The Chimes (32 page)

I turn to him. ‘Why? What’s the bloody point in staying here?’

‘That memory is harder than the others to tell you about. To ask you about. Can you understand that?’ His voice is strained.

I look at him. I don’t know where this is leading.

He takes a breath.

‘There’s no single memory of it for me,’ he says. ‘There’s no single memory for the way it makes me feel. I promised that I would help you remember it, but I don’t know if I can. Do you understand?’

His voice has a demonic clarity that makes my chest feel bruised and open. Like I’ve run too far, too fast. Like there’s something inside me that shouldn’t be there, a nameless element. Subito I know that it doesn’t matter what he says, whether he feels what I do. Because I’d do anything for him. The knowledge gives me freedom somehow. And a kind of elation. His voice is as clear as a knife and I let it cut through me with its silver light.

He is still facing straight ahead, staring at the wall above my bunk like it’s something he wants to break in half. I have to know.

‘Do you
want
me to forget it?’

Lucien turns to me and I can’t read his expression either.

‘It’s the thought that you might be able to forget it I can’t stand,’ he says. ‘For me, it’s in everything. Everything I hear. The map of the under, the shape of the river. This journey, the sound of it, it’s you. And that sound is better than any other in my life. Do you understand? I can’t keep it separate. If I could, then maybe I could downsound it for you. But if I did that, I think I might end up hating you. Do you really need schooling in knowing that?’

The current of what he has said rises through my body, up to the top of my head.

‘I don’t need you to remember it,’ I say. I walk over to where he sits. I put my palm against his chest to hear the sound of his heart. Rhythms turn and tumble against my hand, mapping a run entirely his own. Violent and painfully clear.

He looks up at me standing above him and he starts to say something else.

I silence him in the best way that I can think of.

Oxford

Barnabas’s Crosshouse

‘Louse Lock,’ calls Callum from the deck. Then there is a window of light in the black above us and his head appears. ‘This is as far as we go, lads.’

I sit up. How have we come into the city without my hearing? I listen for the noises of boatpeople, tradesongs, prentisses. I listen in vain for the hungry whistles and furtive tunes of early evening. The air is still. The rushing of the lock, the sound of insects. Then at last I hear a faint, dignified tradesong. It runs right through to its end before another begins. Nothing like the clash of life and colour and song I know. I miss London in a sharp burst.

In the dark, the four of us stand on deck for a brief while. Then I reach out to Jemima and hug her. She gives me a quick smirk and signs something in solfege, the only part of which I catch is to do with luck. Lucien shakes hands with Callum and then Jemima, and we jump presto from the boat to the towpath.

The riverwater is deep green. We cross a moss-covered stone bridge that looks like it will collapse into the water at any time. Then we’re on the banks and scrambling up scrub and over rails and into a small concreted park at the arse end of an ordinary enough street. This is strange. I thought all of Oxford would be the Citadel, but we walk now along a street with houses just like anywhere. The same staring redbrick terraces as the one where we found Mary in Reading.

One thing is different – I can already feel the low, thronging call of solid palladium. Down the narrow grey road, the Carillon’s silver arms are reaching toward us. I feel as if I am walking without touching the ground.

The two-floor houses are quiet above us. No one on the streets. But the day is lightening and I see curtains begin to twitch behind para windows. I have my head down when I nearly bump into a smartly dressed man walking out of his gate carrying an embossed leather valise and a clarionet case. He curses politely under his breath, sidesteps me and continues on his way over the broken concrete.

‘We need somewhere to shelter,’ says Lucien. He pauses for a bit. ‘I know a crosshouse where we can wait. Come on.’

Not much further and subito Lucien pulls me into the doorway of a large white building. The wooden door gives and he pushes us inside. There’s the smell of old beer. I can just see out past the green wood of the door.

Lucien is breathing fast.

‘What is it?’ I whisper to him.

‘Ssh,’ he says, and places his hand gently over my mouth. We flatten to the paint.

And then I hear voices. Voices chanting, coming nearer. And footsteps in a clear and clever rhythm. It is impossible to judge how many they are because the pattern is so neat and the footfalls so precise. It never wavers.

Straight ahead are blank redbrick houses. To our left, not far off at all, I see a wooden tower that must be the crosshouse we were heading toward.

The voices approach steadily, and as they come, they become clearer. They are moving in some kind of game. It reminds me for an instant of our own practice in the crosshouse.

One voice begins a tune. A few beats and a second voice enters. The same tune, exact. A strict canon. The two voices intertwine and I marvel at the skill. Then a third voice enters. The same tune a major third below. Then another voice reverses the melody and sings backward against the dense tide of counterpoint. The notes pull and press against each other, but the miracle of it is that the voices are still in harmony, still calmly moving in perfect accord. They are so clear and they echo off the grey streets and float upward in the still morning air.

