The Chimes Read online

  I’m in Fleet territory, near the heath. There’s no danger from the rival pact as long as I’m not prospecting or down in any of the car graveyards. The city’s up for grabs, really. It’s only river we fight for, but I move presto anyway.

  Into the heath from the bottom end, past a crumbled brownbrick building with letters of old code like a badge on its brow. Three letters only: one like the tail of a crochet. Then D, which is part of the scale. Then a round one like a breve. Or like a full moon, but empty. I D O, it says. Inside the smashed walls is a huge basin filled with rubble and tile.

  I follow the old path up to the flat. It’s half hidden by a tangle of bushes, and the thorns and branches catch my clothes as I go. A sharp smell of new buds and unwashed bodies and at last I push through to the flat expanse of trodden grass that rises up in a slow slope to Parly Hill.

  It is covered with memorylost, ragged and threadbare, thin as sticks. Eyes either empty or fevered. They wander aimless around the green, or they sit leaned against the fat-girthed trees that line the path. Bivouacs of blue tarp, mantles of grey wool. Rubbish of lives scattered.

  I skirt the sloped field and pass the flat red track that circles endlessly under its busted lights. As I walk, I sign solfege for the directions I’ll need to follow to get back to Dog Isle. I think about memory and what it is. Keep your memories close, people say. Say it to children as often as they can. Keep them schooled up in bodymemory from early on. Give them an instrument for their own. Get them prentissed. And make them mind their memories.

  I think about what it means to keep them close. The trades­people who live and work in the city and trade in the market, they keep them on their bodies at all times, in pouches or pockets. The moneyed guilds, instrument makers and such, have elaborate bandoliers, belts with many pockets. The strandpickers port theirs in stickwrap, rather than linen or leather. Even Harry who reads the weather, whose house changes with the tide and whose head is loose as muttering, still keeps his wrapped in whatever he can find, and pushes them in his old shopping trolley along the strand or the embankment.

  But for all that everyone keeps them and coddles them, I tend to think most adults wouldn’t know their own memories from anybody else’s. Something in their eyes and how they greet you in the market. At a certain point in your life, it’s like you have to choose what to keep.

  ‘Hey!’ A low whisper, and I jump. Behind me, in the eave of a half-standing brownbrick wall, a shadow leans out. Then it peels itself away from the wall and walks out.

  It’s a young boy. His brown eyes fixed on me like those of a keen dog. He’s slight and wiry, his red hair dark with dust. And it’s clear by his bright eyes as well as by his age that his thoughts are still his own.

  ‘What do you want?’ I ask, too loud. My heart is beating presto.

  ‘You did hand signals,’ he says.

  Back in the darkness is another shape. Someone lying down, asleep.

  The boy walks closer.

  ‘I never learnt it. Does it help?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Does it let you keep things longer?’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘The pictures in your head. Of what happens to you.’

  I wonder how long he has been here. I don’t remember a time I didn’t know solfege. It’s taught to everyone. Soon as you get your instrument, so it’s deep as breathing.

  ‘It helps you remember music,’ I say. He looks confused. ‘Look, it’s easy.’ I sketch a scale in the air. ‘Each step has its own sign.’

  He wrinkles his brow and stares at me. He doesn’t have a clue what I’m talking about.

  I shake my head and talk lento. ‘First is Doh. You know that one.’ I clench my hand in front of me like a rock. To my surprise, the words of instruction are just under the surface. ‘That’s the firm note, the tonic. Next is Ray, the rising note, so your hand points up. Like a sunray.’ I show him. ‘Then Me is steady, so pretend you’re calming something.’ I reach out to pat an imagined dog. ‘Fah is the desolate tone.’ I point downward. ‘Then Soh is bright. Open. Like, um . . . like a handshake.’ I reach out to shake his hand and he draws back. I keep going, hardly knowing what for. ‘Lah weeps – hear it?’ I show him my wrist slumped as if in despair. ‘Then Te.’ A pointed index to the sky. ‘Piercing. Like Chimes. Then you’re up the octave and back at Doh.’ I look at him, feeling somewhat foolish. It would take a long time to teach solfege so you could hear it and talk in it. More time than I have spare.

  ‘You use it to help you keep the way, to stop getting lost. Not to think of things that happened before.’ I hear the blasphony, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  He looks disappointed. ‘I don’t care much about keeping music. I just don’t want to end up like them.’ He looks at the dazed men and women wandering the grass.

  ‘What are you doing in this place?’ I ask.

  ‘We’ve got nowhere else to go. We came in from the south yesternoch so my father could get work, but he isn’t well. I’m looking after him.’

  His eyes have a sort of hunger. Something unfamiliar moves in me. What to tell him? The usual.

  ‘You should get work yourself, quick as possible. You’ve got to get work to keep memory.’

  He holds his hands out, flexes his fingers. ‘I know,’ he says.

  ‘Get a prentisship with a guild. What’s your father’s trade?’

