The Chimes Read online

  I walk into the circle and Lucien turns to me.

  ‘Do your best to keep up,’ he says.

  Without accompaniment he starts to sing.

  He sings and time stands still, as if he is walking on water. His voice is stark and true, and in it there are stretches of empty skies and a bright rime of salt.

  The tune starts with a glee and a lilt. The words don’t say much, but I can follow the melody’s meaning. It is about when innocence is really blindness. How when you want something very much, so bad you can taste it, your mind likes to trick you that it’s in your grasp.

  That is the gleeful, lilting, funny bit. But then the second theme comes, and that’s bitter. It is about when the beauty is false and yet you still somehow desire and still cannot have it.

  Lucien sings the first theme through once again with no words now and no solfege, just sounds that curl and change. Then, lightly, Brennan comes in on the drum. He lays down a four-four rhythm. Then he spreads and patterns it until it tells the same story. But his part has a relentless tread: the warning of what will be lost, and the punishment to come. Then Abel brings in another voice on the viol. It starts an argument with Lucien’s, a quickwitted patter of running triplets: scolding, blustering, mocking Lucien’s plaints.

  And I listen. I listen until the flickering walls of the storehouse drop away and the three new figures with their intent faces and movements disappear. Abel and Lucien and Brennan disappear and all I can see is the melody unfold and the music tread.

  In the midst, though, there is something missing. Something waiting. I can feel it, and with each moment it grows stronger. It is coming maybe from the three of them, who though they don’t look at me, are watching. But more than that, it is coming from the music itself. A whole voice is missing. The song has three parts: a yearning, a warning and an urgent scolding. But nowhere is there the voice of the beautiful thing, the one that is waiting to be found and claimed. The one they are all searching for.

  I pick up my recorder and I start to play, even though I don’t know how to make the voice that is missing. When I have played all my feeling into the first part of the tune, I still don’t know, but by then it is too late and I no longer care, so I just play it. I play it high and reckless and free so that it flies above all the others. I play it with some of the anger I feel and some that I throw in for extra. I play a voice that has never known anything except for luck and beauty. I don’t know where it comes from, just that it was missing.

  The tune goes on and on and on. Lucien pulls the song one way and then the other. He offers a new key, tells a joke, breaks into a new rhythm. After a while I hear that the viol has dropped out. And then the drum falls away and I hear that it is only Lucien’s voice and my recorder. I follow him. It is like running and running in the dark, without looking down. The dark streams out around me, exhilarating. For a while I run and it seems that I am following close behind the pale bright light that Lucien’s voice sheds. It is a running that is more like a falling. My stomach drops out.

  And subito I get a glimpse of a strange new territory. Not the close, light-flickered wooden walls of the storehouse after all, but a vast illuminated maze like a spiderweb. And at that moment I see Lucien ahead, laughing in his mastery. His voice lights the maze. Or does it make the maze come into being?

  I stop, breathless, and the heavy wooden walls come back and I can see Lucien looking at me through the cookstove flames. He draws a circle in the air with his finger, still singing. He slows and his voice drops piano and he sings the first verse through to the end. I stand there.

  Across from me, through the fire, I see Brennan and Abel. They hold their instruments quite still, listening.

  I blow air through my recorder, hold it in both hands and wait. Tired, as if I have run a long way. I do not like being tested. But the fire of their music is moving through my arms and chest and it warms me. Abel sits back down by the stove. He spits on a piece of cloth, then rubs at the rosin dust under the fretboard of his viol and looks sidelong at me, thoughtful. I watch his careful movements. Where did the tricky dry repartee of his playing spring from? His eyes go to Brennan and I see a look move between them. A look with a tacet agreement in it.

  ‘I see,’ says Lucien. ‘I see.’

  Then he smiles a slow smile. And like an exchange for the mettle they took, he reaches into his pocket and tosses something to me that I catch. I open my hand. On my palm sits a small riverstone, dry and dull.

