The Extinction of Menai

by Chuma Nwokolo

  The break with Humphrey gutted me, and yet I’d only given him half the picture. The subtext between us had always worried me. With Grace out of the picture it would only get worse. I was a sucker for the helpless male. The ease with which I made a home visit, the magnetism in the room with him . . . there was nothing to prevent the incipient affair from breaking out.

  My marriage was rocky just then. It probably always would be, but it was also five years old and two sons wide. It would not survive a Humphrey Chow mistake. Besides, Humphrey was so damned fragile! I could never go out with someone who would go crazy when I left him. I had made the right decision, then. I drank down my gin. But why did it have to be so bloody wrenching?

  HUMPHREY CHOW

  London | 11th April, 2005

  I listened to the silence. Suddenly I realised I was half dreading, half expecting Bamou’s voice. I pushed away from the sink, snapped on a radio, and filled the flat with the silly banter of a DJ more scared of silence than I was.

  I went through the small flat. I was alone; but my confirmation did not come with any relief. I sat in my tiny study and wrote doggedly. Thirty minutes passed, and I had to check to make sure I was still alone.

  An hour passed, and I reviewed the paragraphs I’d written. It read like wooden reportage. A stenographer’s account. A transcription from tape that lacked the electricity of life. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine the prison, to place myself and Bamou within its walls; I tried to plumb emotions into the tale, in vain. Ivory Coast. Was it possible that I had spent so many years there without recalling a single night? I rose and stormed into the bath, where I showered and shaved. I ate a tub of ice cream.

  After returning to the computer, I deleted the story. I tried to write a sequel for Phil Begg that did not have anything to do with bombs, suicidal psychopaths, or prison cells. I put my hero on a golf course, had him run a cruise ship, stuck him in a polyandrous triangle . . . it was all in vain. By the second paragraph I would find my lips curling into a sneer and would lean on the delete key.

  Finally, I opened up the kitchen cabinet and took out the bottle of Proxtigen capsules I’d swiped from Dr. Greenstone’s office. I stared at it for a long minute, trying to weigh the risks. I had no idea what the medics had done to bring me around after I passed out. Perhaps I would have come around without medical intervention. Perhaps not. It seemed crazy to take the risk just to find out the end of a story—or to tell it more sympathetically. Yet I remembered the lush sweep of memory that accompanied my last Proxtigen, like a talking movie after a silent, like a colour film after monochrome . . . It was like the coupling on of a sixth sense. It had given me a rush like I had never experienced before.

  I wanted it again.

  I needed to recall the Bamou chapter of my life with the vividness with which I recalled Yan Chow’s death . . . I tossed a capsule in my mouth and sipped some water. I shut my eyes and tried to swallow . . . but then again, Bamou might return with the physicality of Dalminda Roco and his bomb . . . I spat the capsule into the sink, slamming my palms on the draining board with a force that brought china crashing down. I ignored the broken plates, pushed the bottle of capsules into my pocket, and called Dr. Borha’s secretary. She offered me an appointment in six days.

  ‘It’s really really urgent,’ I said.

  ‘All Dr. Borha’s appointments are really, really urgent,’ she explained. ‘I also have another opening in two weeks, if you prefer.’

  I switched off the phone, pulled on my jacket, and broke out of the flat.

  * * *

  I WALKED hard till I was exhausted; my fog lifted and I found myself in the commons. I loitered, wondering what to do when it was too late to loiter and I had to return home. Homelessness acquired a new cachet: the state of having a house that wasn’t home, where I was afraid of being alone. Marriage, even a bad one, acquired a new allure: the guarantee of companionship through the lonely hours when old faces stalked in to visit, from an unrecalled past. The streets teemed with life. I tried to lose myself in it, but the faces were securely locked down. The only open faces were seeking narrow things. Where there was a smile she was peddling flowers, or taking an opinion poll, or signing up direct debits on behalf of a charity . . . I slumped on a park bench and watched night fall. The bottle of Proxtigen burned in my pocket, and I chafed at my cowardice. I strained at the gate of my screen memory, interrogating what I knew and all I had taken for granted. Every time I came close, the memory slipped further away.

  I was overwhelmed by a sense of loss.

