One evening after supper, when Father and I were listening to the news, there came a clattering from the garden path. Suddenly Riley’s pointer was up beside us. Unable to decide who to greet first, she ran around the table, leaping and twisting like a salmon, until her tail caught the lead of the radio and sent it crashing to the floor. Father roared and struck out at her. But he missed and fell off his chair. Unable to understand his rage, Riley’s pointer turned then loped back into the garden, leaving us in silence, looking at the battered radio.
The radio never worked properly again. Father took it apart, then screwed it back together, but it was no use. It would emit a broken whisper and we heard only fragments of the news. On fiddling with the tuning knob, it would stammer into life. No matter what the announcer spoke about – the Suez crisis, or the slaughter of the Mau Mau, or the latest dance craze in America – he spoke in the same deep, authoritative, almost indifferent voice, making it impossible to distinguish between the already scrambled news items. This did not bother me at all. What did I care for the news? I was more interested in the moments when the radio fell to static silence. Each time I felt the mood of the evening change. The temperature seemed to drop several degrees, and I would tremble with excitement. Mistaking my emotion for fear, Father would joke, saying, ‘The radio must be tired tonight. Poor thing, it has fallen asleep.’ I could not forget that noise which was also silence. I felt drawn to it. It spoke to me of another world.
One night I sneaked out on to the veranda to fetch the radio and bring it to my room. I sat it on my pillow and switched it on. There it was, the silence! I put my ear to the speaker – and withdrew, for it seemed to emit a kind of cold breath coming from a distant world. I held myself still, listening to that pool of shifting quiet, feeling it float about me, inside me. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever experienced.
Soon I could think of nothing else. A delicious pleasure had invaded me, isolated me, without my having any clear notion as to its source. It made everyday concerns seem trivial, and filled me with a kind of precious essence – acting in the same way as, years later, on meeting Damaris, I understood love to act. Where could it have come from, this powerful joy? It was connected to the radio silence, I knew, but went far beyond it. What did it mean? How could I grasp it?
Once after supper I followed Ade down to the bottom of the garden. I found him looking at a boxing magazine. That evening he didn’t tell me to go away, so I sat down by the lakeshore, and we looked at photographs of the boxers. Ade told me about Hogan Bassey from Calabar, who was famous throughout Africa; he had become featherweight champion of the British Empire. At school they talked of nothing else, and there were bouts in the playground. The best boxer, Olu (he whose incipient moustache had showed under the spotlights during The Snow Queen), had bloodied another’s nose.
‘Well, but that’s nothing,’ Ade said. ‘One day I will be as good as Hogan Bassey hisself. Remember that no person can escape his right hook. If he gets hit, O, he hits back twice as hard!’ Ade stood up and started to swing his fists; jabbing, swiping, punching from all angles. When, finally, he stopped, he was breathing heavily, and there was a keen focus to his normally agitated eyes. Slowly and deliberately, he said, ‘Hogan Bassey has beaten every white fighter put against him.’ I recall the moment clearly, how he flashed his eyes then looked away, how he emphasized that word – white. I was stung. It was not the first time we had noted the colour difference. And yet until recently that difference had been a source of mutual interest. I thought: I hardly know Ade any more. He has a separate school-life, and separate friends, boxing one another, thinking of Hogan Bassey, and these friends knowing little or nothing of me, but hostile to me all the same.
‘I have something to tell you,’ I said.
‘OK, but remember I’m going to be a champion boxer like Hogan Bassey.’
‘OK,’ I said. And I began to talk all about the instances of silence in my life; I wanted to communicate something important. I told him about the season in 1946 when the skies became quiet, and I was conceived; about my first weeks in the womb, when I had no ears to speak of, and the silence was in me; about Mother’s funeral, her silence, which I could not grasp. I continued to speak, telling him about the period when I had lain in my cot, wide-eyed and unmoving. Without pause, halting Ade when he asked questions, I spoke of the cool quiet when he used to open the window and close the shutters of my room; of the silence dropping from the sky in ‘First Snow in Port Suez’; about my admiration when he had survived his beating without uttering a cry.
