Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

I had not heard it at first, perhaps because of the whine of the traffic, but gradually, as I had become accustomed to the stillness of the room, not stillness but something weightier, viscous and blank-dark, I had started to hear a low yellow groan, a continuous whine voiced not out of conscious despair, nor anything thought-of, but simply to occupy the quiet. Later, when Mother was back at our house in Ikoyi, I understood that that strange groan had come from between the toothless gums of the idiot boy.

And it was that same unyielding naked moan that accompanied me during the following days, days in which every other sound was eclipsed, those shattered fighting days. Mother had swallowed the blue liquid and spent the next morning climbing stairs, and in the afternoon sweated hours in a hot bath. She went to bed after and shuddered, sobbed openly. The rainy season had begun, and I too was weeping, clamped limpet-like to the womb wall. At times Ben came in from the kitchen, bringing food and limewater. He said he was going to call the doctor, he knew what was coming, but Mother shooed him away, it was all right, he was not coming now, it was only a dress rehearsal. It felt like I was being forced by a vast sea, the indrifts came with pain, and I fought hard against Mother and her poison’s will. But I knew I had won when her muscles relaxed and she cursed the old woman for giving her a weak drug.

When Father returned he found her in bed, still weeping. She shouldered him away and refused his touch lest he upset her and me inside. ‘What have I done?’ she whispered.

I do not know whether the poison was designed to finish me or simply to induce the birth. Whatever her intention by taking it, it made me more determined to stay put. Soon I had dwelt longer than nine months. Mother now lay motionless in the day, occasionally dozing. Father dared not leave her and spent much time chattering. His talk was different than before. Now I heard the Arthur Ransome stories, the adventures of the Arabian Nights . He read aloud portions of certain novels. I listened with puzzlement, although never with indifference. And the longer I delayed my birth, the keener my sense of hearing became.

Nevertheless, I began to conceive Father as a danger to me. He was, I told myself, an inverse Scheherazade: he told stories, true, yet they were intended not to preserve but arrest life — his purpose, I thought, was to prevent my birth. Could it be that as long as I listened to this nightly chatter I would be unable to emerge from the womb? I began to think it might be better on the outside. I knew that there was greater variety in the world than my father recognized. Had I not heard its miraculous cacophony? Might it not be my task to try to regain this lost possibility? Besides, I was tired of the dampened underwater sounds, of stories only ever half told. So I took the decision to be born.

By then, however, after the forty-sixth week of her pregnancy, the doctors had decided to have me induced. At the Children’s Hospital midwives administered morphine and wet presses to my mother. Doctors swabbed below her belly button and readied their scalpels. They tried to cut me out. But no doctor ushered my arrival. I — myself only — timed my birth. On August the second at six o’clock, I began to initiate the contractions. In and out, in and out, I rocked the womb wall. There was tearing flesh. There was blood. And through her pain, mother whispered, ‘Late, late. Stubborn as a splinter.’

Afterwards, Mother lay on the blooded sheets, empty and half-spent, blinking at me, unable to hold my weight. Father or one of the nurses would support me by the back and head and tilt me towards her. But she died after three days of this.

So the first ceremony I attended was my mother’s funeral. I was not brought like every new-born to have holy water dowsed on my forehead. Instead, east we went, to St Saviour’s Church on Ikoyi Island. As I lay quiet in my cot (and my mother in hers), the mourners’ eyes flitted from cot to coffin, from coffin to cot, some sad for our family, others appalled, one pair of eyes, my father’s, narrowed in shame.

I kept quiet. I shed no tears. And for the most part neither did my father. But — only I noticed — as the priest spoke his final lamentation, a single tear fell from my father’s right eye. I see it now, inching down his cheek, slowly at first, then quickening, until it reaches the crest of his mouth; where it halts for a moment, caught between his closed lips; then, with their parting, Father’s tear makes its way down to the tip of his chin; suspends; and falls, silently striking my forehead.

Sometimes I have the feeling that my memory is a mausoleum of broken sounds. I feel an almost unbearable sadness when I think of all I have heard, the little that I retain and everything that is gone, all those minute, unutterable tones which most faithfully encapsulate my history. I know that one day all the sounds will disappear. Occasionally they will drift towards me like ghosts and timorously make themselves known. But gradually they will be overwhelmed by the rising clamour in my ears, as stars are eclipsed by city lights. It will take a bit of time. To begin with there will be an intensifying of pitch and volume. Next, the higher registers will expire. Then all timbre will be lost. One by one the sounds will merge until my hearing is no more than a roar alternating with a terrible silence. All I will be left with are these words.

Arrived at Jebba on 17th November, reads the first entry in my mother’s diary. It is a journal for the year 1945, leather-bound, measuring ten inches by five. It has been lying in Mother’s trunk since her death, when Father packed her belongings away. Since I moved up to the attic I have read the diary many times; as, I imagine, did Father in the course of his top-floor retreat. Soon the mice will discover the journal. Like me, they will consume the words. And in the process they will destroy the paper on which they are written. I will, then, preserve, here on my computer, this record of my parents’ tour. The diary continues: DO Niger met us at the station. We must have looked a couple of frights. Red dust matted my hair and Rex’s eyebrows. The DO took us to the rest house.

The following day Mother writes: Up at dawn. Smell of the Niger upon waking. In the cheerful blueness of the sky I see a kite. It was white, like the djellabahs Moslems wear. Bright sunlight and the air fresh. We go down to the river, a broad, silvery expanse flowing slowly between low banks. Spiky acacias, tamarind, neem and I think mahogany trees of a great height. In one short avenue their branches intertwine, making arches. They call this place the Cathedral. — 20th November. We take an excursion in a dugout canoe, big enough for a half-a-dozen more besides Rex and myself. The water is the colour of polished steel and the clouds shine upwards from the surface. Rex is obsessed with shooting. We pass a Goliath Heron with a speckled breast. It is sitting on a log and Rex takes a shot at it, but the vibration of the boat makes him miss and it flies off the way we had come. — 25th November. From Jebba via Minna and Kaduna on the narrow-gauge railway and into Zaria province. The heat in the carriage is intolerable. Arrive Zaria late. Sick. This morning a fearsome racket. Sick again.

On the 28th of November Mother noted that her sickness was almost over. The following day, she writes: We have taken a truck north-west through flat farmland dotted with baobab trees. Villages frequent. After the first twenty miles the green country changes into arid scrub. In several places, bush fires rage close to the road. Rex restless after the long stay in Zaria. All are happy to be on our way again. The sun is large and orange and is very different to the sun in England. Dawn and dusk are the pleasantest hours. The sun peeps out over the horizon and then it seems to rise all at once. At dusk there is supposed to be a blue flash, which you can just see as the sun disappears and then it gets dark very quickly. Always we have a campfire. Then the mosquitoes arrive. You must have had your bath by then, or you’ll be bitten. Next you get into your trousers and mosquito boots and a long-sleeved shirt and you sit by the campfire and have your drink of gin and bitter. The night closes around you and you are very aware of the stars.