The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  I closed my eyes. ‘Tough day, eh?’

  She was silent. There was still no visual contact, but the timbers of the house were thin. I heard her exhale and sink down. We rested against the same wall. She yawned.

  I tried again. ‘Did you make a lot of money?’

  ‘And what business of yours is that, stranger?’ She said tiredly.

  ‘I remember now,’ I said, softly.

  ‘Hallelujah, bring the champagne, Padre, the husband remembers his wedding day!’

  ‘Padre’s gone home,’ called Mishael from his room.

  ‘Was I talking to you?’

  ‘Oh, sorry!’ he shouted sarcastically.

  She pushed herself upright, and the stairs creaked again as she mounted the short flight up to the loft. She rounded the banisters and looked in on the veranda. On the wall behind her hung the small square of our wedding photograph. Her voice was no longer tired. ‘You remember now, don’t you? And that’s supposed to erase the disgrace, the pain of the last three years? To erase your adultery, your callousness, your . . .’

  ‘I was ill,’ I whispered, trying to cue her to lower her voice. ‘I’m still ill, but I’m getting better.’

  ‘You were not ill,’ she said in the same voice, and I understood that in a sense she was not just talking to me, she was talking to the bones of the house that had witnessed the disgrace of the jilted wife. ‘You were calculating. You are here now, why? I’ll tell you why, Izak, why is because you have no money for hotel. Telephone Grace Chow, let her send you money and leave me alone! Let me be!’

  She crossed into the room and shut the door. I listened to the angry snap of the belt snaking from her waist, the chink of bracelets plonked into her jewellery box . . . I listened to her stalk from one end of the room to the other as she undressed . . . until finally she sighed onto her bed like a ball deflating.

  There was something eerie about a café out-of-hours. It was the ghostliness of the bustle that had soaked into the walls . . . but now there was so much resentment in the mix as well. I walked downstairs. Across the deck, large windows faced the street, and their vertical slats divided up the moonlight. Out in the yard, mongrels gathered, drawn by the resident bitch coming into heat. One howled at the moon, and the others followed suit. From upstairs, Estelle threw a curse and an empty can, and they broke up, for the moment.

  I opened the door and stood on the threshold. The car and the flat in Putney were waiting. I would have a few days’ worth of junk mail and overdue bills to sort. I had a laptop to rescue from the hospital. I had a flagging career to attend to. Fingers crossed, my memory was healed and the pieces of the jigsaw complete. The work Asian Borha had started was painfully done. I could pick up my life, and when Ram Gupta came into it, tell him of the young Dalminda Roco whom I had met at age twelve and who had crashed out of my memory on that psychotic day in Scotland, grist from a tired writer’s mind. I stood in the doorway for several minutes, filling my lungs again and again.

  I could not leave.

  I was not healed after all. Despite her words it seemed to me that there was only one person in the world that my life or death could stir. It was difficult to leave such a woman . . . for a flat and a year-old car . . . especially with the emotions rekindling in me. I had travelled three thousand miles from an English hospital bed to an Abidjan nightclub, recovering memories that had stymied psychiatrists for years. I did not know how, but the woman upstairs had something to do with it. Our wedding photograph was still on her wall. My clothes were still in her wardrobe. She was the anchor I needed now. I shut the door securely and mounted the stairs to the top. At the door it was a struggle to get out the words, and she asked if I was going to watch her all night.

  ‘Je t’aime.’

  She stared me down. ‘Try something more original. I can get five hundred men between here and the Palais Omnisport to stand at my door and tell me “I love you.”’

  ‘I’m getting better, Estelle,’ I whispered, ‘but I’m afraid of sleeping—I don’t know who I will be when I wake up.’

  ‘You can always turn to . . .’

  ‘Please don’t say it, Estelle.’

  ‘Dee.’ She sat up. There was an edge in her voice. ‘That’s what you used to call me.’

  ‘Dee?’ Long pause. Tentatively, ‘Is that your . . . middle name?’

  ‘No. But that was what you called me, and I rather prefer that to “Estelle.”’

  The dogs began to howl again. ‘Why did I call you that?’

