The Chimes (31 page)

I see as if watching from a far-off window a field in London, Lincoln’s Inn or Coram’s, as brownrobed members of the Order move on it. It is night and they walk among the memorylost and they stoop to each and gag them. From the distance their movements are gentle. Bind them and blind them with cloth, tie their hands behind their backs, corral them and herd them like animals from the square – going where? – the blank figures walking.

Everywhere I see flame, as memories are burnt in their thousands. And everywhere, through the ones that remain, the Carillon tolls and it takes on a tone I had never before heard. I understand as if for the first time. Chimes are tolling out death. Human death and the death of stories.

I emerge finally from the tide. Tired like after a long run in the under. But weak too, as if from hunger or missing blood or air.

I catch Lucien up on the memories I have been given, and he places them carefully in the stickwrap bag from Mary. They look so jumbled and meaningless in there. A small mettle bell without a clapper. A handful of lead and some para squares lettered with code. A burnt book. A bundle of twigs bound in red string. A picture of a child painted on cloth. Flotsam and jetsam.

‘Last one,’ says Mary. ‘Are you ready, my dear? You look all in.’

I take a deep breath and pull my shoulders down. The story I will need to tell is all there in that bag, but I feel uncertain whether I can untangle it, what I can make out of it.

‘The last one is here.’ She points to her closed left hand, fingers shut in tight keeping. ‘But I need my last one in exchange.’

Without waiting, she picks up my memory bag.

From it, she brings forth a candle. It is my memory of the night in the narrowboat. Our bunks next to each other. His hand, that strange moment when the distance between us was crossed. The hardest journey of all of them. The feel of his hair against my hands. His face in the tawny light. The taste of his mouth.

‘No!’ I say, forte. ‘I need that one. I have to keep it.’ I am so tired that I feel my knees bending.

‘What is it?’ asks Lucien.

‘A love token?’ says Mary, her beaklike mouth pursed. ‘I understand, my dear, but we have an agreement.’

‘The candle,’ I tell Lucien, because there is little point being embarrassed now, if I will forget it anyway. ‘From the narrowboat.’

Lucien takes my hand. His is dry and cool. He squeezes my fingers hard and he brings his head close to mine. His breath against my ear.

‘I won’t let you forget.’

But I am filled with dread. What if he is not able to stop it? I look up at Mary.

There is no choice. Even if there were a choice, there is barely enough of me left to make it.

‘Take it,’ I say. ‘You’ve got it all now.’

She inclines her head, places my last memory on the shelf and moves toward me. She extends her hand and waits until mine is open before pressing the object into it and closing my fingers one by one.

‘The last one,’ she says, and smiles at me.

I breathe in and wait for the memory to take me, but nothing happens. I clench my hand tighter, close my eyes. But there is no movement.

I open my eyes.

‘This isn’t a memory,’ I say. ‘I kept my side of the bargain. Where’s yours?’

She is looking at me again with the wry, amused look on her face.

‘It’s more important than even a memory, lovely. It’s a little piece of acquired wisdom from one memory keeper to another.’

I open my fingers. On my palm is a clot of thread. Wool, cotton, silk, different colours all knotted together tight and hopeless.

‘What the hell is this?’

‘It’s a question,’ she says. ‘The question is, even if you have all of these memories, this grand and noble history of ours, how will it help? What is to make it anything but another version of events, another Onestory?’

I stare at the knot of threads on my hand. I feel raw and empty and blank. Some part of me refuses to think, refuses to engage in her puzzle.

She comes in close. ‘A clue, my dear. Where is the Order’s weakness? What is it they are afraid of?’

The tangled heap of threads is an irritation, a stupidity. It gives me a headache just thinking of untangling them, and then what would I do with it?

And like that, like a candle being lit, or a chord being struck, I understand the answer to her puzzle. I stare at her.

Mary nods to encourage me.

‘Yes?’

‘Mess,’ I say. Both Lucien and Mary have their eyes turned to me. They seem to sway in the lanternlight, but it’s just me.

‘They can’t stand mess,’ I say again. ‘Human mess. They can’t abide the things that don’t fit into a perfect harmony, a tidy chord. They wanted to perfect us. Their music doesn’t have a place for mistakes and errors, for people who love the ones they’re not meant to love, for babies with noses that run and those who are deaf and alone. In the end it can’t fit in things like grief and loss and stickiness and dirt.’

I think of the members of the Order I have seen with their shaved heads and their spare, nearly skeletal, frames. Their paleness not Lucien’s living pale, but of cloisters and practice rooms without sun.

‘And bodies. They are afraid of bodies. Because bodies betray us. They grow and change and they love and they leak and they get tired and sick and old and they shake and die.

‘They are afraid of these things,’ I say, ‘because they are afraid of dischord.’

The Map

We are sitting in the narrowboat, having returned through the dark streets of Reading. The sky was getting pink as we walked back the way we came, under the concrete overpass and the craned necks of the tall, broken lamps.

I paced behind Lucien, out of habit, as if we were in the under. He carried the stickwrap bag with the memories Mary gave us. I heard it crackle as he ran.

