The Echo Chamber

by Luke Williams

Ha!

  He thinks what the reviews are saying is that something is missing. He wants to freak ’em all out, he says. So this is what he’s done: in the mornings, we’re rehearsing the whole show again, with me as the boy and Jack as the girl. I have to forget my part and learn Jack’s and vice versa. Everyone else has to play to me where they played to Jack and vice versa. Unlearn in order to create he says, with a foxy smile, aimed straight at me. The cheese weasel. We both know what this is about.

  16 June

  Exhausted. Sleep walked through rehearsals. He says I’m miming being a mime. Ha. Ha.

  17 June

  Today in rehearsals, when me and Jack were tripping up on bits of our old roles that remain like debris in our memories, he said again, Unlearn to create! Unlearn to create! No, I screamed. DESTROY! I screamed louder, DESTROY TO CREATE. Then I kicked a jug of water across the stage which smashed hysterically, and I walked out.

  18 June

  Last night was our last night and the opening of the reversed version. We all felt something. It felt right. And knowing this, we felt exhausted. After a few drinks, we said our goodbyes until Oxford next week and slipped off separately into the night. A hot night in Edinburgh, damp heat off bare skin and the smell of sweat mixing in with reefer and patchouli. Got a bit stirred up by all that and found myself wandering down a cobbled side-street when someone grips my elbow.

  It’s her. That bird. Evie.

  You’re better as the boy, she said. When she smiled it threw me a bit. A real freak when she smiles. Nothing wrong with the smile itself except it doesn’t belong to her face. It’s like one of those children’s flip-books where the pages are cut into top, middle and bottom sections which you match randomly. The top half of her face does not go with the bottom half.

  I’ve been to every one of your shows, she said. This did not surprise me.

  We ducked into a bar, to a tiny table in the corner where the walls were all pasted over with playbills and covering those a slight sheen of condensation from the heat of the summer bodies pressed in together, and we ordered some red wine, and I said, How’s your Dad? Mad, she says, and we both laugh, surprised. That’s where you get it from then, I say, and she doesn’t smile at this but says, What do you mean? And I chuck her under the chin. Last time I saw you you were more of a statue than I was myself! An experiment, she mumbles. I don’t know if the mumbling is her being embarrassed about admitting this or because I just touched her face. Both, I realize. What kind of experiment? An experiment in (mumbles). In what? I cup my ear, miming, Pardon? I still can’t hear. I lean closer. She can see down my shirt. No bra as usual. She jumps back like she’s been burned. An experiment in what? SILENCE she says, louder than she meant. Asked her to explain. The essence of mime is silence. She says this quietly. The essence of mime is imitation, I say. And I tell her where the word comes from. It’s how we learn. How we learn to do anything. By copying. And then I notice that we are both in the same pose, elbows up on the table, chin in hands, and when she clocks that I’ve clocked this I look straight at her. She drops her gaze. You are a vessel of silence. She is mumbling again. I am a mirror, I say. What you see is what you see. So I tell her what he said in our first ever rehearsal, in his little speech about mime (a contradiction in terms): ‘The fire which I see flames in me. I can know that fire only when I identify with it, and play at being fire. I give my fire to the fire.’

  I reach out my fingers as though to stroke her face. Again, she jumps back, fearing to be burned. I reach for my cigarettes instead. After the wine came whisky. She asked me about the statue thing. Why I did it. So I told her. I like being looked at. I’d imagine you get looked at anyway. It’s very zen, I said, just emptying yourself out like that.

  I told her a joke. This couple, two statues in Hyde Park, are granted a wish by a fairy who feels sorry for them. They wish to be human for the day. They spend it touring London, seeing the sights, going to a fancy restaurant and so on. At midnight the fairy comes back to meet them in Hyde Park to reverse the spell, as agreed, but the statues are not there. Then the fairy hears rustling in the bushes and goes to investigate. The fairy finds one of the statues clutching a pigeon, while the other one says, Quick, hold him still while I shit on his head.