  ‘That’s for you to tell me, isn’t it?’ She held my gaze for a long second. ‘Tomorrow, we’ll go see our uncle Stephane.’

  ‘Is this a test? We don’t have an uncle Stephane.’

  ‘He’s a new one. He married our cousin Bintou, last August.’

  ‘I remember Bintou!’

  ‘Hallelujah!’ she replied, this time with a smile.

  ZANDA ATTURK

  London | 14th April, 2005

  7:30 a.m.

  London was full of nice people. On the bus to Humphrey’s flat we met a lovely lady carrying more books than was good for her back. She did not look very British, but Amana recognised one of her textbooks and fell into conversation. A few bus stops later, she introduced us. We shook hands solemnly, with me filing her name in a temporary slot for people I would see for a few minutes and never again.

  Amana exclaimed, ‘Japan! That’s a long way to travel from, just to read history!’

  A dreamy look entered the young lady’s eyes. She stroked her textbooks with delicate fingers. Her voice was music to sleep to. ‘I wanted the opportooonity to study under these prooofessors.’

  She struggled off the bus with her books at the next stop, and Amana shuddered theatrically. ‘I sorry for the wives of those prooofessors.’

  * * *

  8:00 a.m.

  I wore dark glasses and pulled the hood up over my head; this close to my brother’s haunts, there was no sense in flaunting my face. The police ribbons we had seen on TV had given way to builder’s scaffolding, which now surrounded the pub. A white mask now covered the charred gash in the face of the building. The rest of the building had escaped without much damage. It was a five-storey block of flats, and the entrance to the upper flats was several metres away from the scaffolding. We entered the stairwell and mounted up to the first floor. We rang the bell and waited.

  I sighed. It was turning out like the last time. ‘Wait here, I’ll check the restaurant.’

  ‘Let me do that. Someone might recognise you.’

  She went downstairs, opening the door for a woman in uniform who was halfway up the stairs when an elderly woman entered the stairwell, struggling up with a basket of shopping.

  It was suddenly a very busy building. I stood aside for them to pass, but the uniformed lady stopped in front of Humphrey’s door and leaned on the bell. The elderly woman was fitting a key into the flat opposite Humphrey’s. I knew it was time to go. As I stepped towards the stairs, the older woman looked up. ‘Oh, hello, Humphrey. Beautiful weather today, isn’t it?’

  ‘Uh,’ I said, and the uniformed woman tapped my shoulder.

  I turned around and she put a letter in my hand. ‘You’re served, sir.’

  ‘I am not Humphrey Chow,’ I said.

  ‘There’s really nothing to be afraid of,’ she said with some exasperation. ‘You’re just needed as a witness. They do pay expenses, you know?’

  I looked at the envelope. It bore the crest of the House of Commons. I shook my head. ‘I’m really not . . .’

  ‘This is your fourth summons, Mr. Chow,’ she scolded. ‘The subcommittee is in session right now and we have a courtesy car downstairs. Do you want to use it or not?’

  I was conscious that the old neighbour who was responsible for this particular predicament had entered her flat and ‘forgotten’ to shut the door. I was even more conscious that any moment Amana would return. If I drew this out, she would become involved. I sighed and walked downstairs. The u
niformed woman followed.

  * * *

  SHE READ Healthy Times and offered me some of her chewing gum. My phone buzzed with Amana’s desperate Where are you? I opened it up to reply, and the phone buzzed three times and died.

  By the time we arrived at the venue of the Parliamentary subcommittee, I had read the summons carefully and understood that I was not under arrest, either as Humphrey, Nelson, Zanda, or Badu. I did not need to have gone with her. I could have answered her with a curt ‘No thanks,’ but I had been overawed by her uniform, the officialdom, and the rank illegality of my own situation. Yet compliance had a momentum that carried me through the corridors. It was not quite on the scale of the Apo complex at Abuja. They led me through an anonymous door, which opened into a small purpose-built chamber in session. My heart sank still further as a name badge was pinned on my shirt.

