Читать книгу The Extinction of Menai - Chuma Nwokolo - Страница 9

Log One

SLEEPCATASTROPHES

Kreektown | March/April, 1990

Felimpe Geya

Sussie Bomadi

Filed Bomadi

Bolu Maame

Dubri Masingo

Sonnie Abah

Adje Makande

Ena Praye

Halia Gorie

Nala Nomsok

Solo Atume (aka “Chemist”)

Births

Nil

Extant Menai population: 1,160

(National Population Commission [NPC] estimates)

CHIEF (DR.) EHI A. FOWAKA

Ubesia | 19th January, 1994

I was having dinner that evening at the Big Time Hotel in Ubesia, when Jonszer arrived. Apart from the bills for my daughters’ school fees at Loyola Jesuit College, nothing brings tears to my eyes like a steamed catfish trembling in a hot bowl of egusi. I had one such before me, and I was eating it with many prayers of thanksgiving to the munificent God that watches over Ehi Fowaka. Then Jonszer arrived. My chief regret for taking this assignment is my new familiarity with souls like Jonszer. He was halfway across the restaurant, black-clad, wild-eyed, and pungent, when I saw him. Fortunately the headwaiter was there. He is a diligent fellow from my town; I knew his godmother. He would have done well if he had gotten his four GCEs. He was just serving my stout, and I spoke to him with my eyes—really sharp fellow, that headwaiter—and he intercepted Jonszer two yards from me and took him outside. I then, regretfully, made short work of my pounded yam.

Then I went out to meet Jonszer. This is what I am wearing today: a white linen outfit, one of the dozen I ordered at the start of Mr. President’s assignment. It is light but dignified, perfect for getting around in these wretched parts where efficient air conditioners are few and far between. Jonszer was quaffing a beer. That headwaiter! He knows how to engage characters like this! When Jonszer saw me he put his bottle to his mouth and gobbled efficiently, putting it down when it was empty. ‘You come, now,’ he said, rising.

He did not mean to be rude, or imperious. His English was rudimentary, very much a second language spoken only when the other person couldn’t be forced to speak Menai.

There were several good reasons not to follow the amiable drunk. Yet Kreektown’s only hotel was a major apology. Working with people like Jonszer allowed me to stay in the relative comfort of Big Time Hotel, while doing excellent fieldwork in Kreektown. That appalling name alone was enough to drive my business elsewhere, but my regular hotels were full. I wanted to ask more questions of Jonszer, but we were attracting attention. This is not the sort of riffraff you want to be socially associated with. I summoned my driver, and we set off. Jonszer sat up front. I took the owner’s corner. Beside me was Akeem, my PA, cameraman, interpreter, and general dogsbody.

‘So tell me about this place you’re taking us to.’

‘Is a funeral. A Menai funeral.’

‘A funeral?’

‘Yes, Doctor.’

I sighed. This assignment was moving me closer to anthropology than pop psychiatry. I had no interests in funerals where I knew neither the corpse nor its relatives. Yet it was better that I be called out to too many things than too few; besides, it would be an opportunity for me to meet people, for the Menai were notoriously quiet, sit-at-home types. And frankly, I’d rather be doing this than be stuck at my desk at Yaba Psychiatric Hospital contesting seniority with the likes of Dr. Maleek.

‘So who died?’ I asked.

‘Nobody,’ replied Jonszer. ‘Is a funeral, not a burial. Is for Sheesti Kroma, Ruma’s daughter.’

Akeem caught my eyes, and we indulged some exasperated headshakings. Nobody died! Yet we were going to a funeral! This was the sort of thing that happened when you were forced to recruit a drunk as your local fixer. It was like that old joke, It was a very fatal accident, but, thank God, nobody died. Yet Kreektown was just twenty kilometres away, and frankly, my car was more comfortable than my hotel room. No surprise there, since the car was more expensive than the entire hotel. Which was the crazy thing about Ubesia: though the capital of an oil-producing state and cultural heart of the Sontik people, it had a local economy more stunted than the national average and has never quite moved from township into city status.

So I let my driver continue.

Kreektown was locked down when we arrived. There was a funeral under way, all right. The businesses were shut. The pool shop and beer parlours had their doors padlocked and their chairs stacked up under their awnings. The villagers had turned out in black robes like Jonszer’s. Never seen that many Menai out at the same time before. They gathered at the village square. It was dark and depressing. There were none of those high-wattage bulbs that organizers of funeral parties would have thought to provide in any civilized village. It was like stumbling into the really Dark Ages, complete with traditional architecture: there were people but it wasn’t a party; there was music—and it is really stretching it, to call that menacing witchery ‘music,’ but I am being scientific here—but no dancing. All they did was weep in song. People stood there like tree trunks and wept and sang these haunting Menai songs, songs that made you feel wretched, like the world was ending tonight, and they sang them one after the other. You don’t want to be in this square for a real funeral. The most sinister thing was the children, some of them as small as five and six, standing and chanting like the adults. These were kids who, in normal funerals, would have been running around at play. It was clear that a severe order of group psychosis was at work here. I don’t mind admitting to a most unscientific unease.

Akeem took photographs while we waited for something else to happen, but nothing else happened. They just stood there and sang.

We walked through the crowd. I recognized quite a few people that I had met in the course of my fieldwork. They were harmless, simple folk: Farmer Utoma, Ma’Bamou, Weaver Kakandu, even that old scoundrel, Kiri Ntupong. Normally these are the most polite and respectful people you will find anywhere in Nigeria, but today they waited for me to greet them first—which I did, in the interest of scientific enquiry—but even then it was like speaking to people in a trance. The wailing and the singing, it was enough to drive a fellow insane.

Then I saw their old man.

Our paths had crossed before. When I first arrived, I confused the Menai by asking for their chief. They are like the Igbos used to be, in not having proper kings. Eventually they took me to this very old man who has some kind of authority over them—what exactly it was, I still haven’t discovered. His house was rather outside the village proper. They called him Mata, which I suppose was Menai for ‘master’ or something. But apart from that there was nothing chieflike about him. Had probably forgotten how to be a chief, if he ever was that. His house was probably the poorest in the village. Doubt if it was electrified. I mean, I won’t give even my houseboy that sort of house for living quarters. I went to see him a couple of times, and all he ever did was offer me a dirty cup of water—which of course I rejected—and sit and stare at the skies. I am not exactly a guru in old age psychiatry (I despise the speciality) and without sticking out my neck—in the absence of an appropriate history and all that—I’d say this was classic dementia: answering every official query of mine with perfect silence.

He could not have looked more different today. He was playing an out-sized wooden xylophone like a man possessed. Although it wasn’t a very energetic performance—I mean, he was playing a dirge—still he was an immensely accomplished musician for a man of his age. Had his audience rapt. And even if this was not a funeral for a dead person, in my professional opinion there was going to be a dead old person in their midst very soon. It was entertainment on its own, watching him play, but it was also like waiting for a fatal accident.

Eventually I turned to go. To listen to their sad songs wasn’t a problem—I could have taken that all night. But to be very candid, there are some things that I won’t do, even for Nigeria. To come to a funeral and stand! In the past twenty, thirty years I can count on one hand the number of weddings, funerals, or housewarmings I have attended and was not immediately invited to sit at the high table. I mean, sometimes I’ve accompanied colleagues to their occasions and the organizers, even without knowing who I was, have called me up to the high table, perhaps on account of my personality, I don’t know. And then I attend an occasion in a village like Kreektown and stand? Really, there’s a limit to patriotism. To make matters worse, as soon as Jonszer stepped into the village square he fell under the spell of the old man’s xylophone. To talk to him was to address another tree in the forest.

Yet after I got to my car, something about that ‘funeral’ kept me from leaving. I am not much of an ethnographic investigator, but the scene unfolding before me seemed quite crucial to the construction of a psychiatric profile of the Menai. I was probably the only scientific eye ever to behold this sight: 95 percent of the world population of an ethnic nation gathered in one square, weeping and wailing. I could hardly leave a scene of such scientific, linguistic, and cultural significance out of mere physical discomfort. So I compromised. I instructed Akeem to begin a video recording of the event, which he did, fetching the kit from the boot and setting up the tripod three metres from the car so that I could monitor proceedings from the comfort of my Mercedes 300 SEL—at the time of writing, this is an eight-month-old import, and I hazard a guess that there are not a dozen of its specs within the borders of Nigeria.

This was the point at which Jonszer turned up again. I let down my window as he approached. His hand was out, his grin lopsided, with the effrontery that only drunks can muster. I gave him a half litre of cheap brandy, and it disappeared into a baggy pocket—I carry this questionable pedigree of alcohol purely for the appeasement of roughboys. It was difficult to know whether his eyes were red from weeping or from drinking.

‘Just come now,’ he said.

‘What now?’ I asked, but he was gone, walking hurriedly, in that demented gait of his, through the crowd and down a side street that led from the square. My driver had gone to ‘make water’ (to use his charming euphemism), and Akeem was tied to his recording. Reluctantly, I followed Jonszer alone. We did not go far. We walked down Lemue Street right up till the bend in the road that led towards the creek, and there he stopped. He waited in the darkness beside a car, the only one on the street. When I joined him, he tipped his head sideways, towards a small huddle in the doorway of the house opposite. I looked, but it was too dark to make out faces or figures.

I was angry. It was dark and stinging with mosquitoes. There was no satellite TV in my hotel room. Back in my hospital, the sly Dr. Maleek was positioning himself for the soon-to-be-vacant office of Chief Medical Director. My fellow consultants and contemporaries were attending conferences and seminars from Joburg to Stockholm, touring with escorts of polyglot, lanky ladies leaving trails of perfumes in their wake. I? I was walking dangerous streets with a drunk reeking of beer and week-old sweat.

‘That’s Sheesti,’ he said.

‘Who, where?’

He pointed with his jaw, and then he was gone.

I was afraid. This was precisely the point for me to call it a night. I urgently had to return to the safety of my car and the security of my boys—because scientific research is best conducted with two feet solidly on the ground. Any mugger looking at my clothes just then could reasonably expect to raise three or four hundred thousand naira between my wallet and mobile phones. I was a legitimate target. But the speed of Jonszer’s withdrawal made it impossible for me to remove myself from the area of risk without actually taking to my heels—an undignified option, which was out of the question. I was still undecided when a man stormed out through the huddle. He was carrying a box and cursing under his breath. The scientist in me paused, warring with the human in me, which desperately desired the owner’s corner of my Mercedes. ‘Are you okay?’ I asked, as the man flung the box into the boot of the car.

‘I am a detribalised Nigerian!’ he shouted, seemingly, addressing not just all of Lemue Street, but the entire Kreektown itself. ‘My father is Yoruba, my mother is Ibibio!’

‘Calm down,’ I told him.

He only shouted louder: ‘My hospital is in Onitsha! I have lived in Kano! In Calabar! In Lagos!’

‘Just like me,’ I told him, but he had slammed the boot shut and stormed back into the house.

I was free again to go, but by now the human in me was even more curious than the scientist. I approached the house, whose number I now saw was 43. The huddle resolved into two weeping women. The younger was begging the older, who was replying, ‘There’s nothing I can do, now, there’s nothing I can do.’

I clasped my fingers over the gentle rise of my stomach and, using a voice developed over thirty years of clinical medicine, asked, ‘Are you quite all right? I am Chief Doctor Ehi Alela Fowaka, JP. Is there anything at all I can do to help?’

I got the polite response that has been my lot, anywhere I go in this respectful country. They greeted me properly, the younger one curtseying, but before they could speak further, I-am-a-Detribalised-Nigerian stormed past, fuming, ‘You are all wizards and witches! I’m sorry! Wizards and witches, that’s what you are!’

‘Easy, Denle, this is . . .’ began the younger woman, but the man was having none of it. He had a half-packed bag in his hand, and with the other hand he grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her towards the car.

‘Let’s go, Sheesti, before they actually kill you. Wizards!’

‘Is because we love you . . .’ began the older, but two doors slammed shut and one very angry Honda swerved away from Lemue Street.

I was standing before the older woman when suddenly I recognized the transcendental moment of the entire research project. A river of wisdom and calm understanding flowed through me, and I understood how the gurus of the fallen religions of the world can become seduced into the delusion of godhood. I deduced the elaborate social mechanism used by this atavistic society to corral her poor members into communal compliance. ‘You must be Sheesti’s mother,’ I said gently.

She nodded.

‘She looks quite alive to me; why would you hold her funeral?’

She opened her hands. ‘It has nothing to do with me. It is custom. It is all right for her to marry a foreigner—we encourage our daughters to marry foreigners—but they must take your name and come and live in Kreektown. That is our custom.’

‘Otherwise you apply the emotional blackmail of a symbolic funeral?’ I shook my head gently, as nonjudgmentally as it is possible to be without partaking in stupidity. ‘This is 1994, you know, not 1794. We have laws, federal laws. And what does your husband have to say about this?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You don’t mind if I have a word with him? Is he in the square, partaking of this lu—of this custom?’

‘He’s inside, but . . .’

‘Oh, don’t worry.’ I smiled. This is one thing that thirty years of senior medical practice gives you: the ability to say grave and serious things with a smile. People are used to accepting tough news from doctors. Anyone else brings the news and they go to pieces, or go ballistic, but a doctor—with the experience—breaks it, and you see the difference. I pushed past the woman—now, this is not something I would normally do, pushing myself so precipitately into private affairs, but the things one does for one’s nation . . . I stood in the middle of a large living room—desperately poor, of course, by my standards, but in the context of Kreektown, quite middle-classy, really. There was a colour television, a fancy sofa, and most bizarrely a chest freezer; and in the middle of all that sat a sad-looking man in a wheelchair. ‘Good evening, sir,’ I began.

He just leered at me. I began to feel vexed. I normally would not have given him a ‘sir’ but for the wheelchair.

‘He hasn’t said a word since his stroke in 1989,’ she said, from very close behind me.

Munificent God! This guru thing was quite exhausting.

She continued without a break: ‘He has nothing to do with this; it is custom. He himself is an Igarra man. We married in February 1973, and he moved here in April of that very same year. Since then he only visited his own town in Igarra maybe five or six times before his stroke. Is what I told Sheesti . . . Is it cold enough?’

I touched the bottle of wine she had produced for my inspection from the chest. There was a strong smell of goat meat from the exterior of the bottle, but the cork seemed intact.

‘It’s very nice, thank you.’

She opened it and poured me a glass, talking all the while, as her physical proximity forced me backwards and heavily onto her sofa. ‘Is what I told Sheesti, I told her, “Marry him and bring him here, like I did with your daddy,” but no . . .’ and she went on and on.

I sat there sipping the wine, ignoring the smell of meat, and trying hard not to stare at Sheesti’s father. The mother was clearly a woman’s woman; her English was as fluent as her Menai and her sentences flowed steadily, brooking no interruption. She manifested the Menai custom of aggressive hospitality, which I was prepared to indulge in this case, since her offering was a sealed, if pathetically cheap, bottle of wine. A few weeks earlier I had been forced to reject an unhygienic offering of locally brewed gin invested with an eye-watering reek, only to observe the subsequent hostility and animosity, which forced my visit to end rather more precipitately than I planned.

The eyes of Sheesti’s father seemed quite alive, despite the long dribble that led down from rubbery lips to a wet shirt. I couldn’t pull my eyes away from this Igarra man who could not attend the funeral of his Menai daughter who was not yet dead. Yet I was a scientist with a job to do. I turned to his wife, feeling the Igarra eyes burning paralysing lasers into the side of my head. ‘Who is behind this thing?’ I asked, firmly, cutting off her chatter. ‘Who organized this funeral?’

‘Excuse me,’ she said, and disappeared into the house, apparently to produce some documentary evidence. This was the good thing about dealing with people of a better quality than the Jonszers of this world. Documentary evidence would go down very well on a presidential report. In the meantime, I was forced to return to the scrutiny of the ‘master’ of the house. I wondered whether to attempt a one-sided conversation in which I would supply commentaries, questions, and suggested answers. This was usually not a problem for me. With my thirty years’ experience, armed with a treatment chart, I can hold a ten-minute ward-round conversation with a comatose patient, particularly with a dozen student nurses and doctors clustered around me, trying to pick up useful hints for their viva exams. But there was something about that Kreektown parlour that threw me off my stride. This did not seem the proper forum to review the pessimistic prognoses of cerebrovascular accidents.

Then she returned. She did not have any facts, figures, or documentary evidence, but she had painted her face, and although she still looked like my mother’s marginally younger sister, she no longer looked like the mother of a woman whose funeral dirge we could hear from the square. Then she came and sat next to me on the sofa, close enough for me to perceive a rather rancid variation on the eau de parfum theme. ‘As I was saying,’ she began, and there was something else in her voice, which was when I looked at the sadness in the eyes of the Igarra man and realised that, president or no president, this fieldwork was ending right there, right then.

‘By the way,’ I interrupted kindly, ‘what’s your name?’

‘Ruma,’ she simpered.

‘Ruma,’ I said, ‘good night.’

SHEESTI KROMA-ALANTA

Kreektown | 19th April, 2000

Ruma aged suddenly and it took the villagers by suprise. It happened in the weekend her headmaster husband died. He had not said a word in the twelve years of his stroke, in the twelve years of his retirement from Kreektown Primary. He was a presence in the house that many imagined she was better off without. Yet once he died she went to pieces, weeping without a break, in spite of how old it made her look.

I came alone for the burial, without my children and my husband. I stayed at the Kilos Inn at Ubesia, missing most of the silly ceremonies. In the evening when he was already buried, I slipped in to comfort my mother and to leave her the provisions I had bought. Then I left for home.

I had buried him a long time ago, after all—before his stroke, in fact, on that day that he flogged me after hearing about my kissing the son of Lazarus. After the things he himself had done to me.

And that would have been it: one more attachment to Kreektown pulled out of my life, leaving just that shrivelling root of my mother. One final visit left to pay . . .

And then I had the strange meeting with Mata Nimito.

* * *

THE DRIVER had been driving fifteen minutes towards Ubesia when I remembered the ukpana leaves. By this time my anger was gone, the anger I needed to walk coldly through my old haunts. The anger I needed to look boldly at my flesh and blood, who had buried me alive.

Our first son, Moses, was prone to eczema. It had defied Denle’s creams, and I had had a bet with him: Menai children did not live with eczema; they had a weekly bath with ukpana leaves for a couple of months, and that was that. Yet I did not have the Igbo word for ukpana, or the English word either. Didn’t have a clue how to ask for it in any herbal market in Onitsha. I just knew where the ukpana bushes grew in Kreektown, near the abandoned church.

I had Razak turn around, and we returned to my old hometown. I could not stop thinking of my mother. We had probably had all of an hour together. Ruma had gone from dressing up in skirts to pining for her grandchildren. She did not say a word, but I knew it, now that I was a mother as well. She had made three clothes for them. She had never made me clothes and the lack of practice showed. I had thrown them in the boot, and I will throw them in the bin, but I could not stop thinking of her.