Ade watched me with agitated eyes. Was he sceptical about my words? I could not be sure. The more he stayed quiet the more I wanted to talk. And it was with a sense of relief, almost, of wild hope or foolishness, that I told Ade next about my powers of listening, about how I could hear the tiniest sounds, unbelievable things, things no one else could hear. I asked him to go to the end of the garden and whisper something. When he came back I repeated exactly what I thought he had said. Inexplicably, I got it wrong. We tried again, and I got it wrong again. I asked Ade what he had whispered but he refused to say; he only repeated that I had got it wrong, and sat on the bank. He tilted his head to one side. There was scorn in his eyes, and I was stung once again. He brought a mouse’s tail from his trouser pocket. It was then, as he began to twist the tail between his fingers, and the night darkened, and I felt his eyes watching me with a peculiar kind of focus, that I knew for certain that something between us had changed. That change, the challenge I saw in that moment, was affirmed and strengthened over the following weeks.
But I am getting ahead of myself. At the time, although I registered Ade’s scorn, I was not prepared to believe it, and I did not allow it to stop me talking; now I had started, I did not want to stop. I said that the time had come for me to tell him something very important, something which no one else knew about and which would put our lives in danger.
‘I have managed to make contact with another world.’
I did not want our friendship to end. If I made myself extraordinary, perhaps Ade would pay me the attention I knew I deserved. He was unimpressed.
‘It is an almost completely silent world,’ I continued.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean somewhere not far from here is a place where people live in almost complete silence. My connection is very thin,’ I said, looking at him directly, ‘and it is only sometimes I can hear it.’ I paused. Ade frowned and stared straight at me. I had the feeling, false I know now, that he believed me. Nevertheless, he was intrigued; his eyes became more active. I was unsure what I was going to say next. I said, ‘Luckily for you, since you don’t have my powers of listening, I have discovered another way to make contact with this world.’ I was improvising. I ran to the house and fetched the radio. I switched it on, and Ade’s eyes became wide – in fear or with mocking I do not know. I began to tell Ade all about the silent world; about how you could walk for days without your eyes settling on a single thing; how it was a bright empty land of raven skies alternating with flaming white light. I told him how in this world there were few objects, animals, and even fewer people; how on the few occasions when you did see something, you didn’t really notice it, or rather you saw it but you didn’t ask yourself what it was, because in this world without sound you just knew. I told him there were no names for things, because a footstep was just a footstep, a branch a branch, a stone a stone, and so on for everything, including people, because each thing was only what it was, and there were no echoes or reflections and nothing cast a shadow, I said.
That summer I spent an hour or two every day searching for the silent world. I would stand in an alley behind the onion line, stretch my arms out and start to spin, faster than I had ever done before, turning and turning until my head felt light. Sometimes the sun went black behind my eyes, and I would fall on the ground. Once or twice after school Ade found me; sometimes he even played along, saying, ‘Have you found it yet?’
‘Not yet,’ I would say, lying there, waiting for the city’s sounds to quieten, then compose themselves. I did not always manage to snare that pool of quiet (it was tiny, hardly noticeable, a slight disturbance of the air, and at first seemed to come from no place in particular), but whenever I did, I set off in pursuit. Sometimes, at weekends, when he had nothing better to do, Ade came along. Running south through the market against the flow of the crowd, between the high-backed stalls, coming out between the cloth sellers, entering the back streets of town, stopping for breath, chatting, drinking, setting off again, following no logical path, but moving instinctively, and always we found ourselves drawn south. Like Riley’s pointer chasing a scent I was pulled along by something powerful which I could not see, a taut, quivering and irresistible force.
There were moments as we searched when we forgot our divide. Ade could be kind; for instance, when I fell on the ground he took my head in the crook of his arm. But there was also in all we did – not just in our search, but at the market also, and on the bus with Iffe – a touch of dishonesty. We did not acknowledge it; it was simply an omission, a silence we could not name. Many things had come between us – our ages and genders for instance – all of which contributed to this feeling of dishonesty. But what hurt me most, because it had come so suddenly, or I had become suddenly aware of it, was the race divide. Calls for independence were then ever-present in Lagos, and there was talk of ‘sending the white man packing’. Until now I had been unaffected by this talk, for I had been living powerfully in the half-real region of sounds, and at the market I was treated no differently from the other children. Prior to that there had been Mrs Honeyman; she had made an absolute distinction between the European and African, had spoken of a gulf – of feeling, of intelligence, of dignity, of truth – separating black and white. For a while I had come under the influence of her ideas and had more than half-believed her.