  I was pressed onto a pew in the audience. The crest on my summons was replicated on the order of proceedings, Parliamentary Sub-Committee on the Pharmaceutical Industry. In the chairman’s seat sat a dapper man with a handlebar moustache. The card before him read, ‘Hon. Dr. Clem Harper, Sub-Committee Chairman.’ He sat at the centre of an arched panel, with two committee persons to his right and three to his left. Facing the panel was the table for witnesses. One of them was testifying when I entered. Two bored men in baseball caps manned the TV camera in a well in the centre of the room.

  I sat down, worrying about Amana. I steeled myself to rise, take a toilet break, and flee. Yet the longer I sat there, something about the process under way—and the stray barbs from Amana—imbued me with courage that would have become a Badu: I decided to throw off the Humphrey Chow misapprehension and claim asylum! Then I heard Humphrey’s name on the public address, and I started to my feet with the men around me. By the time I was installed at the witness table with two others, the beast of my courage had bolted again.

  ‘I see Mr. Chow is with us finally,’ observed the chairman drily. He spoke in a stagy whisper that was more Corleone than parliamentary. I cleared my throat and was startled by the magnification of the microphone. ‘Dr. Jim Stewart, Dr. Jan Brill, thank you for coming.’

  The men beside me muttered with a little more composure into their microphones.

  ‘We will take your submission first, Dr. Brill.’

  The secretaries had placed new name cards before us. Dr. Brill’s card identified him as ‘Executive Chairman, Megatum GmbH.’ He made an expert’s presentation full of statistics from an electronic reader—without once removing his left thumb from its anchorage in a multicoloured suspender. My brain was too exercised by worrying over what I was going to say to pay much attention to what he was saying . . . then I heard the name Trevi Biotics Limited. I returned with a start to the present, but Dr. Brill was just wrapping up. Two members addressed respectful questions to him, which he fielded decorously, and the chairman turned to me. ‘Mr. Chow?’

  The moment had come. I was conscious of television cameras and of the fact that I was certainly the most casually dressed in the room. I was usually on the other side of the cameras, writing the news reports. It was definitely the height of foolishness to inform a UK Parliamentary subcommittee that I was a terrorist seeking asylum. Besides, the reference to Trevi had woken me up to the bigger issues at stake. ‘What?’ I prevaricated.

  ‘You did get our invitation?’ he asked.

  I nodded my head. An irritable woman to his left removed a pair of spectacles and folded it into a tidy square, which she slotted away into a silver case, speaking all the while, faster than I’d ever heard a human speak before. ‘Your case was thrown up as one of the most dramatic human-drug-test accidents in the last year, Mr. Chow. We are interested in the public health repercussions of these drug trials. Our terms of reference are wide, but you might want to advert your mind to . . .’

  I stared.

  The chairman smiled and intervened in patronisingly slow words. ‘Do you have a perspective you want to share with this subcommittee, Mr. Chow?’

  ‘I do have a perspective,’ I said quietly, turning Humphrey Chow’s name on its face. I stood up slowly. The rage in Tobin’s letter was twenty-five years old, but cold rage was good for oratory, I found. I felt it stir slowly in me, consuming the fear. ‘I can talk to you about a British drug trial in Kreektown, Nigeria.’

  * * *

  1:05 p.m.

  It was well past noon when I was finished in the enquiry. I stepped out of the hall, expecting at any moment to be stopped. At first I walked very fast, then I ran, outstripping the claque of journalists seeking private quotes, stopping only when I found the red sign of a tube station. I found a tube map and worked out the fastest connection home. I was about to catch the escalator underground when I saw the headlines of the evening papers: a state of emergency had been declared in Nigeria.

  Sontik Republic had seceded.

  I stopped in an internet café to read up about my hometown’s new country.

  * * *

  I GOT home at dusk, and Amana was nowhere in sight. I plugged in my phone and spent a troubled two hours, waiting for and dreading a knock at the same time. I had no idea what repercussion my impulsive speech at the subcommittee would have, but I had broken cover in the most public manner possible. I phoned her number over and over again, but it rang out. At 9:00 p.m. I left the room and travelled once more to Humphrey’s house. She was nowhere in sight, and I rang my brother’s bell with no expectation that he would open the door. I was not disappointed.

