Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

In the past, when I have been unable to go on, I would pick up one of the books — histories, pamphlets, novels, treatises, letters, the Encyclopaedia Britannica — from the pile in the attic and seek inspiration in its pages. I would find a sentence I liked and transcribe it on to my computer; even, at times, whole paragraphs. Or else I would copy out a description — a gesture, a landscape, more often an object — perhaps substituting a word here and there for one of my own, in order to smooth over false notes. Yes, that is something I have frequently resorted to, in the course of writing this history. At other times I was happy to exaggerate details of my past, details that were plausible, perhaps, but not indisputably true. I was like the unknown cartographer of the mappa mundi, he who when ignorant of lakes and towns sketched savage beasts and elephants, and in place of contour lines created improbable realms … and what kind of lunatic would use such a map to find her way? In short, I have been happy to tell stories. No longer. Now I would rather stay silent than risk telling a lie. Forward.

…

Boarding school. What is there to say? I was unhappy and confused. I recall the cherry blossoms on the front lawn, and Mrs Ling, my English teacher, an unconscious whistler. I recall being made to run through a field of nettles, a collective punishment. I recall the stationery cupboard in which I hid during PE lessons. I had few friends, was alienated from the other girls, who figured me as a freak. My ears had begun to grow at an extraordinary rate. Already large when I left Nigeria at the age of fourteen, by my fifteenth birthday they had begun to develop thick veins and pendulous lobes, and felt far too heavy for my head. Those organs of hearing which I had once prized, and put all my energies into developing, now felt alien, ineffectual, crude, a pair of outsize fungal-growths sprouting from my head.

It was during this period that my fascination with the mappa mundi began. When I returned for the holidays my father would sometimes call me up to the attic to sit with him, although he did not sit but paced in a state of constant agitation, shedding ash from his cigarettes (I felt that those flakes were shedding from him , and that with each cigarette, he was gradually diminishing). One afternoon, his pacing making me dizzy, I tried to fix my attention on to a point of stillness in the room. The mappa mundi. I came to study it more closely on subsequent visits. I felt an affinity with the monstrous races depicted on the map. I knew I was one of them.

When my schooling finished I took a job ushering in a theatre in Edinburgh. It was summer, the city was hot, loud, dense, vivid, carnal, and I became deeply involved in the life of the theatre. I worked hard. I listened to music. I felt free for the first time since leaving Nigeria. I even fell in love — with Damaris, an actress, a thin, beautiful creature who occupied all my thoughts and just about toppled my soul.

Damaris wanted to know all about my father, his life, my relationship with him, and even his work in Nigeria, which I had figured as a cause of his madness. I told her what I knew: he was a broken man who had lost a great many illusions. What were these? He’d helped to build Lagos into a modern city; he’d brought to a peasant population the gift of city planning; he’d played a small part of the great enterprise of the British Empire. But really, I told her, he had done nothing more than project his own perverse fantasies on to Nigeria. All his life he’d believed in a kind of progress for humankind, and his work in Nigeria had been based on this idea. He believed Africa existed in a backward state of time, a wild and immature childhood which Empire would bring into the present age. It was a complete idea, I told her, blinding him to any other. But this idea of his hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped, and he — we — were forced to leave. Now he found himself without desires or energy. He’d lost his faith in Progress, I told her. (But I was wrong; my father had lost faith in Progress years before that, with my mother’s death and the birth of a daughter and not a son.) In Lagos, I told her, he had been able to escape into dreams of town planning, so that he did not have to know his malaise. Now he fled in the face of it up to the attic, like birds flocking to the tree tops before a storm.

‘He repulses me,’ I told her.

‘Why?’ she said, horrified.

‘He is a broken man. He brought it on himself with his bad faith in Empire.’

‘You’re a monster, Evie Steppman,’ she said.

But Damaris was not satisfied and set me a task. I was to find out one thing about my father’s life, something I didn’t know, a story. She gave me a tape recorder for my birthday and instructed me to record him.

…

I found him in the attic. His hair was no longer blond but silvery, and sallow from tobacco smoke.

‘Hello, Evie,’ he said and backed into the corner. I felt a kind of effusive kinship towards him. Not filial, I don’t want to suggest that. And yet it was a type of fondness, and for a moment I wanted to hold him in my arms. I shook out a rug, then laid it on a patch of floor and sat opposite him. We were silent for a while. Then I began to ask him questions about his past, his childhood. I knew that my father had been born in another country and had moved to Scotland as a child. But either sensing his own reticence, or from lack of interest, I had never asked more. Now, as I did, he started to speak, very softly, relating the events which saw him and his family undergo a change of nation, a change of name — in short, a turning away from his family’s past. I put the headphones over my ears, switched the tape recorder on and held the microphone close to his mouth. His voice, heard in this intimate way through the headphones, was not weak as I had expected from someone so thin and dishevelled, but low, cracked, oddly powerful. I had disliked its intonation when he talked during my gestation, and I disliked it still, the bass pitch, the barely distinguishable quality of the vowel-sounds. Nevertheless, that evening I captured the story my father told, which I will transcribe in the following chapter.

The next time I saw him, he was terrible to contemplate. Pale, wearing the purple dressing-gown, he sat rocking on his mattress, a glazed look in his eyes. His face seemed to lack coordination, the wet mouth undisciplined. I approached. He didn’t seem to see me. I remember very clearly. His inability to master his lips had spread to the whole of his face. After that he made almost no mark on the world, occasional moth-light footsteps perhaps, now and then a little noise, low nocturnal murmurings, whispers and interrupted cries, the sound of pacing and coaxing. He had withdrawn completely from practical affairs, and I felt that the objects in the midst of which he dwelt had taken the place of his personality, had come to represent him more truthfully than his presence in space. From that day on I gave my father up for lost. What still remained of him — the small shroud of his body and the handful of nonsensical oddities — would finally disappear one day, as unremarked as the grey heaps of ash beside his armchair, waiting to be blown away on the next windy day.

In a moment I will transcribe my father’s story. The thought pleases me enormously. Not so much because I wish to reveal what my father told me that evening shortly before he died. No, my history is already overburdened with stories. It is the process that counts, the labour of transcribing his words. It is not a difficult process, although it is time-consuming, since the tape is damaged in places and, although my father talked at length, he didn’t always make sense. Nevertheless, I hope, with repeated listening, to make a coherent story. What a happy prospect to stop writing my own history and make use of another’s words!