The Chimes Page 4

  First, as always, he sings the haunted silvery tune that is the Lady’s song. To remind us of why we’re down here, what we’re searching for. The silver flashes for me as he sings it, almost as if it could light up the dark. Then he sings our bearings in his reeded voice. He starts with the melody of where we are, this dark room under the city, and from there his voice moves through several keys until he sings the exact shape of the river, the part that is our territory. This is for his benefit, not ours. Lucien is the only one of us who can hold the whole map in his head at once. After he has his bearings, he sings us the tune of where we will run, and where we will find the Lady.

  Standing still in the darkness, I follow Lucien’s melody as far as I can as he sings. Standing still with my imagination running onward. To get to the curve of tune that tells of the Limehouse Caisson, he has moved back round to the fourth chord, setting that as the tonic, by gesturing across the circle to the wistful pulling tone of the flattened seventh. He sings the banks of the Thames from Wapping to Mill Wall. My body moves with it so I feel the weight of each chord in the muscle. How to explain? The tonic steady, stable like standing upright on solid ground looking forward, that’s your north. The fifth chord is that moment just on the edge of a new balance, one foot and one arm aloft, almost ready to swing round and upward to the new scale. North to east. And with each modulation, so on. I listen hard, feel the shifts in my body and in our planned direction, feel the melody swing me, modulate. He sketches our direction onward and outward in the pattern of notes and cadences we will follow under the river.

  After a while my memory falters and I’m back to standing where I was all along, in the main amphitheatre with the network of tunnels spreading out their mystery around. Listening blind for the tune that will be our thread through the dark.

  At last the melody comes to its end and we stand and smell the tunnel’s cool breath, waiting for the sounding to settle in our minds. Then the run begins.

  The way is hard at first because the tunnel is narrow and low. I run with Clare. Our hearing fits well. She has a good recall for rhythm, which means she can keep the distances in mind. We’re in water halfway up our shins, and there’s the shock of the cold as it makes its way through my overshoes. Then it warms and the warmth is trapped in the layer of wool and leather and we settle into a good half-jog.

  The tunnel is as Lucien sung it, and the tune keeps us following straight for a good while until the first cadence comes upon us, and we follow the tune he gave us sharp west. There are no steps upward to the mouth of the new tunnel, and I have to pull myself up first and then turn to give Clare an arm up. This tunnel is wide and dry with a bricky, sandy smell. We take the twists and turns that the tune tells us, and before long we are running straight again. And then we’re just waiting for the first tunnel that will lead us toward the fourth chord.

  We’re closer to the surface and every few beats there’s a small crack of light above us. Not sunlight, but a softer, grainier darkness. We’re running now, and past a knot of openings to the east Clare starts counting out the beats that give us the exact distance: 8, 2, 3, 4 . . . 7, 2, 3, 4 . . . 6, 2, 3, 4 . . . and so on, hearing the tune underneath. And right on time the next cadence appears, as Lucien sang it, and I see the right-hand tunnel that will lead us northeast, right onto the spot that Lucien sounded. Clare is a few paces ahead and gestures to me as I join her, so I drop to a walk and stand close. We both wait for our hearts to stop thudding so we can listen and see if we’ve dropped down on the right tunnel.

  Ragged breath in the still, close air, and the scritching sound of the feet of small creatures, mice or rats, scurrying in the sandy tunnel. I stand and wait. My breath slows. Then a long silver blink, a pale ellipsis of silence. Husssh, it whispers, like a pulled-back tide. I feel my thumbs prick and I can hear Clare’s slow smile in the darkness. I imagine the sharp white of her teeth. ‘It’s clean, and close,’ she whispers. And I nod. She speaks from a distance, though. Like her mind is clouded with some worry.

  We can hear her now, but it’s needful to keep the tune still. Follow the Lady and lose the tune, and though you’ll have her, she’ll not show you the way back. They say there are pactrunners who have died down here, lost forever in the tunnels.

