the ethnic flavour of the season. It was pundit galore, an open season on hypotheses. What was clear was that everybody who had taken the vaccine was ailing. It was a double whammy: sterility and renal disease. And our children were dying first. There was still a Menai homeland, but it was no longer a viable community. The schools were shut. Chemist was gone. Toyota Doctor was gone. Half the market stalls in Kreektown Square were empty, and it was hard even to buy the ingredients for a pot of soup. Kreektown was a ghost town, and the morale of those left behind was gone. What the civil war could not do to us, what Lassa fever could not do to us, Felix and Laura Fraser, with the help of Tobin Rani, had done to us.
It was a big thing for a man to have on his conscience: the responsibility for the extinction of his own nation. Menai’s herbal medicine is legendary. There were hundreds of people who would never have taken that vaccine if I had not been on that front line, urging them on. I was the star Menai, you see: the scholarship kid. I had the best GCEs in Kreektown history, aside from Bamou’s. I was an expert in our ancient text—I was the one the Mata chose to copy his leather scrolls. I had even thought I’d be the new Mata, but he had cast the skies and he said that future was in neither the clouds of the day nor the stars of the night. My lineage was wrong. Still, with me, the Mata had not needed much persuasion to bless my journeys from Kreektown. I was the one chosen to go and bring home the strategy, the means of the Menai’s survival. But I had allowed myself to be distracted by Laura . . . and my nation was paying the ultimate price.
I did not plan to kill Felix Fraser or anything like that. I am not an anarchist. The Mata schooled all Menai in peace. Much later, when that roach, Dalminda Roco, tried to get me in on the plot to bomb Trevi, I called the cops on him. Yet Felix had gone on TV, denying the link between his vaccine and the first Menai deaths. He was lying. I still remembered Laura’s words. All I wanted was to tell him things I couldn’t say . . . openly . . . to save his face . . . my face . . . your face . . .
But it got out of hand, didn’t it? It degenerated into a stupid brawl. He came at me with the pent-up fury of the cuckold. He broke my nose. But he was an older man, and he had nothing to compare to the pent-up fury of the endangered national.
I broke his back.
I didn’t get what I deserved: they put a spin on the Menai-extinction angle, on the fact that throughout the trial I could only speak Menai . . . I guess I got too intense, had too little sleep, something or another, so I broke down, didn’t I? For a month or so I couldn’t speak a word of English. They say I raved on and on in Menai. I guess I was saying goodbye to the spirits of our people, to the breaking lineage, to the naan of the totem, to the language of the stories . . .
I was packed off to a psychiatric hospital.
I got out after two years, but
it was not until 1990 that I traced your brother down to Miss Chow’s takeaway in Battersea. I watched him two Saturdays in a row . . . and she got the impression I was watching her.
Well, she was a good woman, too.
But it was always about your brother.
I lived with them until it was time to go to jail again. I am proud to say that your brother can speak Menai. At first he did not know what language he was learning, but throughout the time I lived with them, I affected an atrocious English until they learnt a flawless Menai.
Yet Miss Chow was hiding a secret from me: there was a Mr. Chow. He arrived from Shanghai without warning one Sunday morning. Your brother opened the door and there he was. There was a lot of angry cursing in Mandarin when I stepped out of his wife’s room half-clad. He was on my neck, head butting, punching . . . he was half my size and no real danger, but my hands were, you know, weakened by guilt . . . yet another married woman . . . Then your brother put the kitchen knife in his back.
He was twelve years old.
Mr. Chow died there in the flat above the Battersea takeaway. I called the police and told them I had killed him. There was no one to contradict me: Miss Chow had hung herself in the bedroom, and your brother was catatonic. He never said a word to me again until the Social Services came to get him.
I spent ten years in jail in England. In a sense it was the worst time of my life. It was the Hell of being locked away from Kreektown. It was the knowledge that Tume and Malian had just drowned: I had the two of you out there, and I could not do anything, anything to help you. I started my renal treatment in prison. By the time I got out in 2002, half the Menai were dead and I had to get into the mindset of campaigning, not for an endangered culture, but for an extinct one. To work, not to keep a language spoken in a village square, but to get the name of an ethnic nation so imprinted in human memory that, so long as men walk this Earth, they will remember that the Menai once did.
The Extinction of Menai Page 28