After Ade’s comment about Hogan Bassey, however, the divide was quite suddenly raised again. What is more, it became directly relevant to me. Ade seemed now to have his own way of talking about people and events, slightly alien or antagonistic to my own, and I thought his way seemed more in touch with the world than mine. How shut-away I had been all this time! It hurt me to think of it. What I had thought of as absolute – my right to consider Nigeria as home – others saw almost as an aberration. From Ade’s small comments I sensed how he and his friends saw me – as well as Iffe and countless others I did not know. I sensed also how he worked to put me down. Even as we ran in search of the silent world I noticed his mocking eyes, which said to me: Perhaps I’ll come along, but don’t expect me to believe in your childish game.
Now it was late afternoon, and we were running past the slaughter district. I realized we had not brought any water. Turning back would be a waste of time, especially as it wasn’t hot. In fact, I could feel waves of an unseasonally cool breeze. That afternoon the sky lay open, but big rust-coloured clouds came in from the lagoon, blocking the light – the harmattan season. It felt as if the sky was coming down to meet us.
I took Ade by the arm, saying, ‘We’re getting near. I can feel it.’ I said this and yet I wondered how I would know when we arrived. We came to a square built up on three sides. On previous days, in other light, I had been here, when Ben or Father had sent me to buy provisions from Hardy’s Euro-African Emporium. Now a row of houses had disappeared, and in their place modern buildings had sprung up, still half-built. At the far side a group of feral dogs was squabbling – the city was strangely full of them at the time. Elsewhere the space was wide and empty. The weather was cold, the air fuzzy, stale, bitter-tasting.
First the dust, then the cold drove us towards one of the new buildings. High above us rose a mass of girders, glass and steel sheeting, which merged into a tangle of vertical and diagonal lines. At the seventh or eighth floor the structure ended, and I saw a row of floating lights. Only then did I realize how dark it had become. Ade pointed to the lights, saying, ‘The workmen.’ And I noticed that the lights were attached to dark figures moving slowly over scaffolding. ‘Let’s go inside,’ Ade said. We pulled back a wooden fence, entered, passed the foundations and started to climb. I took Ade’s hand. He didn’t pull away. We clambered over planks, then up staircases connecting partly finished floors. Now we reached the fourth floor. Here we were protected from the force of the wind, but not its noise, which boomed in my ears. How should I describe my feelings? Fear, thrill, uncertainty, tenderness?
After the market, after spinning around and around, after our running through the streets, and the empty square, after my thirst, and the dogs, and the hard climb to the fourth floor – after all this, a mood of exhilaration had come over me. Something inside me was straining towards Ade. I felt myself pulled physically, and walked towards him. He went to sit at the edge of the floor; his legs overhung the square. I sat down beside him, and he didn’t move away. It was possible to hear, above or between the roar of the wind, a chiming sound, as of struck hollow pipes. I pointed into the darkness.
‘What’s over there?’
‘The square,’ Ade said
‘And after that?’
‘The sea.’
‘And after that?’
‘England.’
‘And after that?’
‘The silent world,’ he said, and let out a nasty laugh.
I heard the clanging of the pipes, and the dogs, who had started barking, a restless, dangerous sound. Ade said, ‘Over there is where Olu lives.’ I got up. I no longer felt empty or light or lost, but enraged. I pressed my lips together and felt a knot of anger in my chest. I started to walk away. It was Ade’s turn to follow.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said. Now the dogs were laughing like hyenas. It was at that point that I should have left to go in search of the silent world. Instead, I got up and climbed some stairs. When I reached the final step I sat down and closed my eyes. The next thing I knew Ade was shaking me, saying, ‘Quick.’ I followed him up to the fifth floor. He had spotted the labourers coming down the stairs; it must have been the end of their working day. Soon we saw their lights, tiny flames encased in what looked like globes of glass, but that was all, we could see no other trace of the men. The lights winked at us from inside their tiny glass globes, and the globes moved also, but moved differently, swaying and jerking as if suspended on invisible strings. We watched until the last light vanished from the square.
