The Echo Chamber

by Luke Williams

  I do remember my first visit to Mr Rafferty. Even then, his needs were minimal, like my own today. He no longer travelled, rarely left the institution, and his main pastime was restoring clockwork. Now the staff have confiscated his tools, but then my father and I would bring him watches from the junk shops on Cockburn Street. We would look on as he squinted at the silver cogs and loosely sprung coils, picking them apart. Then, hunched over the hands restored behind glass, he would wind the mainspring and wait for the miracle.

  Now Mr Rafferty was struggling with his laces. He had shaved off his moustache (I felt before I saw it) and grazed his upper lip. It was difficult to connect this pale old man with the masterly watchmaker he had once been. I looked away. The whining in my ears climbed in pitch, and for several minutes I sat on the bed.

  ‘Shall we get going?’ I said. I was keen to leave the institution. My grandfather is more likely to engage in conversation outside the building.

  As we left the institution I saw he was in a happy, helpful mood. He led me through the hospital grounds, saying, ‘I want to show you something.’ The late sun fell on his face, which seemed naked and embarrassed without his moustache. We walked along a ridge by the perimeter wall, then joined a walkway cut between rose thickets. Mr Rafferty said, ‘It’s brisk out,’ and his breath rose visibly. This seemed to please him. I took his arm to stop him slipping on the flagstones, and after a while he led me to a clearing. In front of us stood a hothouse. Lately I have noticed that when I stop still after walking I hear a deep sound in my head, like a funeral chord. I heard it now. Perhaps that is why I let Mr Rafferty pause outside the glass doors: the bass notes made me forget my purpose.

  The hothouse is a big, square building with arched windows set in pillars of stone. A sweep of glass forms the roof. Mr Rafferty said, ‘Let’s go inside.’ I wanted to leave the institution and get to the park, where I planned to question him about our first meeting, and about my father’s state of mind in those days. But now the funeral chord shifted several keys higher, acquired dissonance, distracting me. Mr Rafferty was tugging at my sleeve.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘look!’ As the sun sank lower in the sky the clear arches with their glistening panes flamed with colour, and smoke rose from the roof. I looked through the windows at the fire and gasped, then pointed, and Mr Rafferty laughed, then I understood: the fire was not fire, but the sun reflecting off the panes; the smoke, not smoke, but vapour rising where the hot glass met the outside air. Mr Rafferty took my arm and led me through the doors.

  ‘The building is never so beautiful as at this hour,’ he said.

  Inside, the air was wet. We wandered among the rotting plant life, brushed ferns with our hands, smelled the stink flower and mounted a narrow gantry spanning the north wall. Large climbers grew on the trunks of the banana trees, and blue moisture dripped from the ceiling. The drops hit, then slid along the serrated leaves, then fell; and the whole canopy seemed slowly to dip and rise.

  Mr Rafferty peeled off his greatcoat and loosened his shirt. Sweat-beads had formed on his upper lip, clinging to the graze, and his temples were dark and flushed. I mopped his face and neck and retied his laces. On entering the building the shift in temperature had been sudden, and I had welcomed it. Yet I saw that Mr Rafferty was suffering. And I myself was feeling restless and fatigued, although not on account of the heat. It was rather because of the swollen, almost meaty quality of the leaves, and the unreal greenish colour of the light. Breathing deeply, my grandfather stepped back down on to the hothouse floor. I followed him along the pathway, and we came to a pond with a mechanical waterfall, buzzing and whispering. It was cooler here, where spume from the falls sugared our faces, and we sat to take a rest. A coin fell from his pocket and rolled into the pond, but he didn’t notice.

  ‘May I ask you something?’ I said. He didn’t answer. His eyes were following a movement in the foliage.

  ‘Well, isn’t that Perry?’ he said. An old man in a motor-powered wheelchair was steering clumsily towards us. ‘I think he ought to stop driving that chair. His hands are too shaky.’

  Perry did not advance smoothly. He kept veering from the pathway, cursing the undergrowth.

