Making Wolf

by Tade Thompson

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

'Shocking and perceptive' Guardian

'It was easy to stay up well past lights out to read just one more chapter - and then one more...' James Oswald

'Engaging' Sunday Times

LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA GOLD DAGGER

Meet Weston Kogi, a London supermarket store detective. He returns home to his West African home country for his aunt's funeral. He sees his family, his ex-girlfriend Nana, his old school mate Church. Food is good, beer is plentiful, and telling people he works as a homicide detective seems like harmless hyperbole, until he wakes up in hell.

He is kidnapped and forced by two separate rebel factions to investigate the murder of a local hero, Papa Busi. The solution may tip a country on the brink into civil war.

Making Wolf is the outrageous, frightening, violent and sometimes surreal homecoming experience of a lifetime.

Praise for Tade Thompson:

'Breathtaking landscapes and intoxicating food and drink . . . endemic corruption, sultry sexuality and casual, slapdash violence . . . A rock-and-roll edge' The Financial Times

'Brutal, uncompromising and thought-provoking . . . superb' M. W. Craven

'A magnificent tour de force' Adrian Tchaikovsky

'Smart. Gripping. Fabulous!' Ann Leckie

'Mesmerising' M. R. Carey

Release date: May 7, 2020

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 272

Sample

The lady beside me, who had spent the entire seven-hour flight reading three glossy magazines, whom I had tried to engage in conversation without success, nudged me with her elbow and thrust her jaw towards my drink.

‘If you don’t finish that, they’ll take it from you,’ she said.

She turned back to her article before I could respond. Less than a minute later, the cabin crew took my drink away.

Air travel. Never my favourite thing. Each time I had to endure descent from thirty thousand feet, I made a pact with God, and this time was no exception. Seat belt fastened, tray folded back up and locked in place, in-flight literature stowed away, back rest restored to the upright position, I gripped the armrests tightly. An announcement of some kind was not broadcast as much as beamed directly into my head. I started sweating and the landing gear struck the runway and my aunt was dead.

I held my breath until the plane was taxiing on solid ground. Dark outside, the terminal lit up like a lighthouse beacon. Other passengers undid their seat belts and started flipping on mobile phones before the plane came to a halt. I waited until the seat belt light went off and the cabin crew announced that it was all right.

Welcome to Alcacia International Airport. This is Ede.

Nobody ever welcomed you to Ede City; they just informed you that you had arrived and left you to fight or fall. Nobody wanted to be here; they only travelled to Alcacia if they had to. Like UN peacekeepers. Like UNESCO. Like me.

The passport control officer required twenty bucks American folded and tucked into the photo page. He made it disappear with consummate skill. It was both horrifying and reassuring to know that Alcacia had not changed.

Blur to the luggage carousel. This served me new anxiety, but it was unfounded. I rescued my baggage. The airport appeared cleaner than I remembered, and more people wore uniforms. I was unmolested until I reached customs, where unfit officers demanded to search my bags. They found nothing, but still stood expectant, Mona Lisa smiles breaking through their sternness. Twenty bucks American each, which was twenty more than I had budgeted for this part of the journey. I could already feel the last vestiges of my inner peace leaching away.

Arrivals seethed with people and heat and intractability. The barriers pulsed, as if they were breathing. People strained to see loved ones, and a few held placards; but most just pushed and shoved. With the exception of a few South Asians, the faces were mostly black. Nobody smiled. I dove in and fought my way to the taxi rank. I used my rusty Yoruba, but it sounded odd, even to me. I needed more practice, a few days, perhaps, but I knew I wouldn’t be here long enough to improve sufficiently. Silent, surly driver. Dark, windless night, no stars but abundant neon. Streetlights lined the first mile from the airport, but then became intermittent and stopped altogether. There was a savoury smell in the taxi, but I couldn’t place the food. The air conditioning worked, so I counted my blessings and undid the top two buttons of my shirt.

The taxi dropped me at the Ede Marriott. The women loitering just outside were not guests. Only their smiles were free. I checked in and tipped the bellhop. As soon as he closed the door, I stripped off my clothes and turned on the shower. It did not work. I opened the tap, which did work, so I filled the bath and doused myself in cold water.

