The Chimes Page 17

  But if I blink, I’m back in the candlelit space of the narrowboat, with the low chug of its motor and the sway and slap of the water passing.

  Lucien watches me and smiles. ‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’

  We have travelled four nights when it happens.

  It is early evening and the smell of pepper fills my nostrils for Chimes as usual. We stand on the deck of the narrowboat. A light rain has started and it drills holes into the water around us. No movements anywhere except the steady, light rhythm of rain on water.

  In spite of what I now know about the Carillon, Lucien continues to conduct solfege, Matins and Vespers both. When I ask him why, he pauses as he does when he’s looking at a thing from every angle and thinking how to explain. In the end he says not much at all.

  ‘If you have an enemy, you seek to know as much about them as possible, don’t you?’

  I nod lento.

  Then he thinks a bit more. ‘Why does Chimes deaden us, our memories? Infrasound, the vibrations in the air. But something else as well. When you don’t grasp something or remember something, I think your mind at last says, “OK,” and part of it accepts this. In the end your mind gets to welcome that deadening. That’s what I believe anyway. Half of our memoryloss is by choice.

  ‘Vespers is difficult. The most highly trained musical minds compose it. And who are they talking to? A handful of other musicians and scholars. Those who can understand how a certain phrase is a witty play on one from Buxtehude or Brahms. Or that a rhythm is a graceful nod to a Vespers chorale from a month back. Nobody else is meant to understand this. Not really. And what is the cost of all that lack of understanding?’

  I look at him, shake my head. I don’t know.

  ‘The further we can follow in solfege, the better, that’s all.’

  Callum stands on deck with us, though he does not follow our solfege. Jemima disappears below and I wonder again how the music strikes her. Do the vibrations speak to her body in a different way?

  Chimes comes.

  It starts piano. Brings the long, slow progression of the melody simple. Muted, plain. Today it’s two lines of tune, intertwining. The first is stately and simple. The second lighter, presto. They interweave: half-competition, half-friendship. But something jars, a buzz in my ears. It comes and goes, a tune in the bass progression, something familiar.

  The first theme is almost at an end when I realise what the falling minor seventh cadence reminds me of. The bass is tracing an inversion of our comeallye.

  By the time I realise, it is too late to turn to Lucien, too late to move at all as at once the chords come thick and heavy and full of thunder.

  Our pact tune, split open into arpeggios and scales. Robbed of life and movement, but clear as ours. Chimes slows and examines the tune and it becomes impossibly rich, encrusted with harmony and ornament, and it stretches as if it would last forever and break open the sky.

  After, I am kneeling on the deck of a narrowboat, perilously close to the water, my forehead touching a plantpot and one hand gripping tight to the brass track that runs the edge of the deck. The rain is falling fast.

  I rise up slow. The shock stays with me. Deep in the bone. Our comeallye flooding the sky. The message clear inside it. Two pactrunners, escapees. Warning. Reward. It makes a joke of the meandering rumour tunes of the narrowboaters.

  We go back to the bunkroom in the hold. I stand there shivering, still hearing our comeallye and reeling from the strange violation of hearing it aloft in the sky like that.

  ‘Who will remember it tomorrow, though?’ I say. ‘Who even knows our tune? Most people listening won’t understand.’ But I know I am speaking just to say something. The Order don’t care who understands. The real message woven into the melody is one we hardly needed reminding of. It is the Carillon’s vast strength as it fills the whole wide air with our pactsong, the private tune we hum between ourselves in secret in the under. Two pactrunners are no match for the power of the Order.

  ‘You’re soaked,’ Lucien says. He rummages in the drawer beneath his bunk, throws me a clean shirt that must be Callum’s.

  ‘Here.’

  I pull off my T-shirt without thinking. The candle flickers. The light is low.

  ‘What’s that?’ says Lucien. ‘On your arm.’ He points to the place on my forearm where I scored the memory with my knife.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. I pull the shirt on and the shirtsleeves down.

  ‘That’s not nothing.’ His voice is dangerous, piano. He grabs the sleeve and pulls it back up. His eyes go thin. ‘How in hell did that happen?’

  I can’t think of what to answer.