  ‘There’s not a day passes without his baking himself in the hothouse,’ Mr Rafferty said. ‘It’s the only thing keeping him alive.’ The old cripple lurched forward then puttered to a standstill. For a moment he adjusted the vehicle and then he raised his face to us – pale, with a bony nose, powerfully hooked, and thick grizzled eyebrows. It was the only hair left on his entire head. In spite of the heat, his shoulders were wrapped in a blanket. He squinted up at me. Mr Rafferty said, ‘Old Perry, he’s virtually a tropical plant himself,’ which made perfect sense, as all at once I took in the waxy skin, the thick, blighted fingers, his corpse-like smell.

  Perry beckoned me with a trembling hand. In a rasping voice he commanded, ‘Take me tae the carnivorous plants.’

  ‘Me –?’

  Mr Rafferty spoke quietly. ‘He can’t make it past the African palm.’

  ‘We don’t have the time,’ I said, ‘I’ve got something important to talk to you about.’

  ‘Don’t refuse the old veteran. Go ahead.’

  ‘Take me,’ said the cripple.

  Annoyed, I put my hand on the armrest. ‘Perhaps another time,’ I said. But Perry had shuddered into motion, saying, ‘Dinnay let the fronds get in my road.’

  I strode in front. ‘The plants, they’re a worry,’ he said. ‘I used tae cut them back. But since this –’ he kicked feebly at the metal frame, ‘you might as well no bother.’

  ‘A shame,’ I said. ‘Which way is it?’

  ‘Round tae the left. Behind the great palm … Hang up.’ The chair swerved off the pathway and collided with an iron pillar. As I righted him, Perry said, ‘What a beauty!’ We were before the palm, which reached massively upwards, its trunk rising column-like almost to the roof.

  The cripple said, ‘It’s older than you.’

  ‘Come, where are we going?’

  ‘Hang up a minute.’ He wanted to talk. ‘If I dinnay bring out the tree surgeon soon, it’ll die like the rest. Christ almighty. Look.’ The palm pushed its fronds vigorously against the roof; and yet on examining the ribbed and flaking trunk, I saw it was lesioned in many places and supported by iron bars. Its growth had been carefully manipulated by the hothouse gardeners.

  ‘Old Mister Sandor –’

  ‘Let’s get on.’

  I parted a thick leaf-curtain. On the other side we came to a bank of flowers with gaping pink mouths. They appeared ravenous. Perry took out a matchbox and slid open the lid. For a moment I mistook its contents for sultanas, then I recoiled – the box was filled with dead flies.

  ‘They destroy themselves on the window panes in my room,’ he said and emptied the box into his palm. Taking one after another delicately by its wings, he began to drop them into the long-lashed flytraps, which closed lazily around their prey. I watched amazed for several minutes as, swaying gently from side to side, with a kind of fierce pleasure, or so it seemed, the cripple’s plants set about digesting the flies.

  ‘How do you like that?’ he asked.

  ‘I must be getting back,’ I said, parting the leaf-curtain.

  As we made our way along the path, Perry muttered to himself, coughed, jerked to and fro in his battery-powered machine, cursed the hospital management. ‘It wasn’t like that in Mister Sandor’s day,’ he breathed.

  ‘Watch the stones,’ I said.

  Perry talked on, and my sense of hearing started to leave me. His voice seemed very far away. In a few minutes every sound was deep and unclear, like noises underwater. No doubt because of this my eyes were active. I was looking at the chaos of fetid undergrowth, which restricted the chair’s movements. It had not always been this way. At one time the flora had been ordered and cut back, regulated by the great steam heaters, the sprinkler system, the complicated mass of blinds and pulleys. Now it was overgrown, prehi
storic. It smelled of decay.

  By the time I got back to the pond Perry was no longer with me; he must have taken a different path. I noticed Mr Rafferty had fallen asleep. Bubbles formed between his slightly open lips. I wanted to wake him; it was getting late and I didn’t want him to grow tired, in which case he would surely refuse to answer my questions. Nevertheless I let him rest for a while longer. I was thinking of the venus flytraps, as I had left them a moment ago, potent and gorged, and the funeral chord sounded again, stronger than before. Could my grandfather hear it in his sleep? Could Perry, wherever he was? I didn’t think so. Every other sound had disappeared. My sense of vision loomed enormously. I sat there gazing at the falls. I began to study its appearance, as though I’d never seen a waterfall before, its thousand glistening surfaces, the spray or mist rising where it struck the pond. The chord became gradually quieter, and I grew more and more content. Everything appeared dense and still, in particular the falls, which looped down now in a continuous silent flood and seemed made not of water, but, impossibly, of ice.