  ‘Not bad for a farmboy,’ he says. ‘Which is lucky for you. And lucky for us too, I suppose.’

  Lucien makes a gesture and Brennan sits, and then he sits down himself and the fire makes gilded shapes over his face and the eyes that are strange and pale. He stretches his shoulders and folds his long legs and then by some half-shrug he shows that there is space by the fire for me to join them, if I wish.

  ‘Tomorrow we’ll teach you how to run in the under,’ he says.

  Memorylost

  thirteen months later

  Matins

  I wake up and I’m hanging. Up above, the beams of a wooden roof thick with old oil and smoke. The light is thin and grey and blurred, and for the life of me I don’t know where I am. Panic starts up in my stomach and chest like some trapped thing flapping. I look around for a clue in the grey that will tell me what I am doing here. Something lost down deep in the sleep I just came up from. Some word or meaning for the sadness in me that I cannot name. I wait and I sway, and at last an answer comes up out of the riverine murk. Not sure if it is the one I was looking for, but it floats up and it brings a sort of relief. It comes in the sounds of morning. Listen, it says. You are home.

  Dry sharp half-echo of coldness. That comes first. Down low to the ground so it makes the distances stretch. Then the storehouse grows up from that – four walls solid and stripped bare like a beat for marching to. Then I listen for the others. I listen for their different sounds, their rhythms. Clare’s clipped tread in its forward and back of impatience. Brennan heavier. Abel light and uncertain, like each footstep wants to change its mind. Lucien? Not yet.

  Next I try to hear the water out past the storehouse walls. The boatpeople are already travelling downriver to trade from Richmond. They sing the sightlines of the river and the metre of the tide upstream and down. Their melodies follow each curve of the bank so if you listen close, you can almost see it. Voices low and wordless in the half-song of navigation, a sort of la la leia la that is almost the sound of the river itself. Above that, different messages curl in and around with the small schooners and flatbottomed boats. There are words to these, some working sly against the music’s message. A burst bank at Leaside. A poliss barge moored this morning at Hammersmith to check for smuggled goods. Poppies for sale at Columbia Road. A girl gone missing off a boat down Lambeth way.

  At last I pull back the blankets and swing my legs over the side of the hammock. As I do, something clatters to the floor and I fetch it up. A riverstone, dry and gritted – a memory I must have visited last night. Whatever it holds it is silent now and I get it back in the memory bag presto. Bodymemory trumps objectmemory, and bodymemory says, Join the others. It says, Eat, downsound, get down to the river. It says, Night is for remembering. And in a sidelong voice, it says, Before is blasphony.

  My name is Simon, I think. I live in the storehouse on Dog Isle, in the city of London. I am a member of Five Rover pact.

  I push the curtains aside and go out into the day.

  In the storehouse, the embers of the cookstove are aglow and the rest of the pact are there, which makes my heart rise up. Abel stoking the stove. Clare slicing bread at the workbench. Brennan stretching by his quarters. If you listen right, the whole thing has its rhythm. Abel fetches the caddy and spoons tealeaves into the water. Clare pours milk into a copper pot, adds honey, nutmeg. Brennan skewers bread on the toasting forks. We each take a fork to the fire, in our circle round the stove, and we drink tea with sweet spiced milk. Bodymemory keeps us in our plac
es. No one speaks in the mornings, not until we’ve gathered ourselves enough to know who we are and what we’re about. Not until after Onestory.

  If you listen now, you’ll hear the steady tread of feet on the streets outside. Jostling, moving fast. People walking to crosshouses, parks, public spaces, gathering to hear and sound Onestory ensemble in public, grouped together for companionship and comfort. We, Thames pact of the run from Green Witch to Five Rover, gather to sound it with mugs of sweet tea around the cookstove, our voices an undercurrent muddy with sleep, Lucien leading. Same every morning. In the pops and cracks of the fire, with the sweet tea and the river moving slowly beside, and with the under calling to us already.