The last time I travelled from Alcacia International Airport was fifteen years ago. On that day, all the passengers ran with their suitcases and backpacks across the runway to the plane. There had been an accordion connection, but an imperfect seal had led to the fall and subsequent death of three passengers, countless others injured. Their bodies lay broken, blood-wet and mangled on the tarmac when I wheeled my luggage past.

Back then, there were gunshots from beyond the terminals and the smoke trail of a rocket-propelled grenade snaked from the ground describing an arc that just missed the communications tower and ended in the ruins of a section of roof.

I remember that I lost one of my bags, dropped it while running for an aircraft that looked like it was ready to start taxiing down the runway. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the pilots took off with only a third of their passengers. I kept looking back, even though I knew it was impossible for me to spot my aunt at the terminal. I was worried. The woman was fearless but didn’t know how to look out for herself. She was among hundreds of people outside the airport trying to avoid the wave of bloody revolution sweeping across Ede.

University students had been running riot for weeks. My aunt had finally saved enough money to buy me a ticket to London, England. She had packed my sister off the year before. There was widespread fear as the youths clashed with police in bloody street skirmishes that left the city fractured and charred. There were rumours of people eating fresh corpses, but it was always a friend of a friend or a distant cousin who heard it. The exodus out of the city was rapid, and people fought each other for spaces on lorries, buses and freight trains.

The students were demonstrating because the military government had promised elections and stimulated the registration of political parties, then invited the top players in all the parties to a conference, after which the conference hall just happened to blow up in a ‘gas flow malfunction’, killing all but eight. The result was an election suspended until further notice, widespread anger and the radicalisation of university students.

My aunt did not seem to be bothered. She just told me to be sure my passport was secure and that my books were packed. We set out at five a.m. I wore two layers of clothes. My aunt and I, we looked like looters.

‘When you arrive at the airport, take off the outer layer of clothes,’ she’d said. ‘Igba yen ni wa wa da bi eniyan pada.’ That is when you will look human again.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said.

We got into her 1980 Volkswagen Beetle and drove to the airport on the last of her hoarded petrol. Even that early in the morning, we passed four male students beating up a policeman who lay insensate on the road. They stomped on him repeatedly and blood seeped carelessly on to the tar.

Drums beating, interrupted only by gunshots and explosions. Burning cars on every street corner. My aunt drove through all of this, and, when she came to the traffic jam on the road that led to the airport, she switched off the car and left it. We walked. We pushed through the crowds with me holding my ticket high. She bullied and bribed her way through. Without a ticket, nobody could get into the terminal so I left her pressed against the glass. My eyes misted up; apart from the crowd that crushed against her there was the danger of the violence spreading. I waved. She mouthed something that did not seem tender.

At check-in, I was searched and my rectum probed for drugs. They X-rayed me for swallowed items. There was a brief interrogation. I had money for bribes laid out in packs of one hundred local dollars and had used them up when I got to the tunnel. When it fell apart, I shrank from the screams of the wounded and followed the rush to find alternative routes to the plane.

There were explosions and short-lived fires in the Duty Free shops as the revolutionaries reached the taxi rank, from where they could fire rockets at will and within range of the best parts of the terminal. Smoke burned my lungs as I ran and ran and ran to the plane that seemed too tiny for the number of people waving boarding passes. Knowing my countrymen, I was sure that most were forgeries.

The final scuttle up the emergency inflatable slide – yes, you can move in the reverse direction from its intended purpose. We scrambled up like contestants in a Japanese game show. I gripped plastic, slid a bit, stopped myself, continued, and gained the summit in inches. After me, only two passengers made it in before the attendants said, ‘Sorry!’ and closed the doors.

As we sped away, I looked out of the window and saw people smashing up the windows of the terminal building. I hoped my aunt had got through the crowd and home safe.

The plane’s engines fired more powerfully. Gravity pressed me into my seat as the plane rose, giving me an aerial view of the city. Smoke from multiple fires. People were dying down there but I was safe. Nana was down there. My girlfriend. Her parents had fled with her to the north of Alcacia days before. I felt pangs of loneliness, but then we were in cloud and I couldn’t see Ede any more.