  ‘It’s a memory,’ I say, because in the end it seems I have no choice but to tell the truth.

  Lucien’s indrawn breath is fierce.

  ‘Fucking stupid,’ he says. ‘Clare may need to do it and I’ll say nothing further about that. But you? I thought you were smarter.’

  I have never seen him so angry. He swears under his breath again and turns away.

  I want him to understand that I did it not only for myself. I did it for Clare. A sign of solidarity, wasn’t it? An apology for what I somehow knew was coming – our leaving, our betrayal. But it will only seem like an excuse, so I say nothing. Lucien gets up subito and stalks out of the cabin.

  The cut on my arm is painful, but it stings less than Lucien’s anger.

  He is gone for a long while. When he finally returns to the cabin, I’m sitting on my bunk. I am playing the recorder tacet, melody without breath.

  Lucien says nothing. He rolls my sleeve up again rough and takes a tube from his pocket. He squeezes a white paste on his fingers and rubs it into my arm. The white stuff burns the skin around the cut. Lucien rips a strip from the bottom of my old wet T-shirt and binds it twice round my arm, tighter than is really necessary.

  ‘Do me a favour, Simon,’ he says with a cold voice. ‘Next time you get some idea in your head, some noble plan for saving memory, don’t act on it.’

  We are sitting side by side, but the space between us is immense. I don’t know how to talk to him.

  ‘Can you see much in this light?’ I finally ask.

  He turns his face so that he is looking right at me. He is still angry, but there is something else there too. He has been surprised by his anger as much as I have.

  ‘Some,’ he says. ‘Not as much as you.’ His voice is dark. His eyes meet mine, then move away.

  ‘Lucien,’ I say.

  I do not know what I am doing, but before I can question it, I put my hand on the side of his face, though I know it by heart and don’t need to recognise it by touch.

  I touch his brow with my fingers. I move them down over the fine skin at his temples, the plane of his cheeks, the sharpcut lips. I study his face as if I were blind too. My heart is going so hard he must be able to hear it. It must deafen him. And I am shaking like I’ve been pulled from the river with the cold still on my skin. We sit there like that for a long time.

  Then the folly of what I am doing, the gravity of the overstep, hits me subito. I draw back like I’ve been stung. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I am really sorry.’

  Lucien shakes his head from side to side. He hasn’t moved away from me. He sits there.

  ‘That’s not a good idea, Simon,’ he says. Says it slow. ‘It’s too dangerous. It can’t happen. You do not want it.’

  I find myself shaking my head also. A slow mirror of him. I don’t know what I am refuting exactly. If I’m saying yes or no to what he said. No, it cannot happen. Yes, it cannot happen. No, I do want it. Yes, I do want it.

  ‘All that time,’ I say, ‘I followed you. You had my memories safeguarded. You knew where I was from and what had happened to me and you knew who I was. You knew . . .’ I stop.

  Then the shame rises up and it burns. He knew this, the other thing, the secret of my regard for him. Of course he knew. How much longer than me? I think of my heart’s keen leap in his company, my eyes on him alway
s, my fear on the race when I held him, and I cannot believe how bloody ig­­­­norant I have been. The embarrassment flares up inside and I know I have to leave.

  He shakes his head. He has not turned away. He has not moved.

  ‘You shouldn’t think so,’ he says. His voice is rough, and catches. ‘You are not so easy to know as you might think. Not so easy to know at all.’

  His hand goes to the back of my head then. His smell of rivermud, sky, smoke, as he leans forward and kisses me.

  My whole body in my heart and mouth. His hands in my hair. The long lean of his body hard by. The candle flickers.

  After a while he pushes me back. He is breathing hard. His grip on my shoulders is so tight I can’t move my arms. I can’t help the huge foolish grin on my face either. The only thing I can think to say is his name.

  His grip gets tighter. What is he scared of? It’s simple, I want to tell him. His name then mine. Question and answer. ‘Lucien,’ I tell him, and kiss him.

  ‘Simon,’ he says at last.

  His face is so serious, yet I am grinning away and my whole body feels light. I lift his fingers from their grip.

