Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

So we lay in the shade of the ebony tree every morning while I listened (ears, unlike eyes, cannot be shut) to her spiritual instruction, the Creation story, Noah and the Flood, Christ’s sojourn in the desert: ‘ You’re hungry ,’ read Taiwo, in her devil’s voice. ‘ You have been fasting forty days. Look at these round stones. Don’t they remind you of bread rolls? ’ I had to feign interest, for if she caught me wandering in my mind, I was scolded, and the reading began over again. But when the passage was finished she asked to know my thoughts, since she was jealous of thoughts that were not on her. So I said I dreamed of her. To keep her happy I invented a catalogue of sins, phrased in child-talk, which she would take pleasure in admonishing, and forgive after, as if it were a game to release me from wrong, and that simple. Then she would go inside to fetch cakes and limewater.

On those mornings in the garden when she read from the Bible, she also advised me on hygiene: where to wash, and how often, and the special places a girl must tend to. ‘Wash your cake,’ she told me. ‘Wash there with mild soap and water.’ She warned me as well against fizzy drinks that Father occasionally brought home, the bottles were dirty from the shipping, she told me, the seamen filthy. And taps bred germs. It was past nine when the instruction finished and we ate our mid-morning snack. By then the heat of full day was approaching, and we would make for the house.

Outwardly, I obeyed Taiwo — what else could I do? Secretly, I yearned for change. I was powerless, physically, to alter my situation, and so I began to wish harm on Taiwo. If she were no longer in the world, I thought, Father would be forced to look after me himself. I admit it — there were days when I wished her dead. Other times my hopes for a different life focused on Ade. I had outgrown my cot, and in the afternoon when he returned from the market we were no longer separated by its bars. Undivided, a new intimacy developed between us. We began to talk, and I asked about his days at the market. I was happy, since human closeness was lacking in my life. More than this: I sensed Ade could help me to leave my stultifying nursemaid and do the only noble thing that lay in my power, which, I decided, was to escape into Lagos. Perhaps Ade would accompany me and teach me how to walk among crowds!

That was how it was when I was three years old. Whenever Ade was absent from my life, I suffered Taiwo’s company or lay alone in my room. My days felt false and mundane. Father was distant as ever. Taiwo seemed keener in the pursuit of her religious attachment and appearance. I did not yet dare to ask Ade to help me leave the house. I was little nearer to becoming a full person with a proper name. The decade took flight and expired. I grew two inches.

That season, the first of the new decade, the 1950s, a decade which would close with independence for Nigeria and exile for Father and me, began under a cloud of boredom. I went through the motions of guilt, of anxiety and joy, of loneliness and pain with impressive though splenic energy. I was rehearsing the character that was expected of me, a girl-child of three and a half. Yet there were moments of respite. Although I was peculiar, and extraordinary in several ways, I was still a child, and I liked to play. Early afternoon I went out to the garden and found pleasure in games. I had an idea that a class of spirit lived inside every object, and I had only to brush against it, or stroke or tap it in a certain way, to draw forth that spirit. I was consciously touching things, and I burned in quiet bliss when the objects chimed or clattered or whispered. Absorbed in my game, I forgot mealtimes. Eating could wait, for I had made an important discovery: I had discovered how to wake the spirit that rests inside still and quiet things. I applied my new knowledge diligently. Any object whose sound I particularly liked, I would hide beneath my bed. My favourite was a length of twine which I stretched taut and passed my finger lightly across, and it produced a tremulous humming — not, I recognize now, unlike the Theremin. How dull all other objects seemed to me then!

At other times my play was more conventional. Behind the servants’ compound (on whose lower floor stood the kitchen, on whose upper lived Ade, with Iffe and Ben, his parents), the garden began its decline to the lagoon. I would amble down to the lakeshore and from the crest of the lawn launch rocks, which rolled elliptically, then fell, with a heavy sucking of air, into the water — and for an instant there rose crystal beads containing the fantastic spectrum of rainbows. Sometimes, from his place at the kitchen window, I saw Ade toss scraps into the garden; into which immediately descended a volary of birds, a brilliant cloud of feathers. Once I saw Ade at his bedroom window directly above the kitchen. He was folding a rectangle of paper into a point. He pressed his thumb along each folded edge and held it to the light. Then he snapped his fingers, and the paper transformed into a white aeroplane! He held each wing carefully and, with one eye closed, peered along the point. Next he took a pencil and wrote something in the fold. He made several more. Then he piled the aeroplanes one into the next, drew back his arm and thrust them from his grip. I jumped to catch them, white darting flashes, as they streamed through the air, singly or in pairs. Catching three, I watched the rest flutter to the ground, like so many birds.

I took my catch up to Ade’s bedroom, unfolded the aeroplanes and spread them on the floor.

********?

********?

********?

Ade had tried to communicate with me. But I could not read.

The rains arrived, and I was unable to play outside. I had been born during that same season four years previously, and now, amid the tumult, as when newly born, I felt exhausted once again. The rain beat down upon the roofs, on to the streets, the tangle of green, like so many exclamation marks puncturing the earth, thrumming up the water and effacing reflections.

Taiwo, for days now afflicted, like us all, with mindless boredom, sprawled in her armchair in an obscure and heavy trance. Occasionally she would wake, as if from hibernation, look around helplessly, then hunt for herself in the wardrobe mirror. But after a few minutes her eyelids would fall shut. And for days I had been confined to my room, with vacant Taiwo as my guard and keeper, with no more stimulus than the sodden scenery. Even the sounds of Lagos were crowded out by the beating of the rain, which afflicted everything, not only us, the human inhabitants of the house, but also the voiceless drunken animal life, the mice and the birds, who had disappeared at the first cloudburst, and most helplessly of all, the inanimate objects, the wardrobe, which pulped and swelled, Mother’s trunk, the floorboards, which grew patches of white fur dotted with the blue eyes of mould.

Father, it seemed, was the only one among us untroubled by the rain. He had become absorbed in his work at the Lagos Executive Development Board. In a large yellow mac he mounted his bicycle and left the house before dawn, no longer lunched at home and often returned after dark. Once I saw him pedalling furiously homeward, bent over his handlebars, his tailcoats flapping foolishly over the rear wheel. After he dried himself off he would sit on the veranda. Sometimes his colleague Mr Honeyman would stop by. There were blessed evenings when Father called me from my room, dismissing Taiwo for the night, evenings when, projected on a sheet hung at the far end of the veranda, I witnessed grainy, poorly shot photographs of Lagosians in fancy dress. Then, towards the end of the rainy season, Mr Honeyman produced a different kind of photograph, a bird’s-eye view of Lagos. Father pointed to our house, which looked like a toy box. It was so tiny and inconsequential. And so near the centre! They were making plans to clear the slums, which were circled in red. They planned to install plumbing and a sewage system, evict people from their homes, which were to be replaced with hotels and office blocks, banks, parliament buildings and new roads. But what excited them most were skyscrapers.