  Then Evie told me the story of the Happy Prince. Who wasn’t really, in the end. The whole time she tells the story, she’s not looking at me. She’s smoothing over the same patch of wax which has dripped from the candle on to the table. She smooths away at it and tells me the story of a young prince who has all that he desires, and lives a decadent, pampered life until he dies. Once he is dead, he is turned into a statue. A statue as beautiful as he was in real life, Evie says, with skin made of pure gold, and eyes of sapphires. His statue is set up high over the city, where he can see all the misery that was hidden from him during his life of luxury. The poor seamstress with the feverish child who cries for oranges she cannot afford. The young writer, freezing in his garret, unable to complete his work of genius for he is too cold. The prince sees all this, Evie says, now scratching at the wax with her little finger. And it kills him. As a statue, he is powerless. He can’t move. It’s only now, as I’m writing, that I realize what a sweet, sad story this is. One day, Evie says, a swallow comes to shelter under the statue of the prince, on his way to join his friends in Egypt for the winter. The prince asks the swallow to delay his journey by a day, and to deliver the jewels in his scabbard to the poor people he sees. The swallow obliges and delays his journey to help the prince. The next day, the prince makes a similar request, asking the swallow to delay his departure by another day to deliver valuable bits of himself – gold leaf from his skin, sapphires from his eyes – to the poor. And now that the prince has given away the jewels in his eyes, he is blind. So the swallow stays with him, and tells him stories of the misery he sees, stripping the rest of the gold leaf from the prince at his direction and distributing it to all these unfortunates. In the end the swallow decides to abandon his journey to Egypt and stay with the prince, because he loves him. The swallow dies from the cold. The prince’s lead heart cracks. And the prince – now stripped of his jewels and his gold leaf – is considered shabby and unsightly by the town councillors so he is taken down from his pedestal and scrapped.

  When Evie reaches the end of her story she is crying. And then she says, Do you know why the swallow fell behind his friends on their way to Egypt, why he delayed his journey in the first place? No, I said. You must read the story then, Evie said. Oscar Wilde.

  We must have been pretty drunk by the time we left the bar cos she had one of my smokes and she doesn’t. She snatched it out of the pack as we were leaving the bar, and when I went to light it for her she grabbed my wrist to look at the matchbox. It was a souvenir one from the play. She asked to keep it.

  19 June

  A strange and sad and funny day. Woke this morning to a note left by Evie. She’d obviously stayed the night. Don’t remember her being there. Would you meet me today at 3 p.m. by the cemetery gates?

  Which fucking cemetery? Too hungover to think of how I might start asking so I leave it to chance and walk around the b’n’b in circles – bigger and bigger circles – till I hit one. It’s after 3 p.m. She’s not there. That’s how I know it’s the wrong one. I continue circling. I hit another one. It’s 4 p.m.-ish. She’s not there either. I carry on. A third – Edinburgh’s full of cemeteries! – a fourth, and she’s there, waiting. I asked if she wanted to show me a grave. Said she was taking me to visit Mr Rafferty. Her grandfather. He was quite mad, and we would be visiting him at the institution where he lived.

  To someone else it might have looked like a country house. Walked into the building and felt small with something sad and familiar. That smell. The convent came back in a rush. Evie warned me that Mr Rafferty might mistake me for someone else and if so, would I mind playing along? Of course, I make my living doing just that!

  He’s in his seventies with a face like a soft felt hat, one that has b
een sat on, with its hollows and bulges. Hair a deep blue black and obviously dyed, giving him a sort of surprised look. Gave me the most delighted smile, Evie’s smile. But on his face, it fit.

  Called me Julia and gave me a big hug, crying into my hair. Glowered at Evie as though she were intruding. Called her Rex. Who were these people he had taken us for? He swept us into the room. Quite bare. Just a bed, desk and chair, and wardrobe. The chair was set askew, the desk cluttered. I saw that he’d made some strange little object out of what looked like tiddlywinks sellotaped together. He grabbed it, then presented it to me with a sort of bow. Thank you, I said. He’d been working on it for months, apparently. I made appreciative noises. Evie peered over at it, and, addressing me as Julia, asked if I had ever seen such a beautiful timepiece! No, I murmured, choking back the urge to laugh. Mr Rafferty said it was his wedding gift to me. He looked into my eyes and squeezed my hands. His gaze made me think of the near-human look you see in pictures of chimpanzees sometimes.

  After, me and Evie went to the pub. She told me she planned to travel to Easdale, a tiny island off the West Coast of Scotland, for a few days, to stay in a friend’s cottage. Asked me to join her.

