‘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