  I hear him before I see him. The long-legged walk in from the balcony. Lucien comes in and it’s hard to look at him first thing. When you go from darkness into light, it’s the same, isn’t it? I see his profile first, then the sharp swing of his arms. He passes the kettle to me and I take it, hang it by its hook over the wire that sits inside the cookstove mouth.

  Then there’s the ripple in the air that signals it’s almost Chimes. A kind of hitch or lift, a clearing of the throat before a grand announcement. And a question comes up with it. It rises out of the silt of sleep in my head. Not sure if it’s my voice or someone else’s. The arrival in London, it asks, what was it like? I look to my side as if there might be someone there to tell me where it comes from, what it means. But not enough time to puzzle it now, as in the middle of the room Lucien’s arms lift up and with them the first notes of the Carillon. It is Onestory.

  A leap of joy inside me, fierce and bright. I open my mind and let the music and the words come. The rhythm as familiar as breathing. The chords sure and full of beauty. Lucien makes the solfege, spells it out by hand so that we see it and hear it inside at the same time. That is how it works. Doh Me Lah.

  What happens in the time of dischord? the music asks.

  And we sing the right response:

  ‘In the time of dischord, sound is corrupt.

  Each one wants the melody;

  No one knows their part.’

  Onestory tells it like it’s always still happening. Always here and always telling the tune. Every piece of it just a strand of the bigger melody. But that’s taught too: The part is the whole, and the whole is the part. The way I think of it, Onestory is a circle that connects up the end to the beginning. No before and no after. Start at one point and sooner or later you’ll meet yourself coming up the other side.

  ‘In the time of dischord, there is no score.

  Music without meaning

  Knocking at the door.’

  How does sound become corrupt? the Carillon asks.

  ‘In the time of dischord, worship only words.

  Greedy is the lingua.

  Greedy are the swords.

  ‘In the time of dischord, worship only talk.

  Devil in the music.

  Put the sound to work.’

  What happens in the cities? the Carillon asks.

  ‘Sound becomes the weapon, sound becomes the gall,

  Sound becomes the screaming,

  All the cities fall.’

  The answer is harsh and punishing. At the height of dischord, at Allbreaking, sound became a weapon. In the city, glass shivered out of context, fractured white and peeled away from windows. The buildings rumbled and fell. The mettle was bent and twisted out of tune. The water in the river stood in a single wave that never toppled. What happened to the people? The people were blinded and deafened. The people died. The bridge between Bankside and Paul’s shook and stirred, or so they say. The people ran but never fast enough. After Allbreaking, only the pure of heart and hearing were left. They dwelled in the cities. They waited for order; they waited for a new harmony.

  The words are simple, because words are not to be trusted. Music holds the meaning now. No one is unaccounted for. Even us, plundering the last of the Lady from the under.

  ‘Mettle in the river, out of breaking’s harm.

  Calm and consolation.

  Bright and balm.’

  The notes come off my tongue as they always do. Repeat it forte, over and over and over, until it’s locked in a place deeper than memory. A great calm enters with it. The ragged worry of the morning’s waking, the blur and the striving, they all drop away.

  ‘Out of dischord’s ashes, harmony will rise.

  Order of the Carillon.

  Music of the skies.’

  I don’t know if it’s just me that does it, but sometimes I try to see Onestory as a line that starts in one place and moves to another. I can’t, though. I never can. It’s blasphony to try, I think. Instead, it moves round its circle and through its changes, and each moment is always happening – the glass floating, or the bridge stirring, the people running.

  Dischord lives with us, even in the harmony of the Order. You can see the fallen buildings of Allbreaking if you look to the other side of the river. The bridge between Bankside and Paul’s shakes and stirs. The people run but never fast enough. There is no bridge between Bankside and Paul’s now, but in the streets and markets, the kids sing the old forecast, like it is still taking place, like it is always taking place. London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down, my fair Lady.

  At Prime we get dressed for the under. Wool longjohns first, jeans over that. On our feet, another layer of wool to wick the water and keep warm. I put poly overshoes on over this, then gaiters. Brennan binds stickwrap round his feet, then gaiters. Says it keeps the water out better, though I have my doubts.

