Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

I have not yet told Evie. She has been working hard on her plans for the archive. Every day she goes to the British Museum reading room, where she fills ledgers full of notes. She has not had an attack of the Faulty since before her birthday. She barely notices the others.

I have written to D asking if we might accompany him anyway. He liked my style at the gig. Said I’d pay our way by assisting somehow. Told him about Evie’s project. The entourage is planning to travel by bus. He can spare two seats, I’m sure. And there is always money to be made making myself into an object.

The attic is almost completely dark. The only light comes from my electric heater and the insipid blue seeping from my computer screen, which gives me a feeling of emptiness and peace. I have always been drawn to darkness, which I associate with silence. That is why, whenever I sense a trace of the sun, I paste another page over the skylight, or else cover one of the blades of light that slice through the gaps in the walls or roof, even the floorboards. The attic is covered with printed sheets. How happy to think my history is not idle! Just yesterday I pasted up my transcription of Damaris’ dairy. This happy period — one of the few in my adulthood — stares down on me now. That is as it should be.

Forward.

17 Sept 1972

We packed up Bedouin. Joined this caravan of freaks. Heading down the highway to Cleveland, first show of the tour. D’s trying tricks out on his guitar, the starts of songs, an almost chorus. White heat as the sun streams in. Me and Evie up front, quiet, on our own. E’s got the window seat, leaning on the glass, hypnotized by the long cars and the road-signs sliding past — there goes Nanticoke! — still thinking of New York.

We got in two days ago. Flew. Our first time! Though we didn’t need that plane, still high on being together after two weeks apart. E went to Edinburgh to get her passport. Also to see her dad. He won’t be here when I get back, she said. The day I left her at King’s Cross I noticed the freckles. Mustard dust. How you’ve come out of yourself, I thought. She kissed me goodbye without caring who saw, then loped off down the platform not glancing back. I am always the one who leaves. I do not like this, being left.

And oh I enjoy remembering how much I missed her, now she’s sitting curled up on the bus seat beside me. The pleasure of gently testing a new bruise. When she was away, each minute took its time. That dumb ache! Just how I’ve heard boys describe getting kicked in the balls. One night we speak on the phone for the first time. Standing in that phonebox she rushed in at me. Her smell of Rich Tea biscuits. Her hands, too heavy for her wrists. Overblown flowers. Something ridiculous, like chrysanthemums.

Flying’s heavy. You feel the plane butting its head against gravity. You fly despite it. To spite it. E’s fingers twisting round mine as the plane lumbers along (me scared, saying stupid shit, I love you, I’ve always loved you, I’ll always love you), then it stampedes … a run-up at the sky and we’re in the air. This great beast hauling itself up, and Evie takes her fingers from mine to stick them in her ears, screaming with laughter, with disbelief, over the noise of the engines. Clouds hang below us. Unmoving. Sculpted. Weighty. Evie puts her hand back in mine as the air hostess passes (bright hair, red lips). She smiles. Welcome to America!

And then it was my turn to laugh, out of shock, as we drive into Manhattan. Like I’d always known it, the way I would my own mother if I ever met her. A stranger looking strangely familiar, someone you have always known, without knowing. Like seeing a mythical beast for real, but then we get out and we hear it. New York Fucking City.

Later we leave our room to find food, Evie wearing the beaded headband I bought her from Carnaby Street. The turquoise a nice surprise against her unwashed hair. Evie entranced, following trails of sounds like a dog on the scent, changing tack when she picks up a new one … clanks and hisses and taxi brakes and stand-up rows in the street … I chase her this way and that. New York, she says, sounds like prisoners banging tin cups on the bars of their cells.

23 Sept

On the bus. Can’t take in much. Way too twitchy, too horny … feeling pretty high from last night, and then there’s this local kind of high I’ve got, right between the legs … Oh Mama! We opened last night. Saw some of the show from the wings but mostly heard it from backstage. Wardrobe duties. D’d rush in, shrug into whatever alien kimono we held out for him, then rush out. A couple of times he got the chance to smoke a fag, too hyped to sit, leaning back instead against the dressing table with one leg folded under him like a long white locust. But Evie. Evie was out there in the audience. I caught the end from the wings, saw the guys take their applause like soldiers home from battle, sweaty and victorious, bloodied almost in the lights, the rest of us standing around like handmaidens. When they came off I caught a look in D’s eyes that made me flinch. The emptiness you get. Hung around backstage as long as I could, waiting for E. She never showed. Went with the others to the aftershow party. I’m getting drunk fast on the champagne and the mood, stumbling around looking for her. Then I spot her. She’s under the piano. Sitting cross-legged, palms on knees guru-style. She smiles up at me then takes tissue paper out of her ears. She’s had it in most of the night. The gig was too loud. But not at first: she dug the idea of this whole alter ego thing, the band stepping out on stage as characters. But then at its peak, during the anthem, staring in wonder at this beautiful alien come to Earth to save the kids with rock ’n’ roll, she catches the eye of a woman in the front row who gave her such a look — ‘she could see I was believing a lie and despised me for it’ — and that was when she had torn up some tissue paper and stuffed it into her ears –

Scribus interruptus . Evie read the first line over my shoulder. Gave me a kiss that nearly made me come, then took matters into her own … fingers. Slipped them into my jeans and into me and fingered me right there under cover of my denim jacket. Wow. Wow. Wow.

24 Sept

Another hotel. E asleep, hair the colour of damp sand. Our things less ours with each new room we move to. On the cabinet between our beds (but we only sleep in one), E’s beaded headband has the look of an object left behind by someone else. Is this true of people too? No. In an unfamiliar room, crammed together in a single bed, we’re more each other’s than ever. No sign of the night terrors. She’s my amulet.

Last night, in bed, after a languorous fuck, stretching our limbs most extravagantly (the luxury of a bed!), I told E about Elvis, since we are in Memphis. She’d only just about heard of him. Such a square! So I held her tenderly in my arms and sang ‘Love Me Tender’. Then I taught her the words. We sang it together, and she recorded it. Like most people with terrible voices, she sings with great enthusiasm.

25 Sept

Travelling to New York. Night. Lying in Evie’s lap, eyes closed, a sleep that itself feels in transit, Evie stroking my hair, me vaguely aware of E and Zed, the make-up artist, talking in low voices over me. Far away and in my head as voices sound when you’re half asleep. E telling Zed about her project. About how, in Memphis, she’d gone to a barber’s to record the sound of a wet shave, the stropping of razor on leather, the slapping-on of foam, the razor rasping skin. Then she’d recorded the sound of the barber ringing up payment in his old-fashioned cash register. That’s when she realized that any sound she chose to record would, at the point of her hearing it, become in some way extinct: she would never again hear the sounds she was hearing right there, right then, in that way.