Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

I returned to Ikoyi. I don’t know how I got there. I recall passing through alleyways, backyards, gardens, crossing roads and footbridges, avoiding people as much as possible. I remember the sun sparking on the lagoon. And its rays beating down upon me. I remember the aching of my body. And my dizziness. For long stretches I knew neither where I was, nor where I was going, nor how I arrived at this place, which seemed like another world. At night I slept in boats moored by the shore and suffered appalling dreams. It was in this way I found my way to Ikoyi. It took a long time. I even got there without knowing it. ‘Evie!’ a voice cried one day. That is how I remember it. It was my father. His chest was heaving, his breath hot, and he lifted me up and carried me to the house that I could no longer consider home.

In the weeks after I returned to Ikoyi, I fell sick. I had emerged from underground and the sun-shafts had worked on me. I felt limp, breathless, crushed, unable to endure light. Every voice cut into my head. Every touch was rough. Days passed before I could take in food. I felt hot, yet did not sweat. In time my breathing eased. The fever broke. And I became aware that my father had cared for me during the sickness; it was he who had pressed wet cottons to my forehead and offered water through a straw and peeled fruit to feed the pulp between my lips, which were broken. I did not see Ade in my periods of waking and I feared he had died from the impact of his fall. Later, when I had recovered from my fever, I learned he’d survived, but that he was no longer living with us. There had been trouble between my father and Iffe over Ade’s accident and my disappearance. Now Iffe, Ben and Ade lived in the new township of Suru Lere on the outskirts of Lagos.

With the breaking of the fever my father began to question me about where I had been. I tried to tell him about the pits, about Nikolas and the nightsoil workers, but he would not believe me. He thought my sickness had affected my mind and claimed I’d been absent for no more than several days! If my father himself had been more complete in the mind, I might have trusted his judgement. But I noticed something tragic and false about him. Although he still worked for the Lagos Development Board, although the slum clearances had begun and every day he went to oversee the demolition work, although the last years of Empire seemed to have inspired in him a kind of manic confidence — despite all this, I saw that the lines on his forehead had deepened, and his long figure seemed curved inward at the middle, and his pale eyes expressed continually less sense. So I did not believe him when he told me I had lost my sense of time. Even today, when I ask myself how long I lived with Nikolas in the pits, I defy my father’s judgement and estimate it to be something like nine months. Of course, the figure satisfies something in me.

At that time the British were preparing to leave Nigeria: Independence was approaching; Nigeria had her first prime minister, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, and in December 1959 federal elections had been held. In the European quarter of Ikoyi several houses were already boarded up. During the day I sat in the garden and watched the light creep up my leg, or listened to the silence, which rose like vapour from the lagoon. The air was still, hot, thick, and light cloud-columns split the sky. Everything felt deadened, not least my feeling for time, which seemed both to slow down and to change rhythm. Although the calendar above my bed continued to count the days, it counted days that lacked new occurrences. Father told me I would start school once we arrived in Scotland. The prospect neither disturbed me nor made me especially excited.

Conscientiously, if somewhat morosely, I sought silence, and I plugged my ears with clods from the walls of my pit, the only trace of that underground kingdom I had managed to keep. When I had lain alone in my hollow I had delighted in the emptiness and silence; now, that same emptiness and silence left me feeling lost. The world and its energies seemed far removed; and the more distant they seemed, the more my thoughts reached out to them.

I tried to persuade Father to take me with him into town, but he would not be moved, the demolition work was too dangerous, he said. To keep me company he gave me a radio of my own, a shiny portable device with a sky-blue case and concealed speaker, which emitted a beautiful deep, crisp sound. I listened to it obsessively, and for a while I forgot my loneliness. Of course, I no longer believed that the announcer lived inside the radio. My father had explained that he lived in England, and the broadcast came all the way from Bush House, in London’s Strand. The announcer’s voice, Father said, was carried through the medium of air, and sounded in all the radios of the world at once. The idea that it did not stop at the edge of the city, and that it jumped rivers, mountains and seas, amazed me. To think that a voice could hop continents. And that it was able to bring so many people simultaneously under its spell!

It was strange to think that people in Britain, fellow citizens of the announcer, might be strolling down the Strand at the very moment he began broadcasting the news and by chance might look up at the sky, where, invisible but apparent, pleating the air with its waves, his voice would be floating above their heads. I had lost forever the belief that the announcer lived in our radio. And yet I’d gained a new feeling of sanctuary: now I knew there was a community of listeners on verandas all around the world. I liked to think that my grandfather, Mr Rafferty (who I’d never met, but whom Father had told me about — I was to meet him when we got to Scotland), might be tuning in at the same time every evening, hearing the same words spoken with the same voice. Like Father, I learned, Mr Rafferty was a cricket fan, so I took an interest in the test match reports, broadcast after the main items. My thoughts reached out to Mr Rafferty; they travelled up from our garden, so I imagined, and over the Atlantic Ocean, describing a parallel path to the radio waves, but in the opposite direction, until they found their way into his ear.

One evening after supper Father poured me a glass of lemonade and asked me to bring the radio out on to the veranda. He was nervous and excited. I knew this because he worried the scar on his chin.

‘Lagos will be on the radio tonight,’ he said, and laughed. ‘Switch it on!’

Soon the Bow Bells chimed out over the dark garden. I recall only one item from that evening, the story of a signal worker at Euston Station who had been run over by a train. When, finally, the news broadcast ended, the announcer said, Now for a special report from Lagos, capital of the British territory of Nigeria … How strange to hear the name of our home town broadcast on the radio! Tomorrow in Lagos a special building will be opened. Independence House. For years the British administration has been building a wonderful capital city for Nigeria, which will soon take over the reins of self-governance. Independence House, symbol of all that the British have given to this once-impoverished country, will be opened by the Governor, Sir James Wilson Robertson … The announcer continued to speak in his lulling and authoritative voice, in ‘BBC English’, whose intonation seemed to draw out the vowel-sounds, and I had the impression that Lagos had been held for a moment in his mouth, exposed, freed from the daily concerns of us, its inhabitants, in order to reveal its pure form. We are witnessing the awakening of national consciousness in a people who have for centuries lived in the dependence of some other power. A wind of change is blowing through Nigeria, and Lagos, its glittering capital, is the centre of the change.