The Chimes (23 page)

She leans forward. ‘What you’ll learn, Simon, is that people do not want to know the truth. You might think you are doing them a great favour to bring it to them. But even if you put it right on their doorstep, nobody will thank you for it. They’ll throw it away. Throw it in your face. Most people prefer to forget.’ She moves behind the counter. She mutters and it’s a stuck note. It reminds me of Harry somehow. ‘This has nothing to do with me at any rate. I left Ravensguild. After your mother died. After your father took his life. Too many deaths.’

I stand up. ‘What did you say about my father?’ I take the few steps across the stall. I grab her brittle shoulders in my hands and I shake. ‘What the hell did you say?’ I want to make her feel pain. I want to see something other than the flat, closed look on her face. Because the last picture I have of my father is him slumped at my mother’s side where she lay under the white coverlet. His hand gripping hers tight enough to stop the shaking. And she is lying again. I shake her and my face is hot and the air is hot and it is me who needs to feel the pain. I am crying for it to come now, sharp and sure. Because I don’t have any other footing. I don’t remember his death. The only thing I hold in my body is the memory of his fist, and the cold of his anger.

Then after a while I see Netty and the look on her face. I drop her shoulders and step back. ‘Who is left?’ I say. ‘You owe it to the people whose memories you took,’ I say. ‘Those memories were their lives. Who is left?’

‘Keep your voice down,’ says Netty.

I stare at her. She is scared. She looks back through the tarp again.

‘Who is left?’ I say, forte.

‘Please. All of the memory keepers we used have died or been taken,’ she says. ‘I waited, but there has been no word of new keepers to replace them.’

I step closer again. She is holding something back. I see the glint of it in her eyes, and I want to see the fear in there again.

‘Who is left?’ My voice is so loud that I hear footfalls beyond the tarp come to a halt.

‘Just one,’ she says. ‘She was my keeper, but she is mad. It has been years since I sent her anything.’

‘Where is she?’ I ask.

‘In a place called Reading. Between here and the Citadel.’

‘Sing it,’ I order.

‘Mary has gone mad. She will not help you.’

But before I leave her, Netty sings me the way to find the last memory keeper.

Upriver

Lily Bolero

We are on the towpath. Matins came and went, and Lucien and I walked through the early morning city, keeping to the empty backstreets. Just the occasional people up that early – bakers, coffee sellers, a few traders. Lucien had his dark paraspecs on and we moved quickly, curling past Euston, past Morning Town and through the old market to the first lock.

The stone of the path is cracked, and the bank leans over us on the side, covered in moss and small ferns. There’s mist coming flat across the water. I walk in front, but it’s Lucien setting the pace, a presto stride to eat up the distance and go unremarked by any watchers. At Primrose Hill we hear the lone notes of a muted French horn coming across the water and I see a bundled-up figure, short enough for a kid, standing at the bottom of one of the gardens whose lawns fold right down to the canal. The hornplayer strolls back and forth, and the horn gets slowly flatter in the cold. The muffled arpeggios repeat over and over: major, minor, first inversion, second inversion. The morning light reflects off the chill pale gold of the instrument whenever the player turns. Nothing else moves, though, and we’re past, listening to the notes stepping strange and relentless up and down.

More houses with lawns, each with a boatshed and jetty at the bottom, a dinghy, some mossy terracotta flowerpots, the habitual pair of para boots. Windchimes hang from one tree. A rope swing is knotted to another. In me, there’s an ache of something that is missing. I do not think I have been down here before. These are homes – homes of the wealthy, the successful traders and the lauded instrument makers, those whose children go to the top schools, and maybe even audition for the Order. In the houses, both parents are alive, alive and getting their children out of bed for morning practice at first light, shoring away memory even before Chimes tolls for Onestory. The windows are tall and golden, and they look down on us as we walk past through the misty dark.

The waterway gets wider and the road above us higher and we can’t be seen. Lucien moves us into a jog. We go past old cages with their signs and pictures of animals. One of the cages is arched high and has fine netting, and the branches of the trees inside are covered with chalky white splashes.

I can feel a headache coming. I need to stop, to wait and to think. I need to remember. The thought of leaving London is full of dread – dark water that rushes in to break connection. I am not ready for a journey. I whistle to get Lucien’s attention. He wheels round, sharp.

‘What?’ His voice is harsh, but it is worry, not anger. I wait. ‘What?’ he asks again. He is not happy being in unfamiliar territory in the daylight. For a short while I feel sorry for him.

‘I need to stop and wait for a time,’ I say. And for some reason, this is awkward to say. ‘I need to think. To remember.’

