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
