The Echo Chamber

by Luke Williams

  Over the following days I lay on the bed in this dimly lit chamber. The smell was outrageous; sweet and fetid, it bloomed like a hothouse flower, and the temperature rose and rose. I did little but lie there, recovering. Sometimes I did not sleep for several nights. Sometimes I was overcome with laughter. At others I forgot who I was. In time I felt restored and began to examine my surroundings. The light was dim, blue-black and spangled with pale yellow. The furniture seemed to rise seamlessly from the floor, as if cast in lava: black, organic table and chairs, a long, low bed without sheets where I lay, a high-backed armchair where the man with the bristling skull sat, watching me.

  What follows is the story of my friendship with Nikolas, leader of the nightsoil workers, an eccentric tribe who were employed by night to clear the city’s sewage and eject it into the lagoon; before dawn, the workers would descend to the pits, their home, into which I had fallen. The world of the nightsoil workers had evolved out of the city sewers. All this I learned from Nikolas in the first months of my stay.

  In the beginning, he told me, Lagos’ sewage system was little more than a network of shallow open channels into which the citizens threw their filth. But soon, as the city’s population grew, they began to overflow, and the streets became filled with pools of stinking waste. With the streets overflowing, the council built a sanitary tramway. Every evening after dusk men in masks collected the nightsoil and shovelled it into the carriages. The line ran from Ikoyi Island, crossed the Macgregor Canal and tacked across the city centre, before turning south; when it reached Dejection Jetty on Victoria Island, its steaming cargo was loaded on to canoes and dumped in the lagoon.

  Because of the tramway, Nikolas told me, the sewer system fell into disuse. That was when the nightsoil workers moved in; they went on to deepen the network, hollowing out a warren-matrix of rooms that spread slowly beneath the streets, an expanse made up of old nightsoil and every other kind of waste: rusty metal, sackcloth, planks, pipes, piles of tins, rags, old umbrellas, bottles, glass and broken metal. A second Lagos evolved, existing entirely underground, hidden from view, unknown to the majority, forgotten by those who walked the streets above it, a city made from all that was not wanted or had fallen into disuse. Nikolas delighted in showing me the ingenious uses to which the nightsoil workers had put the city’s waste, pointing out a Guinness bottle used to roll pastry, a discarded stocking through which coffee could be strained, wrought-iron railings used as meat-skewers.

  He was always in action, at every moment twitching and gesticulating, and he burned with a furious internal energy he was barely able to contain. As a child, I learned, he had fallen down a mine shaft and consequently his back was bent. In Ibadan, where he went to school, the missionaries had caned him repeatedly on his wrists. Now his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. During the War he fought in Burma with the Frontier Force. His army-issue boots had been too small, and he lost the feeling in his toes. Because of this he limped. He held his tall frame loosely at odd angles, and his joints appeared twisted. In fact, thinking back, only once – later, towards the end of my stay in the pits, when I walked into his chamber and watched him sleep – do I recall seeing him completely still, and even then I could not help but be aware of a kind of slow combustion in his chest, an internal fire which recalled the legendary origin he claimed for himself, citing as its source the mythological coupling of a salamander and the Yoruban sky-god Sango.

  At first, recovering in his chamber, I’d listened to Nikolas’ talk in a sort of torpor. It had taken a considerable effort of will to wake from the enchantment of my twilit husk. Later, however, I found myself attempting to direct the flow of his speech, stopping him when he digressed and pressing him whenever his allusions intrigued me. One day, after he told me that he was not originally from Lagos, and frustrated by his elisions and ellipses, I asked for a fuller account.