I sit on the bed now and it’s as if some part of me has been cut off. I keep going to touch my memory bag, to check it, then stopping myself as I remember it’s no longer there. The repetition starts to get irritating. I realise that I am afraid. It is a dull fear, boring and familiar, and it makes everything go flat around me. Like things are stuck to cardboard and I could hit out and knock them over. Only Lucien’s presence is real and solid. But I don’t want to look at him because then he might see I’m flimsy too. Paper and cardboard. There’s nothing inside me and I don’t want him to know this.

Lucien moves and the stickwrap bag rustles; the new memories jostle. They are full of sickness and pain, and I shouldn’t touch them anyway.

‘Simon, are you all right?’ Lucien is leaning back propped on his elbows on the bed.

I don’t want to speak because I don’t trust my voice. I nod. Then I just say what I’m thinking.

‘I have no idea what to do,’ I say. My voice is flat like the room is flat.

‘Just what you said,’ he says. ‘You will put them together so that they make a line that someone can move along. Like you did with your own memories.’

For a moment I am amazed that he thinks it has been, and could be, so simple. ‘I didn’t do that alone,’ I say. ‘I needed you in order to do it.’

Lucien studies me. ‘It’s strange that you see everyone so much clearer than you see yourself,’ he says soft. ‘You don’t know your own gift, Simon.’

I don’t look up at him as I don’t know what is on my face.

‘Most people I’ve met, inside the Order and out, never ask themselves what their own thoughts mean. Never seek to put them together like that. It’s always just one and one and one, and no one ever gets beyond that, in my experience. But you, you puzzle on one thing and you seek to link it to the next thing. You ask where it came from, and why it came. And you seek to hold both things in your hand and move on to the next, to three.’

I am not sure I understand what he is saying.

‘Do you trust me?’

I nod.

‘Then trust that you can do this,’ he says.

‘If I make a story that puts the memories together, what then? How do we share it?’

‘You tend the plot. I sing,’ he says. ‘Isn’t that how the forecast goes? I will put the story to music, and we will play it using the Carillon.’

The full risk of this, said out so plain, shakes me. It seems small to raise the other thing.

‘I’m not sure I can keep them.’

‘You mean your own memories?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not going to forget now, Simon,’ he says. ‘Think of all the work you’ve done. We’ve done. Your memory is much stronger now. You’re not really scared of that, are you?’

But something, whether my breathing or my silence, must let him know I don’t believe him. He sits back up.

‘OK, here’s what we will do. You’re not going to forget anything. Not your own memories, the ones that make you who you are. Not these new memories, which are our task and our test at the moment. There are things that go deeper than Chimes, correct? Bodymemory for one. We’re going to use that.’

And then he sings our comeallye and orients it to the line of the river and the Limehouse Caisson.

In my mind I am standing in the amphitheatre. I hear the ferns, the outlines of the tunnelmouths.

Lucien sings a tune and I follow it through the under. I see the tunnels, the turns he takes, the shifts, the corners. Then he stops.

‘Where did I get to?’ he asks.

‘The entrance to Mill Wall Tunnel.’

‘Good. Now sing it back to me.’

I do. As I sing, I see myself running.

‘Good. Now, you are going to hide your memories in mind’s ear.’

I look at him to see if he is joking, but his face is serious, intent.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, for each of your memories, you’ll find a turn or a landmark on this run, and then you’ll put it down. If you want them back, you simply need to retrace your steps on this run.’

And so we start. Back at the amphitheatre. Each turn I stop and I search my memory, and I consult Lucien to check them, and I choose one and I see myself putting it down in the under.

The burberry I place down in the muddy water of the sluice gate by the first cadence of the first tunnel. The riverstone I place next, where the next tunnel meets the river inlet. I bury the woodblock at the start of the comms tunnel that breaks off from the river inlet and leads south.

At each turn, each shift in the melody that tells of a split in the tunnel or a change in direction, I place a memory. A roughcloth strip, a bar of chocolate, a dog collar, a paralighter. Until the tune is the tunnels and the tunnels are littered with the story that is my life so far.

‘Now we both have the tune,’ says Lucien.

I sit there, wondering if it will work, wondering how solid a foothold my memories can make in the spiderweb of the tunnels. But Lucien’s voice is confident and it makes me feel somewhat better.

‘You can run whatever direction you need through it. Do it presto, lento, da capo al fine, whatever. The memories should stay in place. I can downsound it with you, anyway, if you want.’

‘Thank you,’ I tell him, and get up. I don’t know what to say. The space between us has become charged with a silence that seems to be growing.

‘There’s one missing,’ I say.

‘Which?’ says Lucien, but he doesn’t look at me. He lies back again, staring at the ceiling and rubbing the spot between his eyes as if he has a headache.

‘The last one I made. The night before we arrived in Reading.’

Lucien doesn’t reply. The silence is thick and it’s like sightreading a difficult tune in front of a cold audience.

‘What happened in the memory?’ asks Lucien.

My mouth is dry. What to say to that? Either he’s forgotten it or it meant nothing to him. Whatever the case, the message is clear. He is not going to help me.

‘Don’t worry,’ I say, with a hot flush of blood in my face. I stand up. ‘I can remember it by myself.’ I pull my jacket back on.

‘Simon,’ says Lucien. I can’t read his voice at all. But he’s trying to return to the way things were. Before. And I don’t want to return.

I need air. ‘I’m going on deck,’ I say.

‘Don’t,’ says Lucien, sitting up.