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.
When his legs healed he began to explore the house on foot. He discovered the room where we’d stored our possessions on returning from Lagos. Some he threw away, some he gave to the charity shop on Main Street. Most he carried up to the attic. He tipped their contents into a heap and began to sort through them, working hard, even frantically, but without method or conviction. The mouldy cricket gear, the pocket watch he had broken so many times but which continued to tick, the mappa mundi, the bronze pendant from Benin, letters, papers, the endless stubs of cigarettes and piles of ash, the moth-eaten books, the trunk in which Mother’s clothes lay, as well as old photographs, medals, pencils, lamps with torn shades — all these things made him seem detached and apart from life. As the years passed — and I grew into a monstrous solitary teenager, and in my fourteenth year left for boarding school in Edinburgh, about which the less said the better — I barely thought about him. Sometimes I arrived home for the weekend to discover that my father was missing. I would wander all over the house, calling his name and knocking on walls, until he emerged from under a table or bed; only to scurry back up to his perch beneath the eaves. I asked him why he spent so much time in the attic. Apparently he was more comfortable when closer to the clouds.
Enough! I am tired of this chapter. Thinking back to those years in Scotland, trying to relate the circumstances of my father’s madness and death, I can barely recover the memories. With the greatest effort I have managed to set something down. And yet I can’t help feeling that the process of remembering has hidden something, and that something the most important part. What is more, I’m exhausted by the labour, and in between writing I have lain on my mattress, immobile.
In the past, when I have been unable to go on, I would pick up one of the books — histories, pamphlets, novels, treatises, letters, the Encyclopaedia Britannica — from the pile in the attic and seek inspiration in its pages. I would find a sentence I liked and transcribe it on to my computer; even, at times, whole paragraphs. Or else I would copy out a description — a gesture, a landscape, more often an object — perhaps substituting a word here and there for one of my own, in order to smooth over false notes. Yes, that is something I have frequently resorted to, in the course of writing this history. At other times I was happy to exaggerate details of my past, details that were plausible, perhaps, but not indisputably true. I was like the unknown cartographer of the mappa mundi, he who when ignorant of lakes and towns sketched savage beasts and elephants, and in place of contour lines created improbable realms … and what kind of lunatic would use such a map to find her way? In short, I have been happy to tell stories. No longer. Now I would rather stay silent than risk telling a lie. Forward.
…
Boarding school. What is there to say? I was unhappy and confused. I recall the cherry blossoms on the front lawn, and Mrs Ling, my English teacher, an unconscious whistler. I recall being made to run through a field of nettles, a collective punishment. I recall the stationery cupboard in which I hid during PE lessons. I had few friends, was alienated from the other girls, who figured me as a freak. My ears had begun to grow at an extraordinary rate. Already large when I left Nigeria at the age of fourteen, by my fifteenth birthday they had begun to develop thick veins and pendulous lobes, and felt far too heavy for my head. Those organs of hearing which I had once prized, and put all my energies into developing, now felt alien, ineffectual, crude, a pair of outsize fungal-growths sprouting from my head.
It was during this period that my fascination with the mappa mundi began. When I returned for the holidays my father would sometimes call me up to the attic to sit with him, although he did not sit but paced in a state of constant agitation, shedding ash from his cigarettes (I felt that those flakes were shedding from him, and that with each cigarette, he was gradually diminishing). One afternoon, his pacing making me dizzy, I tried to fix my attention on to a point of stillness in the room. The mappa mundi. I came to study it more closely on subsequent visits. I felt an affinity with the monstrous races depicted on the map. I knew I was one of them.
When my schooling finished I took a job ushering in a theatre in Edinburgh. It was summer, the city was hot, loud, dense, vivid, carnal, and I became deeply involved in the life of the theatre. I worked hard. I listened to music. I felt free for the first time since leaving Nigeria. I even fell in love — with Damaris, an actress, a thin, beautiful creature who occupied all my thoughts and just about toppled my soul.
Damaris wanted to know all about my father, his life, my relationship with him, and even his work in Nigeria, which I had figured as a cause of his madness. I told her what I knew: he was a broken man who had lost a great many illusions. What were these? He’d helped to build Lagos into a modern city; he’d brought to a peasant population the gift of city planning; he’d played a small part of the great enterprise of the British Empire. But really, I told her, he had done nothing more than project his own perverse fantasies on to Nigeria. All his life he’d believed in a kind of progress for humankind, and his work in Nigeria had been based on this idea. He believed Africa existed in a backward state of time, a wild and immature childhood which Empire would bring into the present age. It was a complete idea, I told her, blinding him to any other. But this idea of his hadn’t worked out the way he’d hoped, and he — we — were forced to leave. Now he found himself without desires or energy. He’d lost his faith in Progress, I told her. (But I was wrong; my father had lost faith in Progress years before that, with my mother’s death and the birth of a daughter and not a son.) In Lagos, I told her, he had been able to escape into dreams of town planning, so that he did not have to know his malaise. Now he fled in the face of it up to the attic, like birds flocking to the tree tops before a storm.
‘He repulses me,’ I told her.
‘Why?’ she said, horrified.
‘He is a broken man. He brought it on himself with his bad faith in Empire.’
‘You’re a monster, Evie Steppman,’ she said.
But Damaris was not satisfied and set me a task. I was to find out one thing about my father’s life, something I didn’t know, a story. She gave me a tape recorder for my birthday and instructed me to record him.