The Echo Chamber

by Luke Williams

  29 June

  Evie has spent the last two days, Alice-like, swimming in circles in her own tears. What can I do? I kept saying. As though I were at fault for not being able to dispel this, this I want to say blizzard, or fog, or downpour. Why is it we reach for meteorological metaphors to talk about our moods? Our many weathers. If anything, it is like the sandstorm in Nigeria that Evie has told me about, the kind that blinds and chokes. Is it your mother? I ask. Is it the Benin Bronzes? She shakes her head and laughs at me, a laugh which causes her some pain.

  30 June

  I wonder about those Bronzes. I wonder if they carry some curse. I wonder if E has been cursed by them. Objects are not mute. That cape from the museum. My guess is that you couldn’t fail to sense a thousand heartbeats, the thrum of a thousand tiny pairs of wings, if you swished about in it, knowing what it is made of. And perhaps that bestows some power on the wearer. To be able to stand in a cape like that you’d quell compassion, conscience. And that would make you more ruthless, more powerful.

  Today Evie, exhausted with crying, was able to sit up in bed and eat a little soup, after refusing food these past days. She told me she periodically experiences such episodes. Calls such attacks the Faulty. Believes the Faulty was passed on to her by a woman she knew as a child, some blonde who smoked a lot and believed in Voodoo! When I ask her what causes them, she says, The din of myself, and laughs.

  1 July

  I’ve not slept all night. Last night, Evie began to talk, after four days of silence. It came out in a flood. She told me all about her bedroom in Lagos, about all the sounds she could hear from it. She told me stories about her mother and father, stories from her childhood. Stories her father told her when she was a child. And in the womb?!? One nasty little story about a medieval mapmaker who arranged the mass abduction of women from Nubia then basically raped them. She told me that story in raptures, not hearing what she was saying. And the opposite happened with me. I could not speak as she told me those stories, such stories. A story about a kind of spirit-child called Sagoe. Stories about the people she’d known in Lagos. Most of it lies. No doubt as a child she believed this stuff really did happen. But when she tells me now, is she relating what she believed as a child, or what she believes now? If she believes it now, that would make her mad.

  2 July

  Last night was the last show. Evie came along. When we got back to the boarding house, I slipped into her bed, hoping we could fuck since the last time had been just after our row, and that had felt disconnected. She felt far away again. The gratitude, the relief, have gone. I wonder if she feels like we’re just rehearsing now.

  10 July, London

  E is a blind person to be guided. No. She sees too much. She can’t screen out the distractions you need to ignore to make safe/efficient progress down a London street. Head in the air, looking up, around, never ahead. Or swivelling with each beautiful freak who walks past, ignoring her. Evie’s feeling free, giddy with it, no longer a freak of the first rank.

  Now Jack has moved in with Tamara, I’ve moved us into his room. The best room, the attic, where I am now, Evie making supper in the kitchen, down in the basement, full of green light from the garden down there, feels like it runs on for miles, getting wilder. The attic covers the whole house. You come up through a hole in the floor. Like camping, Evie says, laughing, and it’s true, the room is tent-shaped and we’ve draped fabric on the wall behind our mattress which Evie has christened Bedouin. As in, Let’s go to Bedouin now.

  Orange walls. Two huge dusty skylights at either end we’ve covered in chiffon scarves – one seaweed green, one red – underwater or perpetual sunset depending on which end of the room you’re in. It’s hot in here, but we can’t leave the skylights open or pigeons gatecrash. We hear them constantly. So loud and close it feels like we’re eavesdropping. Our first day we left the skylights open to air the place. We came back, via the florist’s with armfuls of lilies I stole from outside the shop, to find a pigeon sitting on Bedouin. A terrible thing to chase it out, flapping and shitting everywhere. Evie dropped a wastepaper bin over it. I slid an LP (Harvest – sorry, Neil) underneath. The bin was openwork raffia. We could see it panic, trying to peck us through the holes as we bundled it out of the skylight.

