The Chimes Read online

  He’s pale, even paler than usual, his back stiff and flexing and his face in a sweat and grimace when I reach him. He’s in a hunch gone sideways, and his knees are half drawn up under, and I feel sick myself in my stomach and don’t know what to do. First thing is wrap the jacket over his back, as he’s wearing no shirt and his skin is wet and cold as if he’s just come up from the river. I wipe vomit off his pale cheek. I try to put his arms into the jacket sleeves, but he is too stiff and he says through teeth rigidly together, ‘Leave it.’

  So I just drape the jacket and lean over him and lie my arms over his arms so that there’s some warmth between us. And wait. My heart beats flatly onto his back and I have a shifting feeling of dread, as I know there are many things I should be doing, but I can’t think of any of them. It’s him who decides and says what will happen with people, not me.

  I wait in the night, holding him. Above us, the stars swing past lento. A long time goes and only stops when Lucien tips his head to one side and shakes it sharp, like he’s clearing water out of his ears. It’s a rough movement, but it takes control of muscles and bones and how they move together. I lean out enough to see his face. Afraid of looking. I have been here before, and if I have to go back, it won’t be in the same way. I see in my mind a person getting ready to enter dark water, drawing up all of the breath, taking everything from the world outside that he can fit within himself, sealing it tight against the plunge.

  Lucien is very still now, but his eyes are moving smoothly. He’s looking up and down and to the sides in a way that seems like he’s testing them. He blinks: lento, lento, then presto. Then he shakes himself and shakes my arm off his shoulders. He rolls and rises enough on his knees to look at me, and his eyes hold their gaze without fixing. He smiles.

  My own face is locked with cold and not moving, and I shuffle myself backwards, my palms on the rough concrete, looking at him, and sit there.

  Now that I’ve had fear and dread and sickness, what comes is anger. ‘What the hell’s going on?’ I say to him, as if it is his fault. ‘You’re sick.’

  But I stop as I do not want to speak like this with my voice raised. I lift my shoulders in a useless sort of shrug that signals, ‘I’ll be silent.’ I’m tired. The feeling of dread still rising up under my ribs, under my throat.

  ‘You have to help me. I can’t walk right.’ He gestures to his legs. His forehead is pale and wet; the words cost him some thin sweat. ‘I can’t go back to the storehouse. There’s space in there.’ He points to the building outside of which I’d waited.

  He’s taller than me, but he’s light, and even with his legs dragging, we’re across the race quickly. In the shadow of the building, I let him slump down again, and I push the boards back as he instructs and get him through.

  Inside the empty storehouse, the lower floor is much smaller than ours. Divided in two, and the stairway is intact, though there are gaps in the ceiling. It’s near black, but there’s just enough light to see. Lucien points to the corner without saying anything. In it is a long, low wooden box. I lift the lid and feel there’s a mess of paper inside. By touch I learn also of three new candles and a box of lights.

  Once I’ve lit one, I see that the chest further contains a folded wool blanket, a clean shirt, a small cloth bag and a half-loaf of black bread wrapped in clear stickwrap. I take another of the candles, the bread, the shirt and the blanket, and bring this back to the wall where Lucien is still slumped inside the draped jacket. His eyes are closed, and the sweat stands on his face, but his muscles seem to have stopped their dance. I light the other candle from the first.

  This time when I bend his arms to get them inside the clean shirt and then into the jacket sleeves, he lets me, and just smiles with his familiar look of mild amusement. His eyes flutter up a bit, and when he speaks, it is his usual voice, clear and mocking.

  ‘You know, I often wonder what’s going on in your mind. Even tonight, I can’t find the answer to it.’

  He reaches out and grabs his outflung right leg at the calf and pulls it in. I watch carefully. He has some muscle control in his legs. I rip a hunk off the crumbly loaf and hand it to him, but he places it aside on the floor.

  ‘Simon’s someone who is always watching and waiting. I know that. But why does he see what the others don’t? Why is he always in the right place to see these things?’

