The Chimes (8 page)

It gets darker and darker. At last all is black apart from the small circle of my candle. I know the panic as well as I know my breath. Fear that the dark will take me whole and swallow me without a blink. Fear it’ll leave nothing, not even my name. There’s another urge also. It tugs against that need for remembering and says,
Let go, open up to the dark, let the clean order of Chimes take you.

When I came through the door, I was still half winded from the run and they turned for a moment but hardly saw me, their faces all candlelit and calm. The tune they were playing was sad. After a while Abel had it by heart and they played the thing right through so that Lucien’s voice was free to weave around and I listened in spite of myself. I listened for a while and the melody took me to a place I didn’t know, somewhere with pale fluted ceilings and golden light. Now in my quarters, the thought comes that Lucien was singing for my ears especially. That there was some message in the tune for me. I know this to be folly. I take the bag in my hands.

In the depths of the roughcloth, none of the shapes has any meaning. They’re just things I reach for like a strandpicker in thamesmuck. When my hand takes hold of the right one, a picture will flash up true as a bright note, clear as an unmudded stream. I don’t know how it works. Maybe the object comes first; then the memory follows. Or maybe I choose the memory and my hand finds the right object to match. I do one each night only. And I can’t take it with me into the morning.

I search through. I grip thick cloth, a heavy garment. The unravelled edge of a leather buckle. Up into the flickering light it comes. An old burberry. The colour of a dirty parcel. Enormous and the lining frayed and sleeves dipped deep in mud. A voice comes in my head.
The arrival in London
, it says,
what was it like?

A rushing in my ears then, a lightening. The sounds of the river fade and the dark drives upward and I feel myself swing suspended up and out and away from the storehouse and down . . .

I am standing alone on a roadside in the rain.

Everywhere is mud. My whole body is heavy with sleep and with sadness. I look down. On my feet are farmshoes of rope and roughcloth, and they are covered with thick crusts of mud. A roughcloth bag bumps at my leg.

The fields around me are lines of grey along the horizon as I wait. I have been standing forever when a horse and cart at last come to a stop and the horse takes its brief breather to snort and fill the air with steam.

The rain is so heavy the horse’s coat is almost black, the fea­­thers round his feet strung out in whips of mud. The carter sitting in the back there gestures ‘get up’ and I get up into the cart presto. When I’m sat in the back midst the wool bales, the carter passes me an old burberry.

‘Thank you,’ I sign. He shrugs and flicks the reins. He shrugs once and then two times more, not out of choice. The look of his muscles dancing makes me sick to my stomach. Because I know that clutch somehow, in my own body. An echo of hands that are gripping and fighting. Trying to hold on.

The road stretches ahead of us and there is a lesson in it, if I was in the mood to learn. It holds no pressed shape, whether that’s of raindrop or footfall or hoofprint. The road is a river, always the same and always changing and I must go ahead on it—

I come into the flickering light of the storehouse with an abrupt break. Something has pulled me out – a sound, or the new silence after a sound has been cut off. I train my ears like we do in the under. Bare calls from the river, half human, half animal. The sounds of a body turning against a blanket in sleep.

‘Who’s there?’ I whisper to the silence.

There is no reply.

I get up and hold the candle to cast light into the corners of my quarters, but there is nothing except the tail of a wind that lifts the edge of the roughcloth curtain. And a feeling that is empty and hard. A question that sounds in my mind.

Arrival, I think, and am afraid.
There is no before, no after
, says Onestory. Which makes ‘arrival’ blasphony. Yet my mind snags and catches on the word like it’s a splinter.

Matins

Darkness and silence. Somewhere in the deep black above me a blurred light. It reaches its fingers down and I swim up toward it. Then from underneath a tug at my legs. Something clings, tries to pull me back. Panic rushes in like water and I kick sharp. Kick hard until I am free and then push up presto to the surface, hungry for air, for light.

And I am awake.

Lie still and listen. Hardbitten half-echo of coldness. Foursquare solid walls to each side and the march of the wooden roof beams above, black with old oil. Creak of hammock as I sway. The light in the curtained room is grey and blurred, and down below is a river of sleep without the hardness of a yesterday to push off. But something has come up. Wrapped tight round my legs like wrack or weed brought to the surface. A dull brown garment, a coat, streaks of mud all over as if it’s been long buried and dug up. And there’s a sharp pain in my left arm.

In the half-light I pull my arm round to see. There is a dark, watery map of dried blood across the top of the shirtsleeve. I lift the frayed shirt gently and unwrap the cotton wrapped below. Lento, easing it where the layers are stuck. The last piece of cloth has dried to the skin in a rusted badge and I grip the edge and jerk it up and the pain comes. The lips of the cut are puckered and dark. All around the wound is numb, and fresh blood oozes at the ragged edge. I press the dirty cloth back down on it and too quick, too close memory breaks into the rhythm of the day and a picture of
Clare and me in the under . . .