  There’s a broken piano in a corner of the room. Evie tries to play it sometimes. In another a stack of half-finished canvases. Impossible to guess what they were meant to be. All that’s left of the original ideas are pencil marks and vague brushstrokes. The room encourages laziness. Mostly we lie on Bedouin in the stifling heat, smoking pot and fucking, the room like a hothouse, the lilies shedding mustard dust on the floorboards.

  Feel a bit lost. I wanted that tour. His doing, of course.

  12 July

  E loves the squat. A house full of young people after that big old place on her own with a madman in the attic. Today, we all sat in the kitchen, shelling peas from the garden (eating them sweet and raw from the pod as we did). Evie told the joke about the statues in Hyde Park and everyone laughed. She looked so pleased I could have kissed her.

  15 July

  Last night at dinner we were talking about star signs, and the others found out it’s E’s birthday soon. Michael suggested a house birthday dinner. Evie, I thought, would hate the fuss. I’d planned on serving her a special meal in Bedouin, Birgitte already cast as waitress (her first role in months). But no, Evie puffed up like a pigeon at the idea. I found this too funny. I think we’re her first real friends.

  20 July

  We wake up, and Bedouin feels like a womb. Today we are born, I say. Let’s go out into the world. We spend the whole day out in the garden, sunbathing naked.

  25 July

  The Faulty. E lying in Bedouin, naked and sweating as though knocked out by some tropical disease, eyes closed. No, not closed, screwed shut, as if what little light there is in here pains her. I apply more chiffon scarves to the window, wipe her body with damp flannels.

  I put a record on and she says, Take it off, like she is choking.

  I make her pink lemonade. She waves it away. I ask her, What is it? What is it, Evie, dear? She shakes her head slowly as though it hurts to move. A small tear is squeezed out, like the last drops of juice from the lemons.

  26 July

  Day two of the Faulty and she is lying now with her back to the room, face to the wall, staring at it, though there is nothing to see, no interesting cracks or whorls in the paintwork that might be turned into new planets and escaped to.

  So I take an old postcard I saw in a pile of books downstairs, one showing a snowstorm in an Egyptian city, and I pin it to the wall, just in front of her. I couldn’t bear for her to stare at nothing like that. But she does not blink or focus on it or acknowledge my presence. This devastates me. I cannot stand to be ignored.

  28 July

  E beginning to walk and talk again. She doesn’t say much, but at least she is able to read. After three days without attention, barely existing for her, I am jealous of her books, as I am jealous of her staring into nothing and of her silence and of her sleep and of her dreams and yes, even of her Faulty.

  That is, jealous of any time she is removed from me. Perhaps not jealous. Fearful, maybe. I don’t know what I am without her attention.

  Growing times. In knowing Evie, and learning how Evie is beginning to know me, I begin to know myself. And so I am beginning to realize the extent of my jealousy. What a bitch! My need to be noticed. In between shows, I barely exist. Keep thinking about that tour I’ve missed out on. And now that Evie has been accepted by the others, I feel I exist a little less. She’s no longer the freak who needs me. Not here, at least.

  Michael and Birgitte upset tonight since Finn cooked lamb in the vegetarian casserole dish. Delicious!

  30 July

  I found Evie’s birthday present today. No, like the best presents, it found me.

  This is how. I wake up, and she’s not there. I can smell something cooking so I lie waiting
for my breakfast until I realize she isn’t coming up. Find her in the kitchen with Michael. Eating food I don’t recognize, something Michael has made. Look! Eyes shining, spearing what looks like a slice of fried banana on her fork. Plantain! I haven’t had plantain since I was a girl! Taste it.

  Ashamed to say I pull a face. Say Yuk, as though it’s disgusting. It wasn’t. It wasn’t anything really. Just tasted of fried oil.