We got as far as the car could go and I told Razak to stop. It did not occur to me to ask for his protection. Safety was not something one ever thought about in Kreektown. Even in these days of the roughboys, I am not really bothered. I was nearly raped once, outside Kreektown, but he ran away when I lied about my AIDS status. Anyway, the ukpana bushes were still some distance by footpath, so the quicker I left, the better. And I wanted to walk out the silly feelings in my head, not sit in a car and let them fester.

I saw his singate even before I saw him. He stood in the path, on the bend just before the first clump of bushes. Behind him was the purple-blue of the ukpana sprays, but there he stood, not quite blocking the way, though his presence was enough to have turned me around, had I not walked so far already. Here then was the man I loathed most in the entire world.

Leaving the People for marriage was not the great unnameable offence it used to be. Too many Menai had died; the end was clear. I had had measles during the Lassa fever outbreak of the ’80s and so did not get the vaccine that had doomed my people. It was obvious that I had to make a future with someone outside my dying nation. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for him to have looked the other way with Denle and me, but no, he had to bring the weight of our archaic traditions down on the life I could have had. And that was the first nineteen years of my life excised . . . and now here he was, before me.

The anger blinded me to the obvious questions: what was he doing there, why was he without the helpers who took him around in these latter days of his ancientness? His eyes were shut, as well they should be. His Menai heaven would probably fall at the taboo of a mata locking eyes with a ‘dead person.’ I steeled myself and walked up to him and started past him.

‘Sheestumu?’ he whispered. I froze. Mata Nimito named all Menai. He was an old man that the town mostly forgot, until there was a need to remember him: burials, namings, disputes . . . Nobody would ever consider him a friend. There were too many generations between him and us. But he did have that playful way with my name. He let his singate fall and lifted his arms . . . raising the bag of ukpana from his red robes, the leaves plucked just below their nodes, to preserve their potency. I took them, too. It did not seem likely he had a problem with eczema. I put his ceremonial staff back in his hand. His eyes were pinched so tightly shut I wondered if he were now blind. ‘Eniemute?’

A warm glow started in me. The love for a husband comes from a region of the mind. The love for a father comes from another. There is no crossover. I felt a glow building from a hearth I had thought was terminally broken. I told him of my children, their names. He shook his head impatiently. ‘Eniemute!’

With a dry mouth, I described Moses: the long limbs he owed to his father, his quick temper . . . Ameizi, he said. I described Cynthia, who looked so much like my baby photograph . . . Anosso, he said, and then I described my baby, Patricia, who had the nurses pledging their sons in marriage . . . Ogazi, he said.

The naming was complete.

Then he began to sing my torqwa! I that was dead to Menai! I fell on my knees, enthralled again by the antiquity of my lineage. I knelt there, streaming tears as the poetry of my identity bore me from the caravan of the exiled crown prince through the dunes and the deserts and the savannahs and the forests and creeks of their sojourn. I listened to the descendants of young Auta, trumpeter in the court of the crown prince, Xera, and his wife, Aila, daughter of Numisa, until

Rumieta Kroma the trader of cloth

married Teacher Gaius from Igarra

to birth Sheesti, little mother

who, with Denle, son of Alanta,

scion of Esie, built pillars for Menai:

three pillars of Ameizi, fierce athlete,

Anosso her mother’s cunning vomitimage

and Ogazi the fair, for Menai without end . . .

I gripped my nose, as I rose, caught my breath so tight . . . Only now, hearing my torqwa in the Mata’s voice, did I realise the darkling power of my funeral . . . For the first time since the arrival of my children, I felt they were not stillborn. They were named, properly named from the font of all Menai. I may still languish in that never-never world of a Menai who is neither dead nor ancestor, but in the land of ancestorsMenai, my children were known. Denle could not, could never know the burden of the crush of death.

I probably thought the Mata was going to fall, for he did sway, and fragile, fragile was the rag of bones and flesh that I grabbed as I found my feet, and held, but fierce, fierce was the grip he locked me in. How long we stood there, racked by dry spasms, I don’t know, how long I stood, crooning over the man I hated most in all the world, until with a long breath he was stilled and the old body became rigid like a trunk. His arms fell away, but for a thin finger pointing at the singate he had dropped once again to hold me.

My eyes were red, and I was grateful he was being blind. His onion-thin skin was dry. He smelled of roasted corn. Freshly roasted corn and aged palm wine. He stood erect, implacable, like a sentinel from the past. There was no other word, no bon mots and no goodbye, but I knew it was time to go. What had happened was something that had not happened, could never have happened, but I was gifted with a memory of it.

I turned and fled to the car, back to 43 Lemue Street in the old village. She did not argue, and I felt like the mother packing the little girl off to college. She packed her property slowly, touching things that would not fit into the car, like she was saying goodbye. Without the anger in my eyes I saw more of her, and although she had never said it in her letters, I knew now that she was dying—for her to leave the living Menai and go with her dead daughter. To break so unceremoniously with tradition. She began to pack her thirty-year-old crockery, the set so special that she never used it, and I sighed and stood up firmly. Ten minutes later we were ready to go. We shut down our Kreektown house for good and went to mine.

* * *

Onitsha | 10th September, 2001

My darling husband did not throw me out, but it was a near thing. He ran his own private hospital with a businessman’s flair. Even before we got married he had built two houses from his steep fees. With me there, less of the fees ended up buying female handbags, and we had added a couple more. Managing tenants and children was enough work for me. He did not talk to me throughout that week I brought my mother home. All he muttered, again and again to my hearing, was ‘Blood is a terrible thing!’ So I moved her to one of our empty flats. That compromise seemed to work.

He never went to see her, but he never asked me to rent out the flat either. And once, three months on, he threw a brocade fabric on my bedside, saying, ‘See if that old witch likes this.’ I did not tell him that Ruma had traded in brocade and had left the largest collection of uncut brocades at No. 43. It was the thought that counted. Even his ‘old witch’ was not much angrier than the meaningless epithets he uttered in my ear after he switched off the lights at night.

There was the day she blessed him, too. My driver had taken me to Anam to buy yams. On my return, I stopped by her flat. I stepped out of the car into screams from the hysterical housegirl on the balcony above.

‘Which hospital?’ I cried, and she stared.

I broke into the ward just as he was setting a drip. It was not something he usually did himself, but there he was. As I approached, my mother, who was just about to drift off, took his hands and held them for a silent moment. The bedlam around her ceased for a moment, as though they realised that something significant was about to happen. ‘Simba tulisu. Simba tuala,’ she said, and passed out.

* * *

19th December, 2001

‘You could have told me she was ill,’ he grumbled, afterwards. ‘We might have been able to save her life.’

And it was at such times that the wise wife held her tongue, as I did.

She had started her biweekly dialysis right after her hospitalisation. I had waited patiently, with a small smile and a private bet. Yet my darling husband was a stubborn man, and it took him weeks to, casually, ask—as though it had just occurred to him—‘What was that your mother said when she held my hands?’

‘When was that?’ I asked, playing his game. ‘I don’t remember . . .’

‘You do,’ he said, irritated. ‘Samba, samba, something.’

‘Oh,’ I said innocently, ‘that.’

‘Well?’

‘She blessed your hands,’ I equivocated.

‘Yeah? What exactly did she say?’

At that point I was a little wary, for the words could also be construed as a curse. ‘Until now, they made money. From now they will bless lives.’

He let that sink in a while, then he snorted. ‘Well, I hope—for our sakes—that they still continue to make a little money as well!’

* * *

31st December, 2001

Rumieta Kroma died on New Year’s Eve. Denle thought we should bury her in Onitsha. We had a small quarrel over that, but it quickly blew over. He had wanted her in his family vault at Onitsha. Non-Kreektowners simply don’t get it. I sent her body home, so she could sleep beside her husband in our empty living room. I sat in the hotel in Ubesia, seeing her sleepcatastrophe rites through my tears. When night had properly fallen, I sneaked into the empty house to say my farewells at her grave, but the floor had not yet been broken. My people had waited, after all. And in the silence of that bereft house I sheathed my knife for good.

They sent for the Mata, and when he came, they held the second Restoration in the history of the Menai sojourn in Kreektown. Then I joined them in the burial of my mother, Rumieta Kroma, sixty-seventh descendant from Auta, trumpeter of the court of Crown Prince Xera. We moved all the furniture out, cracked the floor, and dug down a tall man’s height in the earth, until soil filled the room. Then we laid Mama to sleep, sans coffin, in a burial shroud freshly woven by Kakandu. At five feet, we spread her bridal brocade. We filled another foot of earth and snapped her nuptial beads into glinting confetti on the red laterite. Then we filled the grave to its lip, packed it hard, and slabbed it over. And as we sang dirges for her sleepcatastrophe, I was mourning Kreektown as well, for I realised that the Mata had finally accepted that our nation was destined to die.

* * *

Kreektown | 2nd January, 2002

When the night was as silent as the living room I went to the Mata’s pavilion. He was sitting, staring at the night sky, and I sat with him. He poured me a drink of water and we toasted. As well-being flooded my body, I poured out the palm wine and we drank. Three hours passed in silence. From a distant oilfield, a single flare stack flickered. Occasionally he clucked at something he saw in the skies. Otherwise it seemed that all was well in the universe; apart from the fact that Kreektown and her last mata were all but dead.

‘Suetu maini kpana aiga she?’ I asked, pointing at the clouds.

He laughed and I laughed with him, savouring a joke I did not yet know. An hour passed and he laughed again, explaining that my grandmother, mother, and I had all suffered eczema, and he did not need the clouds to tell him that my children probably would as well.

‘I can’t come back. My heart is here, but I have a husband, I have a life elsewhere.’

‘Anodu tuetu siliesi.’ He smiled.

In the early hours I left him my shopping and returned home to Onitsha, salting away his words: ‘You’re back already.’

Onitsha | 7th January, 2002

It was after that visit that I started the Menai Society (MS). My darling husband put down the seed money, but I have raised much more since then. At first it was just the language I was looking at: writing a primer, recording proverbs, idioms, historysongs, things like that. But in going around, in recording the stories, I found that what the Menai needed now was medicine, not tape recordings. The Omakasa Enquiry had found Trevi Biotics not negligent, so funding for medical care was a problem. So the focus of MS changed. We started registering Menai survivors, pairing them with kidney units, buying dialysis time . . . it was about this time that we sued Trevi and Megatum in London.

‘We,’ because my husband got involved. I had sued Trevi Biotics in the Federal High Court in Ubesia, and we were limping along, when Trevi found out that Doctor Denle Alanta was our main sponsor. They approached him with fifty times his seed money in bribes. I still don’t know why that turned Denle into a crusader for the town he had once hated so much. As a doctor he loved his money; he charged even the poorest patients his fees and stopped their treatment once they stopped paying. But I suppose he also liked a good fight. That, and concrete proof of corruption, which he had always contested, in the discontinuance of the ’80s litigation filed for the Menai by a medical NGO in London.

So that day I came in and there were new birth certificates for the children on the bed. ‘Is that how you spell their names?’ he asked, as I picked them up. My hands were trembling: he had added the Mata’s Menai names to our children’s official names.

‘How did you know?’ I whispered.

‘They told me what you call them—when I’m not around. I thought they sounded quite nice.’

‘You’re not angry?’

He laughed. ‘I’m so angry I’ll leave Eddie in charge of the hospital and we’ll both go to London for the Megatum hearing.’

‘We?’

He showed me the hands that would now bless people. ‘The curse of the dead witch,’ he said.

Kreektown | 12th March, 2005

‘Why this Field of Stones?’ I asked.

‘When I rest there,’ said the Mata, settling his hand almost tenderly on the earth, ‘I will end the curse on this land.’

‘But you said it’s not even in Nigeria! It’s . . . thousands of miles away!’

‘This land . . . this continent . . .’

Denle arrived with a grim Jonszer behind him. He took one look at the old man. ‘You have to stop now, and I mean now.’

I raised one finger, shielding the microphone for another five minutes until Mata Nimito slowed to catch his breath. Then I reluctantly clicked my recorder off.

Denle was standing over us, angrily surveying the Mata’s home. ‘We could build a house without touching the old one, and let him decide if he’ll use it or not.’

‘Look at it with new eyes, Denle,’ I whispered. ‘It’s not an old house. It’s history.’

I remained motionless on the bench, leaving Jonszer to attend to the old man. We’d had a marathon session: four straight hours, our longest yet. Denle always said the old man would talk himself into the grave if we let him, it was up to me to be responsible. But he saw I was upset, and he took a deep breath and put away his anger.

‘Are you okay?’

‘I don’t want to go to London. You can represent the society at the next session.’

‘It’s more than a court case, Shee. You are the Menai.’ He sat beside me. Softly. ‘Why?’

‘There’s so much I didn’t know!’ I was near to tears. ‘Behind every idiom, there’s wisdom; behind every word, there’s history! You know, I asked him how come all those years he never used this idiom, that word . . . and he said the miasta . . . the . . . need for it . . . had not come! So many stories . . . we were so blessed, we were so . . .’

‘We’ll be back within the month.’

I whispered in his ear so they could not overhear. ‘I don’t think he’ll wait that long . . .’

He watched Jonszer bow as he went through the low doorway with the old man in his arms.

‘We’ll take him to Onitsha, with the facilities in the hospital . . .’

I laughed and he grinned with me, until he realised I was now weeping.

‘What?’ he asked, holding me.

‘He said he won’t die in a zoo, and he’ll be buried in the original homeland of our ancestors from centuries ago.’ I wiped my tears. Soberly, I added, ‘He’s made me promise to take his body back to the Field of Stones, and . . . and I don’t have a clue where that is.’

HUMPHREY CHOW

Lower Largo, Scotland | 15th March, 2005

Rubiesu simini randa si kwemka.

Something queer happened early this morning to put me off Chinese takeaways for good. As I recall, I was alone when I retired after dinner yesterday, and I haven’t drunk alcohol in days. Yet at 4:00 a.m. I woke up with a full bladder, only to find a bearded stranger snoring on the bed beside me.

Now, there are queer things and there are urgent things: I quickly used the bathroom, running a numbing jet of cold water over my head. When I shut off the tap the small room was silent. Except for the rhythmic crashing of waves on the beach outside, the gurgling as my water funnelled to its death by sewerage . . . and a ragged snore from the bedroom.

I looked carefully in the mirror, and they were there, all right: the two loneliest eyes in the world, staring back at me like solitary inmates in their psychiatric wards. ‘Not so lonely now, are you?’ I muttered.

He was still there when I returned, a large heavy youth lying face up in a grey trench coat. His great boots hung over the edge of my bed. A pervasive smell of stale fried chicken hung in the air. The situation was getting queerer and queerer: I snuck downstairs and found that both doors were firmly locked against the Scottish cold. The windows were fast, and there was no sign of a break-in. This was no burglar—although realistically, what burglar would stop halfway through a heist and opt to grab a snooze alongside his victim?

Now, I am a reasonable man. (My wife would argue, too reasonable. Upon stumbling across a fellow breaking into my car the other day, I’d tapped his shoulder and asked if he had mistaken my car for his. In a similar situation, Grace had broken a teenager’s nose with her handbag, but I’m a reasonable man.) I made a very hot cup of tea and took it upstairs. A kitchen knife wasn’t exactly my style. A scalding cup of tea was an urbane prop that could turn from beverage into portable biochemical deterrent if an Unidentified Sleeping Person turned violent.

I shook him awake, and he sat up on the edge of my bed. He looked at me. The only emotion I could see on his face was the irritation of a man shaken awake—say, on a public bench—waiting to find out why his sleep had been disturbed.

‘Who are you?’ I asked eventually.

He yawned and sleepily pulled a black bandanna from his pocket. As he tied the angry declaration across his forehead, I gasped. ‘A suicide bomber!’

‘That’s what I am,’ he said impatiently, ‘not who I am. I am Dalminda. Dalminda Roco, ex–law student.’

Tradition is a terrible thing. ‘Humphrey Chow,’ I said, ‘short story writer.’

He extended his hand for a handshake and when that was done, took my cup of tea with a God, I needed that!

He caught my surreptitious glance under the bed. ‘What?’ he asked.

‘Are you off-duty?’

‘Christ! I was sleeping, wasn’t I? Do I look the sort of fanatic who carries his work to bed?’ He braved a sip of the scalding tea and made a face. ‘Black and bitter,’ he grumbled. ‘What’s the point?’

That was my cue to tell him that the tea was for pouring rather than drinking. I missed it. He plunked down the cup on the bedside cupboard, spilling a dash on the wood and possibly rendering some of my holiday deposit unrecoverable. ‘Chew,’ he said, apparently making conversation. ‘You don’t look very Chinese. In fact, you look definitely . . .’

‘Chow,’ I told him shortly, not believing the conversation was happening. ‘And it’s a long story.’

‘There’s black in you, definitely,’ he persisted. ‘Your hair . . .’

‘I said it’s kind of a long story.’

Yet this was meant to be a short story. I was at the end of a two-week writing break on the east coast of Scotland. Mission: write the kind of offbeat stories that had so excited my new agent when she read the manuscript for my novella two years earlier. I had done several short stories since then, but none had remotely interested her. ‘Can’t you write something like Blank?’ Lynn would ask after spiking yet another clutch of tales. Finally, I had booked the same holiday house in which I had written Blank in December 2003. I had come alone, in the same cold. All that remained was to remember the particularly atrocious takeaway I had eaten the day I wrote my best story ever. The food had given me a bad case of diarrhoea, and I had woken at 4:00 a.m. in a foul mood and written Blank. Lynn fell in love with the story, and I lost my peace of mind. I was now on the last day of my writing holiday. I had eaten dozens of different takeaways, chewed through a packet of antacids, but none of the half-dozen stories I had written was even remotely passable.

‘What are you doing in my bed?’ I asked eventually.

‘Sleeping.’ He yawned and went back to sleep.

* * *

RUBIESU SIMINI randa si kwemka!

In moments of stress, Menai proverbs sometimes popped into my mind. When I was ten, a quiet, intense African stopped for a meal at Miss Chow’s takeaway and stayed for dinner. Thirty months later, he was still there. It was a happy time, I guess; but it was not to last. It came to a head when Mr. Chow arrived from Shanghai unannounced and found Tobin Rani in his wife’s bed. There was a fight, all now rather murky in my mind, and Miss Chow paid for her months of happiness with her life, Yan Chow got a kitchen knife in his back, Tobin moved into prison, and I went back on the queue for yet another adoption. He had good English, that African, but with me, he doggedly spoke his strange Menai language. I was a stubborn kid back then and was equally determined not to learn it, but Tobin was interested in me in a way no other man had been. Besides, thirty months was a long time in days, and . . . urubiesu simini randa si kwemka! There were things that really had no translation in English. They just sat there in the mind in a self-sufficient Menai phrase.

