‘What kind of lies does she tell?’
‘She often pretends not to hear me when I call. Sometimes I find her in the backyard mixing herbs and powders. Once I witnessed her sacrificing a chicken. She really is a very original old creature. I sometimes wonder if she’s not involved in juju. Anyway, she tells me everything.’ She paused and looked into the distance. ‘For instance, she has told me that your friendship with Ade is unnaturally close.’ A look of quiet triumph illuminated her eyes. I felt heat rise to my face. (It was true: before Ade left for Christmas our relationship had taken a new turn, which I will talk about shortly.) ‘Don’t worry,’ Mrs Honeyman said, ‘we will put a stop to it.’ Her eyes, grey once again, looked sternly into my own. ‘Tomorrow Ade will return to Ikoyi. From now on I want you to treat him very differently. It is for his own good. Treat him as you would a stupid child, ceremoniously and with a slightly vexed indifference.’ She rose from her chair. ‘Take my advice, and I guarantee that very soon you will find him ugly.’
16
How I Developed My Powers of Listening
It was January 1957. The sun came early; there was a flash, and suddenly it was bright morning. Spilling on to our garden, the streets, roofs, windows and the lagoon’s calm surface was the teeming yellow light. Everything flashed and burned. But a fetid odour like rotting leaves rose from the ground on which Ade and I were squatting, in the cool half-dark of an upturned fishing boat, playing our new game. We had known about the wreck for months, and before Christmas had visited it regularly: throwing stones at the clanging hull, climbing on to its bulbous tip, where gulls sat, scattering faeces, squabbling, eyeing the water. Only since Ade had returned from the Christmas break, however, had we found a way inside.
From the start, when we became acquainted from either side of the bars of my cot, I had admired certain qualities in my friend: his soft skin, his never keeping still, the scarred and always dirty knees. Added to this was his performance in The Snow Queen: just as, during the play, Ade’s personality, voice and movements had marked the character of the robber girl, so the robber girl – with her painted face and squeaky voice and patchwork dress – had marked my friend. In my mind now he gave off a kind of feral elegance, a vibrating female charm, whose effect on me outlasted the performance. When I looked at him I could not fail to associate Ade with the spoiled and unmanageable bandit of the play, who had cried ‘nanny goat!’ as she tugged at her mother’s beard.
This is how the game went: first I would lift my dress above my stomach, holding it to one side, and pull my knickers down until they stretched taut between my knees. Next I would squat and Ade would watch the stream of urine spill from between my legs and bounce off the broken shells and mix with the sea-scum on the ground. I would quickly pull my knickers up. Before the ground had absorbed my puddle, Ade would push his shorts down around his ankles and aim his okro at my pool. As I gazed in admiration, he would send a loud stream into its centre, where a virulent moss had started to grow, frothy like the tide-reach – we credited ourselves with its growth.
Now it was late, and we stood beneath the hull in the intimate dark, and the gulls raised hell above us. I had just pulled up my knickers under my righted dress. Ade lowered his shorts, giving off the sour smell of spoiled milk, and let his okro dangle above the ground. I stood opposite, watching. For several moments he remained still, staring with great concentration at the puddle I had made. As he drew in his stomach, I could see the outline of his ribs. He was straining hard, but nothing emerged. Turning his back, saying, ‘Don’t look!’ he bent double, hands gripping his hips. I moved round to face him and saw his features tense and contort; with a furious internal energy he was trying to goad or force out the pee. ‘Don’t look!’ he shouted. But I couldn’t not look, because I had noticed something happening to his okro, something I knew was causing the drought – it was thickening and growing longer. I began to laugh, a high, nervous laughter that scared me and infuriated Ade. He winced, backing away. His okro seemed to be possessed of an independent life and a will contrary to his own, for now it began to rise like a pointing finger towards the hull. As I watched – amazed – Ade turned, pulled up his shorts and stumbled out through the gap.
After that encounter in the upturned boat, the mood between us changed. Ade began to ignore me. I felt shy in his company and stopped eating with him in the kitchen compound; instead I took supper on the veranda with my father. One evening I asked him about Mrs Honeyman.