I turned to Ade. ‘I want to ask you something.’
‘What?’
‘What did you whisper that night after supper when I sent you to the other end of the garden?’
‘Eh?’
‘You know, when I was telling you about the silence.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘You must remember,’ I said. ‘That evening when we were looking at The Ring magazine and you told me about Hogan Bassey and boxing at your school and Olu and all the rest.’
‘Eh,’ Ade said. ‘When you told me you could hear everything, but you couldn’t prove it.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘what did you whisper?’
‘What does it matter?’ Ade asked.
‘Just tell me,’ I said.
‘Well. The first time I whispered, Sammy McCarthy. The second time, Joe Lucy.’
‘Who are they?’ I asked.
‘They are the boxers Hogan Bassey defeated in Liverpool.’
I wanted to say, ‘I bet Sagoe would crush you in a boxing match.’ But I didn’t. The dogs kept quiet too. Ade rose and found a stick, which he began to beat against the scaffolding.
What else do I recall from that evening? The cold, the air standing up against us like something solid, thoughts and feelings passing through me like a desert wind, my eyes running, my dry mouth. Huddling next to Ade under a sack, I thought about the night of his beating, how afterwards I had let myself into his bedroom and taken him in my arms, how I had moved my hand under his pyjama trousers then passed my fingers over the welts. And when I thought of this, I drew myself closer with one hand, and with the other I searched for the cord of his shorts. But the way he withdrew from my touch, not hurriedly but with a stony sort of dip of his head, I knew that this – my – privilege was gone. Once or twice in the night we heard a truck slipping along in the dark, and now and then its lights came sliding across our blind vista. I mention this only because light was the exception, it being pitch-dark and the harmattan.
It was somewhere towards morning when I opened my eyes. The sun was big and orange, its surface stained with black marks that appeared to spread like broken clouds of ink. Was it this that prompted us to try to leave the building? Was it as we climbed down the stairs that Ade fell over the edge? It was so sudden. I didn’t even hear his cry. And I did not alter my course but carried on descending towards the square. As I walked via the foundations and peeled back the wooden fence, my thoughts darkened. What had happened to Ade? He had fallen. But where? How far? Later, I discovered that Ade had survived. In that moment, however, as I made my way out of the building, I neither knew nor cared. Hadn’t he mocked me almost continually these past weeks? Hadn’t he tried to ruin my self-belief? Yes, I thought, he had put himself on the right side of truth and wished me gone. I felt light. It was astonishing, the way I felt light, so suddenly. Out in the open I started to walk in the direction of the wind. Progress was difficult. I hardly thought of Ade, but when I did I thought how good it was that this had happened. I had come near to losing my confidence, and my faith in my powers of listening, also in the silent world. I started to run. It was all the same to me if Ade lay broken and dead, lost in the storm. My mind was black. My thoughts circled like ravens around a kill. I thought no more about going back. As I ran I told myself I would embrace darkness and silence, because that was what was in my nature, which was blacker than Ade’s, and wicked, I thought; and love and friendship was not in my line. So I ran through the harmattan towards the silent world.
When the dust lifted next I had a glimpse of the water. Then the air thickened, and it was as if a red curtain had suddenly come down. I stopped to listen. The silent world was getting close. It was no longer a whisper but a swift wind or snow sliding, and my heart opened to its pull and storm-silence. The further I walked, the deeper it became, until, scrambling over rocks, I felt a force drawing in all the sounds, swallowing them towards its centre. I walked on, scared, more than half-willing, not caring, I thought, if I lived or died. I was tired. The thought of Ade was starting to weigh on my stomach. I pushed these thoughts away. Soon I found myself by the water’s edge. The sky had lightened to a raw pink. I sensed a crack in the earth. I walked up to it and now I was standing before a chasm extending like a tram track to my left and right as far as I could see. I stood shaking, doubting. Perhaps, I thought, Ade was lying in the foundations of the unfinished building, with broken bones. I half-turned, ready to retrace my steps to return to my friend. But the wind picked up, and I felt that charged whisper, and I left doubt behind.
I closed my eyes and stepped off the edge.