Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

I told her a joke. This couple, two statues in Hyde Park, are granted a wish by a fairy who feels sorry for them. They wish to be human for the day. They spend it touring London, seeing the sights, going to a fancy restaurant and so on. At midnight the fairy comes back to meet them in Hyde Park to reverse the spell, as agreed, but the statues are not there. Then the fairy hears rustling in the bushes and goes to investigate. The fairy finds one of the statues clutching a pigeon, while the other one says, Quick, hold him still while I shit on his head.

Then Evie told me the story of the Happy Prince. Who wasn’t really, in the end. The whole time she tells the story, she’s not looking at me. She’s smoothing over the same patch of wax which has dripped from the candle on to the table. She smooths away at it and tells me the story of a young prince who has all that he desires, and lives a decadent, pampered life until he dies. Once he is dead, he is turned into a statue. A statue as beautiful as he was in real life, Evie says, with skin made of pure gold, and eyes of sapphires. His statue is set up high over the city, where he can see all the misery that was hidden from him during his life of luxury. The poor seamstress with the feverish child who cries for oranges she cannot afford. The young writer, freezing in his garret, unable to complete his work of genius for he is too cold. The prince sees all this, Evie says, now scratching at the wax with her little finger. And it kills him. As a statue, he is powerless. He can’t move. It’s only now, as I’m writing, that I realize what a sweet, sad story this is. One day, Evie says, a swallow comes to shelter under the statue of the prince, on his way to join his friends in Egypt for the winter. The prince asks the swallow to delay his journey by a day, and to deliver the jewels in his scabbard to the poor people he sees. The swallow obliges and delays his journey to help the prince. The next day, the prince makes a similar request, asking the swallow to delay his departure by another day to deliver valuable bits of himself — gold leaf from his skin, sapphires from his eyes — to the poor. And now that the prince has given away the jewels in his eyes, he is blind. So the swallow stays with him, and tells him stories of the misery he sees, stripping the rest of the gold leaf from the prince at his direction and distributing it to all these unfortunates. In the end the swallow decides to abandon his journey to Egypt and stay with the prince, because he loves him. The swallow dies from the cold. The prince’s lead heart cracks. And the prince — now stripped of his jewels and his gold leaf — is considered shabby and unsightly by the town councillors so he is taken down from his pedestal and scrapped.

When Evie reaches the end of her story she is crying. And then she says, Do you know why the swallow fell behind his friends on their way to Egypt, why he delayed his journey in the first place? No, I said. You must read the story then, Evie said. Oscar Wilde.

We must have been pretty drunk by the time we left the bar cos she had one of my smokes and she doesn’t. She snatched it out of the pack as we were leaving the bar, and when I went to light it for her she grabbed my wrist to look at the matchbox. It was a souvenir one from the play. She asked to keep it.

19 June

A strange and sad and funny day. Woke this morning to a note left by Evie. She’d obviously stayed the night. Don’t remember her being there. Would you meet me today at 3 p.m. by the cemetery gates?

Which fucking cemetery? Too hungover to think of how I might start asking so I leave it to chance and walk around the b’n’b in circles — bigger and bigger circles — till I hit one. It’s after 3 p.m. She’s not there. That’s how I know it’s the wrong one. I continue circling. I hit another one. It’s 4 p.m.-ish. She’s not there either. I carry on. A third — Edinburgh’s full of cemeteries! — a fourth, and she’s there, waiting. I asked if she wanted to show me a grave. Said she was taking me to visit Mr Rafferty. Her grandfather. He was quite mad, and we would be visiting him at the institution where he lived.

To someone else it might have looked like a country house. Walked into the building and felt small with something sad and familiar. That smell. The convent came back in a rush. Evie warned me that Mr Rafferty might mistake me for someone else and if so, would I mind playing along? Of course, I make my living doing just that!

He’s in his seventies with a face like a soft felt hat, one that has been sat on, with its hollows and bulges. Hair a deep blue black and obviously dyed, giving him a sort of surprised look. Gave me the most delighted smile, Evie’s smile. But on his face, it fit.

Called me Julia and gave me a big hug, crying into my hair. Glowered at Evie as though she were intruding. Called her Rex. Who were these people he had taken us for? He swept us into the room. Quite bare. Just a bed, desk and chair, and wardrobe. The chair was set askew, the desk cluttered. I saw that he’d made some strange little object out of what looked like tiddlywinks sellotaped together. He grabbed it, then presented it to me with a sort of bow. Thank you, I said. He’d been working on it for months, apparently. I made appreciative noises. Evie peered over at it, and, addressing me as Julia, asked if I had ever seen such a beautiful timepiece! No, I murmured, choking back the urge to laugh. Mr Rafferty said it was his wedding gift to me. He looked into my eyes and squeezed my hands. His gaze made me think of the near-human look you see in pictures of chimpanzees sometimes.

After, me and Evie went to the pub. She told me she planned to travel to Easdale, a tiny island off the West Coast of Scotland, for a few days, to stay in a friend’s cottage. Asked me to join her.

So I said, Why not?

It’s only now, writing this, that I’m wondering why I said yes. Sometimes I don’t know what I think until I write about it in my diary. Like that reed. Oh! Now I remember. Something from our night together. Early in the morning, asking Evie, pestering Evie, to tell me about the swallow from the story, why he had delayed his journey. Eventually she mumbles, Fell in love. I pester some more then she says, Reed. The swallow fell in love with a reed. This silent, graceful thing just blown about in the wind. It never even noticed him. And now something that Evie said in the bar that night comes back to me. A vessel of silence. More emptiness, I think. There’s got to be a link between that and keeping this diary. There’s got to be a link between that and saying yes to invitations made by near- strangers.

20 June

We drove here in a single night. I don’t know why she wanted to drive at night, but she did, and that was the plan, and I was just bumming a ride so what could I say? The others were already on their way to Oxford when she pulled up in her dad’s Morris Minor. Dusk had just fallen, the sky was that fairytale blue. A few stars starting to poke through. I slung my bag in the back and myself in the front. I was bad driving company, just dozing off in the front seat and twitching awake at intervals to fiddle about with the radio. It made her wince. She is sensitive to sound. Vibrates a bit like a violin string depending on what’s playing. Rock got her all taut like she was overstrung. I left on some jazz until the lights of a combine harvester flashing across us woke me up. And I thought harvesting was daylight work, such a city girl am I! I found something beautiful and classical, and she seemed to slacken, and her eyes went dreamy and a little less, well, pebbly looking. We listened together to this sad noble music which I thought was Mozart, but the only Mozart I knew was jolly stuff. This got quieter and quieter, or rather, fewer and fewer instruments played, until there was only this lonely violin. Towards the end, Evie lifted a hand from the wheel and then brought it down, as if wielding a conductor’s baton, in time with the final note. But there was no final note. Or rather, the note she was anticipating was not played. She had got it wrong. We both laughed. But of course I didn’t really miss that last note, she said. What do you mean? Well, everyone thinks that music begins and ends with the first and last notes. And it doesn’t? No. Music begins and ends with silence, she said.