  The shrill of my phone cut through my thoughts. It was Doctor Borha. I glanced at my watch in surprise. He offered to meet, and we agreed on the Cricketers Arms under my flat. I rose and started for home, surprised at my relief. When I arrived, he was draping his coat on the back of a chair and the table was already furnished with two pint glasses of cider. I pulled a mug of beer at the bar, joined him at the table, and sloughed off my own jacket.

  ‘Thanks for coming out. You got my call?’

  ‘What call?’

  ‘I called your secretary for an appointment as you suggested.’

  He shook his head and gestured at the envelope on the table. ‘I got a police package on you; that’s why I’m here.’

  He was looking more serious than he had been that afternoon. I met his gaze. ‘You’re putting in some serious overtime on my case. Is it the terror angle, then?’

  ‘You intrigue me, remember? Listen, Humphrey, have you ever had a genetic counselling session?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I guess that answers my question.’ He sipped his cider.

  ‘The boffins at a drug trial told me I had an extra chromosome, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘It’s that as well,’ he agreed. ‘Gupta used his clout to dig up your biological mother’s medical, welfare, and police records.’

  ‘Laura Fraser,’ I said quietly, conscious that I had never spoken the name aloud before.

  ‘Yes. Her gene records checked out fine, by the way. She had a long history of drug abuse, but her drug of choice was a designer narcotic that didn’t fit any known profile. Your paediatrician picked it up in her breast milk soon after you were born, but her husband was a brilliant chemist, so that’s probably one mystery solved. Now, listen here, Humphrey, your juvenile records have some odd psychotic episodes. My suspicion is that your problems stem from this mutation that dated from birth.’

  ‘I got a high in the womb, and the pusher was her husband?’

  ‘Exactly. Marijuana has that effect; this drug might have been even more toxic to the embryo.’

  ‘Should I be worried?’

  ‘There’s not much you can do about it.’

  He scratched his head and pushed the papers back into the A5 envelope. He looked out on a pedestrianised street full of harried workers and distracted tourists. A spatter of rain appeared on the window. A couple hurried in and settled at the table beside ours. The man was brash and loud and carried a large, heavy briefcase. The woman was burdened with a crying baby. He met my eye as they settled in. There was a stony defiance there, as though he challenged me to complain about his baby; then he went off to place an order at the bar. His raised voice came back to us.

  A comprehensive downpour soaked the street. Dr. Borha watched as though mesmerised. The bar filled slowly. The man at the next table was back from quarrelling with the barman and was quarrelling with his partner in a language I’d never heard before. Some people carried their rage around like an open wound. The woman seemed the most clueless mother ever. Something about that crying baby reminded me of my life with my many foster families: the way the colour of husband and the colour of wife did not quite add up to the colour of child.

  I placed the digital recorder on the table between me and the pensive Doctor Borha. He glanced at it with little interest. He had barely touched his drink. The avidity with which he had gone at his beers in the afternoon was gone. In its place was a certain introspect
ion. I had come worried that he would grill me about Dalminda Roco. As the minutes passed, I began to worry that the evening would end without him grilling me about Dalminda Roco. So I told him about my Scottish holiday. ‘I’m almost . . . kind of . . . afraid to be alone, particularly after this.’ I gestured at the digital recorder. ‘It’s like . . . wow, where are these people coming from . . . are they inside? Will they come out . . . you know?’

  Another minute passed in silence between us.

  The argument at the next table stopped abruptly. The man rose and stalked out of the establishment. The child wailed on. The woman craned her neck anxiously as the man passed her window, swearing as he crossed the road and went out of sight.

  ‘I used to be able to go home Christmases,’ said Asian, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘Then this sycophantic journalist on the island wrote an article about me. He said I had stables in Kent where I parked my two dozen flash cars, that sort of nonsense. Now my mailman—who used to come on a bike—he’s got a small van because of me. It’s like I won the lottery or something, the sacks of begging letters I get from home . . . You won’t believe how much I’m hated now. Those I used to help out now think my gifts were miserly. Those I don’t help think I’m the devil incarnate.’ He shrugged. ‘I haven’t been home in years. In a sense, I have blanked home the way you blanked the Ivory Coast . . .’

  He took a long swig and put down the glass empty.

