The Echo Chamber

by Luke Williams

  There was an ebony tree on the flat of the lawn, and in one month of great heat in November Taiwo and I sat every morning in its shade. I started to take baths before going to bed, since Taiwo, who cherished warmth, but suffered in keener heat, would not miss morning in the garden. She woke me, and we dressed and she went to fetch fruit for breakfast. I would climb out of my window on to the smoking grass and fall beneath the shadow of the ebony tree. Taiwo’s enormous underwear hung from the clothesline. My nursemaid came, and we ate. One morning, Taiwo introduced a new element to our routine. Along with our fruit that day, she had brought a Children’s Illustrated Bible, saying, ‘Mr Steppman asked me to begin your education.’ I doubted the truth of this. And in her thick contralto she recited the story of the world’s beginning, which was not the beginning of the world I recognized.

  I had never liked Taiwo. From the start, when she appeared at my bedside and threw open the shutters, I figured her as an enemy. She expelled the shadows and my room became a void. How different it was when Ade entered that space! With his simple gesture, the pairing of the shutters, he reversed my nursemaid’s work; or more precisely – for pitch-black is as empty as flat brilliance – Ade hung a delicate fabric on which the light could play: I remember the sense of coolness, the wet stillness, and I remember the frail sun-rays which served not so much to illuminate but to soften the darkness. And these rays, pierced with dancing lint, caught odd corners of objects, made the brass on the curtain rail glow, set Taiwo’s gold ring smouldering. It was a mystery to me how in such gloom the gold drew light. In the dimness, when the shutters were wide, and light flooded my room, the metal merely sparkled and appeared gaudy. And Taiwo herself, with her painted face and jewellery and charms, seemed merely extravagant until Ade returned shadow to the room. Her beauty, I thought, was terrific in the darkness she sought to banish.

  Taiwo was in her late twenties when she came to live with us. In addition to the plucked eyebrows, she had a shiny forehead, erratically powdered. She was breathless with full painted-red lips, and I never saw black skin blush so. Her hair she favoured bound tightly above her head. I thought it must have cost great pain to draw that kinked hair straight. Chairs would hardly contain her. Her back spilled out between the bars of the dining chair like a netted zeppelin, ground-strung. Her odour was rich. Cats adored her.

  Although Taiwo was a scullion and nursemaid she believed neither in spotless floors nor well-tended children. She knew a great deal about cleanliness, was a friend of purity, and a Christian. But because of her great size, in her estimation she was not a true Christian. It was impossible for her to talk about religion without resorting to the language of gastronomy. ‘I have fed my soul at the table of the Lord,’ she would say. ‘And He has blessed me for it.’ Everything about Taiwo was overdone; she liked all that was bright and succulent. When she said ‘religion’ she meant eating; when she said ‘eating’ she meant a particular kind of self-loathing. The problem was her fondness for food. She liked food as much as religion and was tied to both. Taiwo hated her abundance, an excess that contradicted the teachings of the church.

  So we lay in the shade of the ebony tree every morning while I listened (ears, unlike eyes, cannot be shut) to her spiritual instruction, the Creation story, Noah and the Flood, Christ’s sojourn in the desert: ‘You’re hungry,’ read Taiwo, in her devil’s voice. ‘You have been fasting forty days. Look at these round stones. Don’t they remind you of bread rolls?’ I had to feign interest, for if she caught me wandering in my mind, I was scolded, and the reading began over again. But when the passage was finished she asked to know my thoughts, since she was jealous of thoughts that were not on her. So I said I dreamed of her. To keep her happy I invented a catalogue of sins, phrased in child-talk, which she would take pleasure in admonishing, and forgive after, as if it were a game to release me from wrong, and that simple. Then she would go inside to fetch cakes and limewater.

  On those mornings in the garden when she read from the Bible, she also advised me on hygiene: where to wash, and how often, and the special places a girl must tend to. ‘Wash your cake,’ she told me. ‘Wash there with mild soap and water.’ She warned me as well against fizzy drinks that Father occasionally brought home, the bottles were dirty from the shipping, she told me, the seamen filthy. And taps bred germs. It was past nine when the instruction finished and we ate our mid-morning snack. By then the heat of full day was approaching, and we would make for the house.

