Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

Our onions became fewer. The morning bloomed.

Some foods I knew, but several I had not encountered before. I had no need to ask, for Ade was being very attentive, in his man’s vest and sun-blanched shorts. He seemed put out by the attention I was drawing, therefore proud to show his knowledge, and he pointed to one stall and then the next, identifying wares. ‘Yam.’ ‘Cassava.’ ‘Okro.’ And the vegetables, whose names Ade spoke aloud, and which I repeated, names that until now I had known only as sounds, acquired meaning: each became real to me. It did not escape me that I myself was still to find a proper name, yet in that moment I found no fault in this. It made me feel free. And it was fun to try each vegetable, newly labelled, to see how it suited. ‘Okro,’ I said aloud. ‘O-k-r-o.’ I thought it a pretty name, only I did not like the k’s hard emphasis. ‘C-a-s-s-a-v-a.’ I liked it better, the middle fricative and the rhythm it made. But I was not a scaly root. I felt I had greater capacities.

With red-purple onions Iffe was filling the basin of the Honeymans’ cook.

‘When do we eat?’ I asked.

‘Soon,’ Ade said. But business was good. Certainly I was bringing luck, for Iffe was already in conversation with the next buyer. Leaning forward on the table-edge was a fat man with tribal woundings. I drank some water. I felt a tingling in my eyelids and when I closed them I saw bright lights. I lay my back against Ade’s. There was a sunburst in my head. Then momentary blackness. Until now, I thought, I had lived in small places: my knowledge was theoretical, principally aural. And just as, a fortnight ago, during the rainy season, I had dreamed of being in Lagos, so now, amid the heat and smells and peculiarity of the market, in the morning’s white light, I dreamed of returning home.

Iffe bought soup and fufu and portioned our lunch into three. I ate happily, swallowing the meat, scooping the fufu into balls and dipping them into my soup. The food was wonderful, yet Ade refused to eat.

‘Chop!’ Iffe said, but Ade turned his head.

‘Fufu makes me sick,’ he said. Iffe put down her bowl.

‘A disobedient chicken obeys in a pot of soup!’ she said, and struck him sharply on his leg. Ade did not reply but stepped back among the onion sacks, and his eyes were bright as he bent his head to the bowl. He ate until the bowl was empty. Then, without warning, he jumped to his feet and fled from the stand.

‘Trouble calls you!’ Iffe said.

A cloud-shadow passed over the vegetable line. Traders returned to their stalls. I lay down beneath the table and for several minutes I did not move. Many stopped at our stand and many more passed by it. My feet pulsed. I felt I slept. The sky was vast, uncomplicated by cloud. My feet stopped hurting. I slept.

When I woke Ade was back by the onion stand. He knelt beside me. I saw that his shorts were torn, and his skin dusty, rank-smelling. He seemed as full of shame as of pride, and wretched in both. My instinct was to turn from him, for in Iffe’s silence I sensed her anger, as she took down the table and began to gather the day’s unsold onions into a heap. I too was disappointed with Ade, for though I liked him enough, he had abandoned me; my displeasure was not for being left alone but for the adventures he had had without me. For all this he was supporting my head, pillowing it in the crook of his arm, and, despite the sickly odour — he had vomited the soup, which had stained his vest — I smiled up at his face.

As we left the trading district I felt very aware of Iffe: when she walked, as when she stood at the onion stand, she seemed to inhabit a sovereign world — where, I thought, to be admitted would be the endorsement of my day. I ran to keep up with her; and when, on the yellow bus, she took a seat in the front row, and I saw the effort of our day’s trading had raised a band of moisture across the bridge of her nose, I wanted to be beside her. But I followed Ade as he moved to the back of the bus. We motored quickly eastward. At one point during the journey Ade began to laugh.

We got off the bus.

‘Why did you go there?’ Iffe said, contemptuous.

‘I didn’t,’ Ade said.

‘I told you!’ Iffe said. ‘There will be trouble.’

What happened next, the trouble Iffe had spoken about, the rise and surfacing of that trouble, together with the atmosphere that evening in our house, has stayed with me. The events that came surprised me in both their force and their injustice, and with the casual ceremony with which they were enacted.

Immediately after entering the house, we were taken to the kitchen, where Iffe told us to wait. In the minutes she was gone there was desperate silence between myself and Ade, who avoided my looks, stared down at his feet. I felt my presence was troubling him. When Iffe returned she was with Ben, who appeared calm as, with a cold and hostile face, she told him of Ade’s wickedness.

He asked Ade if it was true. Had he in fact gone to see Babatundi? Had he been into the garden of the idiot boy?

‘Yes,’ Ade breathed.

Who was Babatundi? What was in his garden?

‘Bend over.’

I was frightened. Ade was shaking, his eyes wide, like a hare’s. Ben held a cane. Iffe took my hand, attempting to lead me away, but I would not go. I stood by the kitchen door.

Ade tried once again.

‘I didn’t speak to him sef!’ He was frantic, nearly hysterical in his fear.

‘Water don pass garri,’ Ben said.

Very slowly, Ade untied his shorts and pushed them below his ankles. His buttocks were so thin and smooth, and his nakedness so unexpected, so humbly revealed — I was repelled, ashamed, moved. Ade bent and gripped his ankles.

Crack! The stroke was like a rifle shot. For a few seconds I heard nothing. Then came the second crack.

I could not see Ben’s face as he beat Ade, but I could hear from the way he was breathing that something had happened to him as he crossed the threshold into violence: he was seized with a kind of madness. Ade seemed to flinch a moment before each stroke of the cane, which was cutting into his buttocks. It was shocking to see the red-black wounds; they appeared so abruptly, as if painted by the cane. I counted six strokes and, after the last came down, my heart constricted with fear and pity. I wanted to go to Ade, since I knew a terrible injustice had been done. He pulled up his shorts and clutched his buttocks with both hands. He turned to leave the kitchen, and my feelings turned also; fear and pity joined with a third emotion, one that made me look at Ade anew. As he climbed the stairs to his room, I flushed with admiration. He had survived his beating in silence.

By seven o’clock, when Father returned from work and came as usual to kiss me on the forehead, I was lying, exhausted, on my bed, but I could not sleep. My mind was wild with the thing I had seen, the casual violence, one person striking another, and that person the father, the action provoked by neither fever nor rage, but carried out formally, almost as a ritual. I lay in darkness but had no feeling of shelter. And heightening the injustice was the knowledge that Iffe, who was a queen to me, and someone with whom I felt a tie, had acceded to the violence. Although she had been a spectator to the beating, she had participated in it also. And it came to me, as I lay, that I had witnessed a kind of theatre, events that had prior meaning and in part existed for display. I was troubled by this thought, although I did not understand why. But I know now what I could not have known then: that to witness an event (and later to record it, as I am now, here in the attic, on my computer) is to take the decision not to intervene, and so to consider myself a spectator, as I did then, a bystander looking on, was to grant myself an innocence which that evening I ceased to have.