  I lead now, and the Lady’s call gets stronger. The tunnel narrows again and curves downward. It rejoins the floodwash of another drain. There is a grille to the outside that drops stripes of early morning light onto the small rush of waters.

  I hold my breath and go to a crouch and use both hands to sluice through the debris at the grate below. Leaves and old stickwrap bags, wads of old wet papermoney. Then I lift my hands and hold them out and Clare’s breath makes a small, wondering ‘Ha!’ in the silence. On my palm is a nugget of Pale. About three ounces, and shined with soapy, idle gleam in the thin light, as beautiful as anything I’ve ever seen. It pulses with silence. With a brisk few steps Clare’s next to me and we look at it closer and I give her shoulder a squeeze, in gratitude for her hearing and the glow of her triumph. I slip the Lady into my back jeans pocket and grin.

  ‘Not bad for a morning’s work,’ I say.

  Following our path backward is harder. You need to remember the tune and turn it inside out. But by that time we’ve been down long enough that my ears have slowed and sharpened and I can hear some way ahead. The cooling shift of air around a tunnelmouth, the echoes bouncing clipped and clean in concrete. I hear something else too.

  Behind me, Clare’s breathing has a halted rhythm. Pent up, then every few minutes an irritated burst of breath. I slow, let her set the rhythm and judge what distances she needs. Running with Clare is all quick conflagration and offence. Keeping away from her temper is like balancing on a wire.

  Sure enough, after a while her mood flares. She lights her words with it and flicks them at me.

  ‘What are you and Lucien doing?’

  I almost slip on one of the pipes underfoot. I had expected some imagined slight. A courtesy not supplied, some overstep or understatement.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘At night,’ she says, presto. ‘I hear voices.’

  ‘What do you mean, voices? Saying what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just voices. Someone asking questions, like downsounding. Singing.’

  ‘When? Was it just the once?’ I have a sliding feeling. A feeling of blur. Our jog is lento now, half bent under mettle girders. There’s water to our shins and the current tugs against us.

  ‘You tell me.’

  Grey light through a grating to the street above. A noise that must be the blood in my ears. I force myself to hear the inverted tune, sound it through. I have no idea what she is talking about. We must be nearing the amphitheatre now. Two phrases or so off. Two tunnel changes. Soon we will rejoin the others and be folded back into the quiet hum of the successful run and the rest of the daily rhythm.

  ‘He asked about your memories,’ she says. ‘Why?’

  And that is when I stop. We don’t speak of memories. Remembering is done solo. Each of us keeps them. But glimpse a box or bag in someone’s quarters with that guarded look and you look askance so as not to see. There is a problem with these questions. And not just with the questions, but with Clare asking them. Clare keeping something that I have forgotten at just a day’s distance.

  ‘How did you remember?’

  ‘You mean, how did I remember when you didn’t?’ I hear her shrug. ‘I might not keep them close like you, but I’ve my own ways of remembering. Anyway, sometimes stuff just comes up from nowhere, doesn’t it? What’s the point spending all that time putting your memory into objects? You can’t get something back if it doesn’t want to come.’

  She is right. It happens to me too, the sudden bubble that pops on the surface and subito there’s a clue to what’s hidden that you don’t know. It’ll come up in its own time or not at all.

  ‘What’s so special about your memories, then?’ Clare asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ I sa
y. But there is another part of me that stands separate and watching. A part that says maybe there is something special about my memories. And a tugging feeling. Something I am meant to do.

  After the run is over, Lucien leaves with a curt salute and quickstep down a side alley, off to his own blind business. Abel back to the storehouse to practise. Clare splashes down to the strand. As she goes, she swings the long mettle bar she uses for mudlarking. Iron for raking the river.

  I follow her, walking a few steps to her side. Every few moments she throws a look at me that flicks out sharp, then back. I keep my own counsel and my gaze fixed ahead.