  Michael says they’re celebrating. That cat has this habit of never giving you quite enough information, so that you have almost to ask for it, and he makes you feel you’ve begged it off him. So I don’t ask what they’re celebrating and leave them to it. I go looking for Evie’s birthday present. No money. And I don’t want to lift it. Go down Trafalgar Square – a couple of hours’ statue-ing. Walk up Charing Cross Road and into all the second-hand bookshops. I want something big and antique with beautiful engravings. I find an edition of Paul et Virginie! One lovely engraving of them both, the same one from the box of matches. Paul stripped to the waist, trousers rolled up to his knees. Standing on a rock in the middle of a swollen river, trying to cross it, Virginie on his back. But I hadn’t enough money. Too late to earn more, so I walked until I hit Bloomsbury. That dusty part of the city left me feeling thirsty so I walked up Rosebery Avenue to Angel, then all the way along Upper Street, heading, I realized when I got there, for the William Camden. Had half a bitter I lingered over, exchanging humid glances with the boy (all eyes and lips) behind the bar. He came out to collect empties and as he leaned over to wipe my table I told him to follow me out back. A good cock, thick and hard. Nice surprise and all the hotter from someone so slight and pretty. I sat on a bin and sucked him, not off though. Brought him close – brought me close – then stood up, hitched up my dress. He slid my panties down then stayed there, licking. The sweetest tongue. Then we fucked, kissing. I came quick on that cock, quicker than I wanted, he held off for as long as he could but I saw it in his eyes when he just couldn’t any longer, and it was during his sharp last reflexive shudders, almost piercing, that I saw it, in a cardboard box full of junk by the bins. The tape recorder. After we had finished and he’d gone back inside, I picked up the tape recorder and put it in my bag.

  When I got back, Michael and Evie were out. I just had time to check it worked (it does!) then hide it when Evie came in. She told me they’d been to the British Museum, to see more, different, Benin Bronzes. What? The museum in Oxford, she said. Suddenly I remembered. Just before her first attack of the Faulty. I am livid with Michael for having taken her there, and her not long past that last attack.

  Right now E is lying next to me on Bedouin, reading. The Walk by Robert Walser. I have hidden the tape recorder inside the broken piano. She has no idea.

  2 Aug

  Evie’s birthday, mid-morning. We’re in the kitchen. The others wander in and out and kiss her, saying Happy Birthday. I tell her she’ll have to wait until tonight for her present from me. Birgitte takes pity on her, Ach Evie you should hev one gift to open, and gives her a bundle wrapped up in some pages from The Stage. A rose-printed shawl. What is Birgitte thinking of? Evie delighted with it but yes, I will say it again, looking like a monkey in fancy dress when she threw it around her. I would dress Evie in nothing but shifts. Plain madhouse garments of hemp. What is odd in her and freakish becomes gaunt and beautiful if you look hard enough. Like those Depression-era photos of raw-boned lank-haired women tired and tragic in floral prints, but heroic in denim. What do you think, says Evie, looking down at herself in the shawl. I am spared from either insulting her or being forced to lie when Finn announces I have a visitor. And in he walks. I am stunned. What is he doing here? I take a look at his expression, shit-eating, bit pissed off, and I know it means he is resentful of having to give me some good news. And I’m right. I’m in! Felicity twisted her ankle and I’m needed for the Rainbow Theatre gig. Which means I get the US tour too!! So I’m whooping round the kitchen, and Evie asks what’s up, and I tell her: a show with one of the hottest, hippest, coolest cats in rock history. Then a two-month tour round America. And then I look at E, hunched up in her shawl, and the scraps of The Stage on the table where she tore the paper open so excited was she to get this gift. And suddenly I wonder. When was it that anyone last remembered E’s birthday?

  Before I know it, I throw my arms around her. Evie! Evie! We’re going to America! And I realize now I must give her the present, that it is somehow linked to our trip around America. So I drag her upstairs, push her down on Bedouin, take the shawl from her shoulders and throw it over her head. As though she were a parrot. The tape recorder feels satisfyingly bulky, all wrapped in newspaper. When I place it in her hands she tears off the shawl, then the paper. You will record America, I say, hugging her from behind with my arms and legs. She just sat there, turning the thing over in her hands and half-pressing the buttons a little cautiously. Lost sounds, she mumbles. When I ask what she means she says she can record the sounds of America which will soon be lost for ever. Tears in her eyes. You can record the sound of wind through bluegrass, I tell her, kissing the back of her neck. The alien corn.