‘She’s a writer,’ he said, ‘and a melancholic, and she keeps canaries.’ I asked what a melancholic was, and Father thought for a while, then told me it was a person through whose head dark clouds frequently pass, and for whom the rainy season rages sometimes. He paused, then said, ‘It’s better to stay clear of Susan Honeyman, Evie, I won’t invite her round again. One shouldn’t believe a word she says.’
My father was right: Mrs Honeyman had told me I would find Ade ugly, but in the rusted chasm of the inverted hull, with its sour odours and spines of shifting light, he was more appealing to me than ever. But that did not stop our relationship from breaking apart. Now, at the market, I played alone; after which I went straight to my room and read or listened to the radio. And when, at the end of July, Ade started at the mission school, what was left of our friendship developed an antagonistic edge. Sometimes Ade mocked me openly. I felt we were on opposing sides – but of what? The more I felt scorned, the more anxious I was to be near him, and I started to watch him in secret. I noticed how bony he had become, and stronger-willed, deeper-voiced. He began to wear men’s shoes with the laces taken out. Proud and unhurried, when he turned from his friends after grappling in play, I noticed he had acquired Iffe’s grace in movement. In the evenings he padded to the bottom of the garden and skimmed stones on the surf. Sometimes I tried to follow, but he waved me away with the back of his hand.
It seemed inevitable to me that I should assume the responsibility of maintaining our relationship alone, in secret. In doing so I was aware of claiming more than my share of the shame our encounter had engendered. Perhaps it was recompense for my having witnessed his beating. Mrs Honeyman’s belief that ‘children come out of women through tunnels of pain’ connected in my mind with my need to watch Ade, as well as my growing feeling that, to be an adult, a woman (though I was only ten), was to bear pain alone.
One evening after supper I watched Ade make his way across the lawn towards the lagoon. He was carrying some kind of package wrapped in newspaper. I followed him. He did not stop at the shore as usual, but turned and climbed over the fence, out of our garden. I waited until he had disappeared, then I too climbed the fence, entered the bush and fought my way through. On the other side, I stopped and parted the branches. Ade was walking across a thin stretch of wetland, towards an old wooden jetty, calling, ‘Sagoe, Sagoe, I have it!’
Sagoe. Babatundi’s elder brother! Like all the market children, Ade had feared him, his fabled cruelty; and together we’d worried he might appear on our visits to Babatundi. Now Ade was striding towards him, package held out almost in defence, it seemed to me, as one might offer meat to a vicious dog. I hid in the undergrowth. It was the first time I had seen Sagoe, who looked more like a feral cat, I thought, the kind that haunted the Apapa docks.
Sagoe was thin and tall and was smoking a cigarette. As he moved to take the package, he thrust his unfinished cigarette at Ade, who put it between his lips and began to smoke. Sagoe opened the package, tipped its contents out into his palm, then spat on it. He offered it to Ade, who did the same. Now Sagoe rolled it in his fingers. Then he took up a stick by his feet, a bamboo rod attached with a length of string, at the end of which gleamed a giant hook. So they were fishing! Sagoe fed the bait on to the hook then began to swing it around his head. He leaned back and launched the hook high over the water. Immediately a company of gulls swept down and began to snap at the bait as it fell through the air and then hit the water. Instead of letting the hook sink, as I expected, Sagoe haul
ed the line in as soon as it struck the surface. Four times Sagoe launched the hook into the air and hauled it in. On his fifth attempt a gull caught the bait in mid-air. There was a violent screech. Sagoe staggered on the jetty. Suddenly I understood Sagoe’s project, and my heart sickened. The bird was flapping desperately, but its beak was caught in the hook. It was unable to make any headway through the air, and so it hovered above the water, fighting, dipping and rising. With a great effort of balance, his legs straining, back bent, Sagoe fought the gull. Ade was jumping up and down, in awe or excitement or, like myself, fear, I do not know. The gull let out a series of terrible cries. Its wings seemed to flap too slowly and it looked as if it would lose momentum and plummet to the water. Unable to bear the screams, I put my fingers in my ears. Sagoe and the gull fought for a very long time. Slowly, however, the bird grew tired; it dropped lower and lower, and Sagoe’s arms slackened. I took my fingers from my ears. Sagoe called Ade. The bird, quiet now, fell and settled on the water, where it floated at an unnatural angle, its beak half-submerged. The two boys began to haul in the line. Now the gull was only several yards away from the jetty. Even from where I stood, in the undergrowth, some ten yards away, it looked enormous, bloody at its beak. As they dragged it out of the water, it began to shriek again. Ade took hold of the rod, and Sagoe picked up a stick and began to swing at the gull. He had trouble making contact, the bird was flapping and thrashing at the ground, but every so often he managed. Soon the bird became still, quiet, and Sagoe rained down on it a series of blows. At one point the head twisted and came free. That is when I cried out, and the boys turned and saw me.
