The Chimes Read online

  ‘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.

  I push out, away from the pictures in my head. The thing I’m holding clatters hard on the floorboards. The sound makes me jump and it’s that which shakes the pictures that cling around my head.

  Sickness rises in me and I’m shaking. I force my head down between my knees, try to breathe, but it’s like the ground has come up hard and pushed out the air. The memory is not mine but Clare’s, and I have touched it, and somehow the pictures of her memory came into my head.

  Things are swinging and I can’t find the place where they stop. My memory. Clare’s memory. I blink at the strangeness of it. How do I have it in my bag? And subito I see it again, but from outside not within, so it is my memory that flashes up not Clare’s. I see her sitting there in the crosshouse behind Paul’s where Brennan and I were singing the snares. So thin you could see the tendons in her face and shoulders and the rib bones through her T-shirt. And nothing in her eyes, though we could see the dark bruises on her, and blood on her shirt. She was terrified and it took me a while to realise that she thought we might hurt her. And though we held our hands out in front of us to show ‘no threat’, it didn’t matter. She still came at us, her teeth bared, the half-broke plate held like a knife.

  The broken piece was her memory of joining the pact. And she must have given it to me. When? And I saw it and I don’t have time or desire to wonder at this right now.

  I look close at the cut at the top of my arm. It is still painful.

  ‘It’s time,’ she said when we were standing on the strand. How many days ago now? And she showed me how she measured it. I will find her a better way, I think.

  ‘It’s time, Simon,’ says Lucien. He stands at the door of the open-roofed hut, in the sun.

  The narrowboats in the canal mooring are shiny blacks and reds and greens, with polished brass and bright curtains. Along the wharf, people have risen into the morning. There are families sitting on the roofs of boats drinking tea from mugs. A few men paint and caulk the boats that stand on the jetty. A young couple leave their boat with tense strides and stand by a bench only a few feet away and begin to argue as if now they have left their home, they are all alone and no one is listening. Everybody around them is listening.

  The narrowboat Lucien walks us to is at the farthest end of the mooring pool. The water round it is oily and grey, and the boat looks abandoned. It isn’t polished to the high shine of the others – it’s painted a thick black colour that is dusty and doesn’t reflect the light. There are brass handles and portholes, but they are also dulled and dusty. The curtains are drawn at the portholes. The only thing that marks it as lived in is a teeming garden of pots that grows on the roof. Pots tiny and large, mettle and clay and para. In them are herbs and flowers, bushy shrubs and plants with small leaves like stones.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ I ask. Lucien hushes me with a hand gesture and knocks a trick rhythm onto one of the cabin portholes. Inside, the curtain pulls back a few inches. I see a quick glimpse of green eyes and sandy eyebrows before it twitches into place. There is movement inside, and after a few beats a man’s head emerges from the cabin door and he’s on the deck, pulling on a T-shirt.

  He’s older than us, a square and practical build, with quick fingers, a plain, energetic face and long hair tied back. The T-shirt has old code on it, and a picture of a skull with a lightning flash across it – an odd relic. His movements are precise as he jumps the short way to the path to stand in front of Lucien.

  There is no exchange except the wad of tokens that the man sticks presto into the back pocket of his lean, faded jeans.

  ‘So, you boys want a ride on the Lily Bolero, I hear?’ he says, and for the first time smiles, which shifts his face from plain and square to handsomeness in a flash. ‘I’m Callum.’

  The boat’s name is also that of a familiar jig, and as soon as I hear it, I know I won’t be able to shake the music free. I sing the nonsense words under my breath in a bid to clear them. ‘Lero Lero, Lily Bolero. Lily Bolero Lullen a Ba.’

  Callum looks into
the cabin window again, waves inside. ‘Hey, Jemima! We have guests. Come and show them around.’

  Another face emerges from the cabin. It’s a girl a bit older than us. She stands on the deck to survey us with a look of confident appraisal. She’s not very tall, and she’s wearing a pair of jeans that are cut off and frayed above the knee, a sloppy blue shirt, a heavy pair of lace-up boots and a man’s green anorak, far too big. Her hair is dark brown and as long as the man’s, and I wonder if he is her father, but I have a feeling he isn’t.