  We take his bunk, though it’s much too narrow for both of us. My bare back to his bare chest. All night the edge of the bunk cuts into my hip and I lie awake listening to his breath, breathing in the same air as him. I feel my happiness turn and wheel overhead.

  Into the Belly of the Whale

  We travel and the countryside changes. It becomes greener, lusher; the river gets narrower. On the fifth night the moon is full, and there are tall buildings, twisted and bent, in the distance. We go past two small islands in the river. To our port side runs the wide, ugly scar of a concrete road with many tracks. Above it, tall, dead lamps like those still left in parts of London.

  Lucien comes to sit next to me, where I’m craning my head out of the porthole. He’s holding the paper map that Netty gave me.

  ‘Callum says we’re here.’ He points to a place near where Netty has marked with an X. ‘The village is called Reading.’

  We stop just before a large lock. Rushing water speeds past in the dark, and the wind pushes between the broken buildings on either side of us.

  We hood up. I sing Lucien the tune that Netty gave me and he sings it back.

  The village is grey and ugly. We walk through a huge concrete tunnel lined in yellow-painted mettle. The tune takes us along a wide sunken road with half-broken walls high above it. It feels bare and exposed in the moonlight. After walking through the wide, quiet streets and rubble for ten minutes, the tune takes us down a narrow, straight street of houses. Those houses that are still standing are small and redbrick and all the same – jammed together with windows along the front like staring eyes.

  There’s no glass left, of course, but about half have the windows boarded on the inside. Those are the lived-in ones, I guess.

  Lucien counts off the beats from the corner and we reach the middle of the street before the tune runs out. The house looks the same as all the others. There’s a garden in front with overgrown hedges. Lucien pushes the gate open and it swings with a mettle note, C sharp. The grass out front is covered in moonlight. There’s an old concrete fountain sitting in the middle filled with burnt paper, flakes of ash sprinkled around it. At its base is an old leather shoe half eaten by foxes.

  The moon makes strange shadows with the shapes of the scrunched-up paper in the dish of the fountain. We both look at the door. All is silent. Lucien turns to me.

  ‘I’ll wait for you here in the garden.’

  ‘You’re not coming?’ For the first time I notice the cold slip around my shoulders and ribs like a wet garment.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Look at my eyes. She’ll see I’m from the Order. It’s best if you go alone.’

  ‘What am I meant to do?’ I don’t like the weak sound of my voice. I have been going along this road because it’s Lucien’s road. I know I have anger kindled down below, for what happened to my parents, for the things we have all lost, but it is out of reach. I feel like I’m listening to a song around me and I have no idea what part to take.

  Lucien looks at me and his eyes are lunar also, casting out into the night. His hair is silver. I straighten my back. I am ashamed of my uncertainty.

  ‘None of us knows what we are meant for,’ he says. ‘Even if a person keeps their memories intact, don’t suppose the way forward is always clear. But we know a thing that needs to happen. So we must get help.’

  Behind my eyes, I see black shapes, as if against a white sky, coming together in patterns like water does. Turning, wheeling, dispersing . . .

  If only, I think, the way forward and the given meaning were lit clear. If I had a name or a meaning that was one single note.

  ‘Take this,’ says Lucien, and reaches inside his T-shirt. He takes his mother’s ring from the pouch, flicks the catch and removes the guildmedal. Then he puts the medal back into the leather pocket and puts its cord over my head. I feel the Lady’s mild pulse.

  He walks away until he’s standing under a half-dead oak tree in the corner of the garden. For a beat it looks as if the branches are growing from his head, crowning him. Then I turn, crunch up the gravel path, take a breath, knock.

  Silence. I put my ear to the door. It was once green, but now its paint is curled and peeling off in flakes.

  Far off inside the house, there’s a bang like something falling off a shelf. I wait and there is silence again. I might have imagined it.

  Behind me in the garden, I can feel Lucien watching, blind as the moonlight makes him, but still watching. I reach out, grasp the door handle and turn.

  The door opens partway and my eyes adjust slowly. My heart is beating tight with fear. The hallway is dark, but there’s a window at the end that gives onto a back garden and lets in a thin corridor of moonlight.