And now, fifteen years later, I had returned because my aunt had died. There was no smoke, no rabid university undergraduates clamouring for blood and electoral representation using surface-to-air missiles. Just me in a hotel room, standing at the window dripping wet because the only way to stay cool in the infernal heat was to shower and let the water evaporate off my skin. It was a window to nowhere. It opened to the wall of the next building, and there was too much darkness to see any features. This was me in the underworld.

I sent a text message to my sister Lynn in London.

Arrived safe. You should have made the trip instead of me. I hate it here. I’ll let you know when I arrive at the ceremony. X

Her reply beeped back within thirty seconds.

You’re a Yoruba man. Alcacia is your home. You’re only renting England. Stop whining, Weston. I love you. X

I only had to survive for two days. Forty-eight hours and I would be back in London living my real life.

I couldn’t wait to leave.

The next morning I set out for the funeral in a rented jeep. The satnav was erratic, but even so, I only got lost on the disorganised Ede roads three times, which I thought was impressive. I should have taken a taxi. The day was bright with subtropical sunshine and windy enough to make me squint. I found my way into the cemetery and took in the gathering. There were wooden fold-out chairs in ranks, some of which were empty. I sat in one at the very back, and although the ground was uneven, I found myself on a hump that gave me a good view of the proceedings. The guests close by glared at me. Not surprising; they either didn’t know me or knew me and thought I wouldn’t come.

This was my experience of the funeral: I kept running the names of the malaria parasite through my head to give me something to do while the preacher read out the eulogy. I was so scared of malaria that I double-dosed on proguanil and mefloquine. The night before, I hunted mosquitoes in my hotel room and sprayed odious chemicals on my skin to repel them.

But the funeral. The funeral was the reason I was back in the home country. My aunt had taken care of me when I was young, paid for my airline ticket to the UK, given me my start. I’d long since settled the financial obligation, but some debts just can’t be settled by an online credit card transaction. There were lots of people, many of whom were here because three large cows had been tethered outside the family home for the last few days. Guaranteed food was a potent crowd draw around here.

This was the scene: Ede City, Alcacia. It was in West Africa. Former British colony, former French protectorate, former Portuguese trading post, now in its fourth decade of independence, the country of my genetic contributors. I’m British these days, but I still consider myself loyal to Alcacia.

The funeral was full of tears, a shrill, quivering warble and humongous, wobbling, semi-exposed breasts. She had a name, but I didn’t know it. She was a professional mourner who worked her considerable girth, voluntary lacrimation and intimidating vocal range in the service of the more emotionally continent bereaved. The invited guests milled about or sat on headstones. Some wept quietly, privately, unusual for black Africans. We like to express our emotions freely, spread it about, communicate it to others. My tears are bigger and better than your tears. I have more grief than you. I loved her more than you.

I sat apart from everyone; I always have.

With time I recognised a face here or there from growing up. No names came to mind, though, so I just continued to roll my eyes over the crowd. Idle. They cast furtive glances at me, trying to place me, knowing me to be foreign from my clothes and demeanour. The priest finished and the mourner let rip, asking to be buried with my aunt who, if memory serves, would have frowned at her lack of self-restraint.

This graveyard was no different from the ones I’d seen in England. Except for the fences, which were there to delineate the boundaries between the quick and the dead. Vandalism was almost unknown because Alcacians were scared of ghosts, wizards and other supernatural nasties. The magical route to riches was to sleep in a graveyard for seven days and nights, at the end of which a demon would appear and reveal the secret to unlimited riches to the brave soul who had breached the taboo. I always touched my head when I passed a cemetery because I believed spirits could suck out my soul from the fontanelle at the top of the skull. Seriously, I did.

Something buzzed behind my ear and I slapped, but not too keenly; I didn’t want to appear too much of an outsider. All the time I was away, telling myself every day that I’d return, telling myself that eating McDonald’s and having an uninterrupted electricity supply hadn’t changed me. Lynn was more realistic in her assessment and told me we would never settle back in Alcacia, but that the urge was a typical immigrant instinct, a next year in Jerusalem thing.

I heard someone say my name and looked around. It’s difficult to recall my exact reaction but I’ll go with alarm, followed by low-level anxiety bordering on panic. Here’s why: Churchill Okuta. Or simply, Church. That grin. Straight out of my secondary-school nightmares. Church was the meanest person I had ever met in my life, and that is saying something. He had made my life unbearable as a child, yet here he was. I had like two inches on him now but back then he towered over me. The day I arrived in my dorm for the first time, Church took a leather belt to me ‘to establish the rules and ranks’.

