The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  It occurred to me that Malcolm had to have a streak of sadism. ‘It’s truly a lovely view,’ I said.

  His two hands combined to shoo away the very thought. ‘Nonsense. Come, I’ll show you.’ By the time he had readied himself to rise, the bill was approaching him. It was intercepted by Ruby, who had been working her boss’s phones from the café. All the same, the canny waiter persisted with a courtesy visit to our table, and Malcolm rewarded him with a superfluous tip. He made his way out of the restaurant, fielding the smiles and waves of the waiting staff like an A-list celebrity.

  Malcolm Frisbee was famous for his irrational tips. The restaurant menu had warned that a 12.5 percent ‘discretionary’ service commission would be compulsorily added to the bill, but Malcolm had survived a crab poisoning that had ended his first career, and as a means of getting restaurant staff fully on his side, he indulged a fetish for fat tips.

  We caught the lift down to the fifth floor. I followed Malcolm into the first gallery, where a special exhibit was running. It was called Beyond Painting. We stood before an elderly picture frame. It seemed fatally damaged, with a single diagonal slash running some twelve or so centimetres down the middle of an unpainted canvas.

  ‘What do you think?’ In his crumpled, blue linen jacket he was the quintessential arts professor examining a degree student.

  I panicked, ‘Of this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I took two steps back, but the explanatory card was still too far to the left to read surreptitiously. I was between the devil of a slashed canvas and the deep blue sea of a confession of artistic ignorance. ‘You mean this very canvas?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘It is a Lucio Fontana. Surely you know Lucio Fontana.’

  ‘Of course,’ I lied, clearing my throat. I did not know much about art: my formal education had holes in it wide enough to sink a college building. To my eye it did seem like an unfortunate studio accident that had aborted a great master’s attempt to paint . . . but it was hanging in a gallery of Tate Modern. Not to consider it an artistic disaster seemed safer. ‘It’s a unique concept, a daring painting.’

  ‘It is not a painting,’ Malcolm responded. Three female London-art-student types in flip-flops drifted closer, making no secret of their interest in our conversation. Their overlong jeans had fraying bell-bottoms as capacious as skirts and trailed loose threads, causing other visitors to give their wake a wide berth. Malcolm continued, modulating his voice to accommodate his new audience, ‘If you notice, the canvas is untainted by paint. The only pigmentation on it will be the discolouration of age. It’s just the slash; notice the centrality of cut to canvas, notice the new, third dimension it conveys to the previous linearity of the artwork, its boldness . . .’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said, warming to the subject. ‘Its uniqueness—’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Malcolm interrupted, reaping a brace of nods from his new listeners. ‘It’s not unique; everyone who can afford a blade is slashing canvases these days. Pay attention, Humphrey Chow. Back in 1955 when Fontana had the gumption to present this as a work of art it was unique. It’s old hat now. Comprehend? Come.’

  I ignored the students’ rolling eyes and followed Malcolm away from the sweep of their scorn. He took me through the huge galleries on the fifth floor of the former thermal plant. Slowed by digesting food and thought-provoking art, we browsed the hangings somnolently, with much nodding and contemplation through half-closed eyes.

  Finally we stood in the amplified silence of a huge, empty hall that could have garaged a couple of articulated trucks: empty, that is, but for seven large movie screens affixed to the walls. Footage from seven grainy CCTV cameras featuring the same deserted studio at night was running simultaneously on all the screens. The exhibit was Mapping the Studio, by Mike Norman. Mike’s studio was not a very psychedelic one. It seemed stacked with odds and ends, like someone’s garage; it was a place where things were made, not a place designed for show. The only thing that moved in the videos were rats. When we arrived, there were only three other visitors in that room, the largest gallery by far on the floor, and they looked on with some embarrassment as Malcolm began to pace the room ostentatiously. Starting from one end of the room, he took large, measured steps in a straight line across the room. He did the same thing on the other side. Then he walked across to where I was waiting at the entrance to the room, trying to hide my mortification behind a Metro newspaper.

  By this time, several more visitors had entered the hall and stood in a loose gaggle beside me, watching Malcolm appreciatively. A uniformed security guard procured by the surveillance cameras also drifted in through the opposite entrance. He watched us through narrowed, less appreciative eyes.