By dawn, I was reconciling myself to the possibility that I was losing my mind, again. I needed help, but the only psychiatrist I knew was my mother-in-law, whom I hadn’t seen professionally in a couple of years. If I phoned to explain that I had woken up with a man in my bed in the middle of a private writing holiday, it was entirely possible that a divorce would be in progress before I returned to London.

I had to confront my demon personally.

But I was scared. I had experienced discontinuities before: I would occasionally remember something that clearly could not have happened, like me dancing in carnivals, which I wouldn’t do in a few hundred years. I called those false memories my sub stories—since my subconscious seemed to be dabbling in the fiction business as well. But Dalminda was no sub story scripted by the deranged mind of a short story writer.

Dalminda Roco was in my bed.

ZANDA ATTURK

Kreektown | 15th March, 2005

The expression on the dead man’s face was mild surprise, as though his assassin had started off with a spot of poetry. I had travelled many miles for this rendezvous with the smuggler, Korba Adevo, at a large, circular tent staked out on the grassed riverbank where the mangrove forest met Agui Creek. The tent was maybe forty feet from corner to corner and furnished like a permanent, if ramshackle, residence. The tarpaulin had been mended in several places. The ferocious dog he’d warned me about was sprawled in a broken heap by his feet, its days of ferocity very much a thing of history. Adevo’s fixed eyes stared at me through the clotting blood from a head wound. He was a fresh corpse, too, with an interrupted plate of starch and banga still floating an aroma in the air. He was dressed in a lace agbada that was fashionable a decade ago, its bloodstained peak cap on the floor beside him. He sat there, alone, in his disordered tent. I let the flap fall and inched backwards into the evening sun.

Outside, my hired horse switched its tail, raising a plume of flies attached to the ulcer on its rump. An old generator sulked nearby, tethered to the tent by its cable. I looked around the mud flats skirting the creekline, searching reeds and mangroves for something out of place. Everything seemed strange and out of place: a boat berthed on mud, a jeep loaded with merchandise on a narrow beach served only by footpaths. The harmattan frisked the trees and the horse’s mane. The wind was shiver-cold, but inside me, a low-grade fever boiled.

Adevo’s text message that morning had just one word: Badu. Every now and again someone chose my number from the bylines on Palaver’s pages to send some bit of news or another, but this was the working journalist’s dream scoop: information about the most hunted man in Nigeria. I had called immediately.

‘Badu?’ I had asked.

‘How are you?’ came the guarded voice. ‘Is about that your Pitani man . . . Is Korba Adevo here . . .’

‘My name is Zanda,’ I had said nervously. ‘Listen, my paper can pay . . . private interview . . . just me, you, and nobody else . . . how much do you want?’

There was a long pause.

‘Look, I’m serious here, just talk! How much?’

‘Four hundred?’

I had taken his directions and driven the few hundred kilometres from Abuja to Kreektown, but the lips of the smuggler were now sealed for good. The disappointment of losing a Badu lead was physical, almost as strong as the shock of walking into a dead man’s tent. Now, my very presence in that isolated hermitage was a bad idea. The hands that had made the corpse could not be far away.

I turned to the elderly horse. I had hired it from a hotelier who also ran three donkeys in neighbouring Kreektown. All I wanted to do just then was recover my deposit for the animal and return to my desk at Palaver before their Roving Eye columnist—or the money in his possession—was missed . . .

Yet I was a journalist. Even though I could never print the story, the camera in my backpack craved a glance at the scene now imprinted on my mind forever. Reluctantly I pulled it out and raised the tent flap once again. I suppose my crisis started here with that failure of memory, that moment when I turned around to find something worse than amnesia’s blank canvas, to find instead the present contradicting the immediate past: there was a warning snarl from the dog, and from the man, a ragged snore that ended in a yawn. ‘God deliver me!’ he said, in the rusty voice I remembered from the phone conversation. He looked at his wrist. ‘Is that the time?’

I tried to keep my balance. ‘You were . . . you are . . .’

‘Adevo,’ he yawned. He picked up his pristine peak cap. A joint popped and two fists strained in different directions as he stretched himself awake, large eyeballs standing out of a heavy-featured face. ‘And you must be . . . Zanda?’ He impregnated my name with a significance that eluded me.

‘Yes.’

‘No camera, please.’ He sucked his teeth irritably. As my knees gave way and I fell into a cane chair, he said, ‘Tired, eh? You shouldn’t have walked; I thought I mentioned Ma’Calico’s donkeys.’

‘I hired her horse.’ I glanced furtively about me.

He chuckled wickedly. ‘That dead bag of bones? I swear to God, you are going to have to carry her back to Kreektown, you will see.’

There was no one else in the tent, dead or alive . . . It was just Adevo, with not a spot of blood on his old-fashioned agbada. ‘You have the eyes of a thief,’ he observed, with professional interest.

It was just another hallucination, then. The last major episode I remembered was so far back in my childhood I’d begun to think I had outgrown the plague. The worst thing about hallucinations was how they messed with your reflexes: back in Kreektown Primary, a snake once slithered out of my locker and I had not moved a muscle, while my classmates had broken ankles and furniture on their way to the door. They thought I was pretty brave, but I’d only thought the snake a hallucination—and I’d learned the hard way what happened to people who saw strange things. All I wanted was to see what everyone else saw—not the animals that leapt out of walls to animate my science classes. Or the dreams that continued when I was wide awake.

A woman began to laugh, and I started, but it was only a customised ring tone. He glanced at the culprit in the bank of phones on his armrest and looked away. ‘Okay,’ he said impatiently, ‘what do you want to do about Pitani? His noise is getting too much! You said you want private interview, not so? This is me here.’

‘What noise are we talking about?’

I realised that the thumb he was rubbing against an index finger was a gesture for my attention. I half rose, the better to unwind the money belt from my waist, then sat back again. My publisher, Patrick Suenu, had reluctantly paid up for the promised Badu scoop, even though I had kept my lead and his location secret. My tenure at Palaver was pretty shaky just then, but a Badu scoop was easily the biggest story in the decades since Dele Giwa’s murder. If I had it in hand, I could sell it for an oba’s ransom, and he knew it.

‘You’re a bit yellow,’ observed Adevo in what was probably his attempt at light conversation.

I let that go and pulled out the wads of currency. My heartbeat had slowly returned to normal, but my fingers were still shaking, so I handed over the money without counting. Adevo took them on trust as well, making them disappear into various pockets on his garment. He replaced the peak cap on his head, pulling its two flaps low over his ears. There was a beatific smile on the face he turned to me. ‘Correct man,’ he said. ‘Oya, you have one hour. Time is money.’

The financial transaction concentrated my mind.

Two weeks earlier, Badu had arrived on the national scene when he kidnapped Justice Omakasa, carried out a mock trial, and executed him vigilante-style. The video of the judge confessing to bribes from Trevi and a host of other litigants had ignited a firestorm on the Internet. The TV networks had it on an endless loop. A police manhunt for Badu was under way, but the judge’s salacious confessions had turned public sympathy in favour of Badu, even as face-saving investigations against people outed by the confession foot-dragged their way through the system.

Then, a couple of days before, Charles Pitani, the inspector general of police, had also been kidnapped. The audacious abduction of Nigeria’s most senior policeman had all the hallmarks of Badu’s first strike, and an intensive security dragnet was under way. Yet Badu had gained such cult status that a Pitani video was feverishly awaited.

Those were the stakes I was playing for, deep in creek country.

Four hundred thousand naira was a lot of money, but not for a Badu story. The police had announced a ten-million-naira reward for information leading to the vigilante’s capture. That was a powerful suggestion that the man before me was a charlatan—except that Badu was now a folk hero. Anyone who gave him up to the police had to be careful not to be lynched.

Badu had sent out his first video for free. I was more than happy to pay for the second. Perhaps he was becoming more of a media-savvy vigilante, using his contacts to sell news to sympathetic journalists to fund his operations.

I hoped I was sitting before one such contact.

I switched on my Dictaphone, rose partway, and put it on the arm of Adevo’s chair. I sat back down and chewed on a nervous fingernail. ‘Tell me about yourself.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, pocketing my Dictaphone. ‘Is it me you want to talk about, or Pitani?’

I hesitated. There was no longer a Dictaphone beside him. Had I imagined pulling it out, or just the bit about its disappearance? ‘We’ll . . . get to Pitani and Badu,’ I said, determined to get my hour’s worth. I patted myself uncertainly. The recording machine was gone. I swallowed. I pulled out a pen and a notebook.

He shrugged nonchalantly. ‘What do you want to know? I entered Harvard at the age of sixteen—’

‘Harvard?’

‘The university. You ’ave heard of it, not so? I graduated firs’ class. Won the prize for my year. After my PhD, I entered revotechnics . . .’

‘Revo-what?’ I asked, writing.

‘Revotechnics.’ He sighed. ‘Journalist of nowadays. So wha’s the problem? Spelling or meaning?’ I didn’t reply, and he continued. ‘By the time I was thirty I was registering patents left, right, and centre. I was chairman of UAC for ten years. Then I ran for the presidency.’

‘And how was your election?’ I asked caustically. I had stopped writing when he started registering patents left, right, and centre, but those shorthand squiggles that I had been silly enough to make stared up at me with pity.

‘Don’t mind those tribalists,’ he said. He took a bottle, shook some groundnuts into a fist, and munched away. ‘Anyway, that annoyed me so much that I retired here to my country villa.’ His groundnut hand indicated his luxurious retirement estate. He shook his legs with barely concealed irritation. ‘Any more questions?’

I did not think my crisp currency notes deserved all this sarcasm, but it was also clear that the hallucination had knocked me off-balance. I had opened an interview with a smuggler with my celebrity formula. In two and a half years of print journalism it was hard to beat a sillier opener: asking a criminal for testimony that could lock him away. I had to pull things together quickly.

Patrick’s money was on the line.

He extended the groundnut bottle to me. I shook my head politely. ‘This Badu, is he from this area at all?’

‘No, he’s from Congo.’

I stared, trying to decide if he was still being sarcastic. ‘Do you know where he is?’

He returned my stare.

I tried another tack. ‘About the second video, is it ready yet? I want the first copy.’

He sneered. ‘From this money? Look, young man, I am a smuggler, not a Nollywood producer.’

I paused again: deep breath, slow exhale. ‘Is the IG still alive at all?’

‘What did you think will kill him? Mosquitoes?’

I paused to consider my options. Despite his fearsome reputation, Adevo did not look like a physical match for me. At fourteen, I had realised I was never going to make six feet and became the second member of the Kreektown Boxing Club. I had maintained the sport in Abuja while I hustled for my degree. I took every opportunity, in and out of the ring, to practise. Adevo did not look fit enough to yawn properly, but he had not left his chair so far, and his off-white robe was generous enough to conceal a small arsenal—a smuggler with his reputation would not get by on divine protection alone. This was a nonrefundable transaction, then. I tried again. ‘Can I meet Badu?’

He stared at me.

‘Are you Badu?’ I asked.

‘Is this a joke?’ he snarled.

The harmattan howled through the interstices of the tent, sinking its chill between my shoulder blades. Fear for my money and my life seized me. I regretted coming alone, coming at all. My dreams of journalistic fame on the wings of a Badu scoop began to fade. I leaned forward and whispered, although I could have screamed in that wilderness and not been heard, ‘Listen, we are on the same side, okay? Talk to me in confidence, eh? I’ll use a false name for you, and a false location for Badu . . .’

He chewed his nuts quietly.

‘So, is Badu planning any more strikes?’

‘We pray.’

I closed my notebook. ‘You want to cancel the interview?’ There was a tremor in my voice, which angered me. I ratcheted up my anger. It was preferable to fear, ‘Is that it?’

‘No, no, the money’s good,’ he said, eating some more groundnuts. ‘The interview’s very good.’

‘Because I’m getting the feeling that I’m talking to a con man who has never even seen Badu.’

‘Is that so?’ There was mockery in his voice.

‘And if that’s the case, just give me back my cash. Forget about my petrol, forget about my time, just give me back my . . .’

He smiled. ‘There’s no refund in ashawo business. You can’t just tell a prostitute it wasn’t sweet—’

‘Listen, my friend . . .’

His smile drained slowly away. ‘I know who you are. You wanted to try me, not so? But I passed your test. Eh?’

The unspoken tract of a strange language sprawled between us. My mind gridlocked and refused to mesh. Visions of a post-Palaver TV-journalism career plunged into a swirling vortex. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘My mouth is . . .’ He zipped his lips. There were bits of caked starch meal on his palm. ‘I swear to God.’

I rose slowly. My mouth was parched. I prayed for a violent fit, but all I got was a roaring in my ears. I took a step towards him and provoked a belly laugh. A low growl issued from the dog, and a metal post with two black nozzles peered out from his robes. I froze.

‘I’m a honest thief. A deal is a deal.’

‘Our deal was for an interview. You call this an interview?’

‘If you also want me to finish Pitani for you, just say so.’

‘What do you mean, finish Pitani?’ I shouted. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Go and ask about me,’ he boasted, getting into a clearly familiar groove. ‘I am Korba Adevo.’ He gestured at the bank of phones by his side. His voice rose and the tent began to billow with his bombastic rage: ‘There’s nothing I can’t move. Me that I have sold army helicopters from this very chair. What about boats? I have six, do you hear me? Six contraband boats! Is it crude? I have bunkered enough petrol to flood this country. Go and check! Lamborghinis, Hummers, there’s nothing that’s too big for me.’ He simmered slowly, then ignited again, his great eyes bulging. ‘Because I’m sitting in this dirty tent! This is my field office only! My house in Ubesia is two storeys! Go to Constitution Road, Aba! Half of the houses on that road are mine! I’m the one that sold the FESTAC mask to British gov’ment, you hear me? There’s nothing tha’s too big for me—’

‘—except the presidency . . .’ I suggested.

‘Leave nonsense for foolish people,’ he counselled shortly. ‘I sell silence as well, okay? That’s me.’ He picked up a phone. ‘You see this red Samsung? It has the telephone of a federal minister. You know why he does business with me?’ He drew his zipper again.

Beneath the bombast was some truth. I had never met him before, but the name Korba Adevo had resonance amongst the dwellers of creek country. This far from civilisation a grave would not require a death certificate to dig. A funeral would not need a coroner’s report. I had lost Patrick’s money. My life was still on option.

I opted to flee.

I raised the flap and backed outside. The harmattan was more insistent now. The fever inside me was gone. I was uniformly cold all over as I mounted the horse. My sore, unaccustomed buttocks connected with the craggy saddle, completing my misery. I remembered my Dictaphone, which had a few untranscribed interviews. Yet I knew that if I returned for it I would either have my head blown off at the entrance or find the fat fence dead all over again. Neither prospect appealed. I turned the horse’s nose for Kreektown and urged it on.

HUMPHREY CHOW

Lower Largo, Scotland | 15th March, 2005

Dalminda Roco sang “Amazing Grace” in the bathroom. When he stepped out, the smell of stale poultry had receded somewhat. Over breakfast, I fixed him with my serious stare. ‘How did you get into my room?’

He looked at me suspiciously, like someone sensing a trick question. ‘I climbed the stairs and opened the door?’

‘Why? And don’t tell me you were feeling sleepy!’

‘Actually, I was rather hoping to get arrested. I was here years ago for a students’ beach party and I know where the housekeeper hides the spare key.’

‘I am renting right now; you realise you are, kind of, trespassing?’

‘Like I said, I was hoping to be arrested; instead I ended up with tea in bed.’ He considered the last of his egg sandwich and shook his head. ‘And a full English breakfast!’

I counted to ten with my eyes mentally closed, and asked quietly, ‘Why?’

He drained his tea and yawned. ‘Who . . . how . . . why . . . look at the pedestrian issues on your mind!’ He pushed his chair back. ‘Me, I’m into more earth-shaking matters.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like bombs!’ His honking laugh went very well with his macabre humour. ‘Bombs shake a lot of earth!’

With that, he rose and slung his rucksack on carefully. He squared his shoulders into the weight of it and looked into the garden, ‘Looks like a lovely day for it,’ he grudged, scratching his beard. He was no longer laughing. ‘I might as well get on with it.’

I edged closer to the block of kitchen knives. I was dealing with a plucky con man. Earth-shaking matters indeed. He was clearly anxious to make away with his swag. I hadn’t seen my laptop that morning, for instance, and I couldn’t afford to lose it. It had too many killer opening paragraphs with short story potential. ‘That’s not a bomb.’

‘It’s not?’ He shrugged the rucksack onto a kitchen counter and offered me a cord. ‘D’you want to pull-test it?’

I didn’t move.

I was torn between pushing this lunatic and his bag outside and mining him for inspiration for my next short story. This was exactly the sort of offbeat material Lynn would swoon over. I didn’t want to die in a bomb incident, but I felt compelled to prioritise my art—for the moment at least. After all, some authors had written their best sellers from prison, writing with boot polish on toilet paper. I was in a seaside resort, on the last day of a barren writing retreat. This seemed a chance to redeem myself: a short story begging to be written. All I needed was the gumption to interview a man carrying a bomb. ‘What put you up to this?’ I asked sympathetically, as he zipped up and reslung his bag. ‘You look a decent sort. Did the MI5 kill your parents? Are you half Palestinian? What’s your particular issue?’

‘It’s Google’s fault.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Pornography isn’t the only bad thing on the Internet,’ he explained. ‘Six months ago, my father was killed by—’

My heart raced. I was on to something: ‘The CIA? Microsoft? Was that why . . . ?’

He watched me warily. ‘Are you a communist or something? He was killed by a heart attack. It was right after he went bankrupt.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. We disliked each other, but at least he paid my uni fees till the end, even when I went a little off-schedule . . .’

‘How “off-schedule” were you?’

‘Let me put it this way, I was never going to graduate, all right? But I rather liked the student lifestyle—’

‘Do you mind if I just get the facts straight? How many extra months had you, sort of, logged?’

He glared. ‘Five extra years. Happy now?’

‘Sorry, we writers sometimes have to be journalistic in our research.’

‘So I was really feeling depressed, you understand, when I had to pull out of uni. I had no skills, no degree, no sponsor. That afternoon in the library, I googled suicide.’

‘Suicide?’ I blinked. ‘What skills do you need to be a waiter? Did you have terminal cancer as well?’

‘I was depressed and broke, all right? Anyway, I just wanted to check out my options, really. I already knew some painless ways to die, but I googled enjoyable and ended up on a website recruiting suicide bombers.’

‘I wouldn’t have put “enjoyable” and “suicide bomb” in the same sentence.’

‘Well, they were paying ten thousand quid for a suicide bomber.’ He patted his clothes, searching for something. ‘That’s plenty of enjoyment right there.’

‘What is this website? Who are these people?’

‘What! Who! Give me a break! It’s just another NGO attracting more funding than they can spend. They’ve been in the suicide bombing business for years. They’ve blown up all their permanent staff—apart from the top dogs of course . . .’

‘Since when did terrorist squads become NGOs?’