  After a while she stops. Pulls her gingerish hair back and knots it behind her head. So tight it makes her cheekbones more than ever like knives. She stands widelegged and gouges a narrow gulley into the mud’s surface. I site a spot nearby and dig also. Something has opened inside me like hunger, but not for what’s hid in the rivermud.

  We dig in silence. When she discards the spot and moves off, I follow.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I ask.

  ‘Nothing. What do you care?’

  There’s not much to say to that. Lucien in my quarters, I think. Downsounding. Singing. And the voice that was in my head on waking, familiar and strange at once. A blankfaced, emptyhanded question. One with no answer that I can supply. The arrival in London, it asks, what was it like?

  ‘Tell me what he wanted.’ She’s facing square to me but I shake my head that I do not know. I think.

  ‘Clare,’ I say subito, ‘do you remember when you joined the pact?’

  She goes tacet; then she takes a few strides and pushes the tyre iron down. She levers it back and forth to clear a space, then pulls it out and looks down at the rush of water that has filled the hole. She doesn’t turn round.

  ‘What do you mean, joined?’ she says.

  A feeling of blankness, like the moment before the run starts. Eyeblind, ears grasping at imagined sounds. A dark room that could stretch forever or end in a wall two steps beyond your face.

  ‘I mean, how did you come to be here? On the river. In Five Rover. How did you find the pact?’

  I hear the tension in her. She bends and pushes her hands into the brief opening she’s forced; then with her two palms cupped she pulls something out, covered in muck.

  ‘I’ve always been here,’ she says.

  I don’t know what to say to her dead certainty. ‘But you had parents,’ I start. The word is unfamiliar in my mouth. Ignoring everything that says not to ask. ‘Do you remember them?’

  Clare narrows her eyes, curls lip back from teeth. She is holding herself tight in all her muscles from neck to feet. ‘What’s your major problem, Simon?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You want to see my memories? Like Lucien wants yours?’

  I shake my head before she’s even finished the question. ‘No.’

  She walks toward me until she is standing close and the mud from her hands drips down my jeans. Her face is in mine, blood flushing her thin skin. The look on it is something not far from contempt.

  ‘It sounds to me like you do.’

  I step back. ‘No,’ I say. The flinch is deep in bodymemory.

  ‘You’ve seen them already anyway.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. You’ve seen them. You just didn’t know what they were.’

  I step off, kick the sand. I’m sick to my stomach with the whole conversation, which seems to have spread into places I don’t have any knowledge of.

  What Clare does next is roll up the long sleeve of her T-shirt. She rolls it high up, with a look on her face of challenge. Mud from her fingers is left in streaks. Her sleeve is tight, but she gets it rolled almost to the shoulder, so I can see her whole forearm and from the elbow up past the biceps.

  I look at her arm, tacet.

  It is covered in scars. They are too clear, too straight, too regular to be accident or injury. She has done them herself.

  I have to walk away for a bit and it is a while before I can come back. She stands there until I do, not moving. Her arms at her side and her hands dripping mud.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  Clare won’t look at me.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why do you do what you do? I do it because I hate the day coming again and again and never changing and nothing to hold on to. Because I hate waking into it with nothing there. You remember better than me. But this way I can measure something at least. Do you know what it means?’

  I don’t answer. I’m still livid with her.

  She looks at me, testing. ‘It’s time,’ she says, with a sort of satisfaction. She points to a raised cut, hard with pink scar tissue. ‘This is about an eightnoch. I know that it’s recent because it still hurts.’ She points to a pale, spidery healed scar on her forearm. ‘This one is older. I don’t remember doing it, but at least I know I did it, and I can see them changing. Once that one heals, I’ll start another.’

  The outline of her face is keen against the sky. She stares me down. I’m still angry, but what is my anger worth? And what does it change?

  Who am I to question her need for something sharp and sure to keep on her own body? At least she holds them with her. At least they’ll never be consigned to thamesmuck and dug up by a stranger. I put my arm across Clare’s shoulders and hold her as we stand there on the strand.

  ‘Shit,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. I have to check the snares.’

