Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

Ade watched me with agitated eyes. Was he sceptical about my words? I could not be sure. The more he stayed quiet the more I wanted to talk. And it was with a sense of relief, almost, of wild hope or foolishness, that I told Ade next about my powers of listening, about how I could hear the tiniest sounds, unbelievable things, things no one else could hear. I asked him to go to the end of the garden and whisper something. When he came back I repeated exactly what I thought he had said. Inexplicably, I got it wrong. We tried again, and I got it wrong again. I asked Ade what he had whispered but he refused to say; he only repeated that I had got it wrong, and sat on the bank. He tilted his head to one side. There was scorn in his eyes, and I was stung once again. He brought a mouse’s tail from his trouser pocket. It was then, as he began to twist the tail between his fingers, and the night darkened, and I felt his eyes watching me with a peculiar kind of focus, that I knew for certain that something between us had changed. That change, the challenge I saw in that moment, was affirmed and strengthened over the following weeks.

But I am getting ahead of myself. At the time, although I registered Ade’s scorn, I was not prepared to believe it, and I did not allow it to stop me talking; now I had started, I did not want to stop. I said that the time had come for me to tell him something very important, something which no one else knew about and which would put our lives in danger.

‘I have managed to make contact with another world.’

I did not want our friendship to end. If I made myself extraordinary, perhaps Ade would pay me the attention I knew I deserved. He was unimpressed.

‘It is an almost completely silent world,’ I continued.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean somewhere not far from here is a place where people live in almost complete silence. My connection is very thin,’ I said, looking at him directly, ‘and it is only sometimes I can hear it.’ I paused. Ade frowned and stared straight at me. I had the feeling, false I know now, that he believed me. Nevertheless, he was intrigued; his eyes became more active. I was unsure what I was going to say next. I said, ‘Luckily for you, since you don’t have my powers of listening, I have discovered another way to make contact with this world.’ I was improvising. I ran to the house and fetched the radio. I switched it on, and Ade’s eyes became wide — in fear or with mocking I do not know. I began to tell Ade all about the silent world; about how you could walk for days without your eyes settling on a single thing; how it was a bright empty land of raven skies alternating with flaming white light. I told him how in this world there were few objects, animals, and even fewer people; how on the few occasions when you did see something, you didn’t really notice it, or rather you saw it but you didn’t ask yourself what it was, because in this world without sound you just knew. I told him there were no names for things, because a footstep was just a footstep, a branch a branch, a stone a stone, and so on for everything, including people, because each thing was only what it was, and there were no echoes or reflections and nothing cast a shadow, I said.

That summer I spent an hour or two every day searching for the silent world. I would stand in an alley behind the onion line, stretch my arms out and start to spin, faster than I had ever done before, turning and turning until my head felt light. Sometimes the sun went black behind my eyes, and I would fall on the ground. Once or twice after school Ade found me; sometimes he even played along, saying, ‘Have you found it yet?’

‘Not yet,’ I would say, lying there, waiting for the city’s sounds to quieten, then compose themselves. I did not always manage to snare that pool of quiet (it was tiny, hardly noticeable, a slight disturbance of the air, and at first seemed to come from no place in particular), but whenever I did, I set off in pursuit. Sometimes, at weekends, when he had nothing better to do, Ade came along. Running south through the market against the flow of the crowd, between the high-backed stalls, coming out between the cloth sellers, entering the back streets of town, stopping for breath, chatting, drinking, setting off again, following no logical path, but moving instinctively, and always we found ourselves drawn south. Like Riley’s pointer chasing a scent I was pulled along by something powerful which I could not see, a taut, quivering and irresistible force.

There were moments as we searched when we forgot our divide. Ade could be kind; for instance, when I fell on the ground he took my head in the crook of his arm. But there was also in all we did — not just in our search, but at the market also, and on the bus with Iffe — a touch of dishonesty. We did not acknowledge it; it was simply an omission, a silence we could not name. Many things had come between us — our ages and genders for instance — all of which contributed to this feeling of dishonesty. But what hurt me most, because it had come so suddenly, or I had become suddenly aware of it, was the race divide. Calls for independence were then ever-present in Lagos, and there was talk of ‘sending the white man packing’. Until now I had been unaffected by this talk, for I had been living powerfully in the half-real region of sounds, and at the market I was treated no differently from the other children. Prior to that there had been Mrs Honeyman; she had made an absolute distinction between the European and African, had spoken of a gulf — of feeling, of intelligence, of dignity, of truth — separating black and white. For a while I had come under the influence of her ideas and had more than half-believed her.

After Ade’s comment about Hogan Bassey, however, the divide was quite suddenly raised again. What is more, it became directly relevant to me. Ade seemed now to have his own way of talking about people and events, slightly alien or antagonistic to my own, and I thought his way seemed more in touch with the world than mine. How shut-away I had been all this time! It hurt me to think of it. What I had thought of as absolute — my right to consider Nigeria as home — others saw almost as an aberration. From Ade’s small comments I sensed how he and his friends saw me — as well as Iffe and countless others I did not know. I sensed also how he worked to put me down. Even as we ran in search of the silent world I noticed his mocking eyes, which said to me: Perhaps I’ll come along, but don’t expect me to believe in your childish game.

Now it was late afternoon, and we were running past the slaughter district. I realized we had not brought any water. Turning back would be a waste of time, especially as it wasn’t hot. In fact, I could feel waves of an unseasonally cool breeze. That afternoon the sky lay open, but big rust-coloured clouds came in from the lagoon, blocking the light — the harmattan season. It felt as if the sky was coming down to meet us.

I took Ade by the arm, saying, ‘We’re getting near. I can feel it.’ I said this and yet I wondered how I would know when we arrived. We came to a square built up on three sides. On previous days, in other light, I had been here, when Ben or Father had sent me to buy provisions from Hardy’s Euro-African Emporium. Now a row of houses had disappeared, and in their place modern buildings had sprung up, still half-built. At the far side a group of feral dogs was squabbling — the city was strangely full of them at the time. Elsewhere the space was wide and empty. The weather was cold, the air fuzzy, stale, bitter-tasting.

First the dust, then the cold drove us towards one of the new buildings. High above us rose a mass of girders, glass and steel sheeting, which merged into a tangle of vertical and diagonal lines. At the seventh or eighth floor the structure ended, and I saw a row of floating lights. Only then did I realize how dark it had become. Ade pointed to the lights, saying, ‘The workmen.’ And I noticed that the lights were attached to dark figures moving slowly over scaffolding. ‘Let’s go inside,’ Ade said. We pulled back a wooden fence, entered, passed the foundations and started to climb. I took Ade’s hand. He didn’t pull away. We clambered over planks, then up staircases connecting partly finished floors. Now we reached the fourth floor. Here we were protected from the force of the wind, but not its noise, which boomed in my ears. How should I describe my feelings? Fear, thrill, uncertainty, tenderness?