‘Don’t be simplistic. Not all suicide bombers are terrorists. This NGO is at the cutting edge of the anti–global warming lobby.’

‘What?’

‘Their carbon-footprint reduction strategy is depopulation. It’s a more aggressive variation of Planned Parenthood. Not saying I buy their politics, mark you, but that’s the law for you, audi alteram partem.’

He finally found his wallet after searching the multiple pockets on his combat trousers. He opened it. Although bereft of currency notes, he had to negotiate a drift of VAT receipts and ATM slips to extricate a weathered A4 flyer folded several times over. ‘They had a backlog of volunteers. Had to wait months and months for my slot . . .’

‘A queue?’ Every time Dalminda opened his mouth he seemed to take another flight of fancy. The only thing that kept his story rooted in real life, and me listening as well, was the weight of his bomb. ‘That is, a queue of people wanting to kill themselves?’

‘I know how it sounds,’ he conceded, ‘but their conditions of service are out of this world.’

I was silent. I supposed he was now mocking me recklessly, but I knew that Lynn would go into raptures at the direction of our conversation. I wondered how it would look if I produced my Dictaphone.

‘I’ll tell you one of their recruitment stories: so this fellow and his family had been oppressed and exploited for generations. His—’

‘How? Was he detained without trial? Were they tortured and deported—?’

‘No.’ He had laid the matted sheet on the counter, and his tongue crept out from the corner of his mouth as he applied himself to the task of opening it up without ripping it.

‘Well?’

‘They were poor.’

He was not looking, and I rolled my eyes. Halfway to the ceiling, they were snagged by the eyes of an old major in a portrait, a whiskered fellow who looked every inch as bewildered as I was at the goings-on in his short let.

‘Anyway, he was married with seven children, all under ten years old, and then he had to get prostrate cancer as well.’

‘Oh.’

‘So this chap had three months to live when he stumbled on the website and signed on. Guess what. He blew himself up two months before he was due to die anyway, but his widow now gets a monthly pension; his kids are on scholarship. They now have a chance to break out of the oppression, the exploita—’

‘How many kids do you have?’

He shrugged. ‘None, yet.’

‘Are you married?’

‘No!’

‘So what will you do with ten thousand pounds when you’re dead?’

Smugly, he said, ‘I’ve spent it already.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘You can take your money a month in advance before blowing yourself up in a crowd.’ He pushed the sheet across to me. ‘I have to make sure a journalist gets this after the blast. Can you send it out for me?’

I looked at the tattered flyer. It was issued by an ineptly named Radical Suicide Society of Global Warming Justice Phenomena. The first ten lines were an inane sort of propaganda, but my eyes fell on the bottom two lines, which were handwritten. It was the address of the corner shop down the street. It had a courtyard covered by what was probably the only CCTV camera in the village, and I had taken to parking my car there every night for the past two weeks. I folded the flyer quickly.

My insurance specifically excluded explosions—and the car financing was so new I hadn’t started repaying it.

‘Um . . .’

‘You’ve got to be quick, though; there are many cash-strapped suicide squads that go around claiming the bombs of other NGOs—’

‘Can we stop calling them NGOs?’

‘Choose any newspaper or TV station of your choice—you can make yourself a bob or two, you know?’

‘You look like you’re over your depression,’ I said brusquely. ‘Why don’t you just dump the bomb in the sea and split. The world is a big place; they’ll never find you.’

‘They have this Deposit-Security Programme. You should read it . . .’

‘Perhaps you can give me a summary.’

‘It’s genius. They checked me into this clinic and put me under. They put a chip the size of a grain of rice inside me. Its biodegradable battery is invisible to X-rays and guaranteed to run for one year. Using me as an antenna, it broadcasts my location to their hub from anywhere I am in the world.’ He studied his fingernails, ‘They know I’m standing in your kitchen right now.’

‘Why don’t you take it out?’ I asked, not liking the pitch of my voice. I had a sudden vision of a chip-seeking missile crashing through the window.

He ran his hand through his hair. ‘That’s the point. It could be in my bladder or my scalp. I have no idea.’

‘If I were you,’ I said, trying to provoke some common sense in the youth in front of me, ‘no one could force me to detonate a suicide bomb. Think about it: the worst they can do is kill you . . .’

‘Their Suicide Enforcement Team is—’

‘Please!’ I snapped. Even Lynn would not swallow that.

‘Without that they’d be broke now, Mister Chew,’ he explained patiently. ‘People would just take their money and run. I know I would.’

‘Chow?’ I suggested sarcastically. It was the simplest of names.

‘Thanks, but I’m full.’

‘Humphrey Chow!’

‘That’s what I said, God. It’s just a bloody name. Their S.E. teams abduct runaways and . . .’ He hesitated before going on. ‘I’ll spare you the details, but personally I’d rather go with a bang than a saw.’

‘Are you . . .’ I cleared my throat. ‘Are you still within your month of grace?’

He shook his head. ‘I ran out of time and money yesterday, and they’ve e-mailed me the red notice. An S.E. team could be here tomorrow. I can run, but I can’t hide—unless I’m arrested. I’ll be safe enough in Her Majesty’s Prisons.’ He paused. ‘Either that or I bomb the corner shop.’

‘I can call the police for you,’ I offered.

‘That’s kind of you, but this country is too damned soft. I have no prior convictions, and the best I’ll get for breaking and entering will be community service.’ He glared. ‘This is your fault! Any other man who finds a bearded stranger in his bed would have thrown a punch, at the very least! There’d have been a major fracas yesterday—aggravated assault and battery, possibly with grievous bodily harm. By now I should have been enjoying police protection!’ He sneered. ‘Tea in bed!’

The image of the chip-seeking missile had receded somewhat. In its place flared a new vision of bearded Suicide Enforcers abducting us . . . torture chambers in a dark dungeon . . . and offbeat short stories flapping inside my head like possessed bats seeking escape, but my sawn-off arms were bandaged stumps that ended at the elbows. I looked wildly around the room. ‘You could break something expensive. You could . . .’

He shook his head. ‘Property damage is strictly small beans. With my law school tragedy I’ll probably get a suspended sentence or a month in the can. What’s that? I need a year in prison. They can’t track me after that. I’d rather go with a bang today than—’

‘Does it have to be the corner shop? Never heard of a suicide bomber taking out a corner shop.’

He paused. ‘Are you suggesting a Tesco? Whose side are you on anyway?’

‘Why this particular shop? It’s out in the middle of nowhere . . .’

He scowled. ‘The owner was rude yesterday. Said I stank of fried chicken. I’ll show her fried chicken!’

‘That’s hardly an offence worthy of the death sentence . . .’

‘She’s the nearest person I have a grudge against . . . unless—’ He broke off and eyed me speculatively.

‘Oh, come on!’

He shrugged magnanimously and turned for the door, ‘Au revoir, then. I’ll hang around for five or six customers and—’

‘I normally park my car outside the shop,’ I said casually. ‘It’s normally the safest place in the neighbourhood. Joyriders . . .’

He turned slowly, venting a diseased talent for melodrama. ‘Your car? How can you think of a car at a time like this?’

‘You dare to preach to me? You are blowing up corner shops for cash!’

‘So what do you suggest?’ he asked, reaching for his cord. ‘Should I blow myself up here?’

I watched his hand silently.

I have not always been this timid. One winter when I was fourteen, I attempted the murder of a Queen’s Counsel. I had found his name in a Hackney Social Services cabinet into which I had broken in search of the identity of my natural parents. Louis Raven, QC, retired, had signed me into care, and he seemed chief suspect for the role of Bolting Dad. I traced him to his golf club on Rounds Street. I watched him all day, following him four blocks to Poplar, where he lunched with three suits. Afterwards, we both walked back to the club; the one was well-fed, the other—following twelve anonymous paces behind—very, very, hungry. He drank till late. That afternoon when I went to confront my father I did not have a plan. By that evening, I had come to picture how different my life might have been, and it became quite clear what I had to do. I suppose the hunger was a factor. I didn’t even have enough money for a knife—I slipped one off the shelf of a hardware store on Poplar East. When he left his club it was 7:00 p.m. and dark, and as he dumped his golf clubs in the boot, I approached. As he opened his Porsche he felt the point of my knife in his side and drove thirty minutes, talking all the way. He was a barrister, all right: eight inches from a painful death and he couldn’t stop talking. I guess that blade kind of inspired him into the performance of his life. He slowed down along Old Kent Road, and I stepped out of the car. He still has the £7.89 knife that I got for free—and the contents of the wallet that he spilled desperately into my lap. Sometimes I wonder whether he was just a gifted liar or whether my arrival in the maternity with Negroid features truly had dissolved the marriage of his Caucasian clients, my ‘legal’ parents, Felix and Laura Fraser. I’ve never bothered to look for them. They can go to Hell—along with the adulterer who supplied my Negroid genes.

ZANDA ATTURK

Kreektown | 15th March, 2005

I got lost on my way back, which was ridiculous because I had spent the first eighteen years of my life in Kreektown. I was thinking too hard on my future, or the lack of it, and when the horse stopped moving I realised he was knee-deep in a swamp. I spent the next few minutes kicking and cursing, but the animal was quite frozen with fear. So I climbed down into the viscous mud myself, and the horse turned readily enough to follow me. We finally gained solid ground, the horse and I and the stink between us. The light was beginning to fail. As the shadows lengthened in the forest, my fear grew.

I heard the village called Kreektown before I saw it and followed the highlife music that led me to Ntupong’s Joint, the only saloon left in the village square. It was a dramatic village surrounded by an encroaching forest. One moment I was under the canopy of trees, the next I was walking down a street of mostly empty homes where the industry of barefoot life moved in sync with the economy of mobile phones. One moment I was dragging my horse down the footpath, past a length of python curing on a grill, the next I was in a depleted village square, two hundred metres across. The earth under me was packed hard enough for cars. The roads were wide enough for cars, but all around Kreektown, the mechanicals that proliferated were motorbikes. I crossed the square where a noisy generator powered a football viewing centre. Next door, a motorbike repairer was hard at work.

The joint was just across the square. Recently, I had watched Kiri Ntupong’s TV testimony at the Justice Omakasa Enquiry into the Menai Inoculation. Despite my straits, I couldn’t help smiling at the prospect of seeing the old man after so many years.

He had died the week before.

I stood in the doorway, a little stunned at the news. I did not recognise the large woman who was now weeping all over again. There were only four patrons in the large parlour. Wedged around a table, they were locked in an intense game of cards. We shook hands solemnly, and one of them, a garrulous raconteur, gave me his business card. He was bearded and defiant with it. I looked at the card, puzzled. ‘Hameed . . . are you supposed to do this?’

‘Do what?’

‘Give people cards saying you’re a secret service agent?’

‘Don’t worry yourself about that. What about my boss that posted me to a village as small as this? Am I supposed to pretend to be a farmer or what?’

I turned the card over. ‘This is not very . . . secret.’

‘Is the best way,’ he assured me. ‘Do you know how many oil worker kidnapping cases I’ve solved from this very chair?’ His companions nodded their corroboration as they watched him deal the pack. ‘So if you hear any coup plots or secession talk, just call my Nokia, there’s cool money there for you, eh?’ He yelled, ‘Woman! Ntupong don chop im own life finish! Wey my peppersoup?’

She wiped her tears brightly. ‘Is coming, my oga!’

He gave me a ‘one Nigeria’ sign, a twining index and middle finger, and returned to his game.

I stepped back into the square and stared. The houses were familiar, but the faces were not. A decade had swept past like a century, and the last of the Menai were dispersed. I paused just outside the kamira, listening to the scary silence of the weavers’ guild house. I had grown up to the hypnotic chakata-chakata of the looms. I pushed the door open, and it fell, hingeless, into the abandoned yard. A sigh of dust rose regretfully. A goat stared from a sill. Several jamayas sat in a weavers’ circle, as though their owners were holding a guild meeting in an inner room and would soon return to the looms.

I walked on. Strangers lived here now, had moved into the empty homes: Sonja’s shop was now Fati’s ‘International’ Stores, Solo’s Chemist was now a card recharge shop, and in Kreektown Square, instead of the Mata’s beloved Menai, all I could hear were snatches of pidgin English, a curse in Sontik, and an argument in Nnewi-accented Igbo. I stood in Kreektown Square, where I had dropped my shoeshine box on December 9, 1998, to catch the ferry to Onitsha and the world. I knew no one here, now.

And no one knew me.

Instead, there was new resentment in the Kreektown air. People came here because they had nowhere else to go. Across Sontik State there was talk of secession. Indigenes of the new Sontik Republic would, with all her oil, immediately rocket to the highest per capita income in Africa. But no one would think it, to judge from the wretched eyes that followed me as I led my lame horse towards Ma’Calico’s. A low-grade malice tinged the eyes that looked at me, who drove a twenty-year-old banger into town: I had another place to go after my business with the Kreektown smuggler. As I turned into Ma’Calico’s yard, I felt that jailhouse grudge sink into me.

I couldn’t leave, either.

It wasn’t an attack of conscience because I had abandoned my doomed hometown. It was the prospect of a police interrogation. Patrick and I shared a mutual dislike for each other, but I needed his job as much as he did the only Palaver journalist who had ever won a Reporter-of-the-Year award. I was a difficult journalist to sack, despite my touted truancies, but after being conned by Korba Adevo, I was not going to be saved by all the awards in the Nigerian Union of Journalists.

A young woman leaned against the doorway at Ma’Calico’s, eating an avocado. She was lean and angular. Her slow eyes followed me with a python’s lazy grace. I remembered her bruising brazenness from when I had passed through earlier. Now, she was also wearing blood-red lipstick. ‘You wan’ room?’ she asked with a winning smile. I supposed it was the pattern: thieves took their loot up to Adevo’s for cash and the locals tried to retain as much of the proceeds for the local economy as they could.

‘I’m sorry,’ I told her politely. ‘I don’t do prostitutes.’

There was a momentary blankness, as though the sense of the words had eluded her at its first pass before boomeranging into the sacristy of her mind. Then she doubled over with the violence of a retch and laughed so hard that tears grew like translucent, animated tendrils down her cheeks. I watched her half-eaten avocado roll away in the dust. Thinking back, I suppose I was still in shock and thoughts that would normally have stopped at that were now popping through before I could rephrase them. Her blood-red fingernails gripped thighs that had locked on themselves, the way children often clamped their bladders while they rolled one more die of an addictive game. Her laughter was stirring in its nakedness—the way she laughed with everything she had. One knee found the ground, and then she was hanging onto the door handle, which was itself hanging on to the door by precarious screws.

Briefly I wondered whether to catch her before the screws gave.

Then the doorway filled up with the bored patrons of Ma’Calico’s bar, their bulbous glasses in their fists.

‘Wha’s that?’

‘Wha’s that?’

‘He . . . doesn’t . . . do . . . prostitutes . . . See as he dirty! Which prostitute go touch am so?’

I led the horse into the backyard, away from the ensuing bray of laughter. As I tethered it, Ma’Calico strode into the yard with my deposit in her hand. I took a deep breath and exhaled. Kaska gai muga chamu ga choke. I was bemused. It was many years since I had begun to think in English, and here was a Menai idiom dropping unbidden into my mind. Had to be the proximity to the village. Beyond the low fence, my car sat patiently, beside a tyreless, rust-encrusted DAF truck that wasn’t going anywhere either. Ma’Calico stopped three metres from me. She sniffed and blinked rapidly. She did not share her patrons’ amusement.

‘My daughter says you called her prostitute.’

My jaw dropped, and I was genuinely shocked, both at the lack of resemblance between the two women and at my own recklessness. ‘Your daughter? . . . but I didn’t know . . . I mean, I never . . .’

‘This is hotel, not brothel.’

‘I know, I know,’ I said earnestly.

‘And Amana is a graduate. And a senior DRCD civil servant.’

‘I . . . I know. I . . . I’m sorry.’

‘What she said,’ she enunciated carefully, as though she addressed a retard, ‘was that you smell. We have nice hotel here where you can sleep and baf before you go. Is three thousand naira for room-and-baf. You stain my bed sheet, is another five hundred naira. Do you want or not?’

I cleared my throat. ‘I want,’ I said, and my deposit disappeared into her brassiere. Ma’Calico seemed as tough as the fabric she was named after. She was as broad as the bole of an iroko—and just as intransigent. She made her change from the cash register of a bosom that seemed designed for commerce rather than that alien concatenation of lust and paediatric nourishment. She radiated confidence, and she gloved it with an arrogance that stemmed not just from the fact that she was the monopoly supplier of short-time and long-term beds for twenty kilometres in every direction but from the certainty that, were you the kickboxing and kung fu champion of all Nigeria, she was ready for you.

She sneered—and at that point, it seemed a biological impossibility that she was the mother of the slip of a woman whose strangled laughter was still gurgling from the front of the yard—and said, ‘And if you touch my daughter, I kill you.’

‘I don’t do feckless girls, either,’ I told her horse, long after she was gone.

MAJOR BELINJA

Lagos | 15th March, 2005

They met up in Lagos, at a private guest house in old Ikoyi. The house was an intricately gabled structure set in the rear half of a mandarin garden. From outside, nothing about the house distinguished it from neighbouring properties. Major Belinja’s car nosed through the leafy driveway and came to a halt beyond the carport. The muted birdcalls from an aviary filtered down to the four soldiers in mufti.

They had spent their years at the Defence Academy jousting for the top position. In their military careers, their rivalry had not diminished, although now it was overcast by a pall of disillusionment. They were in the wrong decade, in the wrong century to be soldiers. Lamikan, for instance, had graduated with the best degree the Defence Academy had awarded in its twenty-nine-year history. He was still thirty-five, but at his age in the ’60s Yakubu Gowon had already been head of state for several years.

They were in their prime, but the year was 2005 and the environment was no longer amenable to military governments. After the calamities of the Babangida and Abacha regimes, Nigerians were not going to cry out for military interventions, no matter what a hash civilians made of things. And they were making such a hash of things! There was a surliness in the young military, a sense of loss that only Belinja seemed to have escaped. Although he was the most junior in rank among them, he had become the most powerful, for he was a major in military intelligence. In a realm where titles were irrelevant, he had created—and controlled—the most subversive information database in Nigerian history. Even his bosses feared him, and he would have been redeployed long before but for fears—not wholly unfounded—that his most critical data were stored on private servers, and sacking him would be a licence to fully privatise the resource.

The hallway of the guest house was similarly unexceptional. Belinja hung back from the door and disappeared into a side entrance. Tanko, Ofo, and Lamikan looked warily around as they entered the high-ceilinged lounge. A buffet table was laid out for a small feast, and a Japanese chef brought a platter of skewered meat, which he set down to complete the tempting collage of dishes. He fiddled with a tabletop heater and then disappeared discreetly, without acknowledging the presence of the soldiers.

Belinja reappeared before his colleagues had a chance to get uncomfortable. He approached the cocktail table. ‘Gentlemen, food is served.’