  ‘It was on the day I finished school that I came to Lagos,’ he began. ‘I had heard a man in my village say that its streets were paved in gold. But something must have arrived to spoil my mind, because I believed him … even though his advice was useless, less than useless even, because that town was to become the theatre for all my miseries to come. When I reached Lagos I was straight away robbed of all my belongings and forced to sleep inside a ditch. The next day I woke with no idea of what to do with myself. I was walking by an old clothes shop and I saw a man with a broken head swap his vest for one or two pence. I caught the malady and was instantly relieved of my coat. I received in exchange seven pence. Now I was thinking only one thing to myself, and that was that I must have some food to chop, some drink to drink and a bed in which to sleep. Soup, some hot drink, and a cheap dosshouse was the first assault upon my seven pence. As for!

  ‘Evie, believe me that night was a troublesome night indeed! I think you must remember what I told you about my life and maledictions. Well, many times my bedfellows spoke to me. Are you asleep? Ehn? Are you asleep? I was not in the mood to talk, and so I made no reply. To silence them completely I began to snore. Zzzzz! Zzzzzz! I began to snore very very loudly, and for some minutes everything that was not myself was very quiet. But soon one of my bedfellows got up and started to unlace my boots! Whoever said that poverty acquaints us with strange bedfellows was not telling a lie! Several times after I fell asleep this same fellow tried to unlace my boots, so I had to stay awake. After guarding my boots carefully throughout most of the night, I fell asleep just as day began to break. When I woke the sun was knocking on my skull. The sun knocks in the morning, Evie, that is a fact which has not been sufficiently observed. When I got up I found that my boots were not on my feet! And my pennies were not in my pocket. And not one of my bedfellows remained to wish me good morning.

  ‘Are you following me?’ Nikolas asked. I nodded. ‘What do you make of that, eh?’ He gave a peculiar kind of wise grin, as though I must now see what kind of legendary creature I was dealing with.

  ‘After I left that dosshouse,’ he continued, ‘I strayed about town, looking for something to chop. I began to pray to God and I said to Him, If You are thinking of me, and if You want me to survive at all, You must help me to find those golden streets. I still believed the vulture who told me that the streets of Lagos were paved in gold. But it was not long before I discovered those words for what they were really worth … as much as the leaf which has been used to wipe somebody’s backyard!

  ‘So. I had to stop many times in order to lie down on the ground and pick the stones out of the bottom of my feet as well as rest my stiff leg. This was not an easy matter. And when I was occupied with lying on the ground, I was prey to everyone who wished to speak to me or accost me. I am not telling a lie if I say that I had plenty of strange encounters, and I acquainted myself with myself better than before, because what marks us bodily the mind cannot forget. And once during this period I even fell in love, but that is another matter entirely. On some days I received a penny or two. There were plenty of days when I received nothing at all, and I just lay there like mumu, not fit to pick myself up and begin to walk without falling on to the ground again.

  ‘Once I was lying on the ground, and many wretched porsons came and sat down beside me. We discussed our terrible hunger. One of us thought we should go to the market and chop rotten oranges. I thought to myself that this was a very bad idea indeed. I accepted the invitation. At the market I filled my hat with oranges. I took a seat and chopped them all in one go. Every single one! And I am telling you they made a dirty supper. That night I slept with my belly full on a heap of stones. As day began to break I became sick. I experienced pains in my stomach and backyard. I vomited and shitted myself inside out. Day after day for many days I lay in the street and not one soul will come to help me. Even porsons will come to rob me and beat me with a mallet. That is when I knew for certain the truth of that wise man’s saying, which is that man will be a beast to man. The next thing I remember is that I was up on my hands and knees. And I was very very thirsty. I crawled to the canal and
drank plenty of water. It was after that I discovered that my hat was gone, and my vest and trousers were gone as well. And I discovered that I was bald, as if a bird had chopped all my hair. And inside my head was a kind of rumpus, as if a fly had flown through my earhole and was causing trouble, buzzing and dancing, conducting important business inside my head.