  Outwardly, I obeyed Taiwo – what else could I do? Secretly, I yearned for change. I was powerless, physically, to alter my situation, and so I began to wish harm on Taiwo. If she were no longer in the world, I thought, Father would be forced to look after me himself. I admit it – there were days when I wished her dead. Other times my hopes for a different life focused on Ade. I had outgrown my cot, and in the afternoon when he returned from the market we were no longer separated by its bars. Undivided, a new intimacy developed between us. We began to talk, and I asked about his days at the market. I was happy, since human closeness was lacking in my life. More than this: I sensed Ade could help me to leave my stultifying nursemaid and do the only noble thing that lay in my power, which, I decided, was to escape into Lagos. Perhaps Ade would accompany me and teach me how to walk among crowds!

  That was how it was when I was three years old. Whenever Ade was absent from my life, I suffered Taiwo’s company or lay alone in my room. My days felt false and mundane. Father was distant as ever. Taiwo seemed keener in the pursuit of her religious attachment and appearance. I did not yet dare to ask Ade to help me leave the house. I was little nearer to becoming a full person with a proper name. The decade took flight and expired. I grew two inches.

  That season, the first of the new decade, the 1950s, a decade which would close with independence for Nigeria and exile for Father and me, began under a cloud of boredom. I went through the motions of guilt, of anxiety and joy, of loneliness and pain with impressive though splenic energy. I was rehearsing the character that was expected of me, a girl-child of three and a half. Yet there were moments of respite. Although I was peculiar, and extraordinary in several ways, I was still a child, and I liked to play. Early afternoon I went out to the garden and found pleasure in games. I had an idea that a class of spirit lived inside every object, and I had only to brush against it, or stroke or tap it in a certain way, to draw forth that spirit. I was consciously touching things, and I burned in quiet bliss when the objects chimed or clattered or whispered. Absorbed in my game, I forgot mealtimes. Eating could wait, for I had made an important discovery: I had discovered how to wake the spirit that rests inside still and quiet things. I applied my new knowledge diligently. Any object whose sound I particularly liked, I would hide beneath my bed. My favourite was a length of twine which I stretched taut and passed my finger lightly across, and it produced a tremulous humming – not, I recognize now, unlike the Theremin. How dull all other objects seemed to me then!

  At other times my play was more conventional. Behind the servants’ compound (on whose lower floor stood the kitchen, on whose upper lived Ade, with Iffe and Ben, his parents), the garden began its decline to the lagoon. I would amble down to the lakeshore and from the crest of the lawn launch rocks, which rolled elliptically, then fell, with a heavy sucking of air, into the water – and for an instant there rose crystal beads containing the fantastic spectrum of rainbows. Sometimes, from his place at the kitchen window, I saw Ade toss scraps into the garden; into which immediately descended a volary of birds, a brilliant cloud of feathers. Once I saw Ade at his bedroom window directly above the kitchen. He was folding a rectangle of paper into a point. He pressed his thumb along each folded edge and held it to the light. Then he snapped his fingers, and the paper transformed into a white aeroplane! He held each wing carefully and, with one eye closed, peered along the point. Next he took a pencil and wrote something in the fold. He made several more. Then he piled the aeroplanes one into the next, drew back his arm and thrust t
hem from his grip. I jumped to catch them, white darting flashes, as they streamed through the air, singly or in pairs. Catching three, I watched the rest flutter to the ground, like so many birds.

  I took my catch up to Ade’s bedroom, unfolded the aeroplanes and spread them on the floor.

  ********?

  ********?

  ********?

  Ade had tried to communicate with me. But I could not read.

  The rains arrived, and I was unable to play outside. I had been born during that same season four years previously, and now, amid the tumult, as when newly born, I felt exhausted once again. The rain beat down upon the roofs, on to the streets, the tangle of green, like so many exclamation marks puncturing the earth, thrumming up the water and effacing reflections.