  Malcolm was panting by the time he reached me. As he caught his breath, a middle-aged woman flustering her way through a handful of brochures removed the audio guide from her ear to ask, in an artsy American accent, ‘I missed most of that. Sorry, what’s the name?’

  ‘Malcolm Frisbee,’ said that worthy. His voice had the resignation of a B-list celebrity destined to a lifetime of halfway recognitions that had to be supplemented with the occasional introduction.

  ‘I don’t mean your name. I mean your piece, your performance art. It’s not in the brochure . . .’

  Her meaning dawned on Malcolm. ‘I’m not a performance artist!’ he snapped. He took my arm and turned away. We left the gallery at an angry three or four miles per hour and stormed up the stairs. Malcolm used the exercise to work off his anger at the indignity and to work up an appetite for desert. Back on the seventh floor, Ruby was waiting at the café with a prescience that verged on smugness as she nursed a sixth or seventh espresso.

  Our earlier table was taken, but a waiter found us a better, if smaller, one for two, right against the glass window. We resumed our meal where we left off, he ordering a white and dark chocolate mousse and I, an ice cream. My order arrived almost immediately, but despite all his tips, we had to wait for his mousse. In the meantime, Phone-in-the-Ear-Ruby replaced the folder with the offending story in front of her boss. This time, there was also a white envelope under the transparent cover of the folder. Clearly, boss and PA had run this tag-game before. The coffee junkie did not meet my eye, nor did she return to her fix at the café. She disappeared into the ladies, like a butcher stepping back from the slab to avoid the spatter of blood.

  The moment had come. The envelope was addressed to me. I did not need a BBC Panorama investigation to figure out its contents. I steeled myself to walk out before the final indignity. I was not going to become another IMX luncheon-termination statistic. I took a final spoon of ice cream.

  Nobody did significant gazes like Malcolm Frisbee. He fixed me with one such and asked, fingers drumming a suspiciously calypsonian tattoo, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘About the ice cream?’

  ‘About Mapping the Studio! Answer me from here,’ he said, digging fingers into his guts. ‘Tell me what you felt, standing there, watching those giant screens.’

  I took another final spoon of ice cream. It was a good thing that the mind was no TV screen and that my blankness as I stood watching the CCTV footage of a deserted studio could be transmogrified into an intellectual opinion. I shook my head. ‘Awesome,’ I said quietly. ‘At first I was like, “Nothing is happening here . . .” Then, as I looked, I realised that . . . well, something existential was happening before my eyes. It was like, you know, a Waiting-for-Godot-kind-of-happening . . .’

  I trailed off.

  Malcolm’s chocolate mousse had arrived while I was dissembling, but he had not dived in with his usual enthusiasm. Instead, he stared. ‘Are you taking the piss?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Come on! We were watching seven videos of an empty studio, for crying out loud!’ He seized my hand. ‘If I gave you a ten-hour film of an empty studio to take home, would you watch it?’

  ‘Err . . .’ I suspected it was a trick question. After all, this was Tate Modern.r />
  ‘Picture this: you come home from a hard day’s slog at the old nine-to-five, and there’s a ten-hour DVD of an empty studio waiting for you to watch. Will you watch it?’

  The ice cream spoon was cutting into my fingers. ‘Well, if you put it that way . . .’

  ‘Fine,’ he said, unhanding me. ‘Now, what if I put the same DVD up on seven cinema screens, in an auditorium measuring, what? Twenty-four paces by sixteen—say a thirteen-hundred-square-foot warehouse—what if I did that, and amplified the sound of Nothing Happening till the static was singing in your ears. What would you think then, eh?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘“Awesome,” isn’t that what you said?’

  I stared at my ice cream.

  ‘And that is the second lesson,’ he concluded.

  He then attacked his mousse with gusto. The nice waiter paused by me to ask whether the ice cream was at all palatable, so I took a final, final spoon of it. If I left at that point, the question would haunt me for the rest of my life, so I asked it. ‘What was the first lesson?’

  ‘Lesson one: Do something different, but do it first. That’s the Lucio Fontana lesson!’ He shovelled a mouthful of mousse into his mouth.