His nickname back then was Tippu Tip, after the notorious black Arab slave trader. He called his dormitory room Zanzibar and the activities there were notorious. ‘Going to Zanzibar’ became school parlance for taking a beating. Years later he was expelled for flogging, using his belt as a leash and tying a junior student to a handrail outside in the cold overnight because ‘dogs shouldn’t live indoors’. The boy almost died of lobar pneumonia.

Now, standing before me, he wore a shirt with a pattern of repeated kolkis on a background of deep purple. Frivolous for a funeral, but that was Church. In the microseconds before we spoke, I wondered if he and I were related, God forbid. What would Church be doing at my aunt’s funeral?

‘You bastard,’ said Church. ‘When did you get into town?’ Broad grin. Church’s grins were frightening as hell because he had small, even, inward-pointing teeth that reminded you of a shark. Neither was he calling me ‘bastard’ in a comradely fashion.

‘Hello, Church,’ I said. ‘Nice to see you again.’

‘Liar.’

‘How’ve you been?’

‘You know. Here and there, here and there.’

‘How did you know Auntie Blossom?’

‘Oh, I didn’t know her. I just like attending funerals. I enjoy the food.’

I grunted.

‘What are you doing these days? I heard you went to America.’

‘London.’

‘Yes, London. All is one to us. Away is away.’

‘True.’

‘So what do you do?’

‘I’m in the police force. I’m a homicide detective with the Metropolitan Police.’

‘Police. Yes.’ Which was meaningless. I started to feel the familiar panic because, back in school, when Church wanted to catch you out in a lie he would make a meaningless statement, one that would coax you into embellishment and which always indicated he knew you were lying. As you talked, stammered and expatiated, painting yourself into that proverbial corner, he would start unbuckling his belt.

And I was lying, but only a little, and only because I wanted him to veer away from my orbit.

What I should have remembered is that Church did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Consequences being a strange and abstract concept, the understanding of which he left to others.

Some Area Boys walked by, paying loud respect to Church by shouting his name. He waved to them then shrugged at me, as if to say, What can I do?

Area Boys were like multi-purpose thugs for hire and private entrepreneurs. To throw a party in peace, you had to pay them in cash, food and drinks. During elections politicians hired them to disrupt the opposition’s campaign. Since the opposition would have hired their own Area Boys, the result was usually a magnificent street fight or a carnival of drive-bys. Occasionally, they went on rampages in which they looted, raped and killed at random.

The ones paying homage to Church had an American street theme. Imagine five men wearing beanies and puffas in average temperatures of thirty-nine degrees Celsius and minimal wind chill. I didn’t dare laugh.

‘Are you going to the after-party?’ Church asked.

‘Yes, Auntie Blossom was—’

‘Okay, see you there.’

Before I could say anything he was fiddling with his mobile phone and making his way to the exit. I can’t say I wasn’t pleased.

I turned my eyes and mind away from Church and back to the ceremony. Now that the preacher was finished, pallbearers lowered the coffin. There were four old men with talking drums beating away in sweet rhythms interspersed with traditional Yoruba verse, some of which were the antithesis of a Christian service.

O d’oju ala. I will see you in dreams.

The family edged closer. Well, the immediate family, because every Yoruba is related and the definition of family is broad. Up until now I had lurked at the edge of the crowd, but I started to push my way through. I became tense. I wasn’t thinking of Auntie Blossom, I was thinking of the tall man wearing a massive agbada who was pouring dirt into the grave. My father, but not my dad. He must have felt something because he looked up just then and saw me. He showed no reaction except to let his eyes linger for half a minute. He had been crying. This made me sad in spite of myself. Back when I was a child this man never cried or showed emotion. He associated tears with womanly behaviour and discouraged my brother Simon and me with violence.

Beside him, with a clump of dirt in her hand and trailing a gang of children, was his new wife, the one he married after my mother. Her name escaped me. The woman looked insipid and judging from her hips and progeny, she was just a brood mare for the old man. I didn’t feel fraternal towards her children. I felt unkind.

A loud bang interrupted my cruel thoughts. The songs all began with an all-powerf. . .