  Some time later my hearing returned. I leaned over and whispered in my grandfather’s ear. There was a hatching of froth on his chin. Had he been dribbling? It was likely. To wake him seemed cruel, but I shook him anyway. He didn’t stir. I thought about what I would do if my hearing deteriorated again. I shook him violently. His gaze roamed upwards, then his eyes fell on me and glazed over. I saw a dark patch at the end of his shoe, where he had let it dip into the pond.

  ‘Did you have a good nap?’ I said, finally. He told me that he was too hot. My grandfather’s answers are often beside the point. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘There are certain things I’d like to talk to you about, things which are important to me, which only you can help with.’ He stared at me in astonishment. Perhaps he wasn’t yet fully awake. I waited several minutes then asked if he knew who I was. After a short pause he spoke my name.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘Shall we go to the park?’ I was trying to be clear. I asked him if he understood. He did not look like he understood. After several minutes, he said, ‘My toe is wet.’ He hadn’t understood a thing. Or perhaps he was being difficult because I had disturbed his sleep.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘We don’t have to go anywhere, if you don’t want to. Let’s chat here.’ I paused. Then I said, ‘Tell me, do you remember when we first met, when I came to visit you, here in the hospital? Do you remember how I was in those days? And Father, what kind of state of mind was he in?’ I asked several more questions. Mr Rafferty waited for me to finish. Then he opened his mouth and spoke. But I couldn’t hear him clearly.

  I looked up at the roof. It had started to snow. I saw shadows flitting across the glass, projected by the streetlamps.

  After some time I said, ‘Mr Rafferty?’

  I won’t narrate this duet in full. Suffice to say there were further misunderstandings. Perhaps my grandfather answered my questions, but I think not. I think he was being deliberately obtuse, since at one point he took his yellow goggles from his pocket and began to fiddle with the elastic. Did he think I was going to take him swimming? It must not be forgotten that all this time my ears were of more or less value as sense organs. And my mind kept returning to the flytraps. It was odd to think of vegetative matter eating insect-life. And it was even odder when one thought of Perry feeding them with sweepings from the window panes of his room. Could the old cripple’s plants not fend for themselves? Perhaps the air in the hothouse was not fit to sustain flies, and the plants, like zoo animals unable to hunt their prey, relied on human offerings.

  Outside, in the hospital grounds, snow was falling silently. In each band of orange lamplight the flakes sifted gently down. We walked along the path by the perimeter wall. I had given up my quest to have Mr Rafferty help me with my history. He was intent on stepping in the snow, which was starting to settle. Now both his feet were wet. I put my hands in my skirt pockets. But for the noise of the traffic and the crunching underfoot, all was quiet. The graze on my grandfather’s upper lip had turned crimson. As we approached the front door, he stopped and said, ‘Is it both ears?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Are you deaf in both ears?’

  I nodded, taken aback.

  ‘How long has it been going on?’

  ‘Well, it’s happened several times before.’

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’

  ‘Not yet, no. Besides, I’m not deaf,’ I said sharply. ‘I have a very keen sense of hearing. It’s only that it is erratic … Bwha, it’s cold.’

  ‘Does it worry you?’ he asked.

  In truth I was wretched, wandering in my thoughts, but I didn’t reply.

  By the time we got to the front door of the institution the snow had started to fall in clusters of feathery flakes. Deepening blue drifts lay all over the grass. We stood with our backs to the door. I rubbed my hands together, and we huddled close. Mr Rafferty wanted to talk some more, but I wouldn’t allow it.

  23

  Father’s Madness and Death

  It’s been over a week since my visit to Mr Rafferty. In that time I’ve done very little. Finally, however, I feel able to press on. What happened in the interim?

  The snow continued to fall. In between periods of silence, the funeral chord continued to sound, and I was unable to recall my first months and years in Scotland. I wrapped myself in my patchwork blanket and lay on my mattress, which had been my father’s, but which I now think of as my own, staring at the skylight. Some mornings the condensation on the glass turned to ice, and my breath rose visibly. I cut the tips from a pair of gloves; together with a scarf from Mother’s trunk, they helped against the cold. As far as I could tell my hearing had not become worse. It had not grown more sensitive either. I was having trouble sleeping, the days seemed long, so I busied myself as best I could: I swept the floor, thought about tidying the attic, about throwing some of the clutter away. I went into Gullane and bought a supply of beans.

