Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

The matchbox is surprisingly intact. The strip of sandpaper remains rough to the touch, and the tray slides freely. On its age-stained label I can make out the legend, ‘Paul & Virginie’, beneath which is an etching of a man and woman, both very young. The young man is stripped to the waist, his trousers rolled up to his knees. He is standing on a rock in the middle of a swollen river, trying to cross it. On his back he carries the girl, who is clinging to him, arms around his neck, face half-buried in his hair. Over them looms a black mountain, at its foot banana trees whose serrated leaves appear to flap in the wind, the same wind which has whipped the river into a frenzy of white froth, the same wind which has unfurled the girl’s hair from the scarf she has used to tie it back. The girl appears anxious, but the boy, smiling up at her, is happy to be carrying his load, which seems to give him the strength to carry on.

Only moments ago I fetched the matchbox from its hiding place: the tin marked ‘unica’ (which I keep in the wardrobe, behind the stack of papers printed with my history). Now it sits before me on my desk. Carefully, lovingly even, I blow from its surface the accumulated dust, which rises in a fizzing grey cloud. I blink several times, breathe deeply; then, taking the matchbox in my left palm, I slide it open, to reveal … a pair of earplugs. Happily I see they are still intact! Happily they remain a pair (being a pair, perhaps, they should not form part of my unica collection, but the tin is the best way to keep them safe from the mice and damp). The earplugs are not the common kind. Small — although too wide to fit into the average twelve-year-old ear — grey-black, friable, tapering to a blunt point, they look like a pair of goat’s droppings. And yet I count them among my most treasured possessions. They are, of course, the very clods I gouged from the walls of my pit and stuffed in my ears. Not only do they sit mutely in their cotton-wool shroud, but their historical role was to restore silence. Thus they represent for me a goal attained, an example to every other object in the attic, the standard by which I judge them all.

How I would love to dwell longer on my earplugs. To note their weight and dimensions, to examine the material from which they are made. What a rest to speak of these broken objects from my past. And how instructional! But I must press on with these stories.

…

As soon as I stuffed my ears, the pits were restored to silence. But I continued to feel a faint trembling of the earth; which grew stronger and stronger, until it began to merge with the trembling of the shadows, which in turn resolved themselves into the form of a man. I looked up into a wide pair of eyes — trickster’s eyes, handsome, dark, soporific — which were gazing down into my own. The eyes moved swiftly to and fro; in fact, the man’s whole body seemed to be in motion, his hands and torso shook, and his naked skull bristled with night-static. I was too tired to move, and so I did not struggle as the man stooped and, with great care, lifted me in his arms. How had he found me? Had I cried out on hearing the dinning earth? Did he know I had fallen from a great height? He carried me along what I thought was a narrow corridor, then down stairs which must have been cut into the earth. We descended deeper underground, and the heat rose, and a sweet hot odour swelled my nostrils. We moved on, past closed cells and interior courtyards that resounded with his steps. Unspeaking, I clung tightly to his waist. The smell now was like a physical presence; it seemed to push at me with the force of a breeze. We entered a wider space and stopped. Slowly, as my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I saw that we had arrived in a large, sparsely furnished room. I made out a bed and two chairs and, rising from the ground, what looked like stalagmites on which candles burned. The man placed me gently on the bed. I slept at once.

Over the following days I lay on the bed in this dimly lit chamber. The smell was outrageous; sweet and fetid, it bloomed like a hothouse flower, and the temperature rose and rose. I did little but lie there, recovering. Sometimes I did not sleep for several nights. Sometimes I was overcome with laughter. At others I forgot who I was. In time I felt restored and began to examine my surroundings. The light was dim, blue-black and spangled with pale yellow. The furniture seemed to rise seamlessly from the floor, as if cast in lava: black, organic table and chairs, a long, low bed without sheets where I lay, a high-backed armchair where the man with the bristling skull sat, watching me.

What follows is the story of my friendship with Nikolas, leader of the nightsoil workers, an eccentric tribe who were employed by night to clear the city’s sewage and eject it into the lagoon; before dawn, the workers would descend to the pits, their home, into which I had fallen. The world of the nightsoil workers had evolved out of the city sewers. All this I learned from Nikolas in the first months of my stay.

In the beginning, he told me, Lagos’ sewage system was little more than a network of shallow open channels into which the citizens threw their filth. But soon, as the city’s population grew, they began to overflow, and the streets became filled with pools of stinking waste. With the streets overflowing, the council built a sanitary tramway. Every evening after dusk men in masks collected the nightsoil and shovelled it into the carriages. The line ran from Ikoyi Island, crossed the Macgregor Canal and tacked across the city centre, before turning south; when it reached Dejection Jetty on Victoria Island, its steaming cargo was loaded on to canoes and dumped in the lagoon.

Because of the tramway, Nikolas told me, the sewer system fell into disuse. That was when the nightsoil workers moved in; they went on to deepen the network, hollowing out a warren-matrix of rooms that spread slowly beneath the streets, an expanse made up of old nightsoil and every other kind of waste: rusty metal, sackcloth, planks, pipes, piles of tins, rags, old umbrellas, bottles, glass and broken metal. A second Lagos evolved, existing entirely underground, hidden from view, unknown to the majority, forgotten by those who walked the streets above it, a city made from all that was not wanted or had fallen into disuse. Nikolas delighted in showing me the ingenious uses to which the nightsoil workers had put the city’s waste, pointing out a Guinness bottle used to roll pastry, a discarded stocking through which coffee could be strained, wrought-iron railings used as meat-skewers.

He was always in action, at every moment twitching and gesticulating, and he burned with a furious internal energy he was barely able to contain. As a child, I learned, he had fallen down a mine shaft and consequently his back was bent. In Ibadan, where he went to school, the missionaries had caned him repeatedly on his wrists. Now his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. During the War he fought in Burma with the Frontier Force. His army-issue boots had been too small, and he lost the feeling in his toes. Because of this he limped. He held his tall frame loosely at odd angles, and his joints appeared twisted. In fact, thinking back, only once — later, towards the end of my stay in the pits, when I walked into his chamber and watched him sleep — do I recall seeing him completely still, and even then I could not help but be aware of a kind of slow combustion in his chest, an internal fire which recalled the legendary origin he claimed for himself, citing as its source the mythological coupling of a salamander and the Yoruban sky-god Sango.

At first, recovering in his chamber, I’d listened to Nikolas’ talk in a sort of torpor. It had taken a considerable effort of will to wake from the enchantment of my twilit husk. Later, however, I found myself attempting to direct the flow of his speech, stopping him when he digressed and pressing him whenever his allusions intrigued me. One day, after he told me that he was not originally from Lagos, and frustrated by his elisions and ellipses, I asked for a fuller account.