Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

I put a record on and she says, Take it off, like she is choking.

I make her pink lemonade. She waves it away. I ask her, What is it? What is it, Evie, dear? She shakes her head slowly as though it hurts to move. A small tear is squeezed out, like the last drops of juice from the lemons.

26 July

Day two of the Faulty and she is lying now with her back to the room, face to the wall, staring at it, though there is nothing to see, no interesting cracks or whorls in the paintwork that might be turned into new planets and escaped to.

So I take an old postcard I saw in a pile of books downstairs, one showing a snowstorm in an Egyptian city, and I pin it to the wall, just in front of her. I couldn’t bear for her to stare at nothing like that. But she does not blink or focus on it or acknowledge my presence. This devastates me. I cannot stand to be ignored.

28 July

E beginning to walk and talk again. She doesn’t say much, but at least she is able to read. After three days without attention, barely existing for her, I am jealous of her books, as I am jealous of her staring into nothing and of her silence and of her sleep and of her dreams and yes, even of her Faulty.

That is, jealous of any time she is removed from me. Perhaps not jealous. Fearful, maybe. I don’t know what I am without her attention.

Growing times. In knowing Evie, and learning how Evie is beginning to know me, I begin to know myself. And so I am beginning to realize the extent of my jealousy. What a bitch! My need to be noticed. In between shows, I barely exist. Keep thinking about that tour I’ve missed out on. And now that Evie has been accepted by the others, I feel I exist a little less. She’s no longer the freak who needs me. Not here, at least.

Michael and Birgitte upset tonight since Finn cooked lamb in the vegetarian casserole dish. Delicious!

30 July

I found Evie’s birthday present today. No, like the best presents, it found me.

This is how. I wake up, and she’s not there. I can smell something cooking so I lie waiting for my breakfast until I realize she isn’t coming up. Find her in the kitchen with Michael. Eating food I don’t recognize, something Michael has made. Look! Eyes shining, spearing what looks like a slice of fried banana on her fork. Plantain! I haven’t had plantain since I was a girl! Taste it.

Ashamed to say I pull a face. Say Yuk, as though it’s disgusting. It wasn’t. It wasn’t anything really. Just tasted of fried oil.

Michael says they’re celebrating. That cat has this habit of never giving you quite enough information, so that you have almost to ask for it, and he makes you feel you’ve begged it off him. So I don’t ask what they’re celebrating and leave them to it. I go looking for Evie’s birthday present. No money. And I don’t want to lift it. Go down Trafalgar Square — a couple of hours’ statue-ing. Walk up Charing Cross Road and into all the second-hand bookshops. I want something big and antique with beautiful engravings. I find an edition of Paul et Virginie ! One lovely engraving of them both, the same one from the box of matches. Paul stripped to the waist, trousers rolled up to his knees. Standing on a rock in the middle of a swollen river, trying to cross it, Virginie on his back. But I hadn’t enough money. Too late to earn more, so I walked until I hit Bloomsbury. That dusty part of the city left me feeling thirsty so I walked up Rosebery Avenue to Angel, then all the way along Upper Street, heading, I realized when I got there, for the William Camden. Had half a bitter I lingered over, exchanging humid glances with the boy (all eyes and lips) behind the bar. He came out to collect empties and as he leaned over to wipe my table I told him to follow me out back. A good cock, thick and hard. Nice surprise and all the hotter from someone so slight and pretty. I sat on a bin and sucked him, not off though. Brought him close — brought me close — then stood up, hitched up my dress. He slid my panties down then stayed there, licking. The sweetest tongue. Then we fucked, kissing. I came quick on that cock, quicker than I wanted, he held off for as long as he could but I saw it in his eyes when he just couldn’t any longer, and it was during his sharp last reflexive shudders, almost piercing, that I saw it, in a cardboard box full of junk by the bins. The tape recorder. After we had finished and he’d gone back inside, I picked up the tape recorder and put it in my bag.

When I got back, Michael and Evie were out. I just had time to check it worked (it does!) then hide it when Evie came in. She told me they’d been to the British Museum, to see more, different, Benin Bronzes. What? The museum in Oxford, she said. Suddenly I remembered. Just before her first attack of the Faulty. I am livid with Michael for having taken her there, and her not long past that last attack.

Right now E is lying next to me on Bedouin, reading. The Walk by Robert Walser. I have hidden the tape recorder inside the broken piano. She has no idea.

2 Aug

Evie’s birthday, mid-morning. We’re in the kitchen. The others wander in and out and kiss her, saying Happy Birthday. I tell her she’ll have to wait until tonight for her present from me. Birgitte takes pity on her, Ach Evie you should hev one gift to open, and gives her a bundle wrapped up in some pages from The Stage . A rose-printed shawl. What is Birgitte thinking of? Evie delighted with it but yes, I will say it again, looking like a monkey in fancy dress when she threw it around her. I would dress Evie in nothing but shifts. Plain madhouse garments of hemp. What is odd in her and freakish becomes gaunt and beautiful if you look hard enough. Like those Depression-era photos of raw-boned lank-haired women tired and tragic in floral prints, but heroic in denim. What do you think, says Evie, looking down at herself in the shawl. I am spared from either insulting her or being forced to lie when Finn announces I have a visitor. And in he walks. I am stunned. What is he doing here? I take a look at his expression, shit-eating, bit pissed off, and I know it means he is resentful of having to give me some good news. And I’m right. I’m in! Felicity twisted her ankle and I’m needed for the Rainbow Theatre gig. Which means I get the US tour too!! So I’m whooping round the kitchen, and Evie asks what’s up, and I tell her: a show with one of the hottest, hippest, coolest cats in rock history. Then a two-month tour round America. And then I look at E, hunched up in her shawl, and the scraps of The Stage on the table where she tore the paper open so excited was she to get this gift. And suddenly I wonder. When was it that anyone last remembered E’s birthday?

Before I know it, I throw my arms around her. Evie! Evie! We’re going to America! And I realize now I must give her the present, that it is somehow linked to our trip around America. So I drag her upstairs, push her down on Bedouin, take the shawl from her shoulders and throw it over her head. As though she were a parrot. The tape recorder feels satisfyingly bulky, all wrapped in newspaper. When I place it in her hands she tears off the shawl, then the paper. You will record America, I say, hugging her from behind with my arms and legs. She just sat there, turning the thing over in her hands and half-pressing the buttons a little cautiously. Lost sounds, she mumbles. When I ask what she means she says she can record the sounds of America which will soon be lost for ever. Tears in her eyes. You can record the sound of wind through bluegrass, I tell her, kissing the back of her neck. The alien corn.

25 Aug

Tonight, three weeks before we are due to leave for America, he told me that none of us will be going after all. It’s too costly a project. D will make do with just the band.