  ‘Hello,’ she says, and her voice is different. Low and like there’s something in her mouth. Then she signs in solfege to Callum. She doesn’t sing, but her hands move so quick I miss half of it. Something about us, about pacts and pactrunners and how they’re not to be trusted.

  I break in, ‘That’s not true.’

  Callum turns to me and Jemima breaks off, turns round also and sees my indignant face. She begins to laugh.

  ‘She’s only joking,’ Callum says. And he signs it at the same time, which I find strange. Why use solfege as well as speech for something like that? Jemima is still laughing, a sound of pure humour. The joke is clearly at our expense, but it is so surprising to hear laughter that I cannot help but laugh also. I think I had forgotten what it sounded like.

  ‘You’ve been misled about pactrunners,’ I tell the girl. ‘The guilds are always badmouthing us, but they need our trade as much as the Order does.’ Something in me wants her to laugh again, to approve of us.

  ‘She can’t hear you,’ Callum says.

  I stop laughing.

  ‘She’s deaf,’ he says.

  Without thinking I look straight at Lucien. His face is as blank as mine and even paler than usual.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know that was possible.’

  ‘She lost her hearing when she was young,’ Callum says, sharp.

  I struggle to imagine it. What could it be like? Like living in a closed room for one’s life. Cut off from joy and beauty and meaning.

  But Jemima does not look despairing or trapped. Then I think of the Carillon and I wonder if she is able to keep her memories. Is deafness an escape? Perhaps the closed room of her mind is actually full of strange and complex pictures and objects. Perhaps the memories in her head are able to form a line that moves along those walls from start to finish. I look at Jemima and my pity disappears.

  I expected the inside of the boat to be all dust and disrepair, but what Jemima shows us is a narrow galley and a scrubbed kitchen table, bolted to the floor. Everywhere things are hanging – lanterns, small sacks of sugar and flour and coffee, knotted ropes of onions and garlic. Small copper pots sway above the large sterno, its gas cylinder lashed firm to a roof beam. The floor of the other half of the cabin is covered in a thick, rich rug with shapes in gold and black and red. There is a curtain and behind it two beds are fitted to the rounded sides of the boat, neat roughcloth covers over them. Beyond that a wooden slatted double door, very low.

  ‘That’s our room,’ says Jemima. ‘You two are sleeping here.’ She points to the bunks. She signs in solfege, slow so we can hear it. ‘It’s nice to have some company.’

  ‘We will leave after Chimes,’ Callum says. ‘And travel at night. You two want to move tacet,’ he says. ‘We can do that. We also like to remain muted, sotto voce.’ He signs to Jemima, who laughs again and nods.

  ‘It’s all quiet on the towpath now. No poliss. No sign of the Order. Narrowboaters have a good chain of call and response. Any movement and we’ll hear it.’ He signs to Jemima, speaking aloud too for my benefit. ‘Why don’t you take Simon for supplies, get some air. There are still a few tolls before Vespers.’

  Jemima fetches two parabuckets and a large flat sack that she secures by straps to her back. I try to help her, but she shrugs me off and gestures me to follow. I look back to Lucien, but he has already disappeared behind the curtain into our new quarters.

  It is strange to be walking beside somebody new, somebody not of the pact. Somebody whose bodymemory doesn’t share the confines of the tunnels and the vagaries of the map. Jemima, I notice, wastes movements. She turns often from side to side, looking all around her. She stops often to inspect things I would have thought hardly worth notice – a branch that has fallen across the concrete path, a pattern of leaves scattered, a cloud that moves lento overhead. I’m so used to the steady pace of Clare’s run and the silent measure of our shared task that I find several times I’ve outstripped Jemima and run ahead. Each time I expect an angry response. I see Clare with her quick kindle and her eyes sparking at me, but Jemima just smiles to herself as if she is looking at those pictures on the walls of her inward house. And each time I return like an overeager dog and take up her pace again.

  I try to imagine what she sees in her world without music, without Chimes. I want to ask her where her happiness comes from. The trees are budding their new leaves and a thought comes into my head. They have a kind of rhythm in their upright trunks and their branches that start thick and then divide and get narrower and lighter and faster till they quiver in the air like breath past a clarionet reed. That is a rhythm you can see, not hear. Perhaps music happens elsewhere than in ears.