Later, after Ade and Sagoe had gone, leaving me on the jetty, I lay on the boards until dusk. I could have washed the blood off in the lagoon. But I had not wanted to be near the gulls, who had not stopped swooping, hysterical; sensing, I knew, the unnatural death of one of their number. On hearing my cry, Sagoe had dragged me from the bushes and instructed Ade to hold me down on the jetty. He had picked up the gull’s head and walked to where I lay, sobbing and twisting, and brushed its bloody neck across my face. ‘Girls are bloody,’ Sagoe had said, laughing.
After that I stopped spying on Ade. I withdrew into myself. Every morning on arriving at Jankara market with Iffe I crept beneath the onion table and sat there throughout the day, seized by a kind of enervating emptiness or hunger. The rainy season began. Every morning crowds of umbrellas sprung up like outlandish mushroom-growths. Now fewer customers came to the vegetable quarter; nevertheless, Iffe had no time for me, she was too much occupied with her plans to fight the slum clearances. Each day meetings were held. Lawyers came with scribes, and there was hardly a moment when she was not making a speech or dictating a letter or signing forms. I rarely saw her barter or even sell her wares – it seemed she was supported by donations from the other traders. I noticed a new meekness about her customers: few suggested the pile might grow a little; no longer did they attempt to embarrass her into giving a superior gift. She had become an O-lo’ri Egbe and represented the interests of the onion sellers. Sometimes I helped to pile onions on the table-top, and my arms ached. Or else I watched the sun drink up shadows on the street. Mostly, however, I sat beneath the onion stand, sucking on a stone, letting the world around me fade.
Several weeks went by in this way. I sat, bored, hardly moving, listening to the noise of the rain. But then something happened which marked the beginning of an important period of my life. This period did not last long (a couple of months at the most), and no one else knew about it (it occurred exclusively inside my head). What happened? I began not only to hear, but to listen, to take in the sounds, form distinctions and organize them into groups. For a time I forgot my loneliness. I forgot Ade and Iffe and my absent father. It was thrilling to discover I could shape raw noise into an intelligible order. In that period I was a kind of child-Linnaeus, charting not vegetative and animal matter, but the obscure life of the acoustic world. How boisterous and confusing Lagos had been until then! And myself, how ignorant! How innocent and forgetful!
It started with the sound of rain. One afternoon, pressing my ear against the underside of the onion table, I drew back sharply, for the vibrations thundered in my head; how violently the rain drummed on that hard surface! After that I began to listen into or within its grain, and soon I started to pick out its individual elements. I noted, for instance, the hissing as it fell through the elephant grass, and the slap and thud as it beat off roads, sounding like a team of barefoot runners sprinting over wet sand; also the high percussive noise as drops bounced off pots and pans; and when it passed through plants and foliage, the noise was more like a continuous sigh; which I set apart from the drops filtering through trees; or the brighter pop and loose tripping of the water falling and flowing in the gutter; or the violent clatter on corrugated iron, which sounded like prisoners banging tin cups against the bars of their cells. Sitting beneath the onion table, I found I was able to isolate the individual tones, set them apart and, as it were, spread them before me.