  At the neighbouring table, the woman’s alarm had grown, rivalling her ward’s. She rose with her baby and hurried toward the door after her fuming partner. I studied Dr. Asian Borha, wondering if he had overplayed his hand with the afternoon beers. He pulled up the second glass, and I tried again. ‘Do you think Bamou will jump out of the woodwork? Like Dalminda?’

  ‘Conversation is an elliptical art, Humphrey. There’s a big world out there beyond your problems, you know, let’s explore it!’ He took a leisurely sip. ‘I understand abruptness when you’re paying ten pounds a minute to talk to me, but we’re chilling in a pub . . .’

  A leggy female had gone down on a knee in front of us, and the flash of a camera went off in our eyes. It was my first paparazza moment, and she was chatty into the bargain. Fame would take some getting used to, not having to correct Chew to Chow. As she walked away, I looked around in embarrassment and noticed the briefcase under the neighbouring table. He had stalked off angry, she had hurried off anxious, and they’d both forgotten their briefcase. Unaccountably, I thought about Felix and Laura Fraser abandoning their brown package. I left Asian to his ten-pounds-a-minute cider and hurried towards the door to see if I could catch a glimpse of her down the street.

  Then the blast hit me, and I lost some more pages of my life.

  ZANDA ATTURK

  London | 11th April, 2005

  I had wanted to seek out Korba Adevo’s contact first. Amana resisted that one-way ticket into the real London underground of false identities and dodgy businesses, so after we had checked into the bed-and-breakfast in Bermondsey, we went to track down Humphrey.

  He was entering the pub on the ground floor of his apartment block when we arrived. Amana gripped my hand fiercely. It took that sight of my brooding mirror image to make it real: I’d had company in my mother’s womb, twenty-odd years ago, and he was having a drink, not fifty metres away. We had made no elaborate plans, but she now insisted that a public house was not the ideal venue for a first meeting between adult brothers.

  We might cry, she said.

  We waited indecisively on that sidewalk for fifteen minutes, but the sky was growing incontinent. A couple of pedestrians had already greeted me familiarly, and we were now the object of the surreptitious interest of a couple with a wailing child. I pulled up my hood, and we walked in. It was a large, three-lounge pub. We saw Humphrey immediately, engrossed in conversation with a bearded, older man in the sports bar. We slipped into an alcove in the shadows from where we could watch them.

  We waited awhile, but all they did was talk.

  The minutes passed. It was getting later. My own tension grew. There was no guarantee that he would go up to his flat when he left the pub. I rose.

  Amana was grinning with excitement as I crossed over to the sports bar, negotiating tables, pillars, and people as I went. As I approached my clone, I was filled with dread rather than excitement.

  I felt around for that surge of whatever brothers were meant to feel for brothers. It was there, all right, drowning in the stew of emotions swirling inside me. Despite my best efforts, my face was frozen. I couldn’t smile. What drove me across that genteel bar, that ground floor of Humphrey’s easy life, was despair. He’d had everything: our real parents, the opportunities, the fame of the published writer . . . and I, ex-shoeshine boy, exjournalist, I wore the infamy of Nigeria’s most wanted criminal.

  What I most wanted just then was to flee the pub. To hide away for the years it would take me to approach the table of brotherhood as an equal to the twin in front of me. Instead, I plodded forward, propelled by Amana’s excitement. I approached him from behind. The hand that he ran over his hair wore a wedding band. There was a wife, then. I probably had four nieces and nephews upstairs . . . the resentment that had driven me after Tobin on my last night in Kreektown broke out in a green rash of envy and sibling rivalry. The black-and-white moment was upon us. I tried to smile as I reached for his shoulder, thinking how odd it was that a trained hand was the one anarchist’s weapon that airport scanners could not interdict.

  And I wondered whether the therapeutic demon Dr. Maleek had exorcised when he lashed out at me in the Limbe bar was a Badu moment. And I saw how the Badu in everyman could do not only those things that one ought to but didn’t . . . but also those things one ought not to do but did anyway . . .

  Then there was a flash. In front of us, a trigger-happy Amana crouched in that stuffy English pub, photographing the first meeting of brothers.

  Spooked, I swerved away for the loo. I barged through the double doors, accelerating until I collided with a washbasin. I clasped my fingers behind my head. A frightened old man at the urinal hurried away, not looking left or right. I shut my eyes and, swaying, gripped the sink to steady myself. I opened my eyes and stared at the mirror.