  The nights seemed even longer than the days. I missed my grandfather. Now that I wore the fingerless gloves, my hands were warmer, and I managed to write a little. I was trying to recount my afternoon at the hothouse, but it was slow progress. One evening, sitting at my desk facing the screen, which was misted over, but which nevertheless smouldered a pale blue, I read over my work, then closed my computer. Progress? It was the contrary. In five days I’d succeeded in blackening only two pages. What is more, I could hardly connect what I’d written to my ordeal in the hothouse. My words seemed to describe another experience entirely.

  That was last week. This morning when I got up, crossed to the skylight, with its smattering of snow and looked up at the sky, I saw the night was fine and clear and I saw the flakes pawing the glass. All was quiet, even the gulls; perhaps they’d fled to inland roosts. I climbed over the heap of junk to the wardrobe, where I keep the completed pages of my history, printed on sheets of unbound paper. I took them out and glanced over the first chapters. It was a mistake. Not even at the outset, when I’d asked myself some questions, and answered with deceit, was my history credible. I read on, past the questions and into the following chapters. I encountered the half-truths, elisions and embellishments. I threw down the pages in disgust. They scattered over the floor.

  It was starting to get light. I wanted to sleep, but I was unable. I began to march over the strewn pages of my history, experiencing an immediate feeling of triumph, and I even chuckled to myself as my shoes dirtied the already blemished sheets. The sun was bright; no doubt reflecting off the snow, it produced a glare from the skylight. I gathered several handfuls of my history in order to tape them over the glass. Three or four layers and the glare was sufficiently diminished to resemble twilight. I bent down and picked up the remaining sheets, which I had forgotten to number, and stacked them haphazardly together. Scrabbling in the half-dark, I came across the pocket watch. I hadn’t even known I had lost it! Its glass front was cracked, the chain missing; added to the scratch on its underside, a series
of marks obscured yet more of the inscription, which I read in the light on my computer:

  Could not ________ move ____ this ____,

  Not ________ passion ________ by spleen.

  And _____________ power,

  By _______ acts _________

  I held it to my ear. Not a sound. I put the watch into my pocket and finished collecting the sheets. Finally I rose, returned my history to the wardrobe and sat at my desk. I glanced about the attic, saw nothing but the usual clutter of objects. I took a deep breath, rubbed my hands together, focused my mind on my ordeal in the hothouse and, all in a rush, managed to set it down on my computer.

  That was a moment ago. Now I will turn my mind back to my first years in Scotland.

  …

  The dark two-storey house in Gullane was full of neglected rooms, vast sofas and cheap artificial plants. The noise of the sea was ever-present, as was the overbearingly loud ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall. Already, when we arrived from Nigeria, the house was in a state of neglect: rotten wood, threadbare curtains, carpets scuffed to brown matting, and everything covered in a dim greasy flour. The chairs with their green hide felt cold against my bottom, the leather torn, cracked, blackened. Also avian-soiled, since birds found their way into the house. With no one to chase them away, they acquired free reign of the space, flying like darts from room to room, perching on beams and pelmets and often, frighteningly, stunning themselves on the window panes.

  All of this owing to the indolence of my father. I barely recall him in those first years in Gullane. He slept most of the day. Having inherited the house from his parents, as well as a small allowance, he had no need to work. Tall, with uncombed hair, his limbs were thin, and as the years passed they knotted in a horrible contraction of all his muscles – one can never observe the passage of time but only its effects. He quickly became quiet and confused. Like an old mirror his skin developed brown spots. If time marked his outward appearance, however, turning that powerful figure into a discoloured old man, inwardly it had a paradoxical effect. For a brief period the spirit of childhood entered him, his energies revived, and his mood and mobility improved. He began to ride his bicycle around the living room, laughing uncontrollably whenever he knocked over a plant. Once I caught sight of him lying on the carpet, legs tangled in the frame, ringing the bell and shouting, ‘Out of my way,’ over and over again.