  There is in his eyes, if I’m not wrong, a kind of apology. I’m not meant to answer any of these questions. They are like his careful movements, a kind of testing, finding the place where he and I fit again. So I just wait, which as he’s noted, I’m good at doing. I eat some of the bread.

  ‘I went to your quarters . . .’ I say, finally. I can tell he is listening though his eyes are closed and he doesn’t move, ‘because you didn’t come as you usually do.’ This makes him open his eyes.

  ‘Where did we get to last night?’ he asks.

  I stand up. It is not the time for him to ask questions.

  ‘What did you take from the Wandle runner? What were they doing on our run?’

  Lucien looks up. ‘I didn’t know you saw that.’

  ‘Yes. You took something from round his neck. What was it?’

  Lucien looks away. ‘They must have known Abel was Five Rover. Though none of us sing the comeallye when we’re running.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ But in my head I hear a fragment of the threat left by the member at Bow and I know already what he is going to say.

  ‘Wandle weren’t pushing into our territory. They weren’t after the Pale. A single piece of Lady wasn’t worth the risk. They were looking for me.’

  Lucien puts his hands into his pocket and draws out a piece of paper.

  In the candlelight, it is hard to see clear, but on the thick surface is a hasty sketch done in ink with a steady hand and a good eye. A young man with curled hair that peels back from a high forehead. A long, thin nose. It’s a good likeness.

  Next to the drawing in a different hand is written the symbol for two hundred tokens, more money than we could take in a month of trades.

  ‘I need to know, Lucien. You need to tell me now. Why does the Order want you?’

  When Lucien shakes his head, I forge on. ‘Where did you go? When I came to your quarters, I thought you had left us.’ The other question is unspoken. I can’t ask it of him. I couldn’t ask it of my parents. What is the sickness? How long . . . ?

  I had meant to stay calm. Calm like he could pass out of existence as they did and I would forget him. But my voice does not obey. It shakes. I close my eyes and curse it.

  I am halfway across the floor, just out of the candles’ intersecting circles of light, when he rises to his feet.

  ‘Simon,’ he says, into the darkness where I’m standing, watching. He can’t see me, because for him the light has slipped a covering over the room’s depths. ‘Simon?’

  ‘Yes?’ I say.

  ‘I’m not sick. Not in the way you think. I’m not dying of it.’

  While he is blind in the light, I let myself turn back to him. He is pulling himself together, bit by bit. After seeing him by the inlet, I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but he is becoming Lucien again. All the parts of him have come back, so that when he stands, it’s alive like an alert chord. His neck is rising and lengthening in the usual way when he speaks, and his milky eyes are wry and straight-staring.

  The relief is strange. It makes me feel giddy, light-headed.

  This time he says it, not just with his eyes. ‘I’m sorry. You weren’t meant to see.’

  His legs are straight under him and there is nothing to tell you he has been rigored. I can see the pale fret on his face as he turns toward the shadows I stand in. A door in my chest opens with an unfamiliar happiness. In my arms, there is an echo of his nearness, what it felt like to hold him.

  His voice is quiet when it comes again. ‘I’ll answer your questions, but you must let me ask first. Sit down.’

  I shake my head. Not to the que
stions, but because I don’t want to move from where I’m standing in the shadow. I need some distance between us. I want to keep out of his eyes for now, while my face finds some way to arrange itself again. The happiness is new to me, and so is the fear.

  ‘Simon, the arrival in London, what was it like?’ His voice in the shadows.

  My response is immediate. I don’t even need to think now.

  ‘The arrival in London was mud. It was nether year. I came in along the east A-road. A carter who was going to market picked me up about five miles from Romford. The rain was so heavy it drove holes in the mud.’

  He pushes me backward along the line of the story. ‘Why did you come to London?’

  ‘I came to London because my parents died. And I needed to find . . .’ I look for the answer for a while, but it’s a blur still. ‘I needed to find something. Or someone. I don’t know. My parents had a farm. We sold bulbs, flower bulbs – tulip and daffydill and iris.’