  We pack matches, canteens of fresh water, a stack of oatcakes in some greased paper, some dried strips of rabbit meat.

  It’s a lean line of us that emerges from the storehouse. All dressed the same, our faces pale as dawn. Quiet out on the race. The flat tables of cracked concrete stretch right down to the wrecks of the two cranes that guard the way in. The water runs in a narrow inlet right along, dividing our side of the dock from the city almost like an island. The mettle struts of what must have been a bridge once, wrongly tuned and bent out of shape.

  The sky is white and still. We walk past the old twisted cranes and from there, speeding now, pushing a bit, we take the Liver Street steps three at a time.

  I breathe the old tea smell of the river and see the familiar shapes of the strandpickers, who walk like storks on straight legs with their backs hunched and their divining forks twitching. They’re like blind people, led by a rumour of the Lady’s whisper and rare generosity – the hint of a fragment left in thamesmud.

  Onestory doesn’t tell you much about the Pale Lady.

  When the weapon of dischord was destroyed – and most say that happened in the scar, out past Batter Sea – what they found in the remnants was palladium, the Pale Lady. The Lady was driven by the blast far and wide, and then she settled down, easy as you like, into the river. It’s there that we prospect her. Because palladium goes to make the Carillon. Hundred per cent of her. Superfine. Out of dischord’s ashes, harmony will rise.

  What Onestory doesn’t tell you is that, in the time of dischord, they used the Lady for other things too. Where she’s less pure, she definitely got around. You can find small dabs of her in secretboards, and in lots of small, silent electricks. Fleet, one of the pacts to our west, have the pick of the old car graveyards, and though they don’t have any hope of securing the pure, there’s a lot of her hiding in the piping there. That kind of prospecting is messy, of course. You need aqua regia, and patience.

  The easiest way to imagine the Carillon is as pipes. The Order each carry their own small pipe, or flute rather, which has the meaning one part of the whole. And in the Citadel, the heart is the Carillon, which is all the many pipes put together, and is what is called an organ, which is just another word for heart.

  My name is Simon, I think. I live in the storehouse on Dog Isle, in the city of London. I am a member of Five Rover pact. We run in the under, and in the un
der we search for fragments of the Lady. We sound Onestory. We trade in the markets of London. We go silent for Chimes at Matins and Vespers.

  In the Under

  The bare edges of the morning are only just beginning to show as we enter through the stormwater drain near Five Rover. The mouth of the tunnel is wide and black. There are small ferns round it and moss like green velvet on the rocks beneath where water spills onto them. Lucien in first, then Clare, then me and Brennan and Abel last.

  For the first four beats there’s still light with us. Then dark closes in. At first I don’t like its hands on me and I fight. Then I forget to fight, and the dark comes closer, gets friendly.

  The tunnel widens into a small room. Our ears sharpen. Lento I can hear the amphitheatre and its shape. The air is cool and still and there’s a shiver to it – the wind moving through the tunnels and the echo from old mettle. I can hear the four main tunnelmouths. I can hear where they give onto the tracks of mettle rails, or the worming wet casings of the sewers and stormwater drains. Lucien hums and we move round so that he’s in the centre. Then Lucien listens for the Lady.

  We all hear her in our own way. For me, the Lady’s voice is like a current of silence, far off. Not sure where the picture comes from, but often I think of it like mudflats at the very end of a grey day, when the water lies at the far edge of the sky. The line of silver, that’s the Lady. So thin you can’t quite make her out, but still you know she’s there from the shining.

  But Lucien hears where she lies and where we will run to find her. This is what we wait for. I do not understand it. His mind running far, far ahead, tuned to her smallest shifts and scatters. Lucien hums a low note again. It’s the tonic, the home key. We sing it back to him as a chord, first major, then minor. Our hearing’s keener now and our singing sets up a low thrum in the amphitheatre that dies lento.