‘And this is the meeting that will change my life?’ asked Ofo as Belinja began to fill a saucer with food.

‘You can start by changing your waistline.’ Belinja’s joke sounded forced, but alongside the logic of the buffet, it did get the others to join him at the table.

‘Who owns this place?’ Tanko asked as he poured himself a glass of iced zobo.

‘I do,’ said a voice from behind him. They turned around for their first sight of Penaka Lee. He was a wisp of a man, only marginally taller than Belinja, but his handshake, when it came, was almost as firm as his gaze. ‘Sorry I couldn’t receive you at the door. I spend most of my time on the phone.’ He was grinning, accentuating his vaguely Asiatic features.

Belinja performed the introductions, but when it was all over Tanko continued to hold Penaka’s hand. ‘I usually don’t like to eat the food of someone I don’t know.’

‘Nigerians have peculiar customs,’ agreed Penaka Lee, tapping a finger on Tanko’s chest. He seemed comfortable with his hand in the other man’s grasp and steered Tanko easily to the drinks cabinet, where the soldier finally surrendered it.

‘It’s a sensible custom,’ said Lamikan. ‘Otherwise, you might finish a meal only to find that you can’t afford it.’

Penaka Lee bowed marginally from behind the cabinet. He lined up some flutes. ‘You have my assurances that this meal is completely free.’ He raised a bottle of champagne and, when he got some nods, began to pour. He passed a glass to Lamikan. ‘I hear you are a champion squash player. What’s your next target? The world championships?’

‘My competition days are over; I’m thirty-five.’

‘Really? You’ve got young genes! Will you stay on in the force—after your commission?’

Lamikan’s eyes narrowed. He glanced at Belinja. ‘I don’t discuss my military career publicly.’

Belinja laughed uneasily, but Penaka’s half smile did not waver. Ofo asked softly, into the strained silence, ‘Who is Penaka Lee?’

The half smile broadened, and Penaka continued without any embarrassment. ‘That can be a complicated question. This morning, for instance, I was reviewing my property holdings. I hold . . . quite a few assets in bricks and mortar.’

‘I’d say that makes you a landlord,’ said Tanko.

‘And you’d be wrong,’ replied Penaka. He selected a glass of champagne, turned, and headed for the room at the end of the lounge. The men took their drinks and followed, Belinja bringing up the rear. They entered a larger room, furnished like a gallery. A visually overpowering skyscape filled one wall. It was an oil painting, but it didn’t seem that way at all—it seemed more like they had stepped into a room cut into a mountainside and now looked out onto a sky of incredible intensity and vividness. Penaka chuckled as he heard the intakes of breath behind him. He turned and was not disappointed by what he observed. For several seconds there was no sound in the room as the soldiers drank in the spectacle. The first dimension of its wonder was the size: the canvas was stretched over the entire wall. Then there was the sheer detail of it: one could stand close enough to inspect the feathers of the soaring kites, or stand as far back as possible, to experience the breadth of such a limitless horizon in what was, after all, a room. And then there was the magic of the colours, jumping the gap from beauty into masterpiece.

‘I see you like Open Heavens,’ said Penaka. ‘If I told you I owned a couple of paintings in Nigeria it would have been just a statistic, but if I showed you one such as this, you’d feel it through your pores, won’t you? It would no longer be a matter of a number on an inventory. It becomes a matter of superlatives, of scale.’ He sipped delicately. ‘My friends, I am a collector.’

‘You collect paintings?’ asked Ofo, stroking the rough finish of the oil on the canvas, giving the other man another cause for laughter.

‘Paintings!’ snorted Penaka. ‘These are toys—houses, boats, aircraft—these are all hobbies. We—the club I lead—collect countries; that’s my real profession.’

There was polite silence in the room. ‘Countries?’ said Tanko eventually. ‘Are we talking South Pacific island countries here? Hundred miles by hundred? Ten thousand population?’

Penaka managed to look insulted without letting his smile slip. ‘This is not a joke, please; this is business. I’m not talking about holiday islands. I’m talking about real countries here. Argentina-Nigeria-size countries.’

‘Oh,’ said Lamikan with the dawning of understanding. ‘You mean the old CIA style of getting some Idi Amin–type sergeant to bump off his bosses and take over government? Is that why we’re here?’

Penaka laughed heartily and congratulated Belinja: ‘Your friend is funny!’ Then he said, stressing his point with firm jabs on Lamikan’s chest. ‘We are businessmen; we never do anything illegal. What we do is done at primitive levels all over the world. In Washington, lobbyists make careers of trying to influence lawmakers one way or the other.’ He cranked up his grin. ‘We make a success of it.’

‘So you are a lobbyist?’

‘In the sense that Open Heavens is a painting, yes. Listen, a lobbyist can deliver a senator’s vote on a particular bill. I can take a particular bill—or policy, or appointment—and deliver it. In a dozen countries at the same time. It is a matter of the level of influence my club can deliver. We take the long view. Sometimes all we do is identify people with leadership potential in a country and build with them, sometimes over a decade. And I don’t like to boast, but considering the state of our collection right now, I must say we have developed a knack for backing the right horses.’

‘Or mules,’ muttered Lamikan into his glass. A chill fell on the room. ‘During the Orkar coup, there was a rumour of a foreign coup plotter who escaped Nigeria in the boot of a car.’

Penaka’s champagne hand trembled. ‘Rumours, stories, the revenge of the powerless against the powerful.’

Tanko cleared his throat. ‘What you are talking about is like . . . developing connections.’

‘Not connections,’ insisted Penaka quietly. ‘Collections.’

‘So,’ said Ofo, gesturing at a political map of the world on the wall opposite the skyscape. ‘How many countries are in your collection right now?’

‘If you’re talking connections like Tanko, there’s nowhere in the world where we have none. But if you’re talking collections—’ He grinned coyly. ‘Well, like my friend Lamikan suggested, there are some things that are better not said in public.’

‘I see . . .’ Lamikan took a deep breath and glanced pointedly at his watch.

‘What’s your nationality?’ asked Tanko.

‘Patriotism is an outdated concept. I hold a couple of passports of convenience, speak eight languages, and pay some tax in nine jurisdictions.’

‘If patriotism is outdated, what have you replaced it with?’

‘Capitalism is inconsistent with patriotism; otherwise there’d be no such thing as a tax haven. Business transcends borders. If countries can own people, why not the other way round?’ He thumbed off a ringing phone. ‘The most patriotic thing you can do for your country is to be very rich! Taxes win wars!’

They talked a while longer. Lamikan had fallen silent, glancing at his watch every now and then. Finally, Belinja took the hint and made their apologies. Penaka’s invitation, when it came, was almost too casual: ‘Some of my club members are in town for the week, and I’m giving them a dinner soon.’ He waved a derisory hand to indicate his pièce de résistance: ‘This painting is nothing. If they like you, you might get an invitation into the most select club in the world.’

Tanko took Penaka’s hand in a farewell handshake and retained it once again. ‘Let me ask you a straight question, Mister Penaka: are you planning a coup?’

‘I’ll give you a straight answer, my friend: I’m not crazy.’

‘That’s not a straight answer.’

‘Touché.’ He nodded. ‘Look, imagine a hundred power brokers from all over the world with a hundred unique contacts each, all in one club. That gives every single power broker access to a hundred thousand quality contacts worldwide. That’s my idea of a coup. Only it’s no longer an idea. You can call up your president on the phone. Imagine that with me as a telephone exchange you have that kind of access to one hundred presidents. That’s my coup, friends. Totally legit.’

* * *

SOON AFTER, Penaka was on the patio, seeing off his guests. The soldiers were almost at the car, but Penaka hung back with Belinja until the rest were out of earshot. His smile was still intact as he said, ‘That Lamikan, I don’t want him back.’

‘He’s Obu’s security adviser,’ Belinja argued. ‘He’s critical—’

‘He’s out.’ Penaka pushed his finger into Belinja’s shoulder and repeated, ‘Out.’ He looked past Belinja to the soldiers talking by the car. ‘Ofo is an interesting character, though. You do take risks, don’t you? M.A. to the head of state. What more can he want?’

‘He thinks his boss is sleeping with his wife. Guess who put that silly idea in his head?’

‘Say no more, Belinja.’ Penaka Lee grinned as he walked with the major toward the car. ‘You’re a genius with your database.’

‘Thanks. When are you seeing the Sontik governor?’

‘I have a plane waiting to take me to Ubesia.’

At the car, he looked at Ofo and said, ‘Belinja tells me you used to write poetry at the Defence Academy.’

‘Still do.’

‘Who’s your favourite American poet?’

‘I’d say Robert Frost.’

‘Give me a poem,’ said Penaka. ‘Any poem.’

Ofo shrugged. ‘“Fire and Ice.”’

‘Okay. I’ll give you a treat from the mouth of the American president. He’s scheduled to address an Island Nations conference next month. Tune in to that speech on CNN; I’ll give you a practical demonstration of my skills as a presidential ventriloquist.’

Ofo kept a polite smile on his face, but as soon as they drove through the gate, he shook his head and joined in the general laughter. Belinja alone was silent.

HUMPHREY CHOW

Lower Largo, Scotland | 15th March, 2005

‘I think I have a solution,’ I said quietly. ‘What if you refunded their money?’

‘I have a cash flow situation here,’ he replied.

‘Let’s say you refunded it; would they still come after you?’

‘Of course not; it’s a bloody business. Once their books balance, we’re quits.’ His eyes widened. ‘You’ll write me a ten-thousand-quid cheque?’

I had to smile at that. The week before, Grace had cut out a job advert for a dog walker and left it on my laptop. I raised my hands. ‘Not so fast. I am a short story writer. I’m sure my agent can get me a decent advance on the basis of your story.’

‘You’ll do this? Just to save your banger?’

‘Not to talk of the innocent people you planned to kill.’

The sarcasm washed over him. ‘How quickly can you raise it?’

‘You’ll have to keep running for a few more days, if that’s what you mean.’

He looked at me suspiciously. ‘You can get an advance of up to ten thousand?’

‘Sure,’ I replied bravely.

He continued to look me up and down. ‘Are you any good? I never heard the name “Humphrey Chung” before.’

‘Chow!’ I moved in polite circles where people snapped their fingers and claimed to recognize my name whenever I introduced myself as a writer, although I was sensible enough never to ask which of my stories they had read.

‘Have you actually published? Never heard of a Humphrey Chan . . . of your Humphrey before.’

‘Yes.’ He was going to persist, so I continued, ‘But then again, nine years of grappling with law exams doesn’t leave much extra time for fiction, does it?’

‘But are you any good?’ he pressed on, refusing to be insulted. ‘How fast can you write it?’

I shrugged. ‘If I’m flowing, three to four hours.’

He stared at me suspiciously. ‘If it was so easy to make ten thousand bucks, we’d all be writing stories, wouldn’t we?’

‘And passing law exams as well,’ I suggested, ‘but then you also need hard work and intelligence, talent and . . .’

His nostrils flared as he shrugged off his rucksack. His face was flushed: I had overdone the sarcasm. I hoped it would be a punch rather than an explosion, but he was only trembling with a renewed greed for life. ‘This bomb pack costs another five hundred pounds,’ he wheedled. ‘I could destroy it. Will you pay for that as well? That would help with my train fare to Lee . . . back home . . .’

I shrugged noncommittally.

It was good enough for him.

* * *

‘I GET the general point,’ I said, stopping him a mere half hour into the story of his life, which seemed an endless succession of drunken nights, vindictive law professors, and stinkers written to his hapless dad. I switched off my Dictaphone and switched on my laptop. We both stared at the blank Word page for several minutes. I cleared my throat. ‘Ah . . . there’s a TV upstairs. Should be more interesting . . .’

He studied me suspiciously. He had found a comb in one of his combat pockets and was grooming his beard. ‘You write better alone, eh?’

‘Yes.’

‘War correspondents manage to write well enough with bombs exploding around them . . .’

‘But then again, I’m not a journalist.’

‘You said writers were like journalists.’

‘In our pursuit of facts, not in our writing style. Newspapers are read for a day. My short stories will still be read a hundred years from today.’

He muttered something inaudible into his beard. I chose not to seek clarification. Eventually, he said, ‘Can I see any of your books?’

‘Don’t have any here.’

‘You’re ashamed of your stuff, aren’t you? I know this guy . . .’

Mentally I rolled my eyes. ‘Only new writers carry their books around.’

‘How can I trust you to write my story if I’ve never read one of your books?’

‘You’ll never read anything else either if you don’t stop pestering me! Your killers are probably circling the airport right now!’

He rose with alacrity. ‘Fine, I’m going upstairs. But I’m trusting you with my reputation.’

‘Not to mention your life,’ I muttered.

‘Don’t write me into a monster. Even terrorists are getting good press just now. That Bantu vigilante in Nigeria, he’s all over BBC, isn’t he, and it’s not all bad. I’m just a regular law student who suffered a depression. D’you know how many students break down every year?’

Frankly, I said to myself, I don’t give a hoot.

‘And don’t forget it was my idea to disable the bomb,’ he added, jabbing at my laptop. ‘Write that in as well.’

I ignored him, and he finally got the message. He turned to go, reaching for the rucksack. ‘Leave that!’ I said, too stridently.

‘Why?’

‘I need it . . . for inspiration.’

He hesitated, but I did not blink. Unless the bomb was with me, I was just going to spend all day worrying that a lunatic was about to blow me up. He shrugged and left the rucksack. Halfway up the stairs, he paused and started descending again. I steeled myself to argue some more over the custody of his bomb, but he had something else on his mind.

‘Could my short story get more? Say, twenty thousand pounds?’

I frowned at his choice of pronoun. I phrased my response carefully, repossessing my intellectual property. ‘My stories have earned substantial sums before,’ I said airily.

‘I want half of every penny over ten thousand five hundred pounds,’ he said peremptorily. ‘That’s my final offer.’ Then he turned and went upstairs.

I thought that for a student who had spent nine years retaking law courses he was demonstrating a monumental ignorance of the basics of offer and acceptance. Still, this was not the time to quarrel over speculative royalties. Moments later, the TV went on upstairs and Spiderman, Batman, or some other rodent-human began to save the world at a disconcertingly high volume. Ten minutes later, I was still staring at a blank Word page.

It dawned on me that the possession of the bomb alone was enough to give Dalminda his year’s vacation in jail. If he didn’t realise that, then it was no wonder he kept flunking his law exams. My hand reached for the phone. This way, Lynn would still get her offbeat story while I got to keep all my hard-earned royalties.

Only one thing stopped me: the possibility that the police might well arrive and be unable to see either the suicide bomber or his bomb. I walked over to the bomb, unzipped the rucksack, touched it. It was there all right. And yet . . .

Rubiesu simini randa si kwemka!

I set my computer on my lap and started tapping away. I was Humphrey Chow after all, short story writer. Even if no one else saw the bomber, everyone should read his story. Upstairs, a bomb exploded on TV and I jerked, sending the laptop to the floor. Its screen winked off as its battery scooted halfway across the room. I retrieved it and put it back in with trembling fingers, then tried powering on the laptop. Nervously I watched it boot up. It seemed to remember all I had written. If this was a hallucination, the computer was hardwired into it as well. I began to write. Desperately. Lynn was going to have to change her taste in short stories. Or I’d have to take Grace’s advice and interview for the dog-walker job.

PENAKA LEE

Ubesia | 15th March, 2005

‘I don’t want to start a war,’ wheezed the obese governor.

‘There’ll be no war,’ said Penaka Lee confidently, raising his voice over the tumult of rain.

Governor Obu pushed away his trolley of files and clasped his hands behind his head. They were alone on the veranda of the Governor’s Lodge in Ubesia. The only other human in sight was the gardener bent double over a flower bed, labouring in the rain in an obsequious show that was lost on the distracted governor. The first lady of Sontik State was away in the federal capital on her minorities rights campaign, but the power of her presence was such that Penaka half expected to see her striding out onto the veranda. Sonia Obu was conscientious and charismatic—an electoral asset for any candidate—but her husband had been elected twice and had run out of electoral options. He needed other kinds of assets, like Penaka’s pragmatic ruthlessness, to stay in power.

‘There’ll be no war,’ Penaka repeated, speaking with a confidence that came from decades of successful deal-making.

‘You’ll say that, won’t you?’ The politician tipped his weight backwards until the front legs of his raffia chair left the ground. He stopped pushing back when he put his body in same precarious position as the rest of his life. ‘But you can’t guarantee it. Despite all the promises from your men in black, in the end, nobody can guarantee it.’

‘There are no guarantees in this business, Your Excellency. But Washington doesn’t want war in this delta. Every shell that falls in Ubesia will add ten cents to the price of gas in New York.’

‘The Biafra War killed millions. I don’t want to be responsible for another civil war.’

Penaka did not reply. He could see that the sanctimonious governor was arguing with himself, working himself up to the inevitability of secession. In the end, Governor Obu would take the decision that best suited Governor Obu. Just then, it did not take much imagination to figure out what that decision had to be. In four months, Obu’s second and last term as governor of Sontik State would be over, and he was not on business terms with any of the front-runners to succeed him.

One of those front runners was the deputy governor, who had refused to take his slice of the monumental heist that liquidated the Petroleum Communities Development Fund. He could not be trusted to cover Obu’s back. If the governor didn’t want to stand trial for the deals he had cut with his budget, he had to argue himself into a secession decision—and quickly, too. That would entitle him to another two terms as president of a new Sontik Republic. If things panned out right, that would take him to his sixty-second birthday; ten more years of presiding over the richest oil wells in Africa would give him the opportunity to create a succession plan that would cover his back. Penaka sipped his soda water slowly. He gave Obu all the time he needed.

‘They’re waiting for my declaration? They’ll recognise us as soon as we secede?’

‘Absolutely.’ He hesitated. ‘Your Excellency . . .’

‘What?’

Penaka looked around. He wondered how much to say, for the natives could be damned sensitive. ‘The Sontik traditional ruler is a strong federalist, but he’s very sick. This is the time to strike, before—’

‘That’s no problem. The Nanga is dying, and Elder Rantan, who will replace him, is already in my pocket. The only problem is that we don’t have an army.’

‘Once you give me the word, Sekurizon will mobilize—’

‘I don’t want mercenaries . . .’

‘These are security contractors,’ said Penaka, smoothly, ‘not mercenaries. I have a planeload of them standing by in Bogotá. They are more efficient than mercenaries. They guarantee outcomes. We have used them before, and they will train up your military in no time.’

Obu grumbled, ‘Abuja will send troops. I know they will. The president has said so. I’m not afraid, but I don’t want bloodshed.’

Penaka was silent.

‘How long will the American destroyer wait?’

‘Five days, maybe less,’ lied Penaka. The US naval exercises were scheduled to run a couple of weeks, but the lie was necessary to keep the pressure on the dithering governor. ‘Once you make the secession announcement, the American destroyers will move into the Bight of Benin—which will now be the Sontik Republic’s territorial waters—to protect your oil rigs, which are of US strategic national interest. You are happy to sign a security agreement with the US?’

