Luke Williams: The Echo Chamber

Still worse: I find I can no longer listen to others; as if now, in my middle years, I am turning into the vacant, fidgety child I never was. Where once I possessed the power to listen, I now squirm, empathize and feel compelled to interject. How different it was before I grew, developed like any child. I began to see, to touch, to smell and taste. But before it all I learned to listen. This, together with my gift for rapt attention, was a combination irresistible to the men and women of British Africa. The servants of Empire were a muddled bunch: second sons, bored wives, athletes, soldiers, clergy. They each had something to prove, to boast about … to confess. ‘Why did you come to Africa?’ — none knew precisely, but everyone had a story — ‘How I got here? Well …’ ‘Those pesky clerks!’ ‘I love to shoot monkeys.’

And I, Evie Steppman, heard all their stories. I am the (until now silent) repository of the dreamers of Empire.

Why did you put up with it?

I found in these confessions the stories that were absent from my father’s lessons.

[ Pause. A scurrying among the rafters. ]

It is these same stories that I am now forgetting.

What are you going to do?

I must write. Set down on paper. Faithfully record my past before it becomes tinnitus and is lost. But how dreary. How dim and unnatural words are! How distanced from the live thing, the unknown generous gentlemanly thing, the cutting and distorting yet strangely exact pitch of my child’s hearing, are words. There are no words that can transcribe the vibrancy of my audition.

Reluctantly I write.

[ Pause. Silence. From which open quiet sea-sounds, dully, distantly, echoes of sea wrecks, surfpurl, tin-can music. Silence. Through which rasps a shrill whistle, a dog’s bark. Silence. And now wakings of battles, seagulls, sirens. ]

Where are you?

Gullane, East Scotland.

From where, exactly, are you writing?

From the house that we — Father and I — moved to in 1961, after Nigeria became independent from British rule.

Tell me about this house.

It is a two-storey house on the sea-front. I have confined myself to the ground floor, although lately I have made frequent trips to the attic, which I am attempting to clear out.

What is there to throw away?

A machete, a Lord’s lamp, railway timetables, a matchbox containing not a single match. There is a tin marked ‘unica’, a radio, piles of audio cassettes, pocket change, keys, mirrors, a rifle, a silver pocket watch with an absent minute hand. There is a cricket bat, a phonograph with its great horn, a family photograph album, an elephant tusk, files, tacks, pencils, cigarette ash, paperclips, rubber bands, a bronze pendant from Benin, several pairs of shoes, unanswered letters, an old purple dressing-gown. Hanging by a single hook is a map of the world, with gaps bitten from it. Books line the west-facing wall: histories, novels, treatises, a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica , 1911. Dominating the room are piles of papers, most my father’s, some my own. At one point, during his final months, my father bundled them up, ready for burning. It was also at this time he became infected with a debilitating lethargy, a sickness which seeded from his having left Lagos, but which only now came to fruition.

Go on.

Back in Britain Father sank deeper and impenetrably into his past. Spending more and more hours in the attic, listless with false memories of a glorious career, he receded into the incongruous corridors of history. During his top-floor retreat (he descended only to pass water, and, latterly, not at all, making use of a metal pail, which I would have to empty), he complained of scratching noises — mice. Even now, writing these words from my own place in the attic, I can follow the sound of tiny feet up beyond the ceiling, and across, left, right, to the oak-wood walls; yes, the scratching is all about me, the mice are in the attic, making homes among the discarded items.

But I tell too much.

Go on.

Let me tell you a story. When Sagoe was aged eight he saw a sheep hanging in a butcher’s window. Sagoe told his father about it, because he was hungry and had not eaten meat in months.

‘Go, buy me the head of the sheep!’ his father commanded.

Sagoe went to the butcher and bought the head. On the way home he ate the meat and returned with a skull.

‘What have you brought me?’ his father cried.

‘It’s a sheep’s head,’ Sagoe said.

‘Where are the eyes?’

‘The sheep was blind.’

‘And where is the tongue?’

‘The sheep was dumb.’

‘And where are the ears?’

‘The sheep was deaf.’

‘Sagoe,’ cried his father. But Sagoe had already run to the forest, leaving scorch marks on the dirt road.

Go on.

[ Pause. ]

Tell me more.

[ Silence. ]

You can’t stop there.

[ Pause. Silence. A winged insect thunders against the skylight. ]

Listen: A woman, not young, sits at her makeshift desk; ponderously, with shaking hands — it is cold — she surveys the room; her eyes first rest on the keyboard of her computer, then rise to the skylight, taking in the darkening sky. She hears the noise of the traffic; slowly, eschewing the city-sounds below, she turns from the skylight, rubbing her palms together for warmth, and begins — where to begin? — to recount her history — which is really the history of herself and Ade and Iffe and Nikolas and Mr Rafferty and Babatundi the idiot boy and Riley’s pointer and Mr and Mrs Honeyman and Damaris and Taiwo and her own father, as well as the impossibility of a mother who died in childbirth — and what to tell? — what is true, what was once true, what has been, might have been, what is? — and how to go about it? She asks herself a question — Who are you? — and another — Where were you born? — because this is what she knows best — at the outset, in the middle, she always asked questions; and here come the words, bit by bit; bit by bit the words form upon the page.

A winged insect, possibly a crane fly, or a moth, thunders against the skylight. Now and then the beating stops and the creature spirals to the floor. In the renewed silence I return to my computer, ready to get started with these stories. But without warning the drumming starts up again, and I am aware of what was present all along. The attic is filled with noise: the buzz of streetlamps, the scratching of mice, fat drops of water running from the treetops and striking the roof. I hear the tick-tock of Father’s pocket watch, car tyres on the street below indistinguishable from the surging of the sea.

Inspired by the din in the attic, the sounds of my past begin to rise to a clamour. The remnants of all I have heard, once clear but now shrill and indecipherable, are screeching in my ears, as though I have walked into an aviary. Father’s lectures merge with the sustained babble of his dying days. My own history combines with legends of sailors and witches that were read out to me from books. City sounds — Lagos, Oxford, Edinburgh — are alike, so what I thought might be a childhood memory is really only a memory of last week.

How can I write amid this commotion? I have to find a way of controlling these voices no longer guided by the clock. When one’s history is not governed by past, present or future, when every sound mimics another, one must order it by another principle.

Something closed must contain my memory. I will, then, enclose these stories within the tent-shaped margins of the attic; and the little I do let out — tales, lives, cities, monsters — will come by way of the attic; for all that will live, will live in the attic. The attic serves no function but to hoard all kinds of objects — not forgotten but buried, hidden at the top of the house; objects that are each decaying in their own way; objects that are still, meaningless and silent.