Clare down in the muck, wedging her tyre iron into the river’s belly and levering up an object without shape. Holding it gripped loose in the cage of her fingers. The words hanging between us, silver and dangerous. ‘Someone asking questions,’ she says, ‘like downsounding. Singing.’ And then, sharper than threat or puzzlement, the bite of her anger. The arrival in London, what was it like?

I shake my head to clear it.
Clare knelt in thamesmud, her wet hands raised toward me
. Night is for remembering, I think. ‘Bodymemory trumps objectmemory,’ I say out loud. And bodymemory says,
Join the others.

There is no sound from beyond the curtain. Earlier than usual. I pull them aside noiseless as I can. Out in the storehouse, the door to the balcony is open. Through it, from the east, the light is just beginning. The clouds all covered in red, and the red covering the river. With the tight throb of my arm and the strangeness of the morning, I hunker at the end of the storehouse, back to the wall.

To my side, on an old plank propped on two blocks of concrete, are the things Clare has mudlarked from the river. Each day in the mud of the strand her hands go down and the objects come up, obedient as dogs to the whistle. She mudlarks them; she cleans them; then she lays them out on this shelf. I never give a least thought to these things, but today as I crouch in the cold, I look.

At one end is a red tin with old code and a picture of a strange white-haired man on it, coughing into a handkerchief. Then what must be a child’s toy, a creature with a face neither dog nor cat, knitted in brown wool with arms and legs hanging loose at the joints.

Next an empty cloth bag with a picture of a tooth broidered into it, stitches so cleverly done that they set my own teeth aching. Then a set of silverish rounds like thin wheels smelted from mettle with some forgotten skill. In spokes like knives or rays of the sun. Old code on them. HYUNDAI. VAUXHALL. RENAULT.

A small hunting knife on a leather cord, a near match for the one I keep at my ankle. A handful of buttons – para, horn, mettle.

What are they? And whose? A long, lazy mettle spring that arcs over itself. A small woodframed picture of a woman and a tiny baby with secrets in their eyes and gold circles atop their heads. I step closer. Mother and child. Clare and I standing on the strand.
But you had parents
, says a voice that sounds like mine.
Do you remember them?

I stand and I look at the oddments. They are fished from the river and spread out any which way like a market stall and I wonder what would happen if I were to take them in hand. What if I shifted them out of their still places and into different ones? What if I put them in a line that started in one place and moved to another?

I reach out toward the woodframed portrait as if to touch it and there is a gasping thump deep in my gut where the air should be. I bend double, half retching. Breathe lento and it passes and  after a while I straighten. All that’s left behind is a shameful feeling deep in me. Like something I’ve swallowed down in secret so as to keep close, away from the light. The objects are flat again and without promise. Unlinked and unmeaning. Rubbish that should have stayed dead and buried.

A noise behind me. A shiver at my back.

‘What are you doing, Simon?’

For a second I wonder if Lucien has been listening to my very thoughts he is that still. I step away from the shelves.

‘Nothing.’

‘Something interesting in Clare’s treasure?’ says Lucien.

He must have been out on the balcony for water already. I look again through the gap and to the sky above the river, which is streaked red like burning.

‘I wouldn’t call it treasure,’ I say. The feeling of breathlessness comes again.

‘What would you call it?’

I wipe my hands on the legs of my jeans. Onestory must come soon, I think. And not soon enough. I am hungry for it. I stare hard back at Lucien.

‘What does it matter what I call it? It’s nothing. Junk.’

He gives me a long, blind look; then he moves toward the cookstove and slaps the blades of his hands hard against his thighs as if to clean them. Ding and clink as he takes the empty kettle from its place over the cookstove. He was not on the balcony for water.

‘Are you taking over the gardening from Abel?’ I ask.

‘I beg your pardon?’ His eyes flare. ‘What do you mean?’

I have aimed in the dark, but I have hit something. ‘Mud on your hands,’ I say. ‘Perhaps you were weeding the tomatoes?’

‘No,’ he says. And he passes the kettle to me. His voice is cool and distant as ever, but there is something new in it. A mild and distant pleasure, like I’ve finally learnt a tricky bit of rhythm.

I walk to the balcony door and slide it fully open to the burning light. It is not like burning, after all, I think, but blood. Sometimes a picture comes up in its own time from somewhere down below. And so it is that in front of my eyes where I should see the reddened sky, I see a white cloth with blood on it in streaks. Not the ban­­dage from my arm this morning but a garment, fine linen. I shake my head to clear it and I walk out into the day. A bubble on the surface is all. A bubble and a voice inside that emerges, then is lost, reclaimed by the speaking air.