  It was a beautiful day outside. Black barges floated past on a muddy Thames, towards the Millennium Bridge. Malcolm did not notice. He was sweating in the cool room. I suppose he had a conscience after all.

  ‘Lesson two: Do it on a grand scale! That’s the Mike Norman lesson!’ He wiped chocolate off his chin with a napkin.

  I realised he was working up the anger to deliver my termination notice. I had to rise; I was cutting this too fine.

  He was thundering, ‘So what is this nonsense about a short story? Come on, Humphrey Chow! I wait for you, I wait patiently for you, for years and years; and you come to me with a short story? So where’s the market for that? What’s my commission in that?’

  The gloves were coming off. I wanted to tell him I hadn’t exactly been with his agency for ‘years and years,’ but I didn’t. It was time to go. I took a deep breath.

  ‘I didn’t actually give it to you . . . I gave it to . . . what I mean is, Lynn and I are working on a collection of . . .’

  ‘Give that poor girl a break,’ pleaded Malcolm Frisbee, clasping his fingers dramatically.

  I forced myself not to look sideways, the first lesson of drama being to affect a total lack of awareness of your audience.

  ‘She could have walked off with her team’s bonus last Christmas if your account hadn’t dragged down her averages! Last quarter, every other writer on her slate grossed fifty K, annualised. You? Zilch! And now you tell me you’re working on a collection? Humphrey Chow, are you on this planet?’

  ‘I am a short story writer,’ I said stubbornly.

  ‘And I’m a stamp collector,’ he said, ‘but I know what to do with my hobby!’ He set down his spoon in an empty mousse plate and counted off four stubby fingers. ‘Listen, you ain’t pretty, you ain’t female, you ain’t gay, and you ain’t funny! You’ve basically got the odds stacked against you, so what do you have to do? You have to write a damn good novel, that’s what! One hundred thousand damn good words—more, if you want to crack the US market! Short story!’

  My ice cream was melting.

  ‘After my Greek accident with the lobster, I could have turned to shorts, you know? My memory could have handled them. It’s after page twenty or so that I began to mix up my goddamned characters. But what did I do? I got a day job, that’s what I did! I left my shorts in my bottom drawer and got a day job! Short story!’

  His ‘Greek accident’ was with a crab, but correcting him would have provoked him further, and he was loud enough as it was. From the corner of my eye, I saw a familiar lady enter the restaurant and look around hesitantly. She was forty metres away, but I recognized her immediately as the lady who had provoked Malcolm into furious flight from the Mapping the Studio exhibit. She was slim and aquiline, fiftyish from her looks, and she leaned forward with a short-sighted stoop, as she searched the faces of nearby diners.

  It was well past time for me to leave, but I watched in self-loathing as Malcolm started on his ‘empty’ plate, so that, had it turned out to be poisoned as well, the police would not have found enough mousse for the forensic tests. He laid his napkin on the table and flicked open the folder. He pushed the envelope across to me, and my name and address stared up at me from the centre of the table, underneath the self-important initials, IMX. My dreams of a writerly rehabilitation on the wings of “Reluctant Bomber” were melting like my dollop of ice cream. I realised I was going to open the letter and become a luncheon statistic after all. There was something about the inevitable momentum of events.

  Yet I have not always been this timid.

  The lady from the gallery finally spotted the mound of Malcolm and made a beeline for our table. The termination letter slipped from my mind as she leaned politely over Malcolm with an apologetic smile. ‘Would that be “Malcolm Frisbee,” as in the “Malcolm Frisbee”?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ conceded Malcolm. He was the sort that preferred to separate himself from the scene of embarrassments, but he was not averse to the occasional embarrassment seeking him out to apologize personally.

  ‘Monica Parkerson.’ She shot out a hand, which was grudgingly accepted by Malcolm. Afterwards, she allowed me to shake her hand as well, although her admiring eyes did not leave Malcolm’s. ‘I’m sorry about the . . .’

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ Malcolm told her.

