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