  Taiwo, for days now afflicted, like us all, with mindless boredom, sprawled in her armchair in an obscure and heavy trance. Occasionally she would wake, as if from hibernation, look around helplessly, then hunt for herself in the wardrobe mirror. But after a few minutes her eyelids would fall shut. And for days I had been confined to my room, with vacant Taiwo as my guard and keeper, with no more stimulus than the sodden scenery. Even the sounds of Lagos were crowded out by the beating of the rain, which afflicted everything, not only us, the human inhabitants of the house, but also the voiceless drunken animal life, the mice and the birds, who had disappeared at the first cloudburst, and most helplessly of all, the inanimate objects, the wardrobe, which pulped and swelled, Mother’s trunk, the floorboards, which grew patches of white fur dotted with the blue eyes of mould.

  Father, it seemed, was the only one among us untroubled by the rain. He had become absorbed in his work at the Lagos Executive Development Board. In a large yellow mac he mounted his bicycle and left the house before dawn, no longer lunched at home and often returned after dark. Once I saw him pedalling furiously homeward, bent over his handlebars, his tailcoats flapping foolishly over the rear wheel. After he dried himself off he would sit on the veranda. Sometimes his colleague Mr Honeyman would stop by. There were blessed evenings when Father called me from my room, dismissing Taiwo for the night, evenings when, projected on a sheet hung at the far end of the veranda, I witnessed grainy, poorly shot photographs of Lagosians in fancy dress. Then, towards the end of the rainy season, Mr Honeyman produced a different kind of photograph, a bird’s-eye view of Lagos. Father pointed to our house, which looked like a toy box. It was so tiny and inconsequential. And so near the centre! They were making plans to clear the slums, which were circled in red. They planned to install plumbing and a sewage system, evict people from their homes, which were to be replaced with hotels and office blocks, banks, parliament buildings and new roads. But what excited them most were skyscrapers.

  ‘We will make ourselves comfortable among the clouds!’ Mr Honeyman said, beneath the rattling veranda roof. ‘We’ll solve the problem of housing in Lagos, and overcome the spread of disease by elevation!’

  While Father was absorbed in his city planner’s dreams, I was making plans of my own. I knew I needed to leave the house and enter the town. Although I had resolved to take matters into my own hands, I did not know how to manage it. But then something quite unexpected happened.

  It had been an afternoon of low cloud and relentless rain. That day I had sat with my elbows on the windowsill, gazing wall-eyed at the rain, in a stupidity of doubt, until Father called me, and at length we ate in the dining room. The meal was sombre but for the cutlery’s chime and clatter. When I returned to my room I looked out of the window and found the world transformed! The sun had emerged, the wind had fallen to a soft breeze, which stirred the branches of the ebony tree. I climbed out through my bedroom window into the still-damp sun-bright garden, impossibly happy. I ran through grass, under the tree and around the kitchen compound to the lakeshore.

  Taiwo was floating face-down in the water.

  11

  In Lagos

  Came the great market days. The rains had flooded the town, filled the streets, overwhelmed our garden – but now grasses, tubers and flowers were everywhere springing up. Birds appeared, and the air vibrated with their wing beats. To think that only a week previously we had been besieged by that empty damp season, and in semi-darkness the world had shrunk to enclose us. But now, through cloudless skies, the sun shone brightly. A hot dry summer-season with far views across the lagoon. The lawn quickly became parched. The foundations of a swallow’s nest appeared below the eaves. High-spirited in the new atmosphere, we rolled up our sleeves, and listened to the swallows, who rained down on us a living symphony, then took off, shrilling, to return with moss, twigs and rags.

  It was during this season that I became acquainted for the first time with the market. Already a week had passed since Taiwo’s death. Father had asked Iffe to take care of me until he found a new nursemaid (in fact he never found one). So here we were, Iffe, Ade and I, beneath the low sky, passing through the front garden on our way to Jankara market. We walked on the sandy road, by dew-damp lawns. Elephant grass waved its stalks far above my head. The shopkeeper Riley greeted us – ‘Good morning!’ – and the watchmen at the gate of the Honeymans’ did the same – ‘E ku aro!’ Beside us a cockerel was stirring up dust. He stopped, swelled his neck and summoned up a cry; the little thong-like tongue thrashed in the violent beak, and from deep in his throat he wished me well. We reached the street where buses ran amid clouds of dust. The yellow bus rounded a corner and, shuddering, pulled to a stop. We boarded, and the sky arched higher.

