Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

It was summer of 1953. I was six years old. At that time a delicious laziness invaded my whole being. Every afternoon Ade and I lay on the bank opposite Babatundi’s gate, stretched out in the sun like lions, dozing, listening to the distant sound, like far-away crashing waves, of cars and trucks, and their bright horns, or else watching Babatundi swing back and forth on his gate. As the day grew late, we would pick ourselves up, brush the spores from our clothes, wave to Babatundi, and amble back to the market.

There was one afternoon when things happened differently, however; and it was on that afternoon I acquired my name. I remember very clearly. We were sitting on the bank. Hours passed, filled with heat and boredom. Babatundi quietly moaned, laughed to himself. Scorched thistles crackled on the rubbish heap, and the grass appeared to salivate with glistening sap. At one point in the afternoon Ade peeled himself from the grass and approached me, appearing serious. I sat up. He told me he had something to show me and took a playing card from his shorts’ pocket. It was the Ace of Hearts. I gasped. It showed a nearly naked dancing girl. She was beautiful: blue-eyed, with dark hair clasped in a fountain above her head. Sitting on a baby elephant, with one leg stretched out in front of her, she wore nothing but a tiny blue skirt and tassels attached to her breasts. Ade pressed a finger to his lips. ‘Shhh. I will show it to Babatundi. It is the way to reach his garden.’ He walked slowly, earnestly up to the idiot boy with the card held before him. In a lightning movement, Babatundi jumped to his feet and started to run, limping down the alley leading to his garden, leaving his gate uncaptained.

‘Come on!’ Ade shouted. I let out a cry of delight and started to follow. As Babatundi moved futher off his legs became hidden from view — curious how he attained grace when just his upper half was visible. The slow climbing and falling, like the motion of a galloper on its carousel.

We ran to the end of the alley, and there it was: Babatundi’s garden! A dusty yard scattered with patches of sour-smelling grass. In the middle was a tree whose trunk and lower limbs had been painted pale red. Broken mirrors hung from its branches by different lengths of cord, also cowrie shells, shining in the brightness, and little rounds of metal on which a strange script had been painted. The idiot boy was waiting for us under the tree. Solemnly, as if events had been rehearsed, Ade offered him the playing card, and Babatundi snatched it, turning his back on us. Emitting an obscene moan, he lowered himself heavily to the ground and started to rock back and forth with the card held close in front of his eyes. I was frightened and intrigued. I could tell Babatundi was enjoying himself because a certain softness had come into his movements. He seemed completely transformed and, as he leaned forward, dragging his bad leg behind him, and collapsed on his front, I became scared. I turned to leave, but Ade took hold of my arm. Putting a finger to his lips, he led me to the other side of the tree.

‘Look,’ Ade hissed. In front of us was some kind of barrow piled high with junk, through which Ade began to rummage. I was too excited to help, so I watched as Ade pulled out a collection of wonderful junk: cowries, pieces of broken pottery, feathers, flints, pages of books and magazines, stuffing into his pockets polished stones, badges marked with Babatundi’s script, gutting the barrow of a shiny farthing, a postcard, a mouse’s tail. I could not see Babatundi as Ade emptied the contents of the barrow, and at first I could not hear him, perhaps because of the whine of the traffic, or because he himself was quiet. But gradually I started to hear a low yellow groan that came and went and rose steadily in pitch.

Suddenly Ade pulled out a wooden box.

‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Open it!’

Inside were rows and rows of stamps representing letters of the alphabet. They were arranged in no order I could perceive, neither alphabetical nor, I suspected, into words. We sat on the ground with the printer’s set open at our feet.

‘Pick one,’ Ade said, pointing to the letters.

‘Which?’

‘Your favourite.’

Forgetting Babatundi, I passed my fingers over the set, feeling the raised pattern of the letters. Unable to read, I knew them principally as shapes, and yet I had an idea of the sound they made. As I pointed to each letter, Ade voiced its sound. I paused over the a . There was something attractive about it. I felt it belonged wholly to my friend. I knew other words beginning with A, but I had come to think of these as steeped or tinted in his character, as a puddle takes on the colour of the sky.

‘Choose one,’ Ade said, and, laughing, I reached and took the p . It was surprisingly heavy. I held it up to the light. Then without warning Ade took it from me and stamped it on my arm. The ink made my skin tingle.

‘Choose another,’ Ade said, and I picked the b , because of the marvellous symmetry, and because I liked its curved belly, and because at that moment it seemed to me the greatest friend I could ever have. This time, aware of the game, I handed it to Ade, who stamped it on the same arm, higher up, just below my elbow. Again, my skin prickled and shivered.

Now it was Ade’s turn to pick a letter. He chose the A . What was there to do but take it and stamp it on him? His arm quivered, and he raised it to the light. The ink was having an effect on him, penetrating his skin perhaps, giving him a pleasant feeling. He looked around to make sure Babatundi was still occupied with the dancing girl, and when he saw he was rubbing his loins back and forth on the ground, he picked another letter — D — which I took and stamped on him. One after another, we chose letters and stamped them all over our arms, laughing, setting our skins alight.

But now Babatundi’s moaning grew in intensity, and I looked over and all at once I thought of the crackling thistles and the sap glistening on the grasses.

‘We had better get back,’ Ade said, and began to gather the stamps and put them back in their box.

I gazed at my arm; there they were, the small, dark letters, scattered from my elbow to my wrist. I shivered with delight.

‘Wait,’ I said and held up my arm. I let my finger run over the letters, and Ade named them: ‘ S … n … D … a … t … r … B … d … o … a … e … v .’

I pointed to the final two letters again.

‘ e ,’ said Ade, ‘ v .’

That is how I acquired my name.

Autumn has arrived. In my attic the air crackles with cold. Whenever the wind blows with extra force, the ceiling, long since rotten within, and yellowed by Father’s tobacco smoke, rains down on me a kind of mustard dust or pollen. At the far end from where I sit, the roof has started to buckle, no doubt beginning to cave in. To the left, at knee-height, a crack has appeared in the boards. I have papered over it with sheets of old newspaper, but the wind blows them unstuck, and they flap violently against the wood. Sometimes, leaning my head against the wall, breathing deeply from tiredness, my hair a matted mass of curls, I think about how much of my history there is still to record. I think about my papers, which are scattered in the attic: novels, histories, reference books, magazines, reports, diaries, articles, letters and such like, most left by my father, some I brought here myself. I think about the times when each of them was new in the world: freshly printed, written, the ink still wet.

In the previous chapter I related how I acquired my name, an event that signals for me the end of my early childhood. I was six years old. My plan for this chapter was to focus on my life and adventures from then until my thirteenth year — my age at Nigerian independence, when I left Lagos with Father and moved here, to Gullane. For several hours I tried to make a start, in vain. I could barely compose a single sentence. What is more, the radio switched itself on, setting off a powerful ringing in my ears, dragging me further from my past. It seems I cannot distinguish between the noise of the radio and the hubbub of my recalling. The hissing, rasping and popping, the irregular voices buzzing, that low asthmatic drawl, all this merges with the noises in my head.