Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

‘Not yet, no. Besides, I’m not deaf,’ I said sharply. ‘I have a very keen sense of hearing. It’s only that it is erratic … Bwha, it’s cold.’

‘Does it worry you?’ he asked.

In truth I was wretched, wandering in my thoughts, but I didn’t reply.

By the time we got to the front door of the institution the snow had started to fall in clusters of feathery flakes. Deepening blue drifts lay all over the grass. We stood with our backs to the door. I rubbed my hands together, and we huddled close. Mr Rafferty wanted to talk some more, but I wouldn’t allow it.

It’s been over a week since my visit to Mr Rafferty. In that time I’ve done very little. Finally, however, I feel able to press on. What happened in the interim?

The snow continued to fall. In between periods of silence, the funeral chord continued to sound, and I was unable to recall my first months and years in Scotland. I wrapped myself in my patchwork blanket and lay on my mattress, which had been my father’s, but which I now think of as my own, staring at the skylight. Some mornings the condensation on the glass turned to ice, and my breath rose visibly. I cut the tips from a pair of gloves; together with a scarf from Mother’s trunk, they helped against the cold. As far as I could tell my hearing had not become worse. It had not grown more sensitive either. I was having trouble sleeping, the days seemed long, so I busied myself as best I could: I swept the floor, thought about tidying the attic, about throwing some of the clutter away. I went into Gullane and bought a supply of beans.

The nights seemed even longer than the days. I missed my grandfather. Now that I wore the fingerless gloves, my hands were warmer, and I managed to write a little. I was trying to recount my afternoon at the hothouse, but it was slow progress. One evening, sitting at my desk facing the screen, which was misted over, but which nevertheless smouldered a pale blue, I read over my work, then closed my computer. Progress? It was the contrary. In five days I’d succeeded in blackening only two pages. What is more, I could hardly connect what I’d written to my ordeal in the hothouse. My words seemed to describe another experience entirely.

That was last week. This morning when I got up, crossed to the skylight, with its smattering of snow and looked up at the sky, I saw the night was fine and clear and I saw the flakes pawing the glass. All was quiet, even the gulls; perhaps they’d fled to inland roosts. I climbed over the heap of junk to the wardrobe, where I keep the completed pages of my history, printed on sheets of unbound paper. I took them out and glanced over the first chapters. It was a mistake. Not even at the outset, when I’d asked myself some questions, and answered with deceit, was my history credible. I read on, past the questions and into the following chapters. I encountered the half-truths, elisions and embellishments. I threw down the pages in disgust. They scattered over the floor.

It was starting to get light. I wanted to sleep, but I was unable. I began to march over the strewn pages of my history, experiencing an immediate feeling of triumph, and I even chuckled to myself as my shoes dirtied the already blemished sheets. The sun was bright; no doubt reflecting off the snow, it produced a glare from the skylight. I gathered several handfuls of my history in order to tape them over the glass. Three or four layers and the glare was sufficiently diminished to resemble twilight. I bent down and picked up the remaining sheets, which I had forgotten to number, and stacked them haphazardly together. Scrabbling in the half-dark, I came across the pocket watch. I hadn’t even known I had lost it! Its glass front was cracked, the chain missing; added to the scratch on its underside, a series of marks obscured yet more of the inscription, which I read in the light on my computer:

Could not ________ move ____ this ____,

Not ________ passion ________ by spleen.

And _____________ power,

By _______ acts _________

I held it to my ear. Not a sound. I put the watch into my pocket and finished collecting the sheets. Finally I rose, returned my history to the wardrobe and sat at my desk. I glanced about the attic, saw nothing but the usual clutter of objects. I took a deep breath, rubbed my hands together, focused my mind on my ordeal in the hothouse and, all in a rush, managed to set it down on my computer.

That was a moment ago. Now I will turn my mind back to my first years in Scotland.

…

The dark two-storey house in Gullane was full of neglected rooms, vast sofas and cheap artificial plants. The noise of the sea was ever-present, as was the overbearingly loud ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. Already, when we arrived from Nigeria, the house was in a state of neglect: rotten wood, threadbare curtains, carpets scuffed to brown matting, and everything covered in a dim greasy flour. The chairs with their green hide felt cold against my bottom, the leather torn, cracked, blackened. Also avian-soiled, since birds found their way into the house. With no one to chase them away, they acquired free reign of the space, flying like darts from room to room, perching on beams and pelmets and often, frighteningly, stunning themselves on the window panes.

All of this owing to the indolence of my father. I barely recall him in those first years in Gullane. He slept most of the day. Having inherited the house from his parents, as well as a small allowance, he had no need to work. Tall, with uncombed hair, his limbs were thin, and as the years passed they knotted in a horrible contraction of all his muscles — one can never observe the passage of time but only its effects. He quickly became quiet and confused. Like an old mirror his skin developed brown spots. If time marked his outward appearance, however, turning that powerful figure into a discoloured old man, inwardly it had a paradoxical effect. For a brief period the spirit of childhood entered him, his energies revived, and his mood and mobility improved. He began to ride his bicycle around the living room, laughing uncontrollably whenever he knocked over a plant. Once I caught sight of him lying on the carpet, legs tangled in the frame, ringing the bell and shouting, ‘Out of my way,’ over and over again.

When his legs healed he began to explore the house on foot. He discovered the room where we’d stored our possessions on returning from Lagos. Some he threw away, some he gave to the charity shop on Main Street. Most he carried up to the attic. He tipped their contents into a heap and began to sort through them, working hard, even frantically, but without method or conviction. The mouldy cricket gear, the pocket watch he had broken so many times but which continued to tick, the mappa mundi, the bronze pendant from Benin, letters, papers, the endless stubs of cigarettes and piles of ash, the moth-eaten books, the trunk in which Mother’s clothes lay, as well as old photographs, medals, pencils, lamps with torn shades — all these things made him seem detached and apart from life. As the years passed — and I grew into a monstrous solitary teenager, and in my fourteenth year left for boarding school in Edinburgh, about which the less said the better — I barely thought about him. Sometimes I arrived home for the weekend to discover that my father was missing. I would wander all over the house, calling his name and knocking on walls, until he emerged from under a table or bed; only to scurry back up to his perch beneath the eaves. I asked him why he spent so much time in the attic. Apparently he was more comfortable when closer to the clouds.

Enough! I am tired of this chapter. Thinking back to those years in Scotland, trying to relate the circumstances of my father’s madness and death, I can barely recover the memories. With the greatest effort I have managed to set something down. And yet I can’t help feeling that the process of remembering has hidden something, and that something the most important part. What is more, I’m exhausted by the labour, and in between writing I have lain on my mattress, immobile.