‘Of course.’

‘After that, Abuja will not dare move without provoking a full American invasion.’

Obu licked his lips. ‘They won’t dare, will they? It’s just that I don’t want to start a war.’

Penaka sighed. ‘I’m not supposed to tell you this, but I will, just to reassure you,’

‘What?’

‘The three battalions that Abuja will depend on to put down the rebellion are on our side. They will march down to Sontik State okay, but they will join up at double salary. Not one shot will be fired. There’ll be no war.’

Obu released his generous weight, and the two front legs of his chair slammed onto the veranda with a thud. His eyes were hooded with derision, and Penaka knew he had overplayed his hand.

* * *

WHEN PENAKA Lee left shortly afterwards, the rain was coming down in steady sheets and the gardener had given up. A steward followed Penaka down the long pathway to the car park holding a large umbrella, but it didn’t stop him getting wet.

He slipped into the back of his limousine, allowing his PA to pass the steward a crisp note through the crack between the window and the door-frame. He dried the rain from his face and hands with a handkerchief before pulling out his phone. He opened the air conditioner vents, but his hands were wet again, this time with sweat, as he dialled his intelligence contact in Abuja.

There was a short pause as Belinja’s security loop kicked in. ‘Hello?’

‘He’s not biting,’ said Penaka.

There was silence.

‘He’s scared,’ suggested Belinja. ‘Maybe next week.’

‘He’ll never be ready. He’s a coward. He doesn’t believe I can deliver Nigerian battalions to the Sontik Republic.’

‘Maybe I should have a word with his security adviser . . .’

‘Lamikan? Well, that’s a thought.’ Penaka sighed. ‘Leave it with me.’

‘What do you have in mind?’ asked Belinja, sounding apprehensive but somewhat expectant as well.

A month earlier, when Penaka had promised to put an American destroyer in the Gulf of Benin to establish his bona fides with Obu, Belinja had been quietly derisive. Two weeks afterwards, a training exercise originally scheduled for the Indian Ocean was rezoned at the last minute, and Belinja’s unwillingness to take the other man on faith had evaporated.

‘I’ll set up a couple of meetings with some friends,’ said Penaka absently, ‘organise a little escalation. Do you have a newspaper publisher on your books?’

‘I have all of them.’

‘I want a paper with a decent circulation.’

‘How about Patrick Suenu’s Palaver?’

Penaka was indifferent. He did not read Nigerian newspapers, ‘That should do. I have a story to plant. Could you . . .’

‘I’ll arrange it.’

‘Thanks, Belinja.’

The phone went dead, and Penaka massaged his cheek muscles. He did not like ditherers. He would be fifty-five in April. He did not have all the time in the world. It was a big country; it needed big decisions. Big decision makers. And if it burned, there were fifty other countries on the continent. He lowered the partition window between him and his staff. ‘Go,’ he said to his chauffeur. ‘Confirm our flights for Kinshasa,’ he told his PA.

He had been caught on the wrong side of a Nigerian crisis before.

It was not an experience to be repeated.

SLEEPCATASTROPHES

Kreektown | January/February, 1999

Oga Somuzo

Saint John

Allotua Allegi

Renata Torila

Jani Agams

Ariz Agams

Eddi Fadamu

Births

Ogazi Kroma-Alanta

Extant Menai population: 430 (NPC estimates)

LYNN CHRISTIE

London | 16th March, 2005

‘I am worried for you, Humphrey Chow,’ I said.

We had the Chinatown restaurant all to ourselves. Every five minutes, a surly waiter tacked by to see whether we wanted something more. He wore an accusing frown, as though our refusal to order extra dishes was responsible for the imminent closure of his cold restaurant. My wintry blue overcoat was buttoned to my neck. But for my black boots, I might as well not have changed out of my nightdress, for all the good my clothing did me. Humphrey risked another bite of his tacos. We had managed to find a Mexican restaurant in Chinatown, and their tacos tasted more like wafers from a Chinese menu. Still, I was carrying a couple of extra kilos, so any excuse to abandon a meal after a spoonful was welcome.

‘I can’t think why,’ he said. ‘I finally write something you like and you’re worried for me?’ He’d dressed with his usual absentmindedness, wearing a green scarf on top of his blue flannel shirt.

I caught myself spinning my wedding band. ‘Where’s the suicide bomber?’

He looked up. ‘It’s fiction, Lynn, remember: I don’t do autobiography. Anymore.’

‘Why use real names? Why set the story in your holiday home?’

He shrugged. ‘I’ll change the names around. It just helped me visualise, you know. It was a literary device.’

‘I don’t want to sell it, Humphrey Chow. I don’t want to show it to a publisher.’

He stopped chewing. Now he looked worried. ‘You said you liked it. You said it trumps Blank.’

‘It’s the strongest stuff you’ve written yet—speaking as your agent. But speaking as your friend, it’s also the most disturbing tale I’ve ever read.’

‘Since when did the status of agent and friend become incompatible?’

‘I was looking to send it to Maximus. What if he reads it and writes you a twelve-month contract to deliver a collection? What then?’

He looked away. I could tell he did not relish the pressure either. It had taken him a year to follow up on his last story, and even though he claimed to be flowing now, there was still a huge jump from making the boast to putting fifty thousand saleable words on a ream of A4 paper. My ring was spinning fifty metres an hour and rising, though that was just everyday-grade worry. ‘Humphrey Chow, I’ll shop your tale around . . . but keep writing!’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He grinned.

‘And stay fit.’ I left my worry ring and nudged his greasy plate away from him. ‘I want you in good shape when Grace is done with you.’ I patted his hand and pulled on my gloves.

Humphrey blew a kiss. For the past six or seven months our parting shot was usually a variation of a wedding proposal, sometimes from me and sometimes from him. It was nothing to worry about, so long as no one considered it to be anything but a joke. I don’t always keep it, but my policy was take the book to bed, not the writer.

I left him reaching for my plate.

ZANDA ATTURK

Kreektown | 18th March, 2005

I had switched off my mobile phone and spent three nights at Ma’Calico’s. The deadline for my column had come and gone. I was not much of a drinker, but I spent my afternoons and evenings at the bar downstairs. I told myself I was, like Hameed the secret service agent, prospecting for information on Badu in the most practical way. Yet I was filled with despair. It couldn’t be long before Patrick Suenu’s posse arrived on the trail of his AWOL reporter.

A bus arrived from Ubesia carrying a group of organisers. They came with a public address system, musicians, and a sizeable crowd of their own. They took a fortifying round of beer at Ma’Calico’s and set off for the square to hold a secession rally. I thought they were pretty slow on the uptake and went along to watch the fun.

They had come the day before, played their music, and made their stirring speeches—but the not-so-secret secret agent was watching from the door of Ntupong’s Joint, and nobody had joined the rally. The secessionists had given up after an hour and piled, discouraged, into their buses.

The reception this time couldn’t have been more different.

Amana saw me gaping at the crowd and laughed. ‘Hameed left this morning. He got an urgent summons to come to Abuja for top secret briefings.’

‘If it’s top secret, how do you know?’

‘I saw them faking it at the post office.’

* * *

SO FAR, I had avoided investigating Kreektown with any kind of thoroughness. For one thing, I did not want to confront the condemnation of an empty Atturk house—or far worse, an Atturk house occupied by roughboys or strangers from Ubesia. I spent my days in my rented room. By early evening, the drivers and conductors from Ubesia would begin to arrive and the bar at Ma’Calico’s would grow interesting enough to bring me out of my hermitage.

The butcher brought the news of the old man’s death. He didn’t sell much meat in that village, so he also did some palm wine rounds, which helped him stay on the cutting edge of what anaemic gossip there was in the community. But in the land of gossip the death of Mata Nimito was a table sweeper. The butcher walked into a heated argument on the virtues of local gin and announced, raising his voice above the hubbub, ‘Hundredyears don die o!’

‘Hundredyears?’ I asked.

‘That dead people dia chief.’

‘GodMenai!’ Something like remorse touched me, manifesting as a thirst for beer. ‘He was still alive?’

The butcher looked at me strangely. The timing of his laughter was off. He had not sold much palm wine that day, which was bad for his sobriety; he had a firm policy of potting his wine in his belly rather than have it go sour in his kegs. He quietened and continued, ‘Everyday, I use to drop one bottle for am, yesterday’s own still dey dia!’ He peered at me. ‘So you know Hundredyears?’

Recoiling instinctively, I shook my head. ‘What killed him?’

He laughed sarcastically, his careening voice inviting other villagers into the joke. ‘Old man like Hundredyears die an dis one dey ask wetin kill am! Okay, na witch kill am!’

They laughed generously. It was the sport of the season, mocking the Stranger That Refused to Go Home.

‘He’s the last of the Menai, isn’t he?’ asked a voice behind me,

‘No, there’s Jonszer . . .’

‘Jonszer! We’re talking of people and you’re counting Jonszer?’

‘And there’s some sick people in their Lagos camp—it won’t be long . . .’

I rose and took my glass outside, away from their raucous talk. Through the open window the laughter mocked me. I felt the traitor. Jonszer was Menai like me. Now in his fifties, he would have been in his twenties when the Trevi inoculations were administered. They had not bothered to inoculate him, considering their precious vial wasted on the drunk. That mean-spiritedness had, ironically, saved his life. Not that it did him much good. A lifetime of addictions had likely addled his mind: in the last two days, he had passed me a couple of times without recognition.

As I brooded, a limousine with the number plate “Ubesia 1” pulled off the Warri-Ubesia highway, pausing ponderously at the entrance to Ma’Calico’s. On the bonnet flew the green-crested flag of the Nanga of Ubesia, traditional ruler of the Sontik people. The windows were blacked out, so there was no way of knowing if the traditional ruler was himself in the car, but as I watched, a door opened and a greying fiftyish man stepped out. I recognised Justin Bentiy immediately, cousin and right-hand man of the Nanga.

I downed the rest of my glass and returned to the saloon as Amana emerged from the freezer with a laden tray, which emptied rapidly as she approached. I took the last bottle of beer, and she raised her voice: ‘Bottle number four for Reverend!’ There was a cheer all round, for I was entering uncharted waters at Ma’Calico’s.

Justin Bentiy entered. It was a mostly Sontik crowd in the saloon, and they recognised him immediately, greeting him respectfully. He sat with Ma’Calico by her counter and ordered a Sprite, which he drank mincingly. In his expensive damask robe, he looked out of place in that rough bar. Then he sent Amana out to the car with cold water for the Nanga. The realisation that the Nanga of Ubesia himself was in Ma’Calico’s yard hushed the room. The traditional ruler had been bedridden for months. Ma’Calico rose to attend to him, but Justin Bentiy swayed his horsetail quietly and she deferred. Amana hurried out nervously. She was gone a while, and the bar room conversation stayed on the health of the ailing Nanga until she returned. Soon afterwards, Justin rose and left, his bottle barely touched.

The news of Mata Nimito’s death had breached my carefully constructed distance from Kreektown. Once again I was in the circle of death and loss. Without trying, I was remembering.

I WAS orphaned.

The new Kreektown settlers were sharper than knives. I was cut, again and again, and it was to Mata Nimito, hermit cloudcaster and stargazer, that I turned.

‘Kiwami ananwusu,’ he had said. ‘You were nurturetaught to live among the People. It’s a new world now. Now, you must not put naked fingers in a crab basket.’

‘How can I live in this world, Mata?’

‘Practiselearn. The lesson of the crab.’

‘What is that lesson, Mata?’

‘Carry your truthsweetness inside; but as for the world, show them only your crabshell.’

And I blended in.

MATA NIMITO, who had no traffic with the world, the great teacher of that world; Mata Nimito, who lived all those years only to die in the week I returned . . . No one did guilt like Menai. It weighed me down now. I had been close to the old man, until I fled his circumcision blade . . .

I rose queasily and walked towards the door again. A wave of memory rode me, and suddenly I was a seventeen-year-old, in that same bar, but it was not Ma’Calico’s anymore; it was Cletus’s Motel, and the language was Menai, the people were Menai . . . I fled the room, fearing another vivid hallucination, stopping only on the threshold, where I gasped.

Amana was right behind me. She was dogging me too often these days. One of these days I was going to come up against the iroko of her mother. There was the usual mischief in her eyes. ‘You’re throwing up!’

‘I’m not drunk.’

She peered into my eyes. ‘But something is wrong. Right?’

I stared.

I had tried to figure her out, without much luck. She was sprite-like in many ways, liberated from the very real things that weighed people down. Her fellow villagers discounted her from the scheme of things, as though they understood that she was outside their norm. Even the dreaded roughboys seemed to hold her in some reverence. When she scolded them, they smiled bashfully, and they brought their quarrels for her opinions. If she had a boyfriend, he did not live in Kreektown, but she did disappear behind the treeline several times a day with a variety of men who emerged, angry and frustrated, while she followed, beaming with a transcendental contentment.

That morning, she had disappeared with a woman, Fati, for the first time.

She looked right and left now and winked conspiratorially. ‘This is a secret, okay? Ma’Calico will kill me if she knows.’ Then she turned for the trees.

I hesitated. I had seen Ma’Calico’s hands at close quarters. They were old, far older than she was: her face looked fifty but her hands were sixty. Those hands had scraped and peeled, had squashed and soaked and burned—and they had done all that in the wet and dry, in the hot and cold, in the smoky blaze. She did not boast often, that iroko, but when she did it was always about her smart Amana, who at twenty-six would still have been station manager of DRCD’s Kreektown base if rioters had not burned it down the very day she arrived from Abuja to begin her posting, and Ma’Calico’s eyes would soften.

Amana reached the line of trees. She turned and gestured impatiently, and the memory of Ma’Calico waned. I followed. We walked briskly into Kreektown’s shroud, which could make dusk of a brilliant noon. A clump of trees. A timeless peace. The hard-packed earth softened. I followed her. I knew the land but not the lie of it any longer. A lot had changed in a decade. We walked in long shadows, but daylight held its own—which was just as well, for I loathed the dark. Then, barely three hundred metres from her mother’s parlour, we arrived at Amana’s redoubt. It was a long, comfortable bench in a grove with associated creature comforts, which she clearly frequented. There was no time to talk, and she straddled the bench with an urgency that telegraphed. She spread a red velvet cloth between us, pulled out her purse, and produced a deck of playing cards.

She stared as I redid my top buttons. ‘What style do you prefer?’ she asked guardedly.

I was breathlessly silent.

‘Okay, let’s play Red Bushmeat,’ she volunteered. That turned out to be a variation of a card game popularised by motor-park touts across Nigeria. I was no virgin myself and determined to teach her a painful lesson. I doubled her opening stake, and we played passionately for thirty frenzied minutes. Every time I lost a game, a grunt of frustration would slip my iron control, but her delight was ever bubbling under the surface. She had quick fingers and dealt with a croupier’s skill. She had eyes only for her cards. After thirty minutes I was hooked.

Although I was sweating liberally, I could have played a few more rounds, but she was the daughter of Ma’Calico all right. A seam of discipline underpinned her greed. She reined in her flushed abandon with a sigh of satisfaction and gathered up her winnings. She folded up her red velvet cloth, her purse bulging with my money, and then she fixed me calmly with perhaps the first serious look I had seen on her.

‘Do you have something to tell me?’ Her voice was very polished, very much the station manager’s.

I stared with angry frustration.

‘I can keep a secret,’ she assured me.

I rose. ‘I’m sure you can,’ I said, still smarting from my earlier misapprehension. ‘I’m a journalist; I have a burial to cover.’

‘I’m going as well.’

‘Why?’

She shrugged. ‘He’s the last of the dead people.’

It was my chance to own up, but instead I said, ‘There’s still Jonszer . . . and—’

‘Okay, okay.’ Irritably, her accent plunging from station manager to agbero, she allowed, ‘Second-to-last.’

We were walking back now. As we reached the treeline, she paused. ‘Honestly, I can keep a secret.’

‘That’s very good for you,’ I told her.

* * *

AT MA’CALICO’S, I went up to my room and waited for evening and the burial. When I shut my eyes, the dead Menai I had known swam in and out of my tipsy vision. I sat up and reached for Palaver. A trucker passing through to Warri had left his copy for me. Badu was still front-page news; this time, it was the fact that he had done nothing for all of four days. I turned to page seven. My column was gone, despite the standby pieces I always kept on file. It was replaced by a shameless pastiche of those same standby pieces by Patience from Motoring. Oddly enough, she had a picture on her new byline, a courtesy Patrick had denied me throughout the over one hundred iterations of my column. There was no chink in the paper caused by the absence of Roving Eye. The ease with which I had dropped out of my old life—and the swiftness with which I had been replaced—depressed and frightened me. I was like a stunted shrub: a couple of tugs and up came years of growth, yanked out of the soil with one hand. I had written for Palaver for two and a half years, but I had dropped out and that was that. I put away the newspaper. This was, after all, how I wanted it: there was no one in my life whose loss could really hurt me.

That was why I had fled Kreektown all those years ago. I closed my eyes and tried not to remember the ninth of December, 1998. Tried not to remember every wrinkle on every lost face, every accent of every lost voice . . .

* * *

I WAS orphaned.

The short hawker arrived at Kreektown Square just before noon and began to set up his stall. It was the perfect timing for an entrance. The other traders had settled into their own routines. Sisi Mari’s sewing machine was singing its monotone, and the middle-aged Ruma was already yawning seamlessly. By Ntupong’s gin joint, I killed time with a pack of cards and a complimentary shot while I watched for a shoeshine prospect. There were hundreds of filthy shoes in Kreektown, but few of their owners were prepared to have them shined, for a fee. My business day was half gone, and I hadn’t even opened my shoeshine box.

The hawker set his portmanteau carefully on the ground. At first sight there was nothing remarkable about him. He was young and slight, the sort of man a large snake might swallow and soon afterwards go hunting rats for dessert. But he did carry his portmanteau with extreme care—that was the rather remarkable thing.

A portmanteau was no novelty in Kreektown. It was the care with which it was handled that caught the eye; that, and the very idea that a petty trader’s stock-in-trade was so precious as to be ferried to market not in an oily carton or mildewed sack but in a portmanteau.

Utoma stopped ogling Etie in the adjacent stall and watched the short hawker with the suspicion reserved for a rival. It would have been rather silly, carrying eggs in portmanteaus, but Utoma sold eggs; that was the thing. He had lost a kidney and half his weight in the eighteen years since his Trevi inoculation, but he was the last surviving member of the modest Egg Sellers Association of Kreektown Market, a rather lucrative position. So he turned away from Etie’s cosmetics stall and glared at the hawker.

Since his arrival, the hawker had dispensed a ‘good-morning’ each to the traders on either side of his stall, so he couldn’t very well be called arrogant.

Yet it was a close thing.