  ‘I said to myself that a one-eared man does not thank God until he meets a deaf man at prayer. It was clear what was happening to me, but what could I do? Did I continue to have no sleep? Yes. Did I find my hat plus the rest of my clothes? No. Did I find a new pair of boots? No. Did my hair grow back? No. Was I at that time skinny like a reed, meaning a puff of wind will cause me to fall on to the ground? Yes. Had I lost every hope? Yes. Had I even lost the desire to better my condition as well? Yes. Did I learn a thing or two about trickery in order to chop? Yes. Did I drink plenty of hot drink? Yes. Did I respect female honour? No. Did my stiff leg get better? No. Did I frequently take refuge in the horizontal? Yes. Was God happy with me at all? No. Did I think the world was at its end? Yes.’

  Nikolas paused. After I don’t know how long, he said, mysteriously, ‘If darkness on a visit is so dark, what does it look like in its own home?’ I was close to tears. I shook my head. ‘Evie, there are times in life when things are not themselves but stand for other things.’

  ‘You are a philosopher,’ I said.

  ‘I just don’t eat.’

  But from his life of misfortune he had descended to a position of great power. I soothed him with this thought. I pointed to his gold bracelet, and his sleeveless jerkin brocaded with gold thread.

  ‘Porsons nowadays,’ he said, ‘do not know a thing about gold. But we who live in the pits know one or two things. For instance, it is not so much gold’s value or beauty which captivates us, but even its practical use as well. Look,’ he held his bracelet up to the candle, ‘see how the metal acts as a reflector? Perhaps you thought I was acting the big man, eh, Evie? But I was not acting the big man. I will not wear gold as a simple extravagance. We in the pits live in dimness, so we must put gold’s reflective properties to use. This is why we value gold very highly.’

  We were sitting in his chamber. The air was close, wet, pungent, stinging, and the warmth which rippled off the bare walls made me think of steam that rises from a horse’s back. Nikolas said it was because we were closer to the earth’s raging core, and I believed him. I believed everything he said. I had only recently recovered from my dissolution in my husk. I felt peculiarly vain and wicked, and sullen, proud, self-serving, even idealistic – I almost never thought of Ade and his fall. And yet there were moments when a great heat of kindness towards the world came over me. But the heat cooled easily, and my mind returned with base thoughts, blood-hate and destructive ill-will. I did not see the good in most. Those in whom I did, however, I abandoned myself to with child-like love. So it was with Nikolas. He had peculiar visceral ways and wanted to turn the world upside down, believing one learned more from suffering than from studying books, that darkness triumphed over light, and that nightsoil was not waste matter – not the ejected poisons of our human gut – but a precious resource; black gold he called it. Wasn’t it nightsoil which caused flowers and vegetables to grow? Didn’t that remarkable substance support the walls of certain houses and towns? And couldn’t one use its dried-out cakes to fuel a fire that burns throughout the night?

  ‘All this is true,’ Nikolas told me. He was sitting on a black throne-like chair, myself on a stool by his feet. ‘And believe me, it is no coincidence that when porsons sit on the toilet they come by many great ideas.’ I started to laugh, but he silenced me with an upraised hand. ‘Who is to say that nightsoil is unsavoury, eh, Evie?’ His voice rose in anger. ‘Europeans think the toilet is unclean and avoid mention of it at all. No doubt the toilet is unclean. But if the toilet is unclean so is their own backyard. I will never know why Europeans flush away their excrement but collect their nose-droppings in white little squares of cloth … what is it, a handkerchief!’ His tone was facetious, and yet his nostrils flared, always a sign, I came to learn, that he spoke in earnest.

  He continued, his voice growing brighter. ‘Let me tell you something that is true. All of Africa has been plundered by Europeans who think our problems can be solved by exposing every speck of grime and eradicating it. This is why we nightsoil workers are such a denigrated race. Condemned to work by night. Cursed by God and the human race. Believe me, our only honour is precarious, our only liberty provisional and underground.’