  ‘Because it seemed such a telling counterpoint to the lifelessness in the cinematic studios, you see.’ She spoke expressively, with her fingers, her bosom, and a muscular voice. It was like watching a stage performance. ‘When you left, the exhibit seemed so flat, so drained of . . . oomph. Your presence, the comportment with which you promenaded . . . the interactivity with the viewers . . . like a silent theatre in the round . . . do you know the phrase that gripped my mind?’ Her voice dropped into a dramatic bass: ‘Of men and mice! Someone should tell Norman . . .’

  Malcolm was beginning to look distraught. ‘I definitely don’t want to press this discussion further—’

  ‘—over a public lunch,’ said the lady, nodding and glaring at me, as though it was my presence that made her confidential conversation untenable. ‘Of course not . . .’ Behind her, Ruby broke out of the ladies’ room and hurried towards us. Monica was nodding as she placed a card before Malcolm. ‘I fully understand, good ideas have wings. Do call me sometime, so we can talk things through. I’m a . . . shall we say . . . connoisseur of good things and I see huge possibilities, I mean huge . . .’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Malcolm, but he made no move for the card. She turned away, a little deflated, and drifted towards the exit, passing Ruby near the waiter’s station. Malcolm turned to me, putting the woman out of his mind.

  ‘You’re a good man, Humphrey Chow, but I’m sorry, I’m really sorry . . .’

  I slowly stirred my ice cream slurry. If there had been any sorrow in Malcolm to begin with, it had evidently been compromised by his excellent mousse. His mood seemed positively upbeat.

  ‘This business is a bitch,’ he continued, ‘but you know me, I don’t do bullshit.’

  As I reached for the envelope in the centre of the table, Ruby deposited her phone bag carelessly on it. A wave of irritation swept me as she leaned over to whisper in her boss’s ear. Her black hair fell over his face, so that when his astonished ‘No!’ issued, it seemed like the start of a ventriloquist’s act. She whispered some more, and then she straightened up and smoothed down her clothes. Frisbee’s eyebrows were moving in for a rare, flabbergasted kiss across their nose ridge. Then the moment passed and all was well on Frisbee Mountain. He gave a belly laugh and thumped the table. ‘Great!’

  Ruby laughed nervously without meeting my eyes and scooped up her bag. She turned for the waiter’s station to sort out our dessert bill. I wiped off a spatter of ice cream that Malcolm’s
thump had deposited on my arm and reached for my letter, but it was gone. It had been under Ruby’s bag but now both were gone. I turned towards the retreating PA, but Malcolm leaned over and punched my shoulder. ‘Tell the truth,’ he said in a voice swerving with ill-fitting tomfoolery. ‘There’s something going on between you and my Lynn, isn’t there? Go on, I won’t tell Grace.’

  ‘I beg your pardon . . .’

  ‘She’s solidly in your corner, and you know what? She’s just sold your “Bomber” story—and your next eleven stories—to Balding Wolf! It’s a pretty decent deal, too!’

  ‘Lynn came through!’ I whispered.

  ‘IMX came through,’ corrected Malcolm, ‘as we always do. Do you want to know the size of the deal?’

  ‘Where’s my letter?’ I asked, turning towards Ruby again. ‘Now that I’m unagented, I should—’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Malcolm. ‘Who said you’re unagented? Lynn has set up a signing at the office Monday morning at nine. Be there.’ He paused, snapping open a complimentary card case. ‘I have something difficult to tell you, Humphrey Chow, and you know me, no bullshit.’ He chewed his lower lip as he scrawled a name and telephone number on the back of a card, which he passed over to me.

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘George Maida. You must have met him at the Christmas party.’

  ‘The Turkish contractor?’

  ‘The Milton Street psychoanalyst. Comprehend? I’ve read your story, Humphrey Chow, and although I like it, it also worries me. I’m talking very, very worried, here.’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘I know you are.’ He opened his hands dramatically. ‘But nine hundred and fifty writers have passed through these hands, and, give me one thing, Humphrey Chow, I know writers. Talk to Maida, ASAP. He’s good. I’m talking very, very good, here.’

  ‘I’m okay,’ I insisted.

  His voice hardened and he leaned across the table. ‘I’ve carried you for years, Humphrey Chow,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re not going to crack on me in the middle of a twelve-story-contract, comprehend?’