Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

It was, I think, for this same reason that my mother found my presence inside her difficult to understand. I was a fish swimming in her waters, tied to her and nourished by everything she drank down. But also not piscean, something that was taking on the form of her: two-legged, mostly hairless, with fingers and even fingerprints — undoubtedly like her — yet living inside her. Creation weighed down and confused my mother.

I delighted in my formlessness and incapacity to discern. What I heard I felt loath to interpret. Yet I understood I had to make something of this world that was pouring into me. If I did not I knew that the massiveness of it all, the abundance and disharmony would stifle my development. And then something changed. After seven months in the womb, a new sound arrived. Until that moment Father had been absent. I had not heard his voice, had spent my days alone with Mother in our mutual cave, which had been as large as the world. The sun, filtering through her dresses and pellucid skin, had filled the womb with diffused rust-colours, pinks, apricot, bistre. At night it was as if I had sunk to the bottom of the sea. The banks of darkness were occasionally disturbed by light, and I dreamed confusedly. But Father’s voice changed everything; and with it the tick-tock of the pocket watch arrived, a new sound, like a heartbeat but more regular. And whenever I heard the clock I heard a voice. Let me describe that voice: slightly nasal, not deep and sonorous, but low all the same, monotonous, rarely altering its pedagogic drawl, sometimes sliding to the higher registers, abruptly cutting off, disappearing, always returning. It was not long before I began to pick out certain words. Where does the voice reside? I asked myself. And then I understood that my gurglings came from within and were the nascent forms of my father’s superior lexicon. I perceived that it responded to Mother’s higher, fluting voice, and that certain expressions produced laughter, others seriousness or consternation. Was it, the voice, attached to the body? And, if so, what relationship might it have to the mind or soul? I had no time to answer these questions because soon the words became sentences, and I knew syntax. I was at a disadvantage, of course, since I was growing under the sign of the phonograph. Yet there were moments of respite. For instance, when Father recited portions of Gray’s Anatomy I was able to construct a crude map of my body. I felt my ear like a tiny conch. I came to think of tibia and fibula as sisters. I had only a partial idea of the shape of the human form; instead I gestured outward. I mapped the geography of Narium Minor, following in my mind the Intercostal Artery to the Costal Cartilages, where, across a thin and sanguine sea, Pectoralis Minor began. Here, so I imagined, stood the Pyramidalis Nasi built by the embondaged monsters Coccyx, Os Hyoides, Tarsus, Sacrum and Ischium, stolen from the Underworld. And there was Atlas holding the sky on his shoulders!

At first I revelled in this learning, for I perceived that I might be able to contain the sounds that threatened to engulf me. I discovered in everything Father said a certain way of compartmentalizing the world. Where once the sounds had segued together, now, with my father’s teachings, I learned that each object and every sound had its opposite. I discovered that East and West repelled one another. I understood that Cat and Sparrow were coupled in mutual hate. And yet it struck me that, even as this conception of the world made it easy to know, name and thus understand, it also made the world unfree. And, of course, on all sides resounded the tick-tock of the pocket watch. I recoiled instinctively, since my inclination was to play. I found renewed joy in acrobatics. Night after night I was subject to my father’s noisome words. It was then I decided to remain in the womb, quiet in my submerged cavern, where miracles daily occurred; there, amid the amnion, I was free to tumble and dream.

Meanwhile, on the outside, Mother lay supine on her reclining chair. She sipped camomile tea. She ate limes. An ostrich-feather fan relieved momentarily the sticky fly-midden of heat. By the eighth month of her pregnancy, the weight of me was too great; fat-bellied, immobile, she would call for Ade — our servant-boy — to press wet cottons to her forehead and footsoles. In the day, when Father was at the Executive Board, Mother would clasp her arms tightly around her abdomen, crushing me into a half-portion of the womb. Sometimes she exposed me to the daylight, and I felt nearly poached and I twisted and sobbed. There were occasions when she would feather her stomach with lightly nerved fingers and call me her ‘little hatchling’, her ‘bald dove’, her ‘stubborn splinter’. Her courage would suddenly leave her. She voiced fears: that her slim hips — ‘boy’s hips’, Father called them — might prevent me from slipping out whole, or else squeeze me into horrid shapes. At night came the temporary relief of darkness, and all my energies came to the fore. I would kick and flail, testing my new subtlety of movement. It was then, overcome, she would weep silently into her pillow. She cursed me under her breath, then Father for his pleasure that had brought this about. She began to call on saints and whisper prayers, although she had no religion. Father would rise from his bed heavily, aware that he could not better the situation, and fumble for the border of his mosquito net. He would climb out and stand over Mother, who was wet with perspiration, not daring to lift her netting. ‘Are you safe, Evelyn?’ he would say. And, ‘Is he coming now? Shall I call the doctor?’ We were like enemies, Mother and I, joined, but in mutual loathing.

I was, I believe, an unreality to her. She tried to understand children and called for Ade.

‘Play, Ade. I want to know about games.’

‘I play outside.’

‘You’ll kindly adapt.’

Ade would visit her during the long, hot afternoons. He showed her how to fold a square of paper into a point, press a thumb along each edge, then snap one’s fingers and transform the paper into a white aeroplane. He made telephones from empty cans and lengths of string. He broke bread into pieces and threw them from the window; all at once Hoopoe birds arrived and snatched the morsels from the air. It was learning about play that shifted her idea of me. She understood that soon I would be a presence on the outside. And when she understood this, she wanted rid of me. Until then we had been indissolubly tied to one another. I was nourished by her; equally, my mood and vigour or weaknesses affected her so finely that it changed her skin colour and textures and dictated her eating patterns as well as her body’s shape. So we both understood that we were one thing and not a pair. But then, once I had reached the eighth month of my womb-term, and had manoeuvred into the birth position, Mother began to endow her swelling with the aspect of a recognizable form. And she wouldn’t have me inside. It was a crushingly hot morning in May. Father was at Ibadan for three days. Mother, dressed in a white wrapper, left the house with Ben — Ade’s father and our cook and driver. They drove west along the Ikoyi Road, which ran between the golf course and the European cemetery, crossed the Macgregor Canal and on past the Brazilian quarter to the law courts. There, at Tinubu Square, Mother instructed Ben to let her out of the car. Walking through the dusty labyrinth of streets, she came to a lane where a clay hut lurched against a wall. She found them inside: mother, father and idiot son. They stood in the cluttered room, utterly remote from one another, their skin cracked and veined with mud. The man and the woman each held a teacup from England, the large, breakfast kind, flower-patterned like the cloth which covered the old woman’s swollen hips. And the cups, which also lined the shelves, were cracked like their faces, with dirt also in the veins and without handles so that the pair — though not the son, who hadn’t the grip to hold anything but the flowery rag he wrenched between the fingers of one hand — encircled them, tenderly, as if the cups themselves, and not their contents, were precious. Now and then a lorry passed by on the road outside, which caused the cups on the shelves to rattle and also the supply tins, cut in half and their tops discarded, which it seemed held the family’s possessions — seeds, dried potatoes, gin, nails, nuts and bolts, clippings from The Times , resins, amulets, medicines, but also weirder things: shrunken monkey’s heads, chameleon skins, white rooster feathers. The old woman shifted her cumbersome weight and gestured Mother to a corner of the room where tins of many-coloured liquids stood. Mother paid for a blue vial and pocketed it away.