  ‘What did your parents die of?’

  I look at Lucien. I see his stiff legs and I see the shape of my mother’s legs rising under the white cover. The farmer’s neck twitches and jerks on the road to London. The boy in the crosshouse yard – what was his name again? Steppan. I see Steppan’s father’s legs and arms pull into spasm . . .

  ‘My mother died of a sickness that looked the same as yours,’ I say. ‘So when you think it’s the right time, I’d be grateful if you tell me what it is. If you’re just going to ask about my memories, though, you should ask what I remembered tonight.’

  Lucien looks up. ‘Was it about your mother?’

  ‘Yes. We were standing in the forcinghouse, splitting bulbs. She bound the memory with that.’ And I tell him then what my mother told me.

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Good,’ as I speak. When I tell him about her skill, his face opens and his concentration is clear to me even in the dark. I describe Johannes giving her the memory. I tell him about the lute string in its silver coil and he nods and nods again. I tell him that she asked me to touch it. I don’t tell him what she said about a family gift.

  ‘Simon,’ he says. His voice is close. Warm, like he is standing still next to me. ‘This is well remembered. This is important – do you know that? It is right at the middle of things.’

  Then I tell him what my father did.

  ‘He hit you?’ asks Lucien. ‘Because he didn’t want you touching others’ memories?’

  ‘Yes. He said I might be killed for it.’ I look at him. ‘Who would do that?’

  Lucien looks at me, as if waiting. Then he leans back against the wall.

  ‘You can hold a picture of what happened for a day or two before it fades. And you make objects that let you bring the memory back, the ones you think are important. You touch them and go down. Do it one by one, object by object. What you cannot do so easy is to thread them together so that one connects to the other. Without help, anyway.’ He shakes his head. ‘Do you think that is usual?’ he asks. ‘No, forget that question. Do you think that is right?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Do you know what steals your memories?’

  I look at him. Because it is a strange question, one that has no answer and many answers. The river of sleep takes memories down into the murk and silt. Night and the darkness take them. Waking takes them, or our own sadness. Or maybe it’s that forgetting is like a spore or blight inside each memory itself, and the two cannot ever be separated.

  ‘Chimes steals memories,’ says Lucien. ‘You know that.’

  I stand there and I look at him for a long while. I hear the words in my head and I imagine the music cutting through the sky, as it does. Pushing us down. Its vast perfection stripping all the small and broken pieces that give us meaning and returning them in order and harmony. And I don’t feel anything. What should I feel? Anger, pity, grief? Is that what they’ve taken from me, then? I want to ask him. Or is it just something missing inside myself?

  ‘Chimes steals memories,’ I say.

  ‘Yes. Or you could put it another way and say it’s the Order who does it, which is also correct. Simon, who knew your mother’s skill?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Were there others like her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘There must have been, because your father knew that what she was doing was dangerous. Think.’

  I think. ‘That is all he said. That people had been tortured, killed for it. But something my mother said . . . I think she took memories to London. I don’t know the reason why.’

  Lucien nods. ‘And you travelled to London too, and we don’t know the reason for that either. But there was one or you would have stayed on the farm, where you would have kept what bodymemory you had from the bulb farming. I think the two reasons are one and the same. Your mother’s skill is bigger than her, and it’s bigger than us, and if we follow it, that is where the song’s meaning is.’

  He straightens further against the storehouse wall. ‘It’s near Matins. We should be getting back.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my questions,’ I say. ‘About how you recognised the song. And about your sickness.’ When I use the word, some of the panic comes back.

  ‘Do you trust me, Simon?’

  The same question. The same answer. I nod.

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll show you what I know, and we will try to fit the two together. Then you can decide how you wish to act hereafter. Tomorrow,’ he says. ‘Can you wait a bit longer?’

  Hereafter, I think. A backwards-looking word for time that is still to come. In itself a blasphony. Before Chimes, a voice says in my head, there would have been a time for such a word. A tripleted rhythm driving upward in my mind. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  ‘Can you walk?’ I ask. Which is a way of saying, ‘I can wait. I will be there in time ahead. I will be there for you hereafter.’

