Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

For several evenings the shadows of our hands danced on the wall. Yet I found I missed our previous contact, face to face, on either side of the cot’s bars. Something had changed in me. And something had changed and developed between us. And I knew this change was because of the game. Taiwo seldom noticed our animated wall; she dozed in her room or decorated herself or read spiritual pamphlets. Neither Ade nor I thought to fashion an object with our hands. Perhaps this was because the shadows themselves were imitations, and it did not occur to us to form an object — Pisces, a swan — and have it represented itself by a likeness. Or perhaps it was simply that we did not have time to develop the game, for not long after something happened to end it altogether.

The evening we played the game for the last time, Father returned early from work and invited a colleague for backgammon and drinks. His colleague laughed in shrill bursts that did not impart mirth, a mad laugh that unsettled me and kept us from our own game. My father lost badly that night. He was very low. The two argued. A glass was smashed. The colleague walked off. Father poured himself another drink, and for several minutes we heard his footsteps pacing the veranda floor. Ade and I returned to our game, the silhouettes of our hands danced on the wall. Soon we heard my father’s footsteps growing louder. He entered the house and crossed the hallway. The footsteps grew louder still, stopped, my door drifted wide, and there stood Father. We withdrew our hands from the circle of light. Father’s face was worn, the blond hair bound in crested tufts. Neither Ade nor I moved or spoke. At that moment Taiwo drifted or flowed into the room. She had painted her eyelids purple; I thought she looked magnificent. At that moment Father saw the crucifix hanging from her neck. He went to her and unhooked her necklace. He held the crucifix before his eyes, then walked to the lamp and let it fall in front of the shade. We all turned our eyes to the wall. There, framed by the circle of yellow light, hung the shadow of Christ, fixed to the cross. The shadows of insects swarmed all around him. No one spoke. We all looked at Christ and the insects. There was a silence. Then Father addressed us directly for the first time that evening.

‘Here is Christ on the Cross,’ he said. ‘All kinds of insects are flying up to him, in order to torment him. When he sees them his spirit fails him. At the same time a moth is flying around Christ … Kill him, the insects shout to the moth. Kill him for us! ’ Father’s voice became very quiet. ‘ That I cannot do , says the moth, raising his wings above Christ, that I cannot do, for he is of the house of David. ’

After the incident with Christ and the insects, Ade and I never again performed our shadow dance. Surprisingly, I did not suffer on account of the end of the game, although I regretted the change that came over the house, the dubious way Taiwo regarded Father, whom she seemed thereafter to consider idolatrous. And I too had found it strange, the story of Christ and the insects, could understand neither its origin nor meaning, and for many years believed it a symptom of his grief-cracked mind. But some three decades later, when we were living in Scotland, shortly before my father died, I came to understand, if not the significance of the incident, then at least its origin.

Tonight, the attic is quiet. Beyond my skylight the beech tree sways. It is late, cold, luminous. The sun falls or rotates, flames and dies. Whenever I finish a page of my history now I print out a fine white sheet with black type. It never ceases to thrill me, when the sheets fall from the printer on to the floor, echoing my words. Not my words: sounds — yes, those printed words are echoes of the sounds of my past. That is not right either. They are not echoes, but translations, mutations.

As I add the sheets to the stack in the wardrobe, where I keep the completed pages of my history, I ask myself: Who will read this? If someone were to look into the wardrobe, what would they think? Perhaps they would not read my history but wonder if I was preparing for a crisis. Stacked up on the back wall are my provisions: paper, napkins, bottles of water, tins of beans, etc. I have found it convenient to store them here since my meals now are more like snacks, taken at odd times; I never know when those will be. And these not being full meals, it is hard to justify a trip down to the kitchen. All that way for a spoonful of beans! Yes, it suits me to have a tin constantly to hand. It has come to me that my life or engagement with the world is diminishing with my needs. Sometimes I go three days and nights without leaving the house, the attic even. In a moment, then, I will take a walk on the beach, before I press on with my history.

…

After the incident with Christ and the insects the game ended and with it the first phase of my early life, the thrall and insouciant ties of infancy, the lovely mutual gaze. I was nearly three. The rainy season was over. The days were long, the sun large in the sky and hot.

There was an ebony tree on the flat of the lawn, and in one month of great heat in November Taiwo and I sat every morning in its shade. I started to take baths before going to bed, since Taiwo, who cherished warmth, but suffered in keener heat, would not miss morning in the garden. She woke me, and we dressed and she went to fetch fruit for breakfast. I would climb out of my window on to the smoking grass and fall beneath the shadow of the ebony tree. Taiwo’s enormous underwear hung from the clothesline. My nursemaid came, and we ate. One morning, Taiwo introduced a new element to our routine. Along with our fruit that day, she had brought a Children’s Illustrated Bible , saying, ‘Mr Steppman asked me to begin your education.’ I doubted the truth of this. And in her thick contralto she recited the story of the world’s beginning, which was not the beginning of the world I recognized.

I had never liked Taiwo. From the start, when she appeared at my bedside and threw open the shutters, I figured her as an enemy. She expelled the shadows and my room became a void. How different it was when Ade entered that space! With his simple gesture, the pairing of the shutters, he reversed my nursemaid’s work; or more precisely — for pitch-black is as empty as flat brilliance — Ade hung a delicate fabric on which the light could play: I remember the sense of coolness, the wet stillness, and I remember the frail sun-rays which served not so much to illuminate but to soften the darkness. And these rays, pierced with dancing lint, caught odd corners of objects, made the brass on the curtain rail glow, set Taiwo’s gold ring smouldering. It was a mystery to me how in such gloom the gold drew light. In the dimness, when the shutters were wide, and light flooded my room, the metal merely sparkled and appeared gaudy. And Taiwo herself, with her painted face and jewellery and charms, seemed merely extravagant until Ade returned shadow to the room. Her beauty, I thought, was terrific in the darkness she sought to banish.

Taiwo was in her late twenties when she came to live with us. In addition to the plucked eyebrows, she had a shiny forehead, erratically powdered. She was breathless with full painted-red lips, and I never saw black skin blush so. Her hair she favoured bound tightly above her head. I thought it must have cost great pain to draw that kinked hair straight. Chairs would hardly contain her. Her back spilled out between the bars of the dining chair like a netted zeppelin, ground-strung. Her odour was rich. Cats adored her.

Although Taiwo was a scullion and nursemaid she believed neither in spotless floors nor well-tended children. She knew a great deal about cleanliness, was a friend of purity, and a Christian. But because of her great size, in her estimation she was not a true Christian. It was impossible for her to talk about religion without resorting to the language of gastronomy. ‘I have fed my soul at the table of the Lord,’ she would say. ‘And He has blessed me for it.’ Everything about Taiwo was overdone; she liked all that was bright and succulent. When she said ‘religion’ she meant eating; when she said ‘eating’ she meant a particular kind of self-loathing. The problem was her fondness for food. She liked food as much as religion and was tied to both. Taiwo hated her abundance, an excess that contradicted the teachings of the church.