Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

The sky was starting to pink over and darken. Clouds, great zeppelins of amber and grey, crept across the horizon, as if, though lighter than the air, and floating in it, they were composed of a substance of great weight. Yet their edges were thinned and stirred, whisked almost. These clouds called up ponderous thoughts, but threw no shadow, and I had a notion it was not yet time to go home. So I took a diversion. I visited the zoo. Dusty from the evening’s sweep-out, and aided by the rain — rain so fine it might have been a mist — the air smelled strongly, sweetly of truffles. I looked over the railing to the gorilla enclosure and saw a dark form among the knotted timber. I walked down into the monkey house and pressed my face to the glass. And there she was, sitting on a cement outcropping, a mighty weight, perfectly balanced. As I approached she seemed to raise herself a little on her haunches, her black fingers husky, charred, her skin sparsely coated and patched with silver. Her eyes, a shade of deep red I have seen on a certain type of berry, stared coldly through the glass. Even colder was her indifference to my gaze, and the obvious might in her arms, with which she had held the child, but used now only to balance her movements and worry a welt on her thigh. I saw in her eyes, in their unconcern, something I did not wholly understand, but which linked, in my mind, the cement in her enclosure and the boy in the doctor’s story and also the light of the swimming pool and my awareness of that light.

Travelling home, I looked through the window of the bus. The clouds had turned to ash, and ghosts of embers were scattered across the horizon. Below the sea and the tall-funnelled tanker with its row of lights slanting from masthead to bow, a string of beads, winking. The water was black; the wash inaudible. Not the engine of the bus. It throbbed in my chest. I turned my thoughts back to my history. I started to recall my mother’s funeral. By the time I reached Gullane the clouds had disappeared, and a few stars were out. Now I am seated at my desk. The pocket watch ticks (from now on, unless I state otherwise, the pocket watch is always ticking); cars wash by outside; the mice are asleep in their holes. In the familiar quiet, I will press on with these stories of my past.

…

It was raining as the small group of mourners arrived at St Saviour’s Church on Ikoyi Island. The priest was waiting below the pulpit. Thick-necked, with skin that had bled from his shaving, he stood with his arms spread before him, palms upturned. Pallbearers, Yoruba from the mission, set my mother’s coffin to the priest’s left; Ben, who bore my cot, placed me to his right. Mourners filed in, perspiring, occasionally coughing. Their footsteps clattered on the floor. Father approached last, worrying the scar on his chin and hauling his big frame with metre-strides. He thanked the men and took his place in the front pew. Lying on my back, I examined the ceiling. It was many-domed, of a dark wood that showed signs of swelling from the damp. I focused on a panel between two arched beams. As the priest began to speak, I kept looking — I could not move, the sheets cosseted me — and I saw that Christ was painted on the ceiling. His face was lean; the cheekbones high; his body wasted and pale; the ribs raised corrugations on his chest. No one attended him, not Mary his mother, nor St John, nor the captain Longinus, nor angels or thieves. A single bead fell from a wound in his right flank. Christ was dead, yet his eyes, an inordinate blue, were open. And for this reason, and the fact that the artist himself could not have set eyes on him, I felt that he was very beautiful. As I followed the play of brightness and shadow from the candles on the ceiling, Christ stared down at me, his face fading and rekindling by turns. I imagined what he would have seen from up there: the floor of black-and-white lozenge-shaped tiles, the rows of pews sparsely peopled, the apse depicting in stained glass his journey to Golgotha. But more vividly, I thought, he saw the two of us, my mother in her open coffin and me in my cot, lying side-by-side, directly in his line of vision; my mother’s eyes closed, as if she had shut her lids to the warm light of the sun, the skin paler above her cheek bones, almost transparent; my eyes round, dry, wild amid my flushed and wrinkled face. And it struck me, as I listened to the priest, who spoke of the glory of the afterlife, that my mother could not have died in vain — to have perished so would have been an affront to Christ. The rain rattled on the roof. A candle hissed and was extinguished, and the priest told the story of the Passion, following the sequence from the Stations of the Cross to the Resurrection.

‘Evelyn’s untimely death,’ he said, ‘reflects Christ’s own, for did he not, like Evelyn, who has given us a wonderful baby daughter, did he not also pass away in order to bring life into the world? Christ taught us that in nature every moment is new,’ he said, ‘that the coming is sacred.’

How right he was! It was then I hoped for a miracle. I willed my mother to wake, she who like me faced the painting of Christ. And if she would not enact a miracle, she might show a sign of forgiveness. Perhaps she would find a way to speak to me! I could not believe she had died for no reason. Even as I willed it, however, I sensed her lifeless form. The priest said, ‘Let us pray.’ I did not close my eyes or listen to his words. Instead I thought of my mother, urging her to speak. I felt there was something inside her that wanted to come out. But she did not speak; the stillness of her coffin, and the horrid heat in the church, and the dull responses of the mourners, only expressed the meaninglessness of her death. I closed my eyes and uttered my own prayer. From the grave comes life, I said to myself, from the coffin the cot, from death, birth. I itched under my sheets. Mother, I said, forgive me. Tell me you died for a reason. The rain continued to rattle on the roof. But my mother was silent.

When I opened my eyes Christ had disappeared; his chiaroscuro face eclipsed by Father’s, equally shadowed. He had moved from the front pew and stood, head bowed, between the coffin and my cot. I saw his eyelids pulse, but his face was taut. As the tear slid from his cheek and struck my forehead, his expression did not change.

I turned, hot with fury. Why, I thought, did my mother have to die to bring me into the world? Where is the glory in death that the priest spoke of? Mother was not glorious. She was cold and mute and the heat in the church was putrefying her.

‘Her soul is in heaven,’ said the priest, ‘filled with glory.’ Mother is miserable, I thought, and she cannot say otherwise. The tear burned on my forehead. Mother’s silence was something I could not fathom.

As a child I learned about the men who collect unica , a term which signifies objects that are the only one of their kind. Examples include: the stuffed corpse of Nipper, the Jack Russell depicted with his head cocked to the left, listening to the gramophone on the HMV record label; the tendrac Dasogale Fontoynanti, the sole specimen of which was caught in Madagascar in 1878; certain postage stamps, for instance a penny black printed with the queen’s head upside-down; a disc featuring the singer Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, the only one of his kind to have had his voice recorded. Collectors of unica operate under the oddest of circumstances. Not only are the objects handled by gangs of unscrupulous agents, they are much sought after, and thus the collector, almost always an optimist, is often duped into buying a fake. These men, with their combination of passion and gullibility, fascinated me as a child: perhaps I saw in their vain but somehow necessary activity a symbol of my listener’s art. It was because of those men that, as a child, I etched the word ‘unica’ on to the side of a biscuit tin. And in the tin, which sits before me now, I stored my favourite unique things. The tin measures twelve inches across and eight inches wide. Although the paint has faded one can make out a design of red-and-white arabesques in whose centre stands an elephant, her trunk gripping an identical tin which bears the same design of arabesques and elephant, tin in trunk, ad infinitum. Inside are some two-dozen items: my caul, my first tooth, a photograph of Father as a child holding tightly to a swing, a matchbox containing a pair of earplugs, a postcard entitled ‘First Snow in Port Suez’. Of these — a gathering of objects unique to me, a positive companion to my history — I will speak later. The tin marked ‘unica’ also contains less tangible traces of the past, marked by their absence, a kind of negative impression of my life, like the brightness on a wall where a portrait formerly hung. I include them in my collection precisely because they ought to exist, unique because they are not there. The most conspicuous absence is my birth certificate.