Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

By the time Father returned to Lagos, I was nearly a year old. I hoped he would name me and make new arrangements for my care. He did neither; he only looked in on me now and then to check I was not sick. During the day Father disappeared into his work at the Executive Development Board. In the evenings he ate supper on the veranda, after which, bent over the table with his drink, he read his maps and papers. But he was not able to concentrate for long and fell to toying with his watch. Sometimes, after eating, he would call for Taiwo to bring me out to the veranda. He would stand up to hold my gaze in a strange, determined way, then open his mouth and look around helplessly, as if searching for something. He had loved Mother and ached on account of her absence. Her death had upset something fundamental in him.

There were times when my father spoke to me. His voice, heard in this intimate way across the veranda, was not deep, as one might have expected from someone so big and dishevelled, but low all the same, and sometimes it reached the higher registers. I had disliked its intonation when he talked during my gestation; and I disliked it still, its breathlessness, the barely distinguishable quality of the vowel-sounds.

‘Daughter,’ he said one evening on the veranda, ‘there are times when I feel guilty that you have been left, not only motherless, but without a brother or sister, who might have distracted you from your loss. But, you know, after giving the matter some thought, I have to tell you that you’re fortunate to be an only child. You will never know the resentment that will develop between siblings, the cruelty.’ He lit a cigarette, which the wind smoked as he related the following story. — There was a shopkeeper who had two sons. He was so poor, he couldn’t afford to feed them. So one day he told them they were old enough to make their own way in the world. He divided twenty pieces of bread and a chunk of mutton into two equal packages, handed them to his sons, then waved them goodbye.

The boys walked into the forest. After a while, the older brother, Sagoe, suggested they rest for a while and eat something. They should eat Little Brother’s food first, said Sagoe, since he was smaller and weaker and would soon tire if he had to carry all that food. So they rested, and ate, then continued their journey. After several days of this, all of Little Brother’s food had gone. When he became hungry, he asked for some of Sagoe’s share. Sagoe refused! Little Brother reminded him that they’d agreed to share their bread and meat. Sagoe thought for a minute, then said, in a strange voice, I will give you some food, but only in return for an eye. Little Brother cried and pleaded, but in vain. Finally, he agreed to give up an eye. Sagoe tore out Little Brother’s left eye, then gave him a piece of bread. They continued their journey, Little Brother trembling with the pain. And he was still hungry! That piece of bread he’d received had scarcely made a dent in his appetite. When once again Sagoe stopped and sat down to eat, Little Brother could stand it no longer and pleaded for more food. Sagoe thought for a bit, then said he would give him more bread, but only in exchange for the other eye. What could Little Brother do? He pleaded for mercy, but Sagoe remained firm. Finally, Little Brother decided that it was better to be blind than to die of hunger. All right, he said, take my eye. So Sagoe tore out Little Brother’s right, remaining, eye. Then, without the slightest bit of pity for Little Brother, who lay on the ground writhing in pain, he unpacked his bread and meat, took out a portion, left it beside Little Brother, and walked away. Hearing the twigs crack underfoot, and guessing what Sagoe had done, Little Brother begged him not to leave him alone there in the forest, weak and blind and without food, where he would surely die of hunger or be devoured by wild beasts. But Sagoe had gone.

I understood then that my father was lost. His wandering, decayed imagination, the imagination with which he had designed his world, and machined it, and bounded it, that same imagination was racked and transcended by my mother’s death. His movements became furtive, difficult to interpret. He was not so much a presence, I thought, as a kind of silhouette, thrown like the wardrobe’s shadow, around which, out of habit or superstition, Taiwo made sure to steal a wide berth. I did not feel lost on those evenings on the veranda, but rather invisible, like a dusty heirloom of uncertain origin. This did not trouble me greatly, because my mind, or rather my audile facilities, were keenly active and absorbed most of my attention.

So I lay and listened, and occasionally Father spoke to me on the veranda. My nursemaid fussed over my appearance. I felt empty, closed my eyes and drank from the teat. A year went by in this way. And then, one afternoon, whilst I was feeding, a thought came to me: how was it that each afternoon my window was open and the shutters closed? It was not Taiwo’s doing — she who arrived each morning and poured light into my bedroom and spread silence — for she had no use for shadows. At some point in the afternoon, as I struggled in sleep, someone was correcting my nursemaid’s hateful work. I knew because I would wake into shuttered darkness and vibrant sounds. For many weeks I was puzzled. Then, when I woke once before my usual time, I found a boy watching me — I knew it was he who had closed the shutters and opened the window. He was sitting on a stool beside my cot, pressing his face to the bars. We watched one another unblinkingly. His teeth were very white. I noticed that his hand picked at the hem of his shorts, his belly button, the knots of hair that were thickening on his head, and one leg persistently shook. I could feel the vibrations through my cot.

In the afternoon Taiwo sat in her room across the corridor, sewing angels for the Christmas fair. It was on account of her religion that she was sentimental. The firstborn of twins, the younger of whom had died, she said she knew what it was to lose family: and perhaps this was why she permitted the boy’s presence in my room — I think she believed the companionship beneficial.

After our first encounter I woke often in the half-light to find the boy seated on the stool, watching me. His eyes seemed a kind of climate, wild and busy, with flecks of red spoking inward, each pupil merging into its dark iris, so dark I thought they were of the same black pigment. He looked. I looked. We looked at one another looking. And I began to feel that I was emerging from my emptiness. No longer did I wish to return to the womb. I could not deny it; I was beginning to like life better. Outside, a hot wind blew. The shutters stirred. I reached slowly through the bars to still the boy’s trembling leg; I felt how bony his knee was and how soft the skin. For a moment the leg rested; when I withdrew my hand it resumed its shaking. He looked harder; he was interested in my fingers with their tiny pink nails. He knew I had done wrong, I think, which fascinated him; he got a strange satisfaction from it. Now and then the Lagos clock would strike, and he, who was always moving, but whose gaze rarely faltered, would look up for a moment or two.

Ade was four years my senior. He wore blue shorts and a jumper from which Iffe, his mother, had cut the sleeves. Mornings he spent with Iffe at Jankara market, where she traded onions. She brought him back in the afternoon, to their compound at the side of the house, where he was cared for by his father Ben, our cook. But he was spending longer and longer in my room and eventually started to return after his evening meal.

It was 1949. The rainy season had begun. I was nearly three years old and still did not have a name. If besotted, grieving, hard-working Father identified me with one, I did not know it. In semi-darkness Ade sat on his stool. Beside me, on a bedside table, stood a hurricane lamp, which threw a circle of light on to the wall. In this light the silhouettes of a thousand insects danced. The scene — accompanied by the rain, which beat a rapturous applause on the roof — absorbed us completely. At one point Ade raised his arm, and his hand, having moved in front of the lamp, was transformed into an enormous shadow on the wall. I laughed. Ade saw the effect, and his other hand joined the first; I watched the shadows: sometimes they came together and leaned, and leaned further and swayed, frequently they divided and spun, the movement effortless, dreamily pelagic. I stood up in my cot, fed my arm between its bars and thrust my hand in front of the lamp. We began to play, Ade tilting his hand to one side, me taking the opportunity to dip beneath them. It was then, I don’t know why, as the insects circled, and our shadows danced, the thought came to me that had we not discovered this game, then we — Ade and I — might have quickly grown apart; but now we had made a surer connection.