Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

We got our clothes back. We dressed without speaking. On the way home, she was quiet again, but not self-conscious at all this time. No, self-absorbed, dreamy. This made me angry. When we got into the cottage, I felt like punishing her. I brought her into the front room. Evie, I said. What you did in that bush. She smiled. You hurt me, I said. I sat on the edge of the couch. I slipped off my knickers and pulled up my dress. I lay back and opened my legs. You need to soothe me, I said. And she kneeled down before me, and I took her head in my hands and I guided her mouth to my cunt.

Later this evening. She’s a terrible cook. She thinks adding lots of cream to the dish (a mixture of chicken, red wine and orange juice) will improve it. It hasn’t. But it could have been my being in the kitchen. She seemed clumsy. Horribly shy. My glance was caustic to her. When she poured in the cream, she dropped the tub and it went everywhere. I got up and took her hand and licked it off. Then in between her fingers, slowly.

When you are drunk and you fall it doesn’t hurt, not until the drink’s worn off. Then you feel tender and offended at gravity. You feel more mortal than you did before. And so it was with this salt air, and Evie, I think. It made her drunk. And drunk on that she’d touched me all over in the branches and only now was she starting to really feel me. With my creamy lips, my creamy tongue, I kissed her. I knew from this great feeling she gave off of … What was it? Relief? Gratitude? I knew then that no one had touched her like that before. I could feel how much she was feeling. And the more she felt, the more I realized I had never felt anything like that myself, starting so young and so casually. And that no matter how good it was with someone, it always felt rehearsed. I’d never had my touch received like this before. And to be felt like that was to feel like that myself — too much. I broke off, told her the colour of the food looked wrong, I didn’t want to eat it, and went up to bed, and locked my door.

23 June

The salt-air and too much fucking.

What day is this anyway?

24 June

Our last night. Too full up on each other to touch. We fall on talk as something new. We talk about the island. I said how this would be a bleak place in winter. Exposed to wild winds with the great heaps of slate piled everywhere grey and unforgiving with no sun to pick out the metallic sheen. The wind would be wild, wouldn’t it? She sounded almost envious. You would like that? When we walk inland, in the quieter places, I feel anxious, she said. About seeing people? (We had seen that same guy with his dog that afternoon.) No, she said. The quiet. I thought you worshipped quiet. In others, I envy it. But quiet for me is torture. Why? I can hear myself. Your thoughts, you mean? The sound of me. I like it best by the sea or in the wind, where I can’t hear myself. Most people feel anxious when they can’t hear themselves. ‘I can’t hear myself think.’ Then I told her about D’s brother. He heard voices. It was bad in the wind or by the sea. Noises outside turned to voices inside. He goes mad with the sound of other people in his head. And you go mad with the sound of yourself!

Evie told me about the castrati then. Those boys who had their balls cut off to keep their voices sweet and high. When they sang they did not sound like boys, and they did not sound like women. It was an eerie sound, Evie said. The practice had been banned by the Vatican in the nineteenth century, but she had heard a recording, made during the earliest days of recording technology, when the last castrato was still alive and singing in the Sistine Chapel. A moment in time, she said, when the sound could be captured for ever. What were her words? Beautiful synchronicity. But think! (she clapped a hand over her mouth). Think of all the sounds we will never hear! And what about the sounds that are facing extinction, she said. Sounds that future generations will never hear!

Like certain rare songbirds, I said. Or the din of yourself.

The castrati! I have not thought of the castrati in decades. There was a period in my teenage years, before I met Damaris, when I thought about almost nothing else. One day in Edinburgh, in a charity shop, I came across a recording of Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, who died in … I forget the year, I will have to consult the Encyclopaedia . What do I recall of Alessandro’s entry, read all those years ago, after I returned from the charity shop? That as a child he had a beautiful singing voice (needless to say). That at the age of nine he was placed in a warm bath, drugged with opium and castrated. That he sang in the Sistine Chapel choir. That he was the only castrati to have made a recording. As soon as I returned from the charity shop — this, shortly after I left boarding school — I went to my room and listened to the recording of his voice. I became obsessed by Alessandro Moreschi, as well as by the strange race of which he was a last member: emasculated giants whose voices did not change with puberty, but whose limbs and ribcages, lacking testosterone, developed abnormally: long and heavy for the limbs; thick-boned and swollen for the ribcages. By the time Alessandro reached maturity, I read, his chest was cavernous, his lungs enormously powerful, and he could sustain a high c, no, d for over a minute. More than this I cannot recall. Once again I am forced to consult my Encyclopaedia . That is something I have often found myself doing, while writing this history. It has never been easy. The set is in constant use, although not the use for which it is intended. The volumes of my Encyclopaedia are not so much repositories of information as elements of furniture, since they comprise the legs of my desk, four pillars supporting the wardrobe door. Let me (briefly) describe the Encyclopaedia . Bound in blue leather, each volume measures approximately ten by seven inches. The pages are yellowed and in places eaten away by the moths and damp. Pasted on the inside front cover of Volume 1 is an advert cut from a magazine.

WHEN IN DOUBT — ‘LOOK IT UP’ IN The Encyclopaedia Britannica, THE SUM OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE, 32 volumes, 31,150 pages, 48,000,000 words of text. Printed on thin, but strong opaque India paper. A COMPLETE and MODERN exposition of THOUGHT, LEARNING and ACHIEVEMENT, a vivid representation of the WORLD’S PROGRESS, embodying everything that can possibly interest or concern a civilized people, all reduced to an A B C simplicity of arrangement.

So much for the Encyclopaedia . Let me describe how I constructed my desk. Having decided to use the wardrobe door as a surface, I searched for the volumes of the Encyclopaedia , which were scattered about the attic, mixed in with other books. When the set was complete (except for Volume 13, which I could not find), I arranged it into alpha-numerical order. Then I made four pillars out of the volumes: Volumes 1 to 8 for the front-left leg of my desk; 9 to 16 the back-left; 17 to 24 the back-right (replacing the missing volume with a book of similar thickness); Volumes 25 to 32 formed the front-right leg. Now the pillars were in place, I placed the wardrobe door on them.

That is how I constructed my desk. The problem was that now, whenever I wanted to consult the Encyclopaedia, I had to take my desk apart! Let me demonstrate the difficulty. Say, as now, I wish to read about Alessandro Moreschi, I must carry out the following steps:

– Take the computer off my desk and hold it in my hands

– Kneel down before the legs of my desk

– By the light of the computer locate the relevant leg (in this instance the back-right) and, within that leg, the relevant volume (MEDAL — MUMPS)

– Place my computer on the floor with the screen facing the relevant leg