David looked down at the sand. He remembered his singateya. Then he took a deep breath and let it go. ‘This is a good memento of the Mata, thank you. I think archaeology is overrated anyway.’
‘Indeed.’
David turned to the truck. He took out his phone.
‘Did you find what you were looking for, David?’
‘I don’t know. But yesterday was also like a private party for me.’
‘How so?’
‘I am fifty-five today.’
‘That is great! Here’s my birthday gift: come back here in three months, and these kids will be able to read, write—and teach you the Menai script . . . even if I’m no longer here.’
‘And the oath of secrecy you have to swear them to?’
‘You heard the grandmother. The Mata’s burial here breaks all the curses on them. The kids will have a new deal.’ He hesitated and then said with a wink, ‘Although a small “ethnographic” schoolroom will help.’
David laughed out loud. ‘So you’ll trade your truck for a school? Deal!’
They shook hands on it and then embraced clumsily. David climbed into the cabin. ‘There is no dialysis centre for a thousand miles, if you ever need one . . .’
‘I know.’
He was silent for a moment, then fired up the engine. ‘I’m really sorry it had to end like this.’
‘Don’t be, Davidi. Everything ends.’
* * *
HE SPED across the shifting desert floor in the largest country in Africa, driven by the sandstorm and a rage for life. Steering by GPS alone, his fingers clamped the steering wheel, and as visibility fell, he pushed down on the accelerator, as though he could overhaul his demons and the sand djinn by speed alone. He lost the satellite connection and his tracking went offline, but he didn’t slow down. Loud music blared from the speakers, but his nerves stayed taut. Then, as the hour struck, as he crossed into the new day, he took his foot off the accelerator and let the truck roll to a stop. He sat up for the rest of the night as eddies of sand tried to bury him, thinking that in a sense he was dead after all, for there was no way he could go back to being the Professor Balsam who had arrived in Nigeria back in February.
When the sun rose, although his doors were jammed solid, the wind was still and the sky was clear. He was hot, wet with sweat, and stripped down to his underwear but alive and only four hours from Khartoum. He slid open the moonroof and hauled himself up on the top of the truck, gasping at the purity of the air after the staleness of the cabin. He sat there soberly, looking out on a world with a virgin sand cover on which no human foot had trod. He felt like a man emerging from his own grave, at a failed funeral where no one had even turned up. He thought back to the hero’s burial given to Mata Nimito by people who had never met him, and David felt a new lease on life, not to write another book but to live such a life that his real death would be a catastrophe for his communities . . . a sleepcatastrophe. . . . He dropped the shovel over the side of the truck and jumped down after it, losing his footing and rolling onto his back.
‘. . . GodMenai!’
The word was out before he realised it. He shook his head ruefully, picked himself up, and began to dig out the truck.
He had a school fund-raising to organise.
SLEEPCATASTROPHES
Kreektown | March/April, 2005
Kiri Ntupong
Asala Turo
Farmer Utoma
Jamis (Jonszer) Biri
Mata Nimito
Births
Nimito Kroma-Alanta
Extant Menai population: 24 (NPC estimates)
PENAKA LEE
Geneva | 28th April, 2005
The private guests milled between the poolside topless ballet and the centrepiece spitted lamb on the mezzanine. A steady stream of signature dishes emerged from the kitchen of the French chef flown in the night before. The wine bar did not disappoint. As for the celebrant himself, there was no sign.
Penaka had reached that station in life where he was not particularly bothered by people’s opinion of his hospitality. He felt like being alone, so he retreated into his basement gallery and shut the world out. The concept of home was somewhat diffused for a man of his circumstances, who kept four private houses around the world and several more well-used guest houses. Yet, year on year, he did spend more time in Geneva than in his other homes, and his most valuable collections were in that one basement.
He did not need to rise from his sofa to enjoy them now. He could look around, as he did, and see the Picassos, Monets, and Dalis that had disappeared from museums and galleries around the world.
His heart quickened once more as he turned to a central plinth. Monica Parkerson had finally delivered the unfinished Benin bronze that had possessed him ever since he first saw it in Conrad Lord Risborough’s house back in 1979. It was difficult to explain Conrad’s reluctance to part with it (he had sold more valuable things) or Penaka’s own desire to own it (he owned far more valuable pieces). He could only describe it as destiny. For all the presence of his one, spectacular, Dali, it did not quite have the same magnetism of his latest bronze. Perhaps part of the value of the bronze was the twenty-six years it had taken him to acquire it.
Yet the wait was over now. It was here.
His lips slipped into his perfect grin. Forbidden pleasures thrilled the most. He thought he would take down the bronze, touch and caress it . . . do with it all those things that seven billion people could not, but he was suddenly tired of it all. And he wondered whether, in the unlikely event that he entered heaven and was sentenced to an eternity of pleasures much like his current life, he would be able to, you know, after a thousand years or two, resign, sleep indefinitely, or something. He yawned and stretched, settling deeper into his sofa. Upstairs on his mezzanine, the specially screened guests at his fifty-fifth birthday oohed and aahed around his more public art, waiting for an introduction into the collector’s secretive world.
PHIL BEGG
London | 28th April, 2005
‘Boss, it’s an email from Nigeria; I think you’d better take a look.’
‘I’ve got no time for jokes, Gene,’ I snapped. I was up to my ears in sign-offs. ‘Our printing window in Melbourne closes in five hours!’
