Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

Governor Richards!

A big man with a big ulcer!

Your behaviour is deplorable.

Governor is a thief.

Council members thief.

Anyone who does not know Iffe

trouble no dey ring bell.

Oh you, vagina’s head seeks vengeance.

You men, vagina’s head seeks vengeance.

Ehen. Well, the Governor he didn’t agree to Iffe’s terms. So what did she do? She put stones in the onion sacks to make up the price! Ha! Iffe, God don butter your bread!’

It was a striking story. And yet what impressed me more than the account of the demonstration, more than the belligerence of the market women, was the excitement the Honeymans’ cook had introduced to the bargaining process: the brilliant length of the tale, her bold flattery, the spectacular waving of her feeble arms. But even more striking was Iffe’s response. She must have been aware of the charade, alert to the charming words whose purpose was self-gain. Nevertheless she granted a superior gift to the Honeymans’ cook. Reward the deceiver? I was astonished. And I arrived at a fresh way of understanding the market: what I had thought was fuelled wholly by the need for profit was, I understood, reliant also on spectacle, on the ritual of display, so that she who bargained most creatively, or more skilfully and emotively than the other, or excited the other’s pride, won the greater bargain. And I understood that to trade was, like other human endeavours, a form of theatre.

So there was play-acting involved in trading! This was a revelation to me. To have noticed drama at the market, and to have become aware of Iffe’s place in that drama, might have been to shatter my admiration for her. It might have led me to feel I had caught her unawares, and had discovered the artlessness or inauthenticity beneath her charm. But it was the contrary. My eyes shone for her all over again. It was thrilling to recognize qualities in her that until now my observations of her had taught me to reject. Those gifts of presence and personality that had impressed me for their authenticity — the unhurried gestures which seemed always to call up from the well of human feelings a genuine response, the moisture on her nose indicating an honest day’s work, her rich voice I thought the very embodiment of natural resonance — shifted meaning, became the contrary, for I now admired those gifts precisely for their theatricality.

By four o’clock, when the last of the onions had been packed away, we began our journey home. I paused before setting off, for I experienced a splendid joy in treading in the place Iffe’s feet had landed only a moment before. I felt extraordinarily happy and light. On the bus, I recall the grey mass of cloud that hung over the sea. What else do I recall from that day? Stepping from the bus to discover the street-lamps had been newly electrified and the humming in and out as we walked between them. Coming round the corner to the first sight of home, where under the swallow’s nest Riley’s pointer sat waiting to gulp down what fell to her from that teeming pod. And yet the last thing I recall was the presence at my side of Iffe, who became more beautiful to me the longer I stayed in her company. And I knew I could no longer consider myself an autonomous being, and that I wanted to be like Iffe in every way, and would do everything in my power to assimilate her qualities, the moment when, walking through the front garden, she looked at me, raised her clammy fingers to her lips and yawned.

Near the beginning of my history, when I wrote, ‘The only object that emits a sound is Father’s pocket watch,’ I was mistaken. There is a second object whose noise disrupts my work: a radio. Every evening at six it turns on automatically, and for half an hour, receiving a weak signal, hisses and pops; the volume of my tinnitus increases; I hear a kind of wandering, high-pitched tone, as well as certain voices, different in tone from the voices I normally hear — all of which ends abruptly after half an hour.

I suspect that, years ago, during his retreat in the attic, my father set the radio to switch itself on and off at these times. No doubt it has been sounding ever since, including these months when I myself have been living in the attic, writing these stories. Yet I only discovered the radio last week. Why? Perhaps because of my growing deafness. Perhaps because of my tinnitus. Or maybe because I have been concentrating so hard on interpreting the sounds of my past.

For a week now I have been trying to find the radio, in order to silence it. I wait for six o’clock, then attempt to follow the whispering and popping sounds to their source. I suspect the radio is hidden somewhere in the south-east corner of the attic, among debris and items of my father’s — clothes, mouse droppings, discarded cups and plates, medals, mouldy cricket gear, boxes of maps and papers, dust-curtains that on windy nights swell and fug the room — but I cannot be sure, for the attic amplifies and distorts even the slightest sound. But this is only partly why I’ve failed to find it. The radio remains hidden chiefly because I confuse its noise with the noises in my head, which do not stem from a fixed point or source. They are not like other sounds — sounds which one can listen to at will and may silence by going away, stopping one’s ears, or by refusing to listen — since not only do they fizz and thunder in my head, it is with my head, and not my ears, that I hear them.

It is half past six. I have just tried, and failed, to find the radio. Now I will return to my history. I must try to block out the sounds of the present and concentrate on those of my past, which I am trying to traduce into words, as the needle inscribes the wax disc. So then, I can reveal that some months after I started to accompany Iffe and Ade to the market, the harmattan season began.

…

One could not see the harmattan when it came. One sensed its approach in the slightly cooler air, on hearing the sand-laden wind, in the grey clouds that began to outlast the day, but altogether more clearly in its effect on the animals. The watchdogs and feral cats, the cart horses, lizards and birds — all grew quiet and recoiled from our human world. The swallows, who had appeared so riotously at the end of the rains, now sang mutedly, shot quickly from nest to garden and back again, cheerless in flight, and I noticed they shied from power cables, washing lines and radio masts and perched exclusively in trees. And Riley’s pointer, normally so alert and friendly, with her heavy trembling head and giant’s paws, she who with her enthusiasm sometimes knocked us over, now, upon seeing us pass, sadly lifted her muzzle, with drops of saliva hanging from it, then set it down on the kennel floor.

The harmattan, when it arrived in earnest, swept the streets clean. It left behind a red emptiness in our quarter of town. Only here and there a lonely man, with a beard of sand, bent horizontal by the force of the wind, could be seen clinging to the corner of a fence. The air was rich with the smell of desiccated earth, which pattered against the windows, blotting out the sounds.

I was not allowed out of doors. Father warned me that I might suffocate in the storm, and spoke about newspaper reports of an unfortunate child who had been discovered, many years after his disappearance, near Birnin Kebbi, his nostrils packed with sand. I pictured a body hauled up from the earth, shrivelled and grey, with a strange peaceful face. The boy continued to haunt me for several weeks. And yet my father’s story, designed to prevent me from going outside, was unnecessary, not because I was afraid of the storm, but because I had little interest in it. I mocked the harmattan. It was so random and unrehearsed, nothing more than base elements picked up and blown south by the wind, the crude unthinking journey of sand. With my new-found esteem for the theatrical, I imputed to all natural phenomena a tired antiquity.