‘I know a good place. Come with me.’

We walk further up the towpath and cross a road, and we’re back on the canal. Old abandoned buildings grow high above us. Pipes break into the concrete walls, leaving rust on the concrete where the stormwater flows down.

After a while the canal widens again, and there is a broad tunnel in front of a low estate. We leave the path and walk upward past a fenced place with mettle towers inside. Signs hang on the mettle fencing, their code eroded. A picture survives, of red lightning striking a child’s climbing figure. Lucien leads us between mettle rails that let us pass one at a time, and then round the side of the building with its empty windows. There’s a thick hedge at the end of the overgrown lawn. Lucien gestures to me and I come up close.

‘What is it?’

‘Through here,’ he says. ‘Can you see anything?’

‘I can’t see a thing. There’s a hedge.’

‘No, beyond that. We need to go through.’

I get up close and use my elbows to make a small gap in the piney branches. Through it is a small grassy space that was once a kept garden. The bushes and trees are wild and overgrown with ivy and twining flowers. There’s a small, open-roofed circle hut at one end. No one around.

‘It’s clear,’ I say. ‘How do we get through?’

‘How do you think?’ he says. ‘Push.’

I do as I am told and suffer scratches to my face and hands, and then reach through to Lucien to grab my hands and follow me blind through the space I’ve made.

The garden is so overgrown that the trees have made a canopy. You can’t see out and you can’t see in. It is quiet and still and almost warm in the morning sun. A bee buzzes by the flowers. Lucien drops onto the grass and covers his eyes with his arms. ‘We wait,’ he says. I nod, invisible.

In the circle hut, there is a wood bench, soapy and splintered. I sit on the floorboards and lean back against it. My heart is beating shallow. The thoughts are shallow too. I am losing my place, and have in my body a need for darkness and depth.

I search back over the past days. I follow the path through the days and notches until I reach the dead girl; then I go forward again and what I land up next to is Clare on the strand. I press my fingers into the cut on my arm and I see myself standing next to her and I hear my own voice.
But you had parents
,
I say.
Do you remember them?
I am angry at the arrogance of it. We were all born on the river and Clare was right. My broken things are no better than hers. I sit there in the sun and think about this for a while. How without mercy and without blame we have all of us been. And how careless to have misplaced so much.

I open my memory bag and search blind through the tangle. I search until between my fingers I feel a pouch of roughcloth with something inside that is hard and brittle like kilned clay. I take it out and look at the undyed roughcloth. Then I reach in and remove what’s inside the bag. A piece of old white pottery the size of my palm. A piece of a plate, I guess. Its surface cool and smooth, with one rough edge smoothed and browned by dirt and another where the break is clean and white and very sharp.

The rounded edge fits easy into the fleshy part of my palm, and when I hold it, the sharp edge faces away from me like a blade. And something shifts sides in my head and I am going down . . .

A wide green space. The sun above making a buzzing sound like a trapped fly. Like something burning in a pan. Where? Trees high all around, their arms all twisted and bent, lean over me as if listening. And flowers overgrown in beds.

The buzzing sound gets louder. The sun high and frayed above.

And the buzzing isn’t from the sun at all. It’s somehow inside me. Inside the memory. It says,
Don’t stop. Keep moving.
But I am tired. I have to sit down.

Stretch my legs in front of me with their jeans full of holes. Wrap my arms tight round my ribs to keep the sting sharp and thereby keep awake, keep alive.

I’m tensed before I even know why. Then the voices are clear coming into the yard from around the crosshouse. I hear them before I see them. Singing. Laughter.

Men. Things move lento so I can look down and see my legs like they’re not even mine. Jeans with holes that are ragged like the sun is in the sky. I use my hands to make my legs move; then I get into the trees by crawling.

They are there in the yard.

Two of them. Not the same men as before. I watch them walk. And I see they’re not men at all. They are prentisses. But still I don’t move from where I sit. Prentisses are a danger just as men are.

One wiry, one heavyset. The first one moving his hands in the air and singing too. He is looking around, speaking to the other. Both are coming closer to where I’m sitting.

There’s pain in my arms, everywhere. The buzzing gets louder.

The two prentisses tread toward the trees where I am sitting. In the dirt in front of me is half an old plate. I grab it. Break it again so there’s sharpness.

The first prentiss is walking to me through a window in the buzzing. Dark confounded eyes, staring. Neckbroke rabbit in his hands, looking at me like I’m something he’s found caught in a snare. And sorry for it. But you can’t trust anything in this world, not even kindness.

I hiss at them.

I hold out the only weapon I can find.