  In that splitsecond I saw that it was not Humphrey I loathed but myself. The one who had abandoned his flesh and blood, all the years of their desperate need. Who had cut himself off from land and language. Even Badu had judged me, had split from me . . . if he could, perhaps he would have served me Omakasa’s sentence . . . Suddenly I saw Badu arriving at Farmer Utoma’s poultry shed with Pitani in his boot, to find the poultry man long dead in his front room. Utoma had raised me as an orphan, but he had met his death alone . . . Badu would have killed . . . I struck then, smashed my hand into the jaw of the man in the mirror. I ran a stream of cold water over my bloodied fist. My red eyes were inches from a shard.

  The sting of pain made things crystal clear: this was nothing more than a barroom meeting. We would share a drink and exchange numbers. And goodbyes. There would be no expectations. Perhaps the phone would ring again, perhaps it would not . . . Life would elaborate, step after step.

  At the doors of the loo, I paused to compose myself. The double doors slammed inwards with a force that knocked me into the wall. I blacked out momentarily. When I came to, the hinges had lost their doors and my forearms were numb from the concussion. I was on the ground, staring, disbelieving, at the carnage in the pub. Broken furniture was strewn all over, and as the dust settled, screams filled the air. Humphrey’s bearded companion lay on his back across a table that had lost its legs. I rose and stumbled across the room, coughing as I crunched through broken glass. A pillar walling off our distant alcove had taken the force of the blast and Amana emerged, dusty, shaken, but unhurt. She grabbed me from behind, wordlessly, as I stared at my motionless brother by the doorway. I leaned over his body. I felt a dull ache where the emotions had swirled just a few minutes before. This grief was just as real as
the previous resentment, and as meaningless. I touched his—my—stubbled cheek with a tenderness I did not need to feign.

  Then I heard the first sirens. I straightened and walked Amana unsteadily out of the pub.

  That night, as she mourned Humphrey, I thought how much more honest a bomb was than humans at breaking bad news and told her about Ma’Calico’s death.

  FARMER UTOMA (ANCESTORMENAI)

  Kreektown | 18th February, 2005

  The stomach is a worm of which it bites when it is hungry. This is a thing of which we know very well. But nowadays it is biting all the time.

  Normally, is my chickens that will wake me up at this time. Once their lamp is on, they will eat. That’s the thing. And normally at this time I must give them food. And water too. Because, nothing sweets the belly of a poultryman like chickens eating and growing fatter and fatter.

  Today there is no noise of chickens at all at all. Not even the smallest quoi quoi quoiiii of baby chickens struggling to near the lamp. Is the habit of doing the same thing for thirty-something years that wakes me up. Is dark in the poultry shed, like the inside of stomach. There’s kerosene in the lamps, but I have switch them off. What’s the need?

  I go to the kitchen. To cook eku is just to mix eku and water on the fire and turn and turn it. And yet . . . eku does not taste like eku since my wife died . . . I don’t know . . .

  From the window I can see the hungrymoon shining on the poultry shed in my yard and on the faraway zinc roofs of Kreektown—or Ghost-town, as Daudi use to call it. May GodMenai rest his soul. Is funny how the sleepcatastrophe of Daudi and Clama and their daughter Netia happened on the same day. After singing their calamity, my voice disappeared for many days. Many, many kilometres away, I can see the gas chimneys of the oil companies firing and farting, lighting the night like Christmas knockout. Is nice. But is like the smile of the teeth of a dead man. Is still a sad night.

  The stomachworm has start to bite again. My feet are so fat they cannot enter any of my shoe again. I sit down. Yet, I want to do something. There is nothing to do, except wait. So I wear my rubber slippers and walk around, slow, slow. Zanda’s old room. Strange boy. To prefer shining shoes to raising chickens. Maybe is the smell that drive him. The first thing my visitors use to say is hai! The smell! Me myself, I can’t smell anything anymore. The smell of chicken shit and the smell of frying chicken smells the same to me! This life of a thing. When Tume and Malian died, is just one years that Zanda live with me before it was Ruma’s turn to look after the orphan boy. Maybe if I really took him as my son instead of all that one-one year fostering, maybe he would not have run away . . . but I cannot lie: after I buried my bloodson, there are two things I cannot bear: the sound of singing, and the sound of another child calling me Daddy.