  Jemima stops at a quiet corner of the canal and looks at the water and waits for a while, studying something that is invisible to me. Then she opens the flat bag. From inside she removes a mettle wheel from an old kid’s bike. Over the bike wheel is fitted a woven stickwrap sack like the kind that carry flour.

  She ties rope lengths to three parts of the wheel and picks a few stones to weight the bag. Then she throws the whole thing into the water. After a long wait in which I almost stoop to touch her shoulder and sign my question of ‘What are you doing?’ she pulls it up subito. There, silver in the sack, are two fish, longer than my hand. Her grin flashes up at me presto and her eyebrows go up as if to say, ‘Yes? And what can you do?’ She dumps the fish in another sack, ties the neck to one of the iron rings along the canalside and submerges it under the water. I am still watching without any words, intrigued.

  ‘Dinner,’ she signs. And then she points to a thick bush that grows along the canal path and hands me one of the buckets. ‘Berries,’ she says.

  I leave her fishing and walk along the path. The bush is thick with brambles and, behind that, dense clutches of blackberries. I pick hundreds, enough to fill the bucket. My fingers are stained deep red and stinging. I think about Lucien. I think about what we are trying to do. I wonder if we will ever come back or if we are leaving London forever.

  Running

  We travel lento. Lucien usually sits on the deck hooded, listening for any sign of poliss or the Order. Callum listens too, for the coded messages of the narrowboaters up and downriver.

  Two nights in he reports to us there’s a tune doing the rounds. Poliss looking for two pactrunners who have made off with large quantities of Pale. Two of prentiss age and they are travelling by water. One tall with pale eyes; the other has brown hair. A prize rumoured.

  ‘Three hundred tokens,’ Callum says, ‘is a lot of money. You should both stay below deck as much as possible until the tune fades.’

  So we do, though it’s close and cramped and I’m ready to go out of my skin with the itch to be in the tunnels.

  To keep busy, Lucien tests my memory. We start with the day we’re on. Lucien’s voice, like in downsounding, leads me through the memories. Then back to the day before and the day before that. I wander through the strange events of the last eightnoch: finding Lucien on the race, the member of the Order in the crosshouse yard, poliss on the run, the discovery of the weapon. I reach six days, then seven, then eight. My head hurts, but it gets stronger each time. Then together we go back through my personal mem­­ories. My mother’s death, leaving Essex, finding Netty, losing Netty, joining the pact, finding Netty again. All that I can I share with Lucien.

  Like in the storehouse, Lucien makes small notches on the edge of his bunk each morning as we trave
l. On the third day on the water we start something new.

  Lucien asks, ‘How clear is your hold on the map?’

  I look at him. In my mind’s ear I see our storehouse and the path down Liver Street steps. I follow it down the strand to Five Rover and I place myself in the amphitheatre. Then I try to see the map as it spreads from there. I can’t do it. My head is blank and empty. Panic starts in my hands, which go tight and gripped.

  ‘I can’t see it,’ I say, and my voice too is tight held, knuckle white.

  ‘Breathe,’ says Lucien. ‘Start slow.’

  He sings then the tune of our amphitheatre, slow and circular with a slight dazzle of the Lady. I close my eyes and hear it, the fretted ceiling, the rust, the ferns, the silence of the tunnelmouths.

  Then he sings the beginning of a simple run. A run that leaves the amphitheatre and moves in a circle of fifths. ‘Wait,’ I tell him.

  Instead of trying to see the whole map lit up like the masterwork of some crazed spider, I focus just on the tunnel ahead. I sing the tune back to him as I go and in this way I follow his route – the comms tunnel, then a stormwater drain, then up into the walking tunnel at Mill Wall.

  And to my surprise, the network of tunnels we’ve moved through, that spun round me without name in an untethered melody, all shift and settle into place. It’s as if I’m blindfolded and then the blindfold is taken off.

  Lucien nods. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘sing me the way from there back to here . . .’ and he whistles the melody of the Limehouse Caisson.

  Before I lose my nerve, I’m off. I take a more complicated route than intended. I get myself lost and tuneless for a while before finding at last a way out, a tiny rivulet of melody that pulls me through. By slow degrees and without anything you could call an elegant tune, I arrive at the contours of the caisson. And it’s like I’m there in body. I can almost see the fastrunning greengrey of the Thames, feel the grit of shells and mud and rock through my thin plimsolls.