Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

A foetus in a jar. It must have been about four months old. Its little ears had been pierced and it was wearing a necklace.

An odd-looking fifteen-year-old girl with thick glasses shouting, ‘Paula! I’ve found the shrunken heads!’

The shrunken heads. Like withered apples.

And you, Evie? What did you see? Just the Benin Bronzes. But that’s where I left you! What’s so interesting about them? I asked her, annoyed. Just a load of bronze masks. Look, I said as we passed a couple of beautiful young guys with perfectly symmetrical golden features, See their faces in the sun! They make more beautiful bronzed masks. E shakes her arm out of mine and tells me I don’t understand, more sad than angry.

28 June

E didn’t turn up to meet me after rehearsals today. After waiting fifteen minutes, I went back to the boarding house, but she was not there. I waited there until it was time to leave for the show but she didn’t turn up. After the show I waited backstage for her. She didn’t come. When I got back to the boarding house she was there in her bed, asleep. I got into my bed, and turned my back to her. I left the room in the morning and when I got back after rehearsals she was still there, in bed. I asked if she was ill and she said no. She hasn’t said a word more all afternoon. I’m in bed now, writing this. I’m due to leave for the theatre in twenty minutes and she’s still here. I don’t know where she was yesterday, or what she did. A moment ago I put my face close to hers, to see if she really was sleeping. I saw a small tear, like a bead, lodged in the corner of her eye.

29 June

Evie has spent the last two days, Alice-like, swimming in circles in her own tears. What can I do? I kept saying. As though I were at fault for not being able to dispel this, this I want to say blizzard, or fog, or downpour. Why is it we reach for meteorological metaphors to talk about our moods? Our many weathers. If anything, it is like the sandstorm in Nigeria that Evie has told me about, the kind that blinds and chokes. Is it your mother? I ask. Is it the Benin Bronzes? She shakes her head and laughs at me, a laugh which causes her some pain.

30 June

I wonder about those Bronzes. I wonder if they carry some curse. I wonder if E has been cursed by them. Objects are not mute. That cape from the museum. My guess is that you couldn’t fail to sense a thousand heartbeats, the thrum of a thousand tiny pairs of wings, if you swished about in it, knowing what it is made of. And perhaps that bestows some power on the wearer. To be able to stand in a cape like that you’d quell compassion, conscience. And that would make you more ruthless, more powerful.

Today Evie, exhausted with crying, was able to sit up in bed and eat a little soup, after refusing food these past days. She told me she periodically experiences such episodes. Calls such attacks the Faulty. Believes the Faulty was passed on to her by a woman she knew as a child, some blonde who smoked a lot and believed in Voodoo! When I ask her what causes them, she says, The din of myself, and laughs.

1 July

I’ve not slept all night. Last night, Evie began to talk, after four days of silence. It came out in a flood. She told me all about her bedroom in Lagos, about all the sounds she could hear from it. She told me stories about her mother and father, stories from her childhood. Stories her father told her when she was a child. And in the womb?!? One nasty little story about a medieval mapmaker who arranged the mass abduction of women from Nubia then basically raped them. She told me that story in raptures, not hearing what she was saying. And the opposite happened with me. I could not speak as she told me those stories, such stories. A story about a kind of spirit-child called Sagoe. Stories about the people she’d known in Lagos. Most of it lies. No doubt as a child she believed this stuff really did happen. But when she tells me now, is she relating what she believed as a child, or what she believes now? If she believes it now, that would make her mad.

2 July

Last night was the last show. Evie came along. When we got back to the boarding house, I slipped into her bed, hoping we could fuck since the last time had been just after our row, and that had felt disconnected. She felt far away again. The gratitude, the relief, have gone. I wonder if she feels like we’re just rehearsing now.

10 July, London

E is a blind person to be guided. No. She sees too much. She can’t screen out the distractions you need to ignore to make safe/efficient progress down a London street. Head in the air, looking up, around, never ahead. Or swivelling with each beautiful freak who walks past, ignoring her. Evie’s feeling free, giddy with it, no longer a freak of the first rank.

Now Jack has moved in with Tamara, I’ve moved us into his room. The best room, the attic, where I am now, Evie making supper in the kitchen, down in the basement, full of green light from the garden down there, feels like it runs on for miles, getting wilder. The attic covers the whole house. You come up through a hole in the floor. Like camping, Evie says, laughing, and it’s true, the room is tent-shaped and we’ve draped fabric on the wall behind our mattress which Evie has christened Bedouin. As in, Let’s go to Bedouin now.

Orange walls. Two huge dusty skylights at either end we’ve covered in chiffon scarves — one seaweed green, one red — underwater or perpetual sunset depending on which end of the room you’re in. It’s hot in here, but we can’t leave the skylights open or pigeons gatecrash. We hear them constantly. So loud and close it feels like we’re eavesdropping. Our first day we left the skylights open to air the place. We came back, via the florist’s with armfuls of lilies I stole from outside the shop, to find a pigeon sitting on Bedouin. A terrible thing to chase it out, flapping and shitting everywhere. Evie dropped a wastepaper bin over it. I slid an LP (Harvest — sorry, Neil) underneath. The bin was openwork raffia. We could see it panic, trying to peck us through the holes as we bundled it out of the skylight.

There’s a broken piano in a corner of the room. Evie tries to play it sometimes. In another a stack of half-finished canvases. Impossible to guess what they were meant to be. All that’s left of the original ideas are pencil marks and vague brushstrokes. The room encourages laziness. Mostly we lie on Bedouin in the stifling heat, smoking pot and fucking, the room like a hothouse, the lilies shedding mustard dust on the floorboards.

Feel a bit lost. I wanted that tour. His doing, of course.

12 July

E loves the squat. A house full of young people after that big old place on her own with a madman in the attic. Today, we all sat in the kitchen, shelling peas from the garden (eating them sweet and raw from the pod as we did). Evie told the joke about the statues in Hyde Park and everyone laughed. She looked so pleased I could have kissed her.

15 July

Last night at dinner we were talking about star signs, and the others found out it’s E’s birthday soon. Michael suggested a house birthday dinner. Evie, I thought, would hate the fuss. I’d planned on serving her a special meal in Bedouin, Birgitte already cast as waitress (her first role in months). But no, Evie puffed up like a pigeon at the idea. I found this too funny. I think we’re her first real friends.

20 July

We wake up, and Bedouin feels like a womb. Today we are born, I say. Let’s go out into the world. We spend the whole day out in the garden, sunbathing naked.

25 July

The Faulty. E lying in Bedouin, naked and sweating as though knocked out by some tropical disease, eyes closed. No, not closed, screwed shut, as if what little light there is in here pains her. I apply more chiffon scarves to the window, wipe her body with damp flannels.