Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

‘We will make ourselves comfortable among the clouds!’ Mr Honeyman said, beneath the rattling veranda roof. ‘We’ll solve the problem of housing in Lagos, and overcome the spread of disease by elevation!’

While Father was absorbed in his city planner’s dreams, I was making plans of my own. I knew I needed to leave the house and enter the town. Although I had resolved to take matters into my own hands, I did not know how to manage it. But then something quite unexpected happened.

It had been an afternoon of low cloud and relentless rain. That day I had sat with my elbows on the windowsill, gazing wall-eyed at the rain, in a stupidity of doubt, until Father called me, and at length we ate in the dining room. The meal was sombre but for the cutlery’s chime and clatter. When I returned to my room I looked out of the window and found the world transformed! The sun had emerged, the wind had fallen to a soft breeze, which stirred the branches of the ebony tree. I climbed out through my bedroom window into the still-damp sun-bright garden, impossibly happy. I ran through grass, under the tree and around the kitchen compound to the lakeshore.

Taiwo was floating face-down in the water.

Came the great market days. The rains had flooded the town, filled the streets, overwhelmed our garden — but now grasses, tubers and flowers were everywhere springing up. Birds appeared, and the air vibrated with their wing beats. To think that only a week previously we had been besieged by that empty damp season, and in semi-darkness the world had shrunk to enclose us. But now, through cloudless skies, the sun shone brightly. A hot dry summer-season with far views across the lagoon. The lawn quickly became parched. The foundations of a swallow’s nest appeared below the eaves. High-spirited in the new atmosphere, we rolled up our sleeves, and listened to the swallows, who rained down on us a living symphony, then took off, shrilling, to return with moss, twigs and rags.

It was during this season that I became acquainted for the first time with the market. Already a week had passed since Taiwo’s death. Father had asked Iffe to take care of me until he found a new nursemaid (in fact he never found one). So here we were, Iffe, Ade and I, beneath the low sky, passing through the front garden on our way to Jankara market. We walked on the sandy road, by dew-damp lawns. Elephant grass waved its stalks far above my head. The shopkeeper Riley greeted us — ‘Good morning!’ — and the watchmen at the gate of the Honeymans’ did the same — ‘E ku aro!’ Beside us a cockerel was stirring up dust. He stopped, swelled his neck and summoned up a cry; the little thong-like tongue thrashed in the violent beak, and from deep in his throat he wished me well. We reached the street where buses ran amid clouds of dust. The yellow bus rounded a corner and, shuddering, pulled to a stop. We boarded, and the sky arched higher.

I thought, but not for long, of Taiwo. No one knew the exact manner of her death; there were no witnesses. Did she fall? Or had she taken her own life? I wondered if the church gave a full burial for suicides. The bus was picking up speed. On the seat beside Ade I leaned forward. Would Taiwo’s family prepare her face — her last, set permanently — as she herself would have wished: scrubbed, hair pulled back from the wide forehead, painted lips and cheeks, eyebrows plucked? My feet in new leather shoes felt prickly. I heard a blend of bells and horns and turned to face the window. What, I asked myself, did thoughts of Taiwo matter now? Had I not wished my nursemaid dead? Happy or obedient fate had heard my plea! At that moment it simply stirred me that I had won my freedom, was seated presently on the tinny, but thunderous, bus looking through the dusty glass — we were crossing the Macgregor Canal. How my luck had changed!

The trading district came into view. We got off the bus and entered the market. Ade and I hung back and hurdled the bands of shade that spanned the walkway between stands — for no other reason than we wanted to — the rules of a game we had not discussed, and it made our progress slow. Every so often Iffe stopped, turned and clicked her tongue, which released us from the shadows’ spell, and we came running to where, a moment earlier, she had been standing. The stalls rose hugely above me. We reached the section of fresh produce where each type of vegetable was stacked together: we walked among brown sticky roots, past oranges in tea chests, past tomatoes with their smell like sunshine, past masses of corncobs behind Iffe to her stand. The morning was hot, damp, substantial, smelling of dust, and a warm sweet odour like caramelizing sugar.

At Iffe’s instruction Ade and I stayed by the onion stand. We squatted beneath the table that held our wares, so my view was near-level to the ground, a view of stones, insects and straw, of sandals and bare feet with their movement of pendulums, of loose sack fibres, newspaper, a single crushed tomato, and with purple lizards darting between. Women — I quickly understood the market was a female realm — stopped beside us. Some bargained for onions, others exchanged greetings with Iffe, and each rested her gaze on mine. For many I was something new entirely and outside their reach of knowledge. Others bent, tight in their wrappers, to look more closely, to press my hand or grip me firmly, as though I was a robust and precious foodstuff, and called me beautiful and in admiration or with envy said I would attract customers, bring luck on Iffe. When they left I opened my hands to find I held gifts from their stalls, different kinds of fruit, which Ade and I ate. I recall particularly a guava, with its pink wet flesh, it was the first guava I had tasted, with a strange musty flavour I did not wholly like.

I took off my shoes. Ade and I huddled close, not speaking, and for some minutes we took in our ground-level view. A woman stopped who sold the morning’s haul of lagoon-fruit. We pinched our noses. We stared into the dead eyes of fishes.

If I was a novelty, and attracted crowds, Iffe too was venerated among the traders. She was a significant woman, tall and uniformly wide from her shoulders to hips — and she had grace. Her movements were unhurried, stylish, difficult to interpret yet full of meaning, and I noticed a certain heaviness about her limbs, as though she bore or carried them through a thicker element. She wore sandals, a blue skirt and white blouse without sleeves, and looked wise, regal, with a blue headscarf sculpted on her head. I admired the flushed region of skin that dappled her upper arms.

But it was her voice that impressed me most and seeded a kind of devoted exhibitionism in me. When she called out the price and quality of her onions, the sound came from deep in her chest-cavity, and I had the impression her larynx was not a crude organ — not, like others’, an instrument for telling lies — but cut and shaped like the sound-box of a cello; I judged there was freedom for such workmanship within her chest and neck. It wasn’t merely that her voice was strong, although undeniably it was, but that when she spoke she seemed to cast out more than merely sound; she made the air vibrate and, yes, I felt she projected a kind of truth. I once caught the scent of cardamon on her breath but her words were not directed at me. I felt the drumming of my heart, I wanted her attention badly and caught my breath when I believed she glanced down.

Although Iffe’s stand seemed modest with a single basket of onions, when one observed the small traders — there were several with sacking by the roadside which carried a dozen or fewer onions, surplus from their gardens, as well as roaming hawkers with their trays of cheap plastic wares, sea-sponges, matches, melon seeds, kola nuts, peanuts — seeing the hierarchy of sellers, I felt Iffe was a considerable woman. I learned this from one of her regular customers, the Honeymans’ cook, who told me Iffe was in line to become an O-lo’ri Egbe — soon she would represent the interests of all the onion sellers in the market. I had noticed she was ready with advice and that she solved disputes and laughed and judged quantities and prices for others, as well as pursuing her own trading practice. So Iffe was in demand, and I remained unnoticed by her. But But I listened for her voice with its rich, clear resonance emerging from between teeth that seemed to shine.