  So I said, Why not?

  It’s only now, writing this, that I’m wondering why I said yes. Sometimes I don’t know what I think until I write about it in my diary. Like that reed. Oh! Now I remember. Something from our night together. Early in the morning, asking Evie, pestering Evie, to tell me about the swallow from the story, why he had delayed his journey. Eventually she mumbles, Fell in love. I pester some more then she says, Reed. The swallow fell in love with a reed. This silent, graceful thing just blown about in the wind. It never even noticed him. And now something that Evie said in the bar that night comes back to me. A vessel of silence. More emptiness, I think. There’s got to be a link between that and keeping this diary. There’s got to be a link between that and saying yes to invitations made by near- strangers.

  20 June

  We drove here in a single night. I don’t know why she wanted to drive at night, but she did, and that was the plan, and I was just bumming a ride so what could I say? The others were already on their way to Oxford when she pulled up in her dad’s Morris Minor. Dusk had just fallen, the sky was that fairytale blue. A few stars starting to poke through. I slung my bag in the back and myself in the front. I was bad driving company, just dozing off in the front seat and twitching awake at intervals to fiddle about with the radio. It made her wince. She is sensitive to sound. Vibrates a bit like a violin string depending on what’s playing. Rock got her all taut like she was overstrung. I left on some jazz until the lights of a combine harvester flashing across us woke me up. And I thought harvesting was daylight work, such a city girl am I! I found something beautiful and classical, and she seemed to slacken, and her eyes went dreamy and a little less, well, pebbly looking. We listened together to this sad noble music which I thought was Mozart, but the only Mozart I knew was jolly stuff. This got quieter and quieter, or rather, fewer and fewer instruments played, until there was only this lonely violin. Towards the end, Evie lifted a hand from the wheel and then brought it down, as if wielding a conductor’s baton, in time with the final note. But there was no final note. Or rather, the note she was anticipating was not played. She had got it wrong. We both laughed. But of course I didn’t really miss that last note, she said. What do you mean? Well, everyone thinks that music begins and ends with the first and last notes. And it doesn’t? No. Music begins and ends with silence, she said.

  The radio announcer was explaining how Haydn had come to write the symphony. Evie was about to speak. I told her to shush cos I wanted to listen and she gives me this funny look. You like stories, don’t you? she said. Who doesn’t?

  Woke up to Oban at sunrise. Drove up to Ellanbeich where Evie turned off the engine and slumped over the wheel like we’d crashed. Exhaustion. Slept for a couple of hours then stood on the dock by our bags, waiting for the first ferry, drinking bitter black coffee from styrofoam cups. Just the smell of it when you’re wrung out with tiredness! And the smell mixing in with old fish and wet rope and the slapping waves … We’re at the cottage now. My room is right at the top, under the eaves. Ha! So why come here? To get away from him, from the others, to be taken somewhere I’ve never been before? We’ll sleep a little and then explore.

  21 June

  Not writing so much as dragging my pen across the page. Out here the salt air comes at you from everywhere, this being an island and a tiny one at that. It leaches your energy and turns your blood to porridge. Eyelids at halfmast. All I want to do is sleep. But I have to write about today. After the tour, it’s no surprise I’m exhausted. But this air! By the time we came back this afternoon we were sleepwalking. Maybe the air made us mad. Maybe we were dreaming. I would pinch myself but there are scratch marks from the bushes. And the light! So late here and so light. It won’t leave us alone. Maddening and magical and not like daylight but like night with the darkness leached out of it.