  ‘I think so.’ He rises into a crouch and his legs are still stiff, but they flex. He grips my arm so tight it hurts. Then he shakes his legs and I see the stiffness drop away. It is Lucien again, and as we walk back through the night to the storehouse, it is Lucien’s usual walk. I feel his presence next to me in the night without looking.

  Inside the storehouse, all is quiet. The others are sleeping. Lucien disappears into his quarters with no word or sign.

  I stand in the middle, by the cookstove, which is still warm. I want to go out to the balcony to look at the river, but I don’t risk the boards’ creak.

  My hammock is still strung. I long to lie down in it and into darkness. But in my mind Lucien stands in candle circles, tall and pale, his spine flickering live like a flame itself. I see myself standing out of his sight and for once knowing one thing he does not. He cannot see my face, or he would know.

  Is there solfege for the word of what I feel? There are hand movements for harmony, accord, consonance. Could it be told in music by the longing in a scale? The urge of the seventh to rise to its octave, the fourth to its dominant? I think of an urgent minor key, of dissonance resolving into sweetness, but it doesn’t really get close to the feeling. Those things are in it, but it is more complicated, less ordered, harder to understand. I walk the two beats up and down my quarters over and over.

  I want work, something to learn or do. If I do something, let it be for him, I think. Let there be a discipline. Try to remember, then.

  Tonight I have no patience for the currents of chance and luck that might bring the right memory to my hands. I close my eyes and I take hold of my memory bag and turn it upside down.

  After a while I open my eyes. What I see is a collection of junk. Strange objects: a shell, a spoon, a paralighter, a muddy burberry, a dog collar. An old leather-bound scorebook. A block of wood with pencil-drawn figures. A scrap of paper ripped down one side. A bar of chocolate, a heavy, rusted mettle lock. I tap a dull rhythm. I try to empty my head, clear and silent but full of waiting, like a crosshouse hall just after an orkestra has finished tuning. I think of
my mother and what she was doing and how little I must have known her. Then I reach for the bound score. It is old and from it rises the smell of bleach and dirt. I reach out and open it.

  It is not a score at all. Crawling down the pages are the ugly, alien black shapes of code.

  I turn the pages. Interleaved within the old parchment, yellowing and brittle, are paper cuttings. They are all in old code too and I have to force myself to look at its dark, angry tangle. I try to study the old signs for meaning, but there are no patterns that I can see, no rhythm. I turn pages presto. Analysis of Specific Allegations with Respect to Acoustic Weapons. Whole-body Vibration and the Human Nervous System. Each page and a different cutting of code in its tight black columns. The Blind Leading the Blind: Convergent Evolution in the Origins of Specialised Hearing. The Potential Effects of Anthropogenic Noise on Birdlife.

  All meaningless and I hold the old book by its spine and flick and a burst of colour comes up out of the denseness of code. A picture. A drawing tinted with skill in old ochre and plant dyes. The picture is of a fat man with a long white beard. He holds a sword in one hand, and above him is the sun, growing high in the sky like a strange flower. On each of his shoulders is a winged creature. They cling to the cloth of his cloak with sharp claws like they are clinging on to life. And at the same time a rushing feeling in my ears and I go down . . .

  My mother’s voice. Sun, warm through parasheeting. We are in the forcinghouse again. In front of me, piles of knotted bulbs have been pushed to the edges of an earth-covered table and the smell of bleach is strong in the air.

  ‘Simon,’ my mother says. ‘Come.’

  Before me, she sweeps a clean space on the earth-covered table. Then she reaches under the workbench and draws out a tall red mettle tin. Her hands are shaking so hard she can barely hold the knife she uses to twist the lid. She drops it once, and I step forward to help, but she pushes me back. At last the lid comes off with a reluctant sucking sound. She lifts clear a flat object wrapped in clean blue roughcloth, unwraps it.