  I was sick with worry. On the bus back, I decided I had lost the battle for independence and called Tobin Rani. It was a strange call in which I could say nothing about anything, and it was over in three minutes. But it was a start. I got into a darkened home at 10:00 p.m. I searched my pockets and found some coins—and the card Jan Brill had put in my hand after my presentation. Behind it he had written, Shall we discuss our common interests over dinner perhaps? I binned it and fed the meter some coins. I switched the television on. The Nigerian crisis was on the news, but I had Amana on my mind. I had my phone in my hand, trying to decide whether I dared phone the police. I shut my eyes to consider my dilemma.

  FELIX FRASER

  Meillerie | 13th January, 1986

  We had been driving on Jan Brill’s property for a few minutes and were still a mile from his chateau. This was usually the point at which the megalomaniac Dutchman delivered a self-adulatory version of the Euro Property Investment Guide, but he was clearly not in the mood today. He gunned the Bentley up the narrow road. Jan’s answers to my questions were grunts, and the music was turned just high enough to make conversation uncomfortable. I wondered why he had come to get me at the train station, if he meant to spend the drive time glowering. Eventually we broke through the valley and drove parallel to the ridge. To the left, the breathtaking view that added hundreds of thousand of euros to the asking price of his estate. To the right, more of the same, the view broken by a stand of trees. The chateau appeared eventually, always a mild surprise. More castle than house, it stood cold, old, forbidding—until we passed through the portals and entered into a desperately modern, self-conscious atrium with all the intimacy of a basketball court.

  Jan barrelled through, scattering the clot of staff in his way. They read his mood and wordlessly dispensed with the ceremonial hospitality I had enjoyed on my earlier visits. I followed him, rolling my chair down a portico and into the study. The door snatched itself shut behind me. The room’s main window was north-facing, sacrificing some natural light for a view that more than compensated. He dropped into a chair and, setting his back against the view, glared at me.

  ‘Just what’s going on, Felix? First, you resign and fall off the face of the earth. Next, you are popping up at AGMs, playing the pity card on my directors! This is not the kind of job you can take a gap year from!’

  ‘I’m back now, all right?’

  ‘Well, it’s not all right with me, if you don’t mind! I’m entitled to some security. I do bus
iness with reliable partners.’

  ‘So, do you want to sack me? Or just nag like any old wife?’

  ‘Speaking of wives, how much of our business did Laura know? What could she have told her boyfriend?’

  I paused. My hell was not going away, did not burn cooler with each passing year. Experience had taught me that rage made it worse, so I tried sarcasm. ‘I wasn’t in the room during their sex.’

  Jan’s glare sharpened. ‘I know you’re touchy, any man would be—but you were the one who hired his wife in the frontline. And I’m the CEO who has to decide whether Tobin Rani is a threat to my business plan.’

  ‘I never shared off-balance-sheet transactions with Laura.’

  ‘Could she have found out?’

  I paused again. I had learned the lesson of convenient lies, and Jan was no fool. ‘Yes.’

  There was a long silence, in the course of which he flicked a drawing pin around his desk with a letter opener. ‘They served Geneva on Friday.’

  ‘Who served Geneva what?’

  ‘Court papers. Some ambulance chasers are suing us in London. Not sure if they are working with Tobin. They’ll probably serve Trevi this week.’

  ‘Those villagers? You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘They’ve got some bleeding-heart foreign NGOs jumping on the wagon. They’re suing for a billion sterling.’

  I began to laugh. Then I saw his face and broke off. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Well, forgive me if I don’t share your amusement, but the prospect of a Megatum liquidation isn’t comedy material.’

  ‘A billion pounds is a joke.’

  ‘Not by Western jury standards. That ethnic group is endangered. They belong in a museum or something, anywhere they can be kept alive forever. Think about that: a lifetime of treatment and twice-weekly dialysis for your victims. Plus punitive damages, compensation . . .’

  I was silent, sobered.

  ‘So lay it out for me. What are you going to do?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘It’s a bad break; I’m not sure there’s a way out.’