Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

I suspected Nikolas spoke faultily, yet there was much originality in his ideas. Besides, his words were touching me in places where mere facts were unable to reach. I felt they did not circle round the true things of the world, but, like Iffe with her sonorous voice, strike to their very centre. The description of the African book had taken me by surprise, and I was silent for a while. I thought about Mrs Honeyman. She had believed absolutely in book-learning. She told me that if I did not study I would fall in with ignorance, with the natives — savages. No doubt she would have taken great pleasure in seeing me here, dressed in a loose frock of sackcloth. I let out a wicked burst of laughter. The pale deceiver was right, I had black blood running in my veins, and I had no use for the sun.

I looked up at Nikolas. ‘I follow you,’ I said.

He bent to examine me. ‘What a beautiful face you have, Evie … you are a little bit vain, like myself! There will always be porsons who are stamped underfoot and hounded underground and these porsons must be honoured either with wonder or laughter.’ He spread his mouth in a wide grin. ‘As a matter of fact you have a fundamental character with plenty of creative talent. You will go on to achieve many significant things, and I even have a wish that one day you will inform the world of what is concealed in these pits.’

‘But I have heard it already.’

And I told Nikolas what I had heard, as I lay in my hollow, before he rescued me.

— a gasping of machinery. Narrow conduits debouching on vast enclosed spaces, on subterranean halls high as cathedrals, their vaults clustered with chains, pulleys, cables, pipes, conduits, joists, with movable platforms attached to jacks bright with grease.

— and, lower, mine galleries with blind, ageing horses drawing carts filled with ore and slow processions of helmeted miners; and oozing passageways, reinforced with waterlogged timbers, that led down glistening steps to slapping blackish water; flint-bottomed boats, punts weighed with empty barrels sailing across a lightless lake.

— and, even lower, nearing the earth’s centre, I heard a world of caverns whose walls were black with soot, a world of cesspools and sloughs, a world of grubs and beasts, of eyeless beings who drag animal carcasses behind them, of demoniacal monsters with bodies of birds, swine and fish, of dried-out corpses and yellow-skinned skeletons arrayed in attitudes of the living, of forges manned by dazed Cyclopses in black leather aprons, their single eyes shielded by metal-rimmed blue glass, hammering their brazen masses into dazzling shields.

Nikolas’ eyes with their flickering rings gleamed kindly on me. ‘You are feverish,’ he said. ‘Try to stay calm and quieten the raging in your head.’ And he blew the candles out.

The fever broke this evening. For two days and nights I have been lying on my mattress in the middle of the attic, plagued by torrid dreams, dreams of the dinning earth — brought on, no doubt, by my recollection of the pits. A tempest blew through my head. My body became a mass of cramps. I felt my blood beating through my arteries, and angry drums played between my ears. I recognize this fever; it’s come from inside me; I heard those same noises decades ago, when I lived with Nikolas in his kingdom underground.

Now, after washing and eating, I am back at my desk. The attic is almost completely dark. The noise in my head has subsided, but the blood is still beating at my temples. I must have knocked over my laptop computer in my delirium, since I found it on the floor. Lifting it on to the desk, I opened it up and saw it had been damaged; a crack runs diagonally across the length of the screen. My computer is old, as thick and heavy as a volume of the Encyclopaedia . It puffs and gasps like Mr Rafferty in his sleep. A moment ago I switched it on. Thankfully, it has survived its fall. I read over the last chapter. My words seem to dissolve rather than record my time in the pits, now sunk beneath a veil of marine light and rotten air. What was I thinking? Blind, ageing horses. Helmeted miners. Cesspools and sloughs and Cyclopses in black leather aprons! I don’t remember writing any of these things. Did I really ‘see’ these strange visions? Or was it the raging in my head that led me to type out those false imaginings? I have no way of knowing, for I was quite out of my mind.

Forward!

…

It was 1960, let’s say, when I emerged from the pits. The mist of morning stung my eyes. The sky, like every sky in Lagos before dawn, in the dry season, as I recalled it, rested darkly on the horizon of water. I stood and watched a canoe emerge from the gloom, and then, a little later, etched against the half-light of the sky, its fishing net. Presently the sun broke above the horizon, and I found myself drowning in white light. I covered my face with my hands. The sun shone … that is not the word. Sunlight poured down on me, spreading and contracting behind my closed lids, and I fell on the ground.

I dragged myself forward, feeling the ground with my hands, until I came to a stretch of elephant grass. Soon I was lying in its fronds. Happily they concealed the sun from me and me from the road, and I gained control of my breathing. How much time went by I do not know. My tongue felt dry, so I sucked dew from the elephant grass. At one point I heard footsteps on the road. Fearing discovery, I crawled through the fronds, away from the road, and came out at the water’s edge. In time I was able to open my eyes. I saw the lagoon: clear and calm, it appeared no different from the days before the pits; it worked lazily against the shore, sighing as it rolled, and when I broke its surface with my hand, it felt soft and cold, and it distorted the image of my fingers, just as it had done before. I got on to my knees and washed my face. How different I looked! My features were thicker and longer, my nose sharper, and my skin appeared dark. The eyes I saw were not those I knew from childhood. I took off my rags, then walked into the water and began to wash. The filth of the pits came off me, first in small flakes, then in clods. I rubbed my skin, scooping water on to myself, and as I did I began to cry, great sobs of unhappiness and shame. When I was fully clean, I rose and stood in the shallows and watched the last traces of the pits disappear below the surface, carrying away from me what seemed the only thing that could have made me truly happy.

It was late afternoon when I stepped out on to the road. The sun had weakened, but the air was still hot, and the feel of it in my lungs heightened my desperate mood. I walked along the shore-road, disorientated. Eventually I found my way to the square where Ade and I had taken refuge during the harmattan. And it will give an indication of my confusion or wickedness if I say that I didn’t think once of my friend and his fall. Perhaps it was because the square was greatly changed. High concrete buildings now lined three of its sides. Crowds of office workers, shoppers, hawkers, vagrants, people of every kind, swarmed the paved way. At least that is how I remember it. But perhaps I am confusing several different occasions, and different times. Was I in the pits long enough for so much change to have occurred? I do not think so. Perhaps, then, I came across the square at a later time. No matter, I will relate it as I remember, even though it seems unlikely, for I must press on with my story. I looked for a place to hide, but there was none. Squatting by the fountain in the middle of the square, I remembered a shop I once knew, Hardy’s Euro-African Emporium. Ben had often sent Ade and me to buy rice or sugar, Ovaltine, dried fish or tins of hair oil. At other times Father would place in my outstretched palm a warm penny to fetch his tobacco, which Hardy spooned from outsized jars like ant-house colonies. I had smelled the variety of teas and the gummy smoke from Hardy’s pipe, lit always; and in the wet season, when the shop swelled and rain rattled the corrugated roof, the scent was of mushrooms. Now it was gone; in its place stood the glass heights of the Bank of Nigeria. But more than anything it was the square’s acoustical qualities that made me understand how different Lagos had become. Here the clamour of the city was louder than ever; and yet it was not so much the volume of noise that spoke of change, but rather the way the traffic suggested by its boom that air could be perforated. And just as, years previously, the return of the swallows had signalled the end of the rains, suggesting to me a new life at the market, so now it was the lack of birdsong, and indeed any of the sounds of nature, that made me feel my old life had come to an end.