  25 Aug

  Tonight, three weeks before we are due to leave for America, he told me that none of us will be going after all. It’s too costly a project. D will make do with just the band.

  I have not yet told Evie. She has been working hard on her plans for the archive. Every day she goes to the British Museum reading room, where she fills ledgers full of notes. She has not had an attack of the Faulty since before her birthday. She barely notices the others.

  I have written to D asking if we might accompany him anyway. He liked my style at the gig. Said I’d pay our way by assisting somehow. Told him about Evie’s project. The entourage is planning to travel by bus. He can spare two seats, I’m sure. And there is always money to be made making myself into an object.

  26

  Transcribing Damaris’ Diary: America

  The attic is almost completely dark. The only light comes from my electric heater and the insipid blue seeping from my computer screen, which gives me a feeling of emptiness and peace. I have always been drawn to darkness, which I associate with silence. That is why, whenever I sense a trace of the sun, I paste another page over the skylight, or else cover one of the blades of light that slice through the gaps in the walls or roof, even the floorboards. The attic is covered with printed sheets. How happy to think my history is not idle! Just yesterday I pasted up my transcription of Damaris’ dairy. This happy period – one of the few in my adulthood – stares down on me now. That is as it should be.

  Forward.

  17 Sept 1972

  We packed up Bedouin. Joined this caravan of freaks. Heading down the highway to Cleveland, first show of the tour. D’s trying tricks out on his guitar, the starts of songs, an almost chorus. White heat as the sun streams in. Me and Evie up front, quiet, on our own. E’s got the window seat, leaning on the glass, hypnotized by the long cars and the road-signs sliding past – there goes Nanticoke! – still thinking of New York.

  We got in two days ago. Flew. Our first time! Though we didn’t need that plane, still high on being together after two weeks apart. E went to Edinburgh to get her passport. Also to see her dad. He won’t be here when I get back, she said. The day I left her at King’s Cross I noticed the freckles. Mustard dust. How you’ve come out of yourself, I thought. She kissed me goodbye without caring who saw, then loped off down the platform not glancing back. I am always the one who leaves. I do not like this, being left.

  And oh I enjoy remembering how much I missed her, now she’s sitting curled up on the bus seat beside me. The pleasure of gently testing a new bruise. When she was away, each minute took its time. That dumb ache! Just how I’ve heard boys describe getting kicked in the balls. One night we speak on the phone for the first time. Standing in that phonebox she rushed in at me. Her smell of Rich Tea biscuits. Her hands, too heavy for her wrists. Overblown flowers. Something ridiculous, like chrys
anthemums.

  Flying’s heavy. You feel the plane butting its head against gravity. You fly despite it. To spite it. E’s fingers twisting round mine as the plane lumbers along (me scared, saying stupid shit, I love you, I’ve always loved you, I’ll always love you), then it stampedes … a run-up at the sky and we’re in the air. This great beast hauling itself up, and Evie takes her fingers from mine to stick them in her ears, screaming with laughter, with disbelief, over the noise of the engines. Clouds hang below us. Unmoving. Sculpted. Weighty. Evie puts her hand back in mine as the air hostess passes (bright hair, red lips). She smiles. Welcome to America!

  And then it was my turn to laugh, out of shock, as we drive into Manhattan. Like I’d always known it, the way I would my own mother if I ever met her. A stranger looking strangely familiar, someone you have always known, without knowing. Like seeing a mythical beast for real, but then we get out and we hear it. New York Fucking City.

  Later we leave our room to find food, Evie wearing the beaded headband I bought her from Carnaby Street. The turquoise a nice surprise against her unwashed hair. Evie entranced, following trails of sounds like a dog on the scent, changing tack when she picks up a new one … clanks and hisses and taxi brakes and stand-up rows in the street … I chase her this way and that. New York, she says, sounds like prisoners banging tin cups on the bars of their cells.