Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

After that encounter in the upturned boat, the mood between us changed. Ade began to ignore me. I felt shy in his company and stopped eating with him in the kitchen compound; instead I took supper on the veranda with my father. One evening I asked him about Mrs Honeyman.

‘She’s a writer,’ he said, ‘and a melancholic, and she keeps canaries.’ I asked what a melancholic was, and Father thought for a while, then told me it was a person through whose head dark clouds frequently pass, and for whom the rainy season rages sometimes. He paused, then said, ‘It’s better to stay clear of Susan Honeyman, Evie, I won’t invite her round again. One shouldn’t believe a word she says.’

My father was right: Mrs Honeyman had told me I would find Ade ugly, but in the rusted chasm of the inverted hull, with its sour odours and spines of shifting light, he was more appealing to me than ever. But that did not stop our relationship from breaking apart. Now, at the market, I played alone; after which I went straight to my room and read or listened to the radio. And when, at the end of July, Ade started at the mission school, what was left of our friendship developed an antagonistic edge. Sometimes Ade mocked me openly. I felt we were on opposing sides — but of what? The more I felt scorned, the more anxious I was to be near him, and I started to watch him in secret. I noticed how bony he had become, and stronger-willed, deeper-voiced. He began to wear men’s shoes with the laces taken out. Proud and unhurried, when he turned from his friends after grappling in play, I noticed he had acquired Iffe’s grace in movement. In the evenings he padded to the bottom of the garden and skimmed stones on the surf. Sometimes I tried to follow, but he waved me away with the back of his hand.

It seemed inevitable to me that I should assume the responsibility of maintaining our relationship alone, in secret. In doing so I was aware of claiming more than my share of the shame our encounter had engendered. Perhaps it was recompense for my having witnessed his beating. Mrs Honeyman’s belief that ‘children come out of women through tunnels of pain’ connected in my mind with my need to watch Ade, as well as my growing feeling that, to be an adult, a woman (though I was only ten), was to bear pain alone.

One evening after supper I watched Ade make his way across the lawn towards the lagoon. He was carrying some kind of package wrapped in newspaper. I followed him. He did not stop at the shore as usual, but turned and climbed over the fence, out of our garden. I waited until he had disappeared, then I too climbed the fence, entered the bush and fought my way through. On the other side, I stopped and parted the branches. Ade was walking across a thin stretch of wetland, towards an old wooden jetty, calling, ‘Sagoe, Sagoe, I have it!’

Sagoe. Babatundi’s elder brother! Like all the market children, Ade had feared him, his fabled cruelty; and together we’d worried he might appear on our visits to Babatundi. Now Ade was striding towards him, package held out almost in defence, it seemed to me, as one might offer meat to a vicious dog. I hid in the undergrowth. It was the first time I had seen Sagoe, who looked more like a feral cat, I thought, the kind that haunted the Apapa docks.

Sagoe was thin and tall and was smoking a cigarette. As he moved to take the package, he thrust his unfinished cigarette at Ade, who put it between his lips and began to smoke. Sagoe opened the package, tipped its contents out into his palm, then spat on it. He offered it to Ade, who did the same. Now Sagoe rolled it in his fingers. Then he took up a stick by his feet, a bamboo rod attached with a length of string, at the end of which gleamed a giant hook. So they were fishing! Sagoe fed the bait on to the hook then began to swing it around his head. He leaned back and launched the hook high over the water. Immediately a company of gulls swept down and began to snap at the bait as it fell through the air and then hit the water. Instead of letting the hook sink, as I expected, Sagoe hauled the line in as soon as it struck the surface. Four times Sagoe launched the hook into the air and hauled it in. On his fifth attempt a gull caught the bait in mid-air. There was a violent screech. Sagoe staggered on the jetty. Suddenly I understood Sagoe’s project, and my heart sickened. The bird was flapping desperately, but its beak was caught in the hook. It was unable to make any headway through the air, and so it hovered above the water, fighting, dipping and rising. With a great effort of balance, his legs straining, back bent, Sagoe fought the gull. Ade was jumping up and down, in awe or excitement or, like myself, fear, I do not know. The gull let out a series of terrible cries. Its wings seemed to flap too slowly and it looked as if it would lose momentum and plummet to the water. Unable to bear the screams, I put my fingers in my ears. Sagoe and the gull fought for a very long time. Slowly, however, the bird grew tired; it dropped lower and lower, and Sagoe’s arms slackened. I took my fingers from my ears. Sagoe called Ade. The bird, quiet now, fell and settled on the water, where it floated at an unnatural angle, its beak half-submerged. The two boys began to haul in the line. Now the gull was only several yards away from the jetty. Even from where I stood, in the undergrowth, some ten yards away, it looked enormous, bloody at its beak. As they dragged it out of the water, it began to shriek again. Ade took hold of the rod, and Sagoe picked up a stick and began to swing at the gull. He had trouble making contact, the bird was flapping and thrashing at the ground, but every so often he managed. Soon the bird became still, quiet, and Sagoe rained down on it a series of blows. At one point the head twisted and came free. That is when I cried out, and the boys turned and saw me.

Later, after Ade and Sagoe had gone, leaving me on the jetty, I lay on the boards until dusk. I could have washed the blood off in the lagoon. But I had not wanted to be near the gulls, who had not stopped swooping, hysterical; sensing, I knew, the unnatural death of one of their number. On hearing my cry, Sagoe had dragged me from the bushes and instructed Ade to hold me down on the jetty. He had picked up the gull’s head and walked to where I lay, sobbing and twisting, and brushed its bloody neck across my face. ‘Girls are bloody,’ Sagoe had said, laughing.

After that I stopped spying on Ade. I withdrew into myself. Every morning on arriving at Jankara market with Iffe I crept beneath the onion table and sat there throughout the day, seized by a kind of enervating emptiness or hunger. The rainy season began. Every morning crowds of umbrellas sprung up like outlandish mushroom-growths. Now fewer customers came to the vegetable quarter; nevertheless, Iffe had no time for me, she was too much occupied with her plans to fight the slum clearances. Each day meetings were held. Lawyers came with scribes, and there was hardly a moment when she was not making a speech or dictating a letter or signing forms. I rarely saw her barter or even sell her wares — it seemed she was supported by donations from the other traders. I noticed a new meekness about her customers: few suggested the pile might grow a little; no longer did they attempt to embarrass her into giving a superior gift. She had become an O-lo’ri Egbe and represented the interests of the onion sellers. Sometimes I helped to pile onions on the table-top, and my arms ached. Or else I watched the sun drink up shadows on the street. Mostly, however, I sat beneath the onion stand, sucking on a stone, letting the world around me fade.

Several weeks went by in this way. I sat, bored, hardly moving, listening to the noise of the rain. But then something happened which marked the beginning of an important period of my life. This period did not last long (a couple of months at the most), and no one else knew about it (it occurred exclusively inside my head). What happened? I began not only to hear, but to listen , to take in the sounds, form distinctions and organize them into groups. For a time I forgot my loneliness. I forgot Ade and Iffe and my absent father. It was thrilling to discover I could shape raw noise into an intelligible order. In that period I was a kind of child-Linnaeus, charting not vegetative and animal matter, but the obscure life of the acoustic world. How boisterous and confusing Lagos had been until then! And myself, how ignorant! How innocent and forgetful!