Then a sixth voice enters. It takes me a while to understand that the sixth voice sings the first tune as if a mirror were held up to it – each note reversed across the stave. I stand still in disbelief. The tune weaves in and around without speeding or slowing. The voices make a magical game of it, throwing the notes like golden balls lightly in the air, juggling them, tossing them from hand to hand. It is one thing to listen to the immaculate canons of Chimes, quite another to hear such music sung in the streets.

Then they come into view. Walking down the street. Three boys and three girls. They walk side by side: boy–girl, boy–girl, boy–girl. They are all tall and wear plain white gowns. Over these a white tabard broidered with gold threads. Their heads incline slightly each to each. Across their backs they carry small transverse flutes in palladium.

They move at a steady pace. I breathe in deep of the stale beery air and hold my breath. The group passes. I hear them turn east and head back toward the Lady’s pull. We wait, hardly breathing, inside the doorway. After a while I see the door of one of the redbrick houses open and a woman comes out, woven shopping baskets held in each hand. Lucien relaxes his hold on my arm and we move away from each other.

‘Who was that?’ I ask.

‘Novices. Probably just about to be ordained. An excursion outside the walls.’

I stand still, dazzled by those golden balls juggled so briefly.

‘Come on,’ Lucien says after a moment. ‘I’ll show you where we wait.’

Lucien checks inside the entrance for memorylost; then he leads into the dark. The space is quiet and clean. It rings with the odd echo of stone floor and high arches. I hear mice scuttle. The beams are half broken, but the roof is sound.

It’s a small, simple crosshouse with aisles at north and south divided by stone arches. The blank walls above the arches are painted rough, like something has been covered up. A few figures in gold robes emerge in a shadowy line and make their still journey toward something long gone. Lucien leans against one of the brick-bottomed columns. There are piles of broken chairs. That will serve well for kindling later, I think. And I slump down. The light is fading. I am tired, but I sit on the floor and I take out the memories one by one.

All of the last slow days and nights in the narrowboat I have worked with them. I began by placing them out in front of me and looking without touch, trying to feel the weight of them in my mind that way. I thought about where they were from, how they might talk to each other. I tried to empty my mind of the other things that it was full of. The pale of Lucien’s bare back in candlelight. His clean, hard forearm cushioning his cheek in sleep. Faces that come up out of the murk of my mind. My father’s. Abel afraid, the scar showing white along his jaw. Groups of people moving like sheep across a green.

Tried to clear past all of that. Empty enough to go down. And I have gone down into the memories again and again. I think about what Lucien said, that it is a gift, that hunger to find how one thing links to the next thing. To wish to find an answer to the questions ‘How did this happen?’ and ‘Why?’

But this is not enough. I want something more than that. I want to show an all of us. And I want the story to hold and keep our separate strangeness and the broken pieces of all the human things that do not fit.

So far the story tells about the world before Allbreaking. It tries to conjure the density and slipperiness of written words. It talks of a world in which ideas are in formation and can be released and yet return at will each night. It shows the Order burning books and destroying words long before Allbreaking. It shows how Allbreaking started, and the bonfires of burning pages. It tells the bodies and faces of the people killed in the blasting chords, brought down in the buildings, drowned as the bridges collapse. It tells that the weapon was a Carillon built by the Order.

It shows the broken memories and the burnt memories and the memories scattered, and it shows those without memory, wandering lost and helpless, worse than blind. It shows members of the Order binding their arms and eyes with great gentleness before taking them to be killed.

It tells the legend of the ravens and the growth of the guild and its clever network, and of dead birds stuffed in buried mouths. It tells about the last keeper, Mary, in her memory palace of hoarded precious junk and nonsense.

It has all of the memories in it, the ones I exchanged for my own. It has babies born and people dying and missed. It has mess and dischord and pain, and it has falling in love. It has my father slumped beside my mother’s bed, holding tight to what he is already forgetting. It has Clare stockstill with terror in the crosshouse by the embankment, carrying nothing of her past except cuts and bruises and the blade of a broken plate.

This is the story I am working on. But it isn’t yet complete as I don’t yet have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see the different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes each time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they’re put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn’t one. I see that if I am lucky and I do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meaning. Because there is not yet any end.

When I surface, Lucien is watching me. I walk over lento and take a seat, and he pulls me rough toward him. I tip back my head so it meets the hard bone of his shoulder. I feel torn between the clear, strong pull of his body and the weight of the memories that sit in their temporary arrangement on the crosshouse floor.

‘You are working hard,’ he says.

I nod. It’s true. It is pulling something out of me. Going down, and surfacing. ‘What happens tomorrow?’ I ask.