  I thought, but not for long, of Taiwo. No one knew the exact manner of her death; there were no witnesses. Did she fall? Or had she taken her own life? I wondered if the church gave a full burial for suicides. The bus was picking up speed. On the seat beside Ade I leaned forward. Would Taiwo’s family prepare her face – her last, set permanently – as she herself would have wished: scrubbed, hair pulled back from the wide forehead, painted lips and cheeks, eyebrows plucked? My feet in new leather shoes felt prickly. I heard a blend of bells and horns and turned to face the window. What, I asked myself, did thoughts of Taiwo matter now? Had I not wished my nursemaid dead? Happy or obedient fate had heard my plea! At that moment it simply stirred me that I had won my freedom, was seated presently on the tinny, but thunderous, bus looking through the dusty glass – we were crossing the Macgregor Canal. How my luck had changed!

  The trading district came into view. We got off the bus and entered the market. Ade and I hung back and hurdled the bands of shade that spanned the walkway between stands – for no other reason than we wanted to – the rules of a game we had not discussed, and it made our progress slow. Every so often Iffe stopped, turned and clicked her tongue, which released us from the shadows’ spell, and we came running to where, a moment earlier, she had been standing. The stalls rose hugely above me. We reached the section of fresh produce where each type of vegetable was stacked together: we walked among brown sticky roots, past oranges in tea chests, past tomatoes with their smell like sunshine, past masses of corncobs behind Iffe to her stand. The morning was hot, damp, substantial, smelling of dust, and a warm sweet odour like caramelizing sugar.

  At Iffe’s instruction Ade and I stayed by the onion stand. We squatted beneath the table that held our wares, so my view was near-level to the ground, a view of stones, insects and straw, of sandals and bare feet with their movement of pendulums, of loose sack fibres, newspaper, a single crushed tomato, and with purple lizards darting between. Women – I quickly understood the market was a female realm – stopped beside us. Some bargained for onions, others exchanged greetings with Iffe, and each rested her gaze on mine. For many I was something new entirely and outside their reach of knowledge. Others bent, tight in their wrappers, to look more closely, to press my hand or grip me firmly, as though I was a robust and precious foodstuff, and called me beautiful and in admiration or with envy said I would attract customers, bring luck on Iffe. When they left I opened my hands to find I held gifts from their stalls, differ
ent kinds of fruit, which Ade and I ate. I recall particularly a guava, with its pink wet flesh, it was the first guava I had tasted, with a strange musty flavour I did not wholly like.

  I took off my shoes. Ade and I huddled close, not speaking, and for some minutes we took in our ground-level view. A woman stopped who sold the morning’s haul of lagoon-fruit. We pinched our noses. We stared into the dead eyes of fishes.

  If I was a novelty, and attracted crowds, Iffe too was venerated among the traders. She was a significant woman, tall and uniformly wide from her shoulders to hips – and she had grace. Her movements were unhurried, stylish, difficult to interpret yet full of meaning, and I noticed a certain heaviness about her limbs, as though she bore or carried them through a thicker element. She wore sandals, a blue skirt and white blouse without sleeves, and looked wise, regal, with a blue headscarf sculpted on her head. I admired the flushed region of skin that dappled her upper arms.

  But it was her voice that impressed me most and seeded a kind of devoted exhibitionism in me. When she called out the price and quality of her onions, the sound came from deep in her chest-cavity, and I had the impression her larynx was not a crude organ – not, like others’, an instrument for telling lies – but cut and shaped like the sound-box of a cello; I judged there was freedom for such workmanship within her chest and neck. It wasn’t merely that her voice was strong, although undeniably it was, but that when she spoke she seemed to cast out more than merely sound; she made the air vibrate and, yes, I felt she projected a kind of truth. I once caught the scent of cardamon on her breath but her words were not directed at me. I felt the drumming of my heart, I wanted her attention badly and caught my breath when I believed she glanced down.