‘It’s no 419 letter, Phil. It’s another Humphrey Chow story.’
‘He didn’t!’
Gene nodded. ‘He’s just made the deadline by minutes, but we’ve typeset the standby story already. What do you want me to do?’
‘Run with the standby. We haven’t checked the e-mails, okay?’
‘You’re the boss,’ he said, in that tone that suggested I wasn’t, really.
* * *
I WENT back to the third issue of a magazine the market didn’t need, which had to be published because the third-largest media group in Europe had to have a foot in the Men’s Lifestyle 30-to-49-year-old demographic. It was a tough job. The money paid the bills, but the ulcers were hell. Issue two had sold 150,000 copies, and we had managed to give away another 80,000. That was a lot of recycling stock, but our ad projections were based on a 300,000 sales threshold and, yes, I was under pressure.
* * *
PRODUCTION WAS going to plan; the PDFs were done and ready to go. Our printers were on standby. Heads were down in the proofing room, and the adrenaline was surging everywhere. Then someone found a booked, full-page ad that had been accidentally spiked. I had to decide between devastating the psyche of Balding Wolf’s 230,000 real readers by canning their biweekly DIY Hints section in the interests of ad revenue. So it was pressure, but it was nothing I couldn’t handle; then I entered my office and found Gene lounging in the easy chair.
In an ideal world, he would probably have gotten my job ahead of me, but he had headed up one failed launch too many. That was how the market worked. He was overweight, ran on Coke and coffee, and no longer needed combs. He was neither sexy nor hip, but he knew the job; and if there ever was a wolf who was balding, here he was. I had
picked him as my deputy because I knew that if I was sacked he would not get my job, and if the magazine went bust, it was back to freelance features in the daily rags for him. He would work harder than I could to keep us in business; but he was also ten years older than I was, so I expected some insubordination.
‘Do we have a problem, Gene?’
He put a printout on my desk. ‘He hit six thousand words on the nose, plus he resurrected Dalminda Roco. I didn’t really like his Bamou phase.’
I glanced at the clock. Australia was printing in two hours and our Kent press was scheduled to roll shortly afterwards. ‘So? We have an understanding on Mr. Chow.’
‘We did, but I read the story, didn’t I?’
‘We’ve got a safe Pushcart winner—’
‘We’ve got a bland Pushcart formula, that’s what we’ve got; and if it’s gongs you want, his last story for us won a national award in—’
‘—Nigeria. Yeah, right. Listen, the name ‘Dalminda’ kills the story, okay? I’m not going to be hauled in by the terror police for Humphrey again.’
‘He’s gone and set Dalminda in Nigeria. It’s a whole new fictive take on political farce with a twist in the tail of a Swiss godfather that makes the Italian mafia look like a bunch of frat boys. The New Yorker called his last story ‘elementally edgy.’ They’ll have to trot out the thesaurus to review this one. I can swipe the stories around in ten secs, without nudging the layout out of sync—’
‘This is not a layout issue. The police think Dalminda is a real person. We are talking potential lawsuits—’
‘What? Al-Qaeda sues IVC? That type of lawsuit?’
I glared at him.
‘Okay, I was out of line there,’ he grunted. ‘But, hey, the only call the publisher’s made on this issue is to ask if we got a Chow story.’
I realised that admitting that one was out of line was not exactly the same thing as apologising, but I didn’t press the point. I sighed, took the printout, and dropped into the chair opposite him. ‘The publisher won’t be happy to get a call from the police after we go to press.’
‘Are you kidding me?’ Gene said, rising. ‘If we can get the Sun to report your arrest, that’s an extra fifty thousand copies sold.’
‘That’s the name of the game, isn’t it?’ I grumbled, ‘Go away, Gene, give me five minutes.’
* * *
I TOOK twenty minutes, in the event, but when I was done, I gave him the call. ‘Okay, Einstein, change “Megatum” into “Mutagem” or something, but go ahead, run the Chow tale.’
Epilogue
SHEESTI KROMA-ALANTA
London | 28th April, 2005
She was in the courtroom in London. It was another colourless day in the Menai Society’s litigation against Trevi Biotics and Megatum. The bar was swamped by a shoal of seasoned counsel to the defendants, who had just that morning filed a fresh box of interlocutory applications trying to halt the case until the House of Commons investigations were completed. The lead QC rose to address the court. The timeworn engine of justice revved up.
Sheesti’s phone pinged, and she pulled it out discreetly. The bright LCD gleamed with Tobin Rani’s poetry in text message. She moaned softly, and the phone slipped from her fingers. As the QC started his address, she began to weep softly. She tried to rein it in, but something gave, deep inside her, and she broke all the way. Clutching her womb, she dropped her eyelids on the film of tears and began to sing Mata Nimito’s calamity. There was consternation in the courtroom. Denle, who had picked up and read the message on the phone, held his wife close and did not try to hush her, did not try to move her. When their alarmed lawyer leaned over, he passed her phone wordlessly to him. Then the swelling song straightened her spine, and he rose with her, her haunting voice and susurrant Menai raising gooseflesh across the English gallery.
When the stewards burst into the court, her phone was before the judge, who was standing, with his courtroom, as still as all the dead Menai who had once upon a time mourned a living Sheesti Kroma-Alanta in Kreektown’s village square.
The Extinction of Menai Page 46