  It was 1959, or thereabouts. I was twelve years old and had been living with Nikolas for several months. At least that is what I believed at the time. I had fallen in with his routine, his strange talk and eccentric ways. The mood in his chamber was high-spirited, and I was infected by that mood. I felt hungry for kindness and knowledge and I was flattered that someone, finally, understood my worth – and that person a noble leader! And yet all this time I had barely left his chamber. Now, writing this history, it strikes me as odd that I did not yearn to discover the wider reaches of the pits. If the thought did not occur to me, I believe it was because I was overawed, and free and happy, simply, to be in Nikolas’ company.

  The heat in the pits was great, and yet Nikolas shook constantly. I thought his trembling came from violence-blighted youth; and also his agitated mind, which embraced a whole Westminster of plans, decrees, slanders, debates, advice, inventions, speeches and reforms. He had a theory about everything. He told me that most people would risk their lives over something they don’t care a whole lot about.

  ‘I am talking about a man’s vest or his stone collection. But those things that are important to that very same porson,’ Nikolas said, ‘he will completely disregard. For reasons hardly imaginable he will build himself a house in a remote town with no running water, in some pit overgrown with thorns and which is scattered with stones.’ Another time Nikolas advised on brushing my teeth. The common idea, he said, is to brush after breakfast. But this was a mistake. He told me I should brush my teeth as soon as I woke up, otherwise dirt accumulated during the night would be swallowed down with my first bite of the day.

  He liked to keep up with the news and, I learned, had his men collect the papers from the bins outside Government House. Now I was fully recovered it became my job to read him the headlines, first the international headlines from The Times, then the national and local, most often from The West African Pilot and The Daily Comet – Lagos papers, Zik’s papers. We read about the problem of hygiene at the shambles, and Nikolas said, ‘The government is trying to shut the market butchers down even though they have been supplying the meat trade for many years. The government favour the great English firms. They will grant plenty of licences to the English and even to some French. Never to a native butcher.’ He mistrusted every colonial officer, as well as businessmen, politicians, priests, missionaries, military men, journalists, even nuns. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that we might be confusing over politicians and thieves, eh, Evie? Lagos is built on stolen land, and the government is the biggest estate agent.’ But Zik, for him, though a political man, the leader of the NCNC, in line even to become first President, was not wolf-like as were other politicians but honest, noble, a poet.

  Nikolas now revealed that he acted as Zik’s spiritual doctor. Apparently (though I never saw it) there was a tunnel leading from the pits straight to Zik’s house. In twenty minutes, whenever he called (how? Was there a telephone in his chamber?), Nikolas could walk right into Zik’s study, where he advised on cultural matters, war, diplomacy, love, the future soul of Nigeria. He also counselled Zik on his anxieties. Apparently the old politician’s nerves were shot. He had a strange attachment to a mechanical doll that one of his deputies, Usman, had given him. He even thought of her as a living creature. He won’t admit it in public, but to me he will come right out and say it, ‘She’s alive, she’s alive, the little aje!’ Apparently he feared that the American doll with her white dress and plait
s would escape and try to kill him.

  Nikolas told countless such stories. From his perspective most of the population was nutty. Everybody in Lagos had some kind of loose bolt in her personality, a secret history or vice. A wife of one of the DOs liked to pretend she was the Austrian princess Sophia von Hohenberg. There was a government clerk from Hausaland who wrote perfect English and dealt with forestry and who claimed he had invented electricity. Everyone, said Nikolas, was like their reflection in the lagoon, turned face on face and scattered by the wind and tide.

  ‘Maddest of all are the Europeans, the foolish, spiritless, cruel old colonials who will make the laws into an exquisite justification for plundering.’ His voice rose half an octave. He was working himself into a fury. ‘Nigeria,’ he shouted, ‘is nothing more than a cesspit for madmen and murderers.’ He stretched himself higher, and his head struck the ceiling. ‘Ow! … Look at this cave! Not a surface – not a cranny – that is clean. It stinks! It is a sewer! When a man is forced to dwell in shit, what does he care for beauty and truth?’ Then he came over to my bed. Suddenly calm, he said, ‘But you will understand all of this already, Evie … because if you are not yourself a nightsoil worker you must know that your soul speaks in fellowship with my own.’