  Once in, I see why the door did not open fully. The corridor is packed. Above me, the walls are lined with boxes of every colour and size. Stacked to twice my height on haphazard shelves made from thin wood and bricks, from rope and cardboard, from para cartons, from instrument cases. Crammed into the shelves, like a crazy person’s market stall, are strange objects.

  Silver forks and knives sit next to strings of bright coloured para beads. Piles of sheet music leaf out of rough piles onto children’s toys. There is old electrickery, paraboards with keys of code printed on them, antique clothing. There are ancient shoes, board games. I see a boat anchor, a dead pot plant, small mettle men holding weapons and crouched in still poses, mould-covered pillows, dolls with staring eyes. And hundreds of instruments, from the cheapest to the most valuable. One side of the hall is straddled by an old upright klavier, half of its keys gone like gappy front teeth and the top lifted off like an emptied skull so that more objects can nestle into the strings. There are clarionets, viols, tambors and, down in the corner glowing softly, a transverse flute made out of pure palladium.

  I feel dizzy, like my knees are going to bend. Before they do, I sit down, close my eyes for a beat. I think of the stripped-clean spaces of our storehouse, my quarters with hammock stowed. My memory bag and candles the only objects on otherwise bare shelves. And then there is a shift in light. I jump up. Standing in front of the window to the back garden is an old woman.

  I had thought that Netty was old, but I had never seen age. Not like this. The woman’s face is all wrinkles, like all the years and all the living of several people have been pressed into one body, one face. Her hair is as white and straight as the horsehair that viol makers buy from the tanners. She wears a cloak. I do not have time to be afraid.

  I open my mouth, but before any words can come, the air around me is split by a scream. A shriek that has at its core the caw-caw of some strange animal – harsh and wild and black and frenzied. The sound is coming from her open mouth and it is rushing toward me so that I hold my hands up over my ears and face, and as her cry comes shrill and swift, she co
mes with it down the hall faster than is possible, with her cloak sweeping and flapping behind her like wings.

  Before I can move, she is on me. Her two hands bent like claws round my throat. Nails in my skin and I cannot breathe. I am choking, drowning. In my nose is the smell of unwashed hair and rosin, as if her hair has been used to bow a viol’s strings after all.

  Then suddenly I am released.

  In the clawed hands, she has the leather pouch. She is hunched over it and I see a flash and feel the Lady’s small vital pulse of silence. She has removed the guildmedal. The next thing I see is the old woman’s head go back and her eyes twitch and roll. Her head goes back and something goes out of her. Or perhaps something goes into her. I cannot tell which.

  I back away towards the far window. The glass cold on my back, some distance between us. The woman stands, still as still, the pouch in her clawed hands, the cloak settled over her.

  After what feels like a long while, she emerges, blinking. Down her face, bright in the moonlight, are the wet tracks where tears have run, their simple lines gone crazed across the tricky wrinkles of her skin. Her head cocks to one side, and her eyes look out at me beady and wet and twinkled. Her face cracks and is remade into a smile. She opens her mouth and I tense for another screech, but what comes out, cracked and broken, is a tune.

  ‘Sing a song of sixpence’ – her voice is like gravel – ‘a pocket full of rye.’

  I stand there baffled, with my heart banging and my arms held up against my chest as if I’m bracing against something.

  ‘Four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.’

  Her voice is full of mirth, as if she has told a wonderful joke. I look around. Junk. A house full of junk and a crazy old woman. We were fools not to listen to Netty. To hope that we would find some answer or help here, some mystery that would equip two pactrunners to bring an end to the Order.

  ‘When the pie was opened, the birds began to sing,’ the old woman croons, and it seems as if she intends the song to reassure me. Her cracked voice falls from song into chant. ‘When the pie was opened,’ she says louder now, insistent, motioning with her head toward me. I look around to see if I can leave without pushing past her, as I don’t want to get close to those fingernails again. My throat stings where she grasped me. To my left is a kitchen. Like the hallway, it is crammed with junk, the only clear space the narrow bench and sink. An old gas oven sits next to the bench, its innards removed, a fire kindled inside it, a kettle atop and a cast-iron tureen directly on the coals. There is no other way out.