  ‘Did Lucien give you the tune?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Clare has a strange look on her face then. As if she is just meeting me for the first time. As if none of the conversation we’ve just had has happened. I feel a shiver down my own arms, though I’m not cold. How long does memory last? says the voice in my head.

  ‘What?’ I ask out loud.

  ‘Nothing. Off you go. You’ll have to run presto if you want to make it back to the river by Chimes.’

  I leave Clare on the strand, follow the tune along the north road that goes all the way from the river with Covent Garden market to my west, up past the hulk of Euston and Pancras, toward Fleet territory. The crowds thin past Pancras and the air is colder there, like it’s been left behind from a darker season. Clare cutting a path through time on her own skin, I think. I take two rabbits from the snare in the old Battle Bridge crosshouse and a squirrel from the estate gardens opposite. The buildings are empty, with sightless windows looking down.

  I should go back now, but I don’t. I sit on a bench that still has a few of its wooden slats. Lucien in my quarters at night. Downsounding memories. The sound in my head of a note struck. A chime or echo. Sometimes things come up from nowhere, I think. A bubble just pops on the surface. Doesn’t mean it’s true memory. What Clare heard and what Clare thinks she heard are two things far apart. But I don’t believe what I tell myself.

  I sit on the bench and I try to go inside my head. I think about waking at Matins and that is easy. But when I try to trace my way back from there to yesternoch, my mind shies from the before of it. I force it anyway. Yesternoch I woke. I sounded Onestory. We ran in the under. We checked the snares. Then in the night, like every night, I chose an objectmemory from my bag and I remembered. I entered the memory and I lived inside it for a little. Then after that I slept.

  I try hard to think what memory it might have been. I breathe in the green smell of the tangled weeds, and my hands move over the wood of the broken bench, and after a while the voice comes in my head again. The arrival in London, it asks, what was it like?

  That is all. Just an echo like the thrum in the air after a note has ended. Try as I like, all else is left behind on the banks of waking.

  What is it that tells you to make a memory? I can’t say. Something that sits raised and raw against the skin of the day. Something that presses at you. And I see that even if Clare remembered false, I have to keep it. I start by looking around for an object that could ho
ld the memory. Something with rough edges of its own to give a grip for the picture. But I can’t find anything that feels right.

  When the answer comes, I try to ignore it. I push it away off into the shadows of the garden. But because it’s the right answer, it skirts round and comes back unbidden. What I am looking for is a thing not subject to the tides of whim and chance. A thing that I’ll keep whether I like it or not.

  I take my knife from its strap at my ankle. Then I stand up, stamp my feet and roll my sleeve as she did. I press the blade into the fleshy part at the top of my arm.

  There is numbness first. Blood pools up lento through the cut skin as I watch. An airy rushing in my head. Then pain at last and its sharpness somehow a relief. I push the knife in further. I think hard as I can until I make a picture. The picture is the two of us. Clare kneeled in thamesmud, her wet hands raised toward me in a question. I put the thought of Lucien in there too. A ghosted pale figure between us. Half there, half not, like forgetting. What’s so special about your memories, then? asks Clare’s voice.

  And the memory is made and finished and it’s done for my own sake, as, if you’re honest, you have to admit all things are done in the end.

  Yet isn’t it also true that I do it for her? For Clare born to parents who don’t exist and who’s lived on the river maybe forever or maybe for a twelvenoch, it makes no odds which. It’s for Clare who never joined the pact but has been with it always. And who’s angry at the world but also at me for some reason I don’t know. Some forgotten betrayal. Or maybe some betrayal yet to come.

  Parly Hill

  I bind a strip of cloth from my shirt round my arm. I walk and I think and the pain comes and goes like mist. I keep to the narrow streets. People step out of my way as they walk home to their fam­­ilies. When I finally come clear, I see from the sky that it’s close to Vespers and that I won’t be able to make it back for Chimes. There is a hitch in my stomach for the river and the smell of it, an urge to be back there next to the moving water. But not much I can do.