Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

We continued on towards the Meadows. As we were crossing the fields, with their rows of cherry trees, bare in the chill air of winter, I stopped, and Mr Rafferty stopped beside me.

I said, ‘What do you think?’ Mr Rafferty said nothing. ‘About me perhaps staying on as your neighbour?’ I laughed. Mr Rafferty smiled, pointing to his mouth. Then he pressed his lips shut and placed a finger against them.

‘I’m to be quiet?’ He shook his head, pointing to himself. ‘ You want to be quiet?’ He nodded vigorously. I shrugged. I had heard from the doctor at the institution that he sometimes lapsed into episodes of speechlessness, but I had not yet encountered this myself.

I didn’t know what to say, so I guided him to a bench, and we sat in silence for a while. To our right, in the near distance, rose the great mass of Arthur’s Seat, concealed by low, drawn-out, unmoving banks of cloud. Here and there, moving in and out of the cloud, along the brown and black basalt crags and the vivid grass, I saw tiny figures, the last of the day’s walkers, together with their dogs.

Eventually I said, ‘Very well, there’re too many words already.’ I didn’t know what I meant by that. The low sun hung over the muddy grass. The Meadows smelled of swamp. Groups of heavy boys butted against one another, while joggers made circuits of the park. Mr Rafferty seemed to enjoy the activity; his face was raised high, like a dog sniffing the wind.

I took a deep breath and said, ‘My difficulty, Mr Rafferty, is this.’ And I found myself explaining my troubles following the transcription of Kemi Olabode’s pamphlet. Only then did I realize I hadn’t yet not told him about my history. It is true, on previous visits, I’d asked him questions about my past, tried to gather information, but I’d never told him why. Now, as I explained my project in full, I became eager, almost excited, and I talker faster and faster.

Mr Rafferty’s face was illuminated by an odd yellow light. It gave him a look of knowingness. I didn’t know how much of what I’d said he’d understood, or even heard. I sighed.

‘I’d better take you back …’ Mr Rafferty said nothing. We rose and began to walk towards the institution. But I wasn’t ready to leave him yet. I had an idea. ‘Come,’ I said and took his arm. ‘There’s a place I’ve been meaning to visit for a while.’

The bookshop had hardly changed. There was a time, in my twenties (during the lost years following the break-up of my first, and only, love affair), when I haunted its narrow shelves and rested on the trestle-tables piled with magazines: Spare Rib, Living Marxism . I would sit for hours on the wooden ladder, reading, or chatting to the owner of the shop. Now I hoped to find some literature about Benin. I sought out the ‘Genocide’ section and absorbed myself in the titles. Mr Rafferty shuffled through the shop, his book bag swinging like a pendulum from his wrist. He disappeared into the children’s section.

Some time later I heard a loud crash, a yelp, a dog’s bark. I looked to see Mr Rafferty kneeling on the floor, gathering fallen books, watched warily by the shop’s dog, a wonderful black-and-tan creature which bore an injured expression. I rose and set Mr Rafferty upright. Still he didn’t speak; he only looked at me with an expression not dissimilar to the dog’s.

Walking home, I found I could not stop talking, an effect of my grandfather’s silence. I told him about my childhood in Lagos and my friendship with Ade. Mr Rafferty said nothing. But when I told him of how I got my name — how, in fact, I had named myself — he squeezed my arm, and his lips curved into a smile.

We had reached the reception hall of the institution, and a nurse approached. Once again, Mr Rafferty squeezed my arm. He pointed to the ceiling. Immediately I understood.

‘You would like me to come to your room with you?’ He nodded. ‘All right. But let’s get some hot chocolate from the machine on the way.’

Mr Rafferty’s room had been recently cleaned. The chair had been placed on the table and the floor shone, smelling of disinfectant. Mr Rafferty motioned for me to sit on the bed. I tried to hand him his chocolate, but he turned, took the chair down and climbed on to it.

‘Mr Rafferty! Sit down!’

He was reaching for a shoebox on top of the wardrobe. Grasping it, he moved to step down from the chair; his foot wandered above the shining floor, feeling for the tiles, and I rose and helped him down. We sat together on the bed. Still ignoring his cup of chocolate, he put the box between us. Apparently it had once contained ladies’ shoes. A picture of the model was pasted to its side: ‘Nana’. It was a t-bar type shoe. This notion of giving shoe-styles ladies’ names, like hurricanes! Mr Rafferty lifted the lid. Inside were piles of letters. He flicked through them until he found it: a postcard. He handed it to me. I looked briefly at the picture, then gasped in recognition. I turned it round and read the back: ‘Dear Grandfather …’

It’s a dog-eared black-and-white postcard, foxed heavily, especially around the sky. On the reverse is its title, ‘First Snow in Port Suez’, and the date of the snowfall, 12 January 1942. Below this is the message I wrote to Mr Rafferty:

Dear Grandfather, Today it has been decided by Her Majesty’s Government that my country shall no longer be mine. I must come to Scotland, where I will see you. I am looking forward to meeting you and to hearing many new noises. Father says you are touched. Also, of hearing what the radio sounds like where you are. Your fond granddaughter, Evie.

I do not recall writing this message. I do recall the postcard, however, for there was a period when I would stare at it for hours. It interested me not so much because it connected me to Babatundi; nor because it found a natural place in my tin marked ‘unica’, whose contents I was always anxious to bolster. Its chief attraction was that it pictured a winter scene: a wide sky blurry with snow, under which flowed a street where people walked, past ice-spangled windows. It was 1956. I had lived only in Nigeria, where the seasons alternated between intense heat and torrential rain, a cycle broken only once a year, in November, by the harmattan. (Nearly five decades since leaving Nigeria I am still unused to northern winters.) So it was that, as a child, I associated snow with a kind of enchantment: with my father’s stories of skating on frozen rivers; with ice-cream, that trace of winter, as dew is to spring, which I had tasted only once; and with Father Christmas circling over white-roofed cities. One of my greatest wishes at this time was to experience real snow. Since this was not yet possible, I concentrated my desire on the postcard.

It is a bright, shadowless street in Egypt. Children stand on the boulevard in the foreground, their faces turned up to the sky, arms outstretched to catch the swarming flakes. They are wearing hats. Hatted also, and in greatcoats, a dozen soldiers march off to the left, past the windows of the Grand Hotel Continental. Looking carefully, I can make out street signs in Arabic and English, half-hidden by the drifts. What interests me most of all, then as now, is a slight figure almost lost at the edge of the photograph, in pale bonnet and skirt, bent forward at the hips, thrusting out in front of her with a cane.

Although fixed forever in the photograph on that miraculous day in January 1942, I can see clearly — in her hunched shoulders and downward gaze, in the little spurt of snow pushed up by her dogged cane — that she longs to leave it. It is a sentiment I can now understand. Yet as a child this astonished me. I felt almost offended on behalf of the snow, to which I attributed a kind of sentience unique among the elements. It was my notion that clouds were not formed of dead matter, but were independent presences in the sky, one step higher in the chain of being from certain growths — sea-coral or bushes — with their ability to rise and drop at will. As for the storm, it was simply the clouds bidding to climb higher in the sky, so shedding their bulk in the form of snow, like a balloonist dropping ballast from her machine. I would imagine myself in ‘First Snow in Port Suez’, among the children, my face turned to the sky, my mouth open wide to gulp down the flakes of frozen cloud.