  We started off fresh enough. A clear morning, like a kid’s crayon drawing, green lawn, blue sky, white cottage, red roof, yellow gorse. We ran outside, down the springy grass to the path. Two dogs came, a sheepdog and a black labrador. Dogs sometimes look like they feel an excess of joy, so much it confuses them and they almost seem in pain with it. The sheepdog and the lab bounded on ahead, looking back every now and then to make sure we were following, as though they’d arranged to take us on a tour. We let them. They took us through tangles of wildflowers, over hillocks and hummocks and down to the rocks, where the air became damper and saltier as we approached the sea, turning, eventually, to seaspray. Then we could get no closer as the waves got high and snatched at the rocks and whatever might be on them and we shouted and laughed and scrabbled back to a safe distance as fast as we could. She is clumsy, I’ve noticed, and looks like a puppet when she runs. Not a puppet, no, one of those Victorian children’s toys, paper figures with jointed limbs that swivel stiffly. The dogs wandered off, and with them went Evie’s energy. Before, with the dogs, she had run with me, not saying much, just laughing, almost hysterically, harder and harder, as if her laugh was something funny which made her laugh even more. But now she was quiet. With the dogs gone she seemed to feel more alone with me. We came inland a little, into the open, where there was nothing else to focus on except each other. Whenever I made some comment, she only mumbled. When I looked at her, she turned her eyes away, seemed to struggle not to turn her head away. She’s the shyest person I’ve ever met. There was something about her nervousness which provoked me. We came to an abandoned quarry which had been flooded. We stood on the edge and looked down. Sunbeams reaching right into the water. Up went my dress, down went my knickers, off came my shoes. Come on! I said to Evie. She couldn’t look at me. She shuffled around, trying to unhook her bra under her t-shirt and slip off her knickers under her skirt. I leaped out over the edge. Water so cold, it stung. She asked me what the water was like. Refreshing! (teeth chattering). In she jumped and up she came, gasping and laughing. We swam. The ruins of a roman bath. Water slate blue, smooth, calm, shadowy. The walls sheer rock flecked with gold. When I got tired of swimming I started on Evie. She’s easy to tease. I ducked down underwater and she started thrashing around, trying to cover herself up. She needn’t have bothered, all I saw was a greenish white glow. I grabbed for her feet, she kicked out, I came up, pretended she’d hit me in the face, she swam up to me all concerned then I splashed her. It was fun. When we got tired of that we thought about going back. And then she realized. How are we supposed to get out? I pointed to some rocks and laughed when I saw her realize we would have to climb them naked and walk all the way round to fetch our clothes.

  The sun was bright but we were cold. The best thing to do was run out quick and warm yourself like a lizard on one of the rocks higher up which got the sun. That’s what I did. When I looked down to find Evie she looked so funny I had to ask her what the fuck she was doing. Wh
at do you mean? She was cross. You look like some creature crawling out of the primordial soup. It was true. She was crawling over the rocks on her belly but with arse and legs tucked under. Trying to show as little of herself as possible. So I stood high up on my rock and stretched my beautiful arms out to the sun and lifted my breasts to the sun and turned up my beautiful face to the sun and said, Here, this is what a woman looks like, and she looked up at me from the rocks below. That is what you look like. And what do you look like? I said. She slowly stood up from her horizontal crouch. Long, white feet, strong white legs, flat hips, a fluffy, tea-coloured bush, concave belly, long waist, small low breasts with large pink nipples, wide shoulders. I can’t say she has a body I want, but I’ve had people with bodies I wanted less. And I cannot say I wanted her because she was nothing I wanted, not sassy or cute or strong or sly or ironic or teasing or searching or dangerous or pure or delightful or feral or any of the other things that have made me look past a body I don’t want to the force of the person within. She is clumsy, awkward, bizarre, self-absorbed. But I like the way she looks at me. And there is always one thing. One thing to want about someone. Her sides, her long waist and flanks, like a boy’s, I liked, I decided. And so I reached out my hand, and she climbed up the rocks, upright this time, and took it.

  We must have looked like a painting to him, the young guy out walking his dog who saw us in the distance, me and Evie holding hands. Another woman would have squealed instead of the sound Evie actually made, a kind of surprised bark like a seal. Before I knew it she had shoved me into a bush and fallen in on top of me.

  I was held in suspension. It hurt to move.

  When the knowledge of the branches became old I became aware of Evie’s weight on my back, her breasts pressing into me, and a softness, her bush, on my arse. And close to this, suddenly, barking – the dog. Honey! Away home! A smile in the guy’s voice. The dog yelped with disappointment as her master dragged her off, whistling. We stayed there a while. Evie’s breath in my ear, first a sound, then a warmth. Then, very slowly, she started to move on me. The branches needling but she didn’t care. Slowly, I felt her getting wet, slippery, faster, her breath hot in my ear, her lips not quite touching me, and me suddenly wanting to feel a kiss and what I got then was a lick, she was licking my ear and she was grinding, pressing me into the needles, and then that sealbark again and she was still.