Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

Slender, angular, shrewd, washed out, gesticulating with her eyes which flashed and faded according to the quality of her mood, Mrs Honeyman attended to me, tried to please me even. She had the idea we were intimates, but the nature of the connection was unclear. Did she consider our relationship to be that of teacher to pupil, or nurse to troubled child, or guru to unbeliever, or seducer to victim, or even, as I briefly hoped, mother to daughter?

She had no children, and on hearing her talk about Mr Honeyman I could not believe she would ever conceive one. She called him, variously, ‘sow’, ‘canned rhinoceros’, ‘blubber-lips’, ‘that spent parvenu’. ‘You know,’ she said once, towards the end of the Christmas holiday, ‘the funny thing is that everyone considers my husband outstandingly clever. But, really, if you set it next to my own, his brain is like a raisin compared to the grape. I knew it when I married him. That is why I agreed to his proposal.’ I laughed, and she turned violently round and said, ‘I allow my husband great liberties. All I ask in return is that he stop spitting on the floor!’

That she should be so insulting to her husband, while being so well disposed towards males in general — almost girlish with laughter when I told her about my friendship with Ade — intrigued me; and this aspect of her character enabled me to forgive her sometimes heartless words.

‘Wait until you find yourself in the arms of your man,’ she said on one of our last evenings together. ‘Evie … think of it. It will be twilight, the street-lamps will be flickering on the river, and he will stop joking — they do, you know, and that is because their blood-pressure alters — and he will take you like this — wait, there is no one to see us! — and press you like this, with his hands like so.’ Clutching me, she said, ‘I sometimes think that to be held tightly and kissed is the whole secret of life.’ But a moment later she grew solemn. ‘With your great ears and ill-proportioned face you will never attract Ade, or any man for that matter. That is probably a good thing, Evie, for children come out of women through tunnels of pain.’

‘It can’t be like that really ,’ I said.

‘What do you know!’ she said, stepping back. ‘You are young. You should take advantage of your youth to learn one thing … refrain from expressing sentiments that are too natural not to be taken for granted. Oh, only a fool loves being alive!’

The following evening, the last before Iffe, Ben and Ade returned, Mrs Honeyman seemed distracted. She didn’t eat. After supper she smoked in silence, then paced the veranda for a while. Standing behind my chair, with one hand resting gently on my shoulder, she whispered, ‘I believe you have met my cook.’ I straightened my back. Fear flashed through me. How could I have failed to link the Honeymans’ cook, with her wizened face and keen bargaining and strange stories, with Mrs Honeyman? Before I could answer, Mrs Honeyman said, ‘She is a remarkable creature in many ways. Very talkative and interesting … vindictive too. She leads what I call a quixotic life. Let me tell you something. The savage mind thinks very differently from mine and yours. It is not goaded by truth.’ She came round to face me. ‘My cook, for instance, will simply lie or tell stories if she thinks it will be of advantage to her.’ Mrs Honeyman stroked the arm of my chair, and her voice became grave. ‘To be honest with you, at this stage of your development you are not entirely unlike her. That is why I was not surprised when you insisted on calling those feathers an instance of snow. This has something to do with the fact of your being an exceptional late birth. I have seen it in your face, Evie, you are teetering on the precipice of barbarism.’ She sat heavily in her chair. In her normal voice (soft, crumbling like ash from her cigarettes), she said, ‘But where was I? Let me see. Ah, yes. Like all of her race, my cook does not know the difference between a lie and the truth. I will see that you learn that difference, because life punishes liars ruthlessly and indiscriminately. That is why the natives are so wretched.’

‘What kind of lies does she tell?’

‘She often pretends not to hear me when I call. Sometimes I find her in the backyard mixing herbs and powders. Once I witnessed her sacrificing a chicken. She really is a very original old creature. I sometimes wonder if she’s not involved in juju. Anyway, she tells me everything.’ She paused and looked into the distance. ‘For instance, she has told me that your friendship with Ade is unnaturally close.’ A look of quiet triumph illuminated her eyes. I felt heat rise to my face. (It was true: before Ade left for Christmas our relationship had taken a new turn, which I will talk about shortly.) ‘Don’t worry,’ Mrs Honeyman said, ‘we will put a stop to it.’ Her eyes, grey once again, looked sternly into my own. ‘Tomorrow Ade will return to Ikoyi. From now on I want you to treat him very differently. It is for his own good. Treat him as you would a stupid child, ceremoniously and with a slightly vexed indifference.’ She rose from her chair. ‘Take my advice, and I guarantee that very soon you will find him ugly.’

It was January 1957. The sun came early; there was a flash, and suddenly it was bright morning. Spilling on to our garden, the streets, roofs, windows and the lagoon’s calm surface was the teeming yellow light. Everything flashed and burned. But a fetid odour like rotting leaves rose from the ground on which Ade and I were squatting, in the cool half-dark of an upturned fishing boat, playing our new game. We had known about the wreck for months, and before Christmas had visited it regularly: throwing stones at the clanging hull, climbing on to its bulbous tip, where gulls sat, scattering faeces, squabbling, eyeing the water. Only since Ade had returned from the Christmas break, however, had we found a way inside.

From the start, when we became acquainted from either side of the bars of my cot, I had admired certain qualities in my friend: his soft skin, his never keeping still, the scarred and always dirty knees. Added to this was his performance in The Snow Queen : just as, during the play, Ade’s personality, voice and movements had marked the character of the robber girl, so the robber girl — with her painted face and squeaky voice and patchwork dress — had marked my friend. In my mind now he gave off a kind of feral elegance, a vibrating female charm, whose effect on me outlasted the performance. When I looked at him I could not fail to associate Ade with the spoiled and unmanageable bandit of the play, who had cried ‘nanny goat!’ as she tugged at her mother’s beard.

This is how the game went: first I would lift my dress above my stomach, holding it to one side, and pull my knickers down until they stretched taut between my knees. Next I would squat and Ade would watch the stream of urine spill from between my legs and bounce off the broken shells and mix with the sea-scum on the ground. I would quickly pull my knickers up. Before the ground had absorbed my puddle, Ade would push his shorts down around his ankles and aim his okro at my pool. As I gazed in admiration, he would send a loud stream into its centre, where a virulent moss had started to grow, frothy like the tide-reach — we credited ourselves with its growth.

Now it was late, and we stood beneath the hull in the intimate dark, and the gulls raised hell above us. I had just pulled up my knickers under my righted dress. Ade lowered his shorts, giving off the sour smell of spoiled milk, and let his okro dangle above the ground. I stood opposite, watching. For several moments he remained still, staring with great concentration at the puddle I had made. As he drew in his stomach, I could see the outline of his ribs. He was straining hard, but nothing emerged. Turning his back, saying, ‘Don’t look!’ he bent double, hands gripping his hips. I moved round to face him and saw his features tense and contort; with a furious internal energy he was trying to goad or force out the pee. ‘Don’t look!’ he shouted. But I couldn’t not look, because I had noticed something happening to his okro, something I knew was causing the drought — it was thickening and growing longer. I began to laugh, a high, nervous laughter that scared me and infuriated Ade. He winced, backing away. His okro seemed to be possessed of an independent life and a will contrary to his own, for now it began to rise like a pointing finger towards the hull. As I watched — amazed — Ade turned, pulled up his shorts and stumbled out through the gap.