They didn’t call Etie ‘Man-Magnet’ for nothing and she would have felt the loss of Utoma’s attention immediately. She glanced towards the distraction without skipping a strand in the hair she was braiding. The sneer she’d prepared for a woman faded. When the hawker lifted his portmanteau tenderly onto a bench, her fingers grew rigid in her customer’s hair. There was one calamity Etie had lived in dread of: a real cosmetologist setting up in Kreektown.

Etie was my neighbour and fellow orphan. She was six years old at the time of the Trevi inoculation and had coped well until her mother died of kidney failure and she had her first seizure.

She held no certificates, but in her small shop on Crown Prince Street she stocked a variety of nail varnishes and lipsticks—and she regularly succeeded in plaiting a hundred and fifty Bob Marley braids on Letitia’s head, which was not much larger than a grapefruit. Any other village in the world would be glad for her talents, but she knew the new Kreektown girls very well. That she was Menai counted for nothing with the new Kreektowners. Any quack with the gumption to put cosmetologist on a signboard would kill her business. The new Kreektown didn’t have enough business for two cosmetics stalls.

Kreektown’s traders watched the hawker narrowly. He had a fetish for the colour red. It was the colour of his clothes, his portmanteau, and the plastic tablecloth he spread on the rack to display his goods.

That tablecloth seemed to incense Ruma. Her merchandise was the most expensive in the market, yet she laid her fabrics out, Menai weaves and ankaras, brocades—even her imported ten-thousand-naira-per-yard Hollandis—she laid them all out directly on the wooden panels of the stall. She muttered, and it was handy that there were now so few of us who spoke the tongue in the market, ‘Ayamuni jakpasi! Just who does this upstartchild think he is, to spread a red clothshrine for his stock? Is he selling gold fabric? Or did he import his own brocades from the land of ancestorsMenai?’

Eventually, the short hawker was satisfied with the symmetry of the tablecloth. He placed an envelope on it and opened the portmanteau reverently.

Even the customers sensed something momentous in the offing and loitered around the red stall. Oga Somuzo, having haggled Ma’Bamou’s size forty-eight jeans right down to a desperate four hundred naira, refrained from paying—confident that a better bargain would emerge from the red portmanteau.

What did emerge was a carton, which contained a smaller package wrapped in layers and layers of old newspapers. A drift of newsprint slowly massed around the hawker’s feet as he carefully unfurled the contents of the carton. The scent of camphor filled the air. Nobody was expecting the old pair of shoes that eventually stood, pompously, in the centre of the red tablecloth.

Saint John scratched his forehead. Lesser mortals could scratch their heads and armpits, but Saint John did things his own way—and frequent perplexity, coupled with his unfamiliarity with the nail clipper, had left him with a forehead more ravaged than his fifty years would have portended. ‘Ezitatu?’ He spluttered, ‘All this potmanto palaver for the sake of one common pair of secondhand shoes?’

‘That are not even polished,’ I added, hinting heavily.

There was something like pity in the hawker’s eyes as he glanced at us. He probably didn’t see anyone worth the trouble of puffing his goods to, because without a word, he bent over and began to gather the newspapers strewn about his feet. This was probably the moment most of us decided he was a pompous little imp.

Ma’Bamou had the only secondhand clothes shop in Kreektown. She brought in her stock of okrika monthly in huge bales that travelled six hundred circuitous smugglers’ kilometres from Cotonou Port in the back of Tamiyo’s Peugeot. She walked mincingly over to the portmanteau with the aid of her iron walking stick. It was really empty. There was just that arrogant pair of shoes, which to her professional eyes would have seemed grade B. She sniffed, a sound balanced delicately between relief and contempt, and returned to her stall; there was no need for a word. Oga Somuzo followed heavily, clearly aware that his old bid for the jeans was history.

Yet they were the only ones who walked away. Even Etie and her customer, whose hair was half in braids and half-afro, joined the crowd around the red stall. Kreektown might have been a village, but it was no ordinary place. We were more than most towns and cities—we were an entire nation, the last stronghold of Menai in the world. This was certainly not so inconsequential a place that a dirty pair of shoes should cause a stir.

So it caused a stir, the very nerve of a hawker who came to Kreektown Market just to sell an old pair of shoes. To whom did he plan to sell them? Did he take the Menai for mugus? The cheek of it! We milled angrily around the stall, although there was no violence in the air. We did not manhandle idiots of any stripe, but we did know how to ridicule a fool so well that when he got home he’d look himself very well in the mirror.

‘Where the rest of your market?’ began Jonszer mildly enough. A knowing wink flickered in his left eye. He knew every excuse in the book. ‘They steal it for bus, not so?’

‘Me, I’m not a trader,’ said the hawker, pulling an affidavit out of the envelope and showing it around, ‘I’m the son of Doctor Nnamdi Azikiwe’s former houseboy.’

This sort of boasting was new to us. It was one thing to boast about wiping a big man’s toilet seats for a living. But no, this young man was far more superior than that to an ordinary trader: he was the son of a man who wiped a big man’s toilet seats for a living.

We were going to have fun that afternoon.

Yet around me was gathering the largest crowd Kreektown had mustered in months—which had not come for a sleepcatastrophe. It was my best marketing opportunity yet: to publicly transform a lacklustre pair of shoes and remind Kreektowners that a shoe-shiner of distinction lived amongst them.

The downside to my plan was the free shoeshine for the arrogant hawker, but it would only cost a smear of polish anyway. I sat on my shoeshine box and took the left shoe.

The hawker did not notice.

‘I use to know one trader’s apprentice like that,’ Mukaila whispered to Saint John, in a voice that carried. ‘One day like that, he miss his bus at Onitsha Motor Park, and he begin to chitchat this very nice lady . . . then they branch inside hotel . . .’

‘Ajajaa!’

‘. . . when they finish, the apprentice try to go but she hold him by the belt. He said he thought it was girlfriend-and-boyfriend matter, she said no, it was business.’

‘Who settled it?’ asked Saint John, who knew the story only too well.

‘Motor park touts,’ replied Mukaila. ‘They said they didn’t know where the boy came from, but that Onitsha prostitute don’t use to wear badge . . . I swear to God, that apprentice sell all his master’s okrika that day, to pay the nice lady.’

‘Me, I’m not an apprentice . . .’ protested the hawker, over loud laughter.

‘Is it that you’re stranded?’ asked Salif solicitously. ‘How much is your bus fare?’

‘If it is a matter of ordinary bus fare,’ said Ajo insincerely, ‘if you ask politely, is a thing of which I can easily lend you . . .’

The hawker straightened up angrily with an armful of newspapers. The retort was fully formed in his mouth when his eyes fell on his tablecloth. By this time I’d had seventy seconds with the left shoe. It was enough. I was reaching for the right shoe when the hawker screamed in horror and leapt on me.

‘It’s free! It’s free!’ I cried, trying to dodge the hawker’s blows, struggling to keep possession of the right shoe. I could be as pushy a salesman as any good shoe-shiner had to be. I knew how to seize and polish shoes still on the feet of objecting owners, who sometimes paid up when their shoes were buffed; yet, months and months of shoe-shining had not prepared me for the thing with the hawker. And it was free! I had said so myself! Eventually I yielded the shoe, but by then my shirt was torn and I was lying on my side in the dust of Kreektown Square.

The short hawker was on his knees, cradling his shoes like babies. The one was shining; the other was still grey and mottled with age. His self-assurance was gone. He rocked to and fro in the dust, muttering: ‘He has cleaned it away, the very dust of Independence Day!’ The throng stood in mystified silence, which turned into consternation when he sniffed and wiped his eyes.

Ruma rolled her eyes knowingly and tapped her head with a discreet finger. A ripple of nods validated her judgment: the last time the staff of Warri Asylum went on strike, this was how lunatics had turned up in the square, bearing branches for rifles, asking for the recruitment office of the Biafran Army. Our honour was safe. This was no premeditated insult to Kreektown. This was a lunatic, pure and simple. She returned to her stall. Her own illness was advancing and did not brook much standing.

The hawker squared his shoulders and rose. He returned to his stall, straightened up the askew tablecloth, and set the shoes down carefully. He shrugged manfully. ‘Okay,’ he told his audience, ‘because of the polish, I will off five thousand naira—but that’s all. Not one kobo more. Who will buy the shoes?’

A few ruffians laughed, but we stared them down. ‘First of all,’ called Kiri Ntupong gently from the safety of his joint, ‘what makes you think your shoes are worth one thousand, even?’ He cradled a snuff hand on a gnarled knee. His eyes were red and rheumy from overindulging his own brew.

‘These are Doctor Nnamdi Azikiwe’s shoes,’ said the hawker quietly. He recovered the circulating affidavit and waved it proudly. ‘The very shoes that he wore on the first of October 1960 for Nigeria’s Independence. Imagine that. These shoes are older than me! They are almost forty years old! They stood next to the Queen of England, see—’ And he opened up the affidavit page of a magazine picture of a youthful queen and a grinning, dashing president for those that cared to look. ‘These shoes you’re looking at were inside the very same room with Tafawa Balewa and Awolowo and Nanga Saul, and all those famous people . . . you can still see the very dust of Independence Day on this one . . .’

There was polite silence in Kreektown Square. The villagers knew their own history. As Nigeria’s first president, Dr. Azikiwe had been central to the Independence ceremony. He was a contemporary to Nanga Saul Bentiy of the Sontik. In the dust where I sat, the photographs from my history books came to life with a trumpeting of destiny. The red tablecloth became a red carpet. The shoes standing at waist level acquired new grandeur; the hands with which I’d handled them began to tingle.

Yet, if I was star-struck, my fellow villagers were cut of more phlegmatic cloth. They did not lose their heads. That was how a classmate returned from his first geography lesson to tell his illiterate mother how Agui Creek—this same Agui we treated with such levity—was actually called River Niger way up north, how it sprung to life more than four thousand kilometres away in Fouta Djalon Mountain, how it watered five great countries and millions of people before going to pieces in our delta, fragmenting into many creeks of which the Agui that washed Kreektown was a tiny finger, and how it finally emptied into the ocean a few kilometres from where we stood. His mother, who had lived all her life by the breadth of the creek without ever having to contemplate its length, allowed her son to finish before asking, ‘So? Is it now too famous for me to baf inside?’

It was Saint John who asked the pertinent question: ‘So?’

The hawker’s mouth dropped open. ‘So? So? These are the most important shoes in Nigeria!’

‘They’re old fashion,’ decided Mukaila. ‘Me, I can never wear them.’

‘You don’t buy shoes like this to wear them!’

‘Why should I buy shoe again, if not to wear?’

‘You buy this type of shoes to keep,’ explained the hawker passionately. ‘These shoes are like a pension plan; you keep them inside a glass cupboard, or trunk box, with plenty of camphor . . .’

‘So you’re the messenger of the latest madness, eh?’ said Ntupong. He had walked up to the shoes for a closer look. His trembling snuff hand granted him easy passage through the crowd, for he was given to explosive sneezes when he snuffed. He studied the shoes at length and nodded sagely. ‘First I am to burn my wooden circumcisionhead, eh? Now I am to replace it with Nnamdi’s shoes, eh?’ He shook his head. ‘Thank you very much.’ He took a final pinch and dusted off his snuff palm on his baggy shorts, but as he turned toward the suddenly thinning crowd, he sneezed. The hawker flinched as the shoes acquired a little more than the dust of independence. ‘Tell those who sent you that Kiri Ntupong was not at home,’ he said as he returned to his shelter.

The hawker took a deep breath and began a desperate sales pitch. ‘So you didn’t hear about Marilyn Monroe’s shoes? One pair of shoes that sold for more than thirty thousand dollars! That’s millions and millions of naira! Think about that! These very shoes you’re looking at are far better than Marilyn Monroe’s shoes! This is Zik of Africa I’m talking about! Even, they’re better than a government pension! See: it’s like having History inside your house! Then one day you bring them out, maybe when you retire, and it’s worth like ten million naira! Think! Ten million naira! That’s like winning the lottery—except—where’s the risk? No risk! You buy it cheap, and the value is only going up and up! A pair of shoes like this is better than a plot of land!’

He stopped only because he ran out of breath.

There was a long silence in which the only sound to be heard was the hawker’s heavy breathing and the commotion of a hen succumbing—with ill grace—to her cockerel. Then Sisi Mari asked politely, ‘Who is this Magdalene Mari?’

‘You don’t even know Marilyn Monroe?’ asked the hawker in a stricken voice.

‘Where’s the shame there?’ she demanded, taking offence. ‘Does she know me?’ There were nods of support from her fellow, democratically inclined Kreektowners.

The hawker realised belatedly that he had travelled too far down the Niger River and had arrived at a market that time had forgotten. He sat down slowly beside his stall as the glow of the red tablecloth slowly faded.

I shared keenly in the fading glory of Azikiwe’s shoes. It was difficult to come to terms with the reality of my own exploding expectations. This was not the business turnaround I had expected. This was not the life I had expected either. I had needed a renaissance so badly. The opportunity of Zik’s shoes had seemed tailor-made to make me shine. Yet right before my eyes, the precious crowd was melting away—and I had not even closed a sale.

‘I knew that 419 people would find the road to Kreektown one day,’ said Etie to her customer as they drifted back to her stall. ‘I should now sell my papahouse and buy a pair of shoes, not so?’

‘But how do they hook so many people when their scams are stupid like this?’

‘You should take your business to Warri,’ suggested Mukaila helpfully, ‘either Warri or Lagos. Lagosians are more . . .’ His words tailed off into a circular, lunatic gesture around the head. Then he headed toward his canoe at the riverside.

Utoma, Ajo, and I were among the last to leave the hawker’s stall. ‘Lagos people copy these foolish things better than Menai people,’ agreed Ajo, not unkindly. He was an undertaker drawn to Kreektown by the bonanza of death. ‘If is the bus fare that you need, just say.’ He slipped away before his offer could be taken up.

Sisi Mari’s electric sewing machine started up, buzzing quickly around the hem of a wavy green outfit, taking advantage of the Rural Electrification Board’s generator, which ran for two hours most mornings. In the distance, a passing ferry foghorned a greeting to an empty jetty as it chugged up-creek. Oga Somuzo miscalculated a haggling gambit and called Ma’Bamou a white witch. Nearby traders rushed in to save him from the angry trader’s walking stick.

Utoma was still the only egg dealer in Kreektown, and his mood was more buoyant than usual. ‘Shine me,’ he said, as though he were doing me a favour. He owned the poultry shed by the creek, a kilometre south of Kreektown. He had fostered me for a year after my parents drowned, and his boots, which reminded me of the muddy, smelly poultry, needed me more desperately than I needed his money. He saw my face and snapped, ‘Emiko sita? So is only the shoe of dead president that you specialise?’

‘It’s not that,’ I said sullenly, wondering, suddenly, what it was. I stared at the mud-encrusted boots, straining for the optimism that had buoyed me when the short hawker opened the 1960 vent of glory. I wavered uncertainly between my black and brown tins of polish. ‘What colour was it before-before?’ I asked.

Utoma frowned, unsure whether he was being mocked. ‘Before-before what? I bought it brown and is still brown, boy, wha’s matter with you today?’

The money he was going to pay, less than my standard charge, was already scrunched into a parsimonious fist. I saw suddenly, transcendentally, that these terms of trade were so skewed that I would never prosper here. The suspicion had been there for a while, but right then I knew I was never going to save money for university from my shoeshine box.

I rose slowly, and the shackles of the Menai obsession with corporate existence fell away from me like a spent sentence. I would no more be Long-Lived in the land of fireflies, condemned to the Weekend Walk to Burials. I would not be a shoe-shiner for people who mostly wore slippers. I’d get to know people who weren’t about to die, live in a neighbourhood whose conversation didn’t hinge on kidneys, where traders prospered more than undertakers. Where the knowledge of world figures could be taken for granted. A capacious grave opened up in me. Into it slithered dead and dying Menai: Utoma, Etie, Ruma, even Mata Nimito, screaming, soundless, buried once and for all. There was something for me in the world beyond the circumscribed shores of the doomed People. Perhaps a library all of whose 359 books I had not yet read. Perhaps people whose eyes were not tinged with envy—and bitterness—that I was not like them, that I was born a few months too late to be inoculated with Trevi’s death.

As I brushed the dust of Kreektown off my clothes, it was as though the dust of Zik’s shoes, and the inebriating spirit of 1960, had infected me with a new and grandiose vision. Utoma could keep his custom and Kreektown could shine her shoes, but I was young and independent; and I was free of the curse of Menai.

‘Emeyama?’ he asked softly in Menai. ‘What’s the cryingmatter, Zanda?’

‘I’m not crying,’ I sniffed. ‘But I don’t have your type of brown.’

Then I turned and left my shoeshine box, and the square. When the ferry left that evening, it left with me.

* * *

I OPENED my eyes and sat up slowly. The disturbance that had roused me seemed to come from the yard: screams and Menai phrases, shouted in a voice too distorted by rage or pain to make out properly. I scrambled to the window. In that unguarded glance I took in the roof of my dad’s house halfway across the village. Then I looked down and there, in the midst of the rapidly filling courtyard, saw Jonszer.

He had a bloodied dagger, and people gave him a wide berth. A length of rope was fastened to his ankle. He leapt, pranced, screamed like one demented, hacking at his body with his blade; as I stood there, open-mouthed in the window, he stopped and pointed his broad knife at me. ‘Miyaka sia Menai!’ In that moment I saw his grief and pain. I gagged and slumped backwards until I was on the floor, leaning against the bed, the only furniture in the tiny room. I gasped. A few seconds of silence ensued, and then he resumed, his voice hoarse, unrecognisable, fading away in the direction of Kreektown Square. In moments the yard was silent, and I knew the crowd had followed him.

I sat there and watched the sky darken. When the shadows began to pool in the corners, I rose. I closed the shutters and switched on my rechargeable lamp. An hour passed before the people started to trickle back in. Their awed comments drifted up through the shutters. His voice still rang in my ears: Miyaka sia Menai! I hugged myself, walling myself off from condemnation. I was independent of his hopelessness and grief. I was free. I was Nigerian, not Menai. African, not Menai. And half of me was clearly not even African anyway.

Someone knocked. I did not move, willing whoever it was to go away, but she opened the door anyway and stood there, her face bereft of its residual mischief.

‘He drowned himself! Just like that! They said he tied his foot to an underwater root! How’s that even possible?’

‘GodMenai . . .’

‘Why do you keep saying that?’

I shrugged. ‘What happened to Jonszer?’

‘He returned from an errand in Ubesia, and some idiot at the motor park told him that Hundredyears was dead. He just went crazy.’

‘They shouldn’t have told him just like that!’

‘Yes. The divers haven’t found his body, but they’re burying Hundredyears now. Are you coming?’

I wanted to sit in that room forever, but I would stick out more by staying away. I rose. It was time to bury Mata Nimito. I had fled six and a half years before to avoid this funeral, but he had waited for me.