That is when I understood that raindrops themselves are silent, and in falling carry only the possibility of sound, just as the hammers of a piano, waiting silently above the strings until the pianist begins to play, hold in their matter a kind of latent music … except that the piano has a limited number of strings; but the rain – there was nothing on which it did not choose to drum! Each body on to which the droplets fell gave off its individual hum or resonance. I wondered what the rain might sound like if I was under the sea, or in a canyon, or on a cricket field, or else flying in an aeroplane. My favourite sound was also the hardest to make out: it was the hollow plash as the rain fell into puddles and the shallows and deeper waters of the lagoon.
And it was this same sense of delight in charting the hidden sounds of Lagos that coursed through me even after the wet season ended. The afternoon the rain stopped I recall the earth’s sighs, accompanied by sheer blue light. Colour returned to Lagos, and Jankara market became bright with sound. As for myself, I remained quiet. Apart from the odd insect, I was rarely disturbed. At lunch Iffe continued to bring me soup, and every now and then she glanced down to make sure I was still there. Fortunately, I did not want company. I was happy to be alone, for I had discovered the most resonant spot, slightly to the right of the table’s centre, squeezed between a pair of onion baskets. There I sat, cross-legged with my hands on my knees, my head cocked to the right, growing ever more solitary and reserved. Above me birds chattered. I made no noise. The sun shone fiercely. I closed my eyes to the sun. Nothing mattered to me so much as listening. The sounds arrived in torrents.
I developed a ritual to prepare myself to receive the city’s sounds: on arriving at the market I would stand in the street, stretch my arms out and begin to spin, faster and faster, until the noise of Lagos rose up in a kind of liquid swell; then I would tumble beneath the onion stand and close my eyes; with the city still lurching, I would take deep breaths until my head began to clear; and, as the sounds composed themselves, I would begin to pick out each individual tone and timbre.
I heard corridors of cloth flapping in the textile section, the snap-snap of barbers’ scissors, the awful sucking sound of the snail woman scooping snails from their shells, as well as the rattle of lizards circling their cages, also the furious buzzing of flies at the meat section, and the breathing – slow, heavy, guttural and irregular – of the homeless men on Broad Street. I listened to the footsteps of the delivery men: the tomato man had a heavy walk; the orange man walked with a limp and drew a wonky cart; as for the onion man, who was not a man but in fact a boy, he had a light tread, as of water trickling down steps, and he whistled Highlife tunes. Without moving, I liked to follow him on his rounds, up and down the onion line, and later, after his work was done, I would follow him to the north quarter of the market, where he visited the barber or scrounged palm wine and played cards.
Soon I had so thoroughly listened to Jankara market that, without stirring from my r
esonant cave, I could ‘roam’ the district, explore its every shack and alley, simply by picking out and following particular sources of sound. I began to expand my territory, first eastwards to Ikoyi, where I noted the wind fluting along the electricity wires, and the creaking of the weather vane on St Saviour’s Church, and the whirr of bicycle wheels, and bells, and radios playing different kinds of music. Next I listened to the Brazilian quarter, with its narrow lanes of booming traffic, its thousand boisterous horns, and also the squeaking of a wheelbarrow. I heard hammering and sawing – much building work was taking place. I was drawn to one structure in particular, St Paul’s Breadfruit Church on Broad Street; there every sound reflected off the cavernous walls, doubling, splitting, colliding, crashing. I was learning to make out the distinctive echoes of certain spaces. Next I travelled west, past Tinubu Square with its hissing waterfall, past the shore of the lagoon, where I noted the sounds of that day’s catch, flapping and dying. After that, I travelled all over Lagos, listening to each district, each corner, each backyard and blind alley.
Meanwhile, the life of the market continued, unaware of the miracles happening between my ears. I was no longer a novelty for the traders, but merely strange, an oyinbo child sitting with closed eyes, saying nothing, needing nothing. Sometimes they brought their faces close to mine. I remember a large sweaty face with shining eyes asking, ‘Wassamatter?’ It was a tomato seller. She had became suspicious and suggested I was eavesdropping in order to tell my father about their plans to ‘sit on a man’. (But she was mistaken; in this period I rarely listened for meaning; only raw sounds interested me, and if I heard the traders discussing their plan to sit on a man I was only dimly aware of the meaning of their words.) Mostly, however, the traders considered me harmless, a bored, solemn, remote little girl.
The Echo Chamber Page 18