* * *

WE TOOK the low ridge, walking through the clump of raffia trees that fringed Kreektown. The village lay to the left, our abandoned farmlands to the right, with the blackened mounds where we used to smoke our fish. Beyond lay the thickets of the mangrove swamp.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you my own secrets. She’s only my African mother.’

I stared, ‘Really?’

She grinned, enjoying my surprise, ‘She’s my mother’s cousin. We first met when I was posted here three years ago.’

‘It’s hard to believe, the way you get along. Where’s your real mum?’

‘Mother, not mum. Dead. Cancer.’ She raised her finger, stopping my next words. ‘Don’t say it. She tried to kill me when I was a baby. I didn’t cry when she died.’ She looked at me defiantly. ‘And I’d probably try to kill my own children, so I’m not having any. It’s sometimes genetic, you know?’

I stared, wondering what had brought on this embarrassing level of intimacy. I tried to stem it: ‘Ah, this year’s harmattan is refusing to go—’

‘Have I told you I’ve been in jail?’

My butt clenched spontaneously. ‘As in . . . prison?’

‘I did time.’ She nodded cheerfully. ‘One year in Kuje Prison, Abuja. But I didn’t steal the money they accused me of, honest.’

‘I believe you.’

‘Your turn,’ she said grimly.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I couldn’t dredge up any confidence remotely as candid as hers, but what I had, I was now compelled to share. ‘I’m Menai,’ I blurted finally. ‘I lied when I said I was Gabonese . . . and this is my hometown.’ I shut my mouth, realizing how dangerous the ambiguous company of a woman could be.

She glared at me for one long moment. ‘Fine! Don’t tell me! As if I care!’

She stalked ahead alone.

* * *

MOST PEOPLE from the new Kreektown were there, milling about, chatting, and watching the volunteer gravediggers at work. Much had changed in the enclosure: it was much smaller. There was still the old house half sunken into the soft creekside earth. There was still the elevation from which the Mata had scoured his skies, but there was also the overgrowth that had stormed right up to the perimeters of his pavilion. Yet Jonszer had clearly kept the fight up till the end: the compound itself was as clean and Spartan as I remembered. The Menai had gathered here for festivals, but the compound had yielded acreage to the forest as the population had decreased. What was left of the pavilion was an old man’s house, and it was swamped now by the new Kreektowners.

He lay there, on his clay plinth, which seemed a hundred years old as well. A low, thick-thatched sun shelter stood over him, but otherwise he lay in the open, in the shroud of his red robe, as though in yet another trance. I stopped several feet from the pavilion, reluctant to go any farther. Involuntarily, I brooded on the contrast between the straitened circumstances of the Mata of the Menai and the grandeur of the Nanga of the Sontik.

If I had come the day I arrived, I would have met him alive.

A clean-shaven man with an unruly flare of grey hair walked toward the pavilion. He wore an expensive black jacket, but his sweat was plebeian enough. His eyes were intense and piercing, fixing on me from a long way off. Then he approached and offered me a handshake.

‘I’m Professor David Balsam.’

Something clicked from an earlier conversation I’d overheard at Ma’Calico’s, something about a harmless black British professor of history who carried around pictures of a bronze head. The locals called him Questionnaire—because he would ask silly questions until he was shooed away. I glanced across at Amana, and she glared vindictively as she slipped away. It was too late for me.

‘Zanda.’

He nodded. ‘You’re not from these parts.’ Coming from him, it sounded like an accusation.

‘Neither are you,’ I countered. My mood soured further; I was spoiling for a fight. I was back in Kreektown Primary, where, for six years, a staple playground debate was the identity of Zanda’s real father.

‘Exactly.’ He smiled nervously. ‘You wouldn’t know who’s organising this, would you? The old man is not to be buried here.’

Before I could respond, he spotted a more likely face and moved away, but my mood was already ruined. It had been a mistake to come. In the presence of Mata Nimito’s corpse, my remorse flared. I turned to go, but Amana had reappeared. Her mood had swung around, and she beamed excitedly. I wondered what there was to be excited about, at a burial.

‘I’m going to pay my respects. Coming?’

‘You didn’t even know him.’

‘It’s not as if I didn’t try. I came here a couple of times on my job, but he never spoke to me. He didn’t speak English or Sontik, and I don’t speak Menai. Come.’

She grabbed my hand, and I followed her through the crowd. There was an air of the carnival. Although Nigerians lived in awe of death, they saw nothing tragic about the death of an old man. Many had come with cans of beer. A grave had been sunk twelve metres from the Mata’s house. The gravediggers sat on the lip of the readied hole, smoking, joking, and passing a bottle of kai-kai around as they waited for the coffin, which had been donated by the Bus Conductor’s Club. I saw how, unless it was relatives who sank the grave, a burial was more waste disposal than funeral. The cheap coffin appeared, precariously balanced on a wheelbarrow. The gravediggers were anxious to be done, but the auxiliary nurse was, for once, out of his depth. They had to wait for a real doctor from the Ubesia council to sign a death certificate and write a burial licence. A bedraggled choir unloaded drums and cymbals from a minibus. The makings of a slapdash funeral were coming together as I stepped onto the elevation.

This was no way to sing a dead mata’s calamity.

Two youths emerged from the Mata’s submerged home dragging his mananga. My stomach heaved. That act of desecration swamped the distance I had built and nurtured since my emigration, ‘Hai!’ I shouted, advancing. They looked up and fled, leaving the ancient xylophone on its side.

Amana looked at me without comprehension. ‘They’re just having fun. The old man is dead; it’s just going to rot there.’

I kept mute. She was not to know that a mata could not be buried without his mananga.

As we watched, David Balsam ducked into the house. I turned away.

I glanced beyond her at Mata Nimito and stiffened. I took two steps closer. Deep breath. Slow exhale. Deep breath . . . I looked around.

She eyed me curiously. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Look at him!’ I whispered.

She did so and recoiled. ‘My God! He must have been at least two hundred years old!’

I exhaled slowly. It was another hallucination, then. I walked slowly up to Mata Nimito, philosopher-guide of Menai, and tried to see what I ought to see. He was so old, so frail, and the muscles of the thin limbs that projected out of the red robe were locked and stiff.

Miyaka sia Menai! Jonszer wasn’t addled after all. He had recognised me all along. His last words for me were a disgusted ‘See what’s left of the Menai!’

I wondered what Jonszer would have done.

I knew.

It was a breach of the distance I had built, but it was only a small, anonymous breach. No Menai would ever know. I went to the mananga. The arms were missing from their sockets. 3:2:1:2, that was the base rhythm. I had attended too many calamities ever to forget it. I had never wanted to hear that tattoo again, but for Mata Nimito, for Jonszer, I would play it one more time. I turned to the Mata’s home. The exterior of it was a stretched canvas for a mad illustrator: stick figures and savannahs, cattle and pyramids, tableaus painted in indelible red and black and ochre.

Inside was a large open-plan home, made small by the glut of old, inexpensive things of profound value. Questionnaire was bent over a rack of figurines, circumcisionheads, and carvings by the old man’s bed; he did not hear me enter. A rage flared, but I clamped down on it. Distance. I ignored him. On the wall, I found the mananga’s arms, the hooked mallets that gave voice to the instrument. They were dusty, had clearly not been touched in months. I ducked through the low doorway and stepped outside.

The air was noisy with the chatter of a hundred souls. The clouds were low and swift. I wondered what the Mata would have cast from such a sky.

‘Zanda?’

I turned. Amana was watching me curiously.

I addressed the mananga. It was a monster of a xylophone: three dozen uniquely sized, weighted, and tuned wooden panes, built in an arc around the player. It measured five feet from end to end. I wheeled it up to a rattan bench and sat, my back to the Mata, facing the bulk of the sightseers, most of whom now watched me. Anuesi gubu anueso gudabe: the day’s for the dead, but the dance is for the living. The tanda ma. It was the basic beat every Menai had to learn. It was the frame to which Menai history was set. Slowed down, it was also the frame on which the calamity, Menai’s dirge, was hung. It surged in my heart, but I clamped my teeth on it. I would not speak or sing Menai. From the corner of my eyes, I saw her, the very arch of her body, a question; I shut my mind and my eyes and let my fingers and ears rediscover the tanda ma. The voice of the xylophone drew down a silence on the pavilion. I felt curious eyes on me.

‘Amie Menai anduogu . . .’

Memory flooded me.

‘It is of Menai stock I speak,’ I began to play.

Near the peak of Arrawadi

is the plain of our Kantai . . .

I had not played a minute when I felt the whoosh of air. My hands faltered and I opened my eyes; for a disoriented moment I was back by my primary school locker, letting out the snake. Then I came back to the present: around me surged a stomping mob struggling to escape. Inside me, a floe of fear coalesced. A woman the size and weight of Asia plunged wordlessly past me, crushing my foot under one of her flip-flops. Suddenly the carnival was gone, leaving the enclosure like a many-limbed creature, breaking bottles, chairs, and saplings. The cheap coffin was splintered and crushed, the drums were punctured, clothes and shoes littered the Mata’s enclosure, but a tinny voice nearly deafened me, and it came from right behind me. I put away the mananga’s arms in their sockets.

I turned, light-headed. His voice was a note higher than I remembered. He had barely stirred, but he was coming fully out of the trance. It was no hallucination, then. I abandoned the mananga and scrambled up the embankment on my hands and feet. From the Mata’s house, a thunderstruck Questionnaire emerged, bearing two singate heads like holy relics. I looked at the Mata. It seemed evil to call a man this old back from the grave. His eyes were milky, almost undifferentiated between pupil and whites. I searched the drawn face for a familiar expression. Then he spoke, and it was Mata Nimito of the Great Calm. It was not evil, then, it was right, to live.

‘Worie.’

‘Dobemu,’ I replied.

He fell silent at my voice. Then he asked, ‘Ama Zanda mu chei?’

‘Zanda mu chei.’

His eyes closed, and he was breathing regularly again. I bowed, condemned by the silence. When I left, he’d had a Menai nation to care for him. I had not meant for this to happen, that the Mata would face his death alone, among strangers so impatient for him to go.

‘My apologies,’ said Questionnaire. ‘You’re certainly not a stranger to the old man.’

‘Yes,’ I said, not looking at him. ‘And where you were grave-robbing before, now you are a common thief.’

‘You misunderstand me completely. Listen, this is extremely important.’ He was climbing up to us. ‘I’d like to talk to the old man about these. Can you interpret for me?’ He took my shoulder to turn me around. I resisted, protecting my tears from sight, but he was strong, and I turned with him, pushing him away, sending him tumbling down the pavilion, bronzes flying. I wiped my cheeks and bent over the old man.

‘Jons miena qua?’

‘Jonszer amie gonzi.’ There was no point in hiding anything from the Mata. ‘Minsa qua na Agui.’

He turned towards the tidal creek, which sat lower in its bed than I had remembered. He looked at me. His eyes were so milky, I wasn’t sure, now, how much he could see. ‘Amazi manasi ungheu.’

I felt the shame but no surprise at his perfect recollections, for he carried millennia of Menai history in his head. I was away for six and a half years and he picked up as if I had just returned from the stream. His eyebrows lifted, and I followed his eyes to the huddle of wine gourds assembled for the burial. He could see well enough, then.

I filled two brown glasses and brought them over. He stared. I remembered and scrambled for water. Water was primal, water was first. I gave him a gourd, which he took with a hand that trembled. ‘Amis andgus.’

‘Andgus ashen,’ I replied and drank from the same gourd. I drank deep, quenching a sudden thirst not for water but for custom. It was true, then: all the healing in the world was in the gourd of water.

‘This is old water,’ I said in the Menai equivalent of small talk, dodging the weighty things that had to be said.

‘The sky pissed it when the world was young,’ he agreed.

An age passed. The sun was going down, so I pivoted the sun shelter until he was looking into clear skies. His hand—leathery, insubstantial—fell on my head, and a shroud of gooseflesh wrapped itself around me, stubbling my skin. I began to remember. Flakes of memory began to coalesce around the water in my guts. I served his wine and joined his eyes in the skies.

There was no ‘ordinary’ sky. Each one was unique. Every hour’s pattern was a perfect, never-to-be-repeated arrangement of shades, wisps, and auguries. For a cloudcaster like Nimito, a sky—day or night—was not just a densely scripted tome to be studied, deciphered, and decoded but a backdrop on which to project and encode a mata’s legendary memories of the past and deductions of the future. For me it was just a ceiling for life, but in his presence it acquired a grandeur that it normally lacked.

I found myself stealing glances at his riveted face, trying to glean something of the psychosis that had kept this man so long and consistently in this groove. His eyebrows were the most animated part of him, the one organ that seemingly refused to atrophy, gaining, instead, a second sight that stymied the first. The muscles of the brows were still as limber as a tongue. I watched the emotions course through them. A flash of sly. A pucker of small surprise. And then—thirty-five minutes after our ritual drink of water—an electrifying dilation that swamped the orbs and spread, through stiffening, corded muscles, through his wasted body.

His face fell slowly from the skies until his eyes held my gaze. There was a look of ineffable sadness in them. I knew it was time to mourn Jonszer. Yet by killing himself he had fallen foul of the great taboo. The Mata could not sing the tanda ma of his man Friday.

I went to the mananga, wondering whether I dared.

Jonszer’s last words came back to me, his disgust amplified by the pathos of his suicide, by the passion of an excellent swimmer who dived into a creek with a cord and roped himself to a mangrove root under the surface.

A nervous hand hovered on my shoulder, and when I turned, Amana was standing there. Her clothes were soiled and her hair generously supplied with twigs and burrs. She was looking at the old man, who had fallen back onto the platform. I put away the mananga’s arms and gathered him up carefully. He was breathing lightly, his body weighing little more than old rags. He smelled of childhood memories and brackish creeks.

I stepped down from the embankment with my burden. As I turned away, Questionnaire was emerging from the Mata’s house, without the bronzes, his lips a thin, angry line.

She swallowed. ‘Where are you taking him?’

‘Home,’ I said.

‘But Ma’Calico—’

‘Home,’ I repeated.

MATA NIMITO

Kreektown | 18th March, 2005

Aiyegun Yesi Yemanagu

You see that nation in the mists

among the hills, beside the scented trees.

You see her maidens’ comely walk,

her handsome sheep,

her finely sculpted men.

You hear the long language that comes like song,

and love her pleasant ways,

and do not know her name?

Her name is Menai.

We are Menai.

Our land is lost.

Our love, our soil, our soul.

But we’re one clan, one nation, and one folk,

pulled by the root from the soil of our hearth.

And we are not made any more for planting towns.

We are one folk, one cloth, one destiny, one kin,

pulled by deceit from the soil of our hearth.

We are not made any more for planting towns.

Living lightly on the land,

planting crops for trees

and tents for houses . . .

Our hearts are planted

in the country that we lost,

and we will return.

We are Menai.

HUMPHREY CHOW

London | 18th March, 2005

‘This could have been great, Humphrey,’ said Malcolm Frisbee.

He was breathing heavily as he approached the end of his exertions. It was the week after my return from Scotland, and we were dining in the seventh-floor restaurant of Tate Modern. His final forkful of lamb paused on the lip of its plate, in the midst of the wreck of our lunch. With his other hand he tapped the plastic folder that contained my short story, which had lain bereft on one side of the table while the main business of the food was sorted. On the folder was stencilled the famous red and black initials IMX. He ate the last of his lamb and sighed regretfully. ‘It could have been really, really great.’

I poked miserably at the remains of my Cornish haddock.

We occupied a table for four, whose surface was barely enough for the main courses that had eventually sated Malcolm’s appetite. Malcolm stood six foot three in his socks and weighed a hundred and forty kilogrammes. He had won the Booker Prize at twenty-six with his first novel, Sundance. That early coup made his reputation, but it also put him under immense pressure for a second book worthy of a Booker Prize winner. In the six desperate years following Sundance, he suffered acute literary agonies, which ended in a writing vacation on a remote Greek island, where he ate a poisoned crab. He was in a coma for weeks. When he recovered, it was without his midterm memory, which elevated the challenge of a second Malcolm Frisbee novel to the level of the scaling of the Pennines by a heavily pregnant amputee.

It would have been another Greek tragedy, except that all that had taken place thirty-six years ago. Malcolm was now chairman of one of the most successful literary agencies in Europe. He was reluctantly approaching seventy but still had two unrelenting passions: the love of a good story, and a regularly indulged love of good food. In his career as a literary agent, he had represented eighteen Booker and six Pulitzer Prize winners.

He brought his passions together in his business model. Few London executives could rival his entertainment budget. He was on a first-name basis with celebrity chefs up and down the country, for he had the sort of appetite that reverberated from restaurant floor all the way to the nerve centres of the most distinguished kitchens. Malcolm snared his authors over expensive, languid dinners and sacked them over courteous, cheap lunches. In between, there were restaurant sessions to mark new books, new prizes, and the opening of promising new eateries.

For the past year I had been steeling myself to turn down a Malcolm Frisbee invitation to lunch. I was married to Grace Meadows, his favourite agent, but even that connection had its limitations. My first and only book, Blank, had been booed by the critics and shunned by the bookshops, but I had been picked for the Richard and Judy Show and notched up pretty good sales on Amazon. Had I received a lunch invitation during the barren months that preceded my Scottish writing retreat, I’d have declined and sent in a letter quitting Malcolm’s agency with some dignity. It wasn’t that clear that morning when Ruby, one of the clutch of personal assistants that he called his memory bank, phoned me to schedule an ‘eat with the boss.’ For one thing, Grace would have warned me if my representation was on the line. For another, Lynn had liked my bomber story. It worried her, but she was sure she could sell it.

She had also told me, confidentially, that Malcolm liked my story as well. Because I had written two IMX agents into my story, it had gone round in a viral e-mail on the IMX intranet. The word was, the chairman had actually read—and liked—it! When the lunch date was made, I had thought I’d written myself back into the good graces of the most aggressive literary agent in London.

Just then, it was beginning to look like his traditional terminal lunch.

‘Lynn said you liked it,’ I ventured.

Four fat fingers shooed away the very thought. ‘I’m not in this business to like stories, Humphrey Chow. I’m in this business to sell ’em.’

‘But . . .’

‘And to sell a story, I have got to love it. Like is nothing. Comprehend?’

I nodded silently, filling my mouth with food, so I didn’t have to say anything. Through the clear plate glass of the restaurant was a view of the Thames on a sunny day, but it was lost on me. Although I knew the score, that didn’t make it any easier to bear. Literary agents needed working writers: young writers who were actively writing or older writers with a decent backlist. I had to accept Grace’s jibe: IMX had kept me on their books because I was married to her. Presently, the plates were cleared away and I helped Malcolm drain a second bottle of a bland 2001 Gigondas.

‘You must be wondering why I asked you to lunch, and here of all places,’ he said finally, staring with the vague disdain of a sated appetite at a tray of steamed mussels proceeding by waitress to a patron at the far end of the busy restaurant.

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.

‘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?’