  The dusty boy turns and looks back into the shadow of the buttress. ‘He was a weaver, but his hands shake now,’ he says. ‘I guess I could try for piecework. But I can’t become a prentiss as I can’t leave him. He wanders off.’

  I look again at the figure lying in the shelter along the wall. I hear a sound. It is the sound of legs and arms pulled in tight, again and again. It goes on and on until a heavy sigh tells that it is over. It is familiar. Something rises up that I cannot name. The boy moves to his knees and places a hand on the man.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he says to him. ‘It’s me. It’s Steppan.’ His voice drops to a cajoling whisper. ‘We’re in London . . . Yes, I’ve got them. It’s OK. Back to sleep now . . . Yes. Yes, I’ve got them.’

  He reaches to his father’s side and picks up their bag of shared memories. Keeping them close though he doesn’t have a word for them.

  I want to tell this boy to leave presto, as soon as he’s able, not to risk losing any knowledge he has in his hands for weaving. I want to tell him that bodymemory is more than just skill. It ties you to your self. And then a dark thought comes. I want to tell him to leave his father while he can. He’ll forget the pain of that soon enough, and at least he’ll still have something to hold to.

  The deep, low throbbing sounds of the early summons. Like someone clearing their throat before they talk. There are a few minutes before it starts. Most of the memorylost look around blankly and seem not to guess what is coming. But streams of people emerge from the hillpaths and from the houses that give onto the heath. Up the threadbeaten grass of Parly Hill they climb. The hill is rounded under the smoky grey sky, and the streams of people are like ants moving up to sweetness.

  ‘Are you coming?’ I ask Steppan. ‘You need to join the ensemble for Chimes,’ I say. ‘You can follow my solfege. It might help you learn.’

  The boy shrugs. ‘Can’t,’ he says. ‘My father might wake and not know where I am. He wanders off.’

  I leave the two of them and join one of the ant trails of people. When I reach the crown of the hill, it is full already, but I find a space out of arm’s reach of any of the other citizens. Mud shows through the grass like thinning hair on a bald head.

  Tingle of anticipation in my thumbs and in my own skull. Smell of pepper. Then a run of bright notes pierces through the white smoked sky. It’s so loud it pitches into us, through all heads. And every man, woman, child or prentiss comes still and bright-eyed and rings clear to their own tone like a mettle tuning fork struck sharp and clean and held up to the heavens for all to hear.

  Burberry


  In the under, there is togetherness. We are linked by cooee and by the sightlines of the tunnels and by the magnetic shadow of the Lady. It is now, now, after practice in my quarters when the black rushes in like panic. It washes through the storehouse and I imagine Clare and Abel and Brennan and Lucien floating silent in the night, cocooned in their own hammocks, suspended in the black. I can’t feel where my body begins and ends. Do I still have legs? Arms? Fingers? What if I forgot them?

  The pain in my arm pulses in a rhythm that must be my heart. Breathe into it, hum a snatch of melody underbreath. I ran the empty streets back to Dog Isle after Chimes, followed the tune turned inside out though I hardly needed it – the river is the tonic of all tunes and my body swings back to it like the needle of a compass. I entered the storehouse. Down at the end, Abel had the viol low on his collarbone and his head cocked to one side. Lucien was teaching him a tune. The look on Abel’s face all eager and young – his hair standing up from his head and his bow arm too high above the wrist as always.

  It gets darker and darker. At last all is black apart from the small circle of my candle. I know the panic as well as I know my breath. Fear that the dark will take me whole and swallow me without a blink. Fear it’ll leave nothing, not even my name. There’s another urge also. It tugs against that need for remembering and says, Let go, open up to the dark, let the clean order of Chimes take you.

  When I came through the door, I was still half winded from the run and they turned for a moment but hardly saw me, their faces all candlelit and calm. The tune they were playing was sad. After a while Abel had it by heart and they played the thing right through so that Lucien’s voice was free to weave around and I listened in spite of myself. I listened for a while and the melody took me to a place I didn’t know, somewhere with pale fluted ceilings and golden light. Now in my quarters, the thought comes that Lucien was singing for my ears especially. That there was some message in the tune for me. I know this to be folly. I take the bag in my hands.

  In the depths of the roughcloth, none of the shapes has any meaning. They’re just things I reach for like a strandpicker in thamesmuck. When my hand takes hold of the right one, a picture will flash up true as a bright note, clear as an unmudded stream. I don’t know how it works. Maybe the object comes first; then the memory follows. Or maybe I choose the memory and my hand finds the right object to match. I do one each night only. And I can’t take it with me into the morning.

  I search through. I grip thick cloth, a heavy garment. The unravelled edge of a leather buckle. Up into the flickering light it comes. An old burberry. The colour of a dirty parcel. Enormous and the lining frayed and sleeves dipped deep in mud. A voice comes in my head. The arrival in London, it says, what was it like?

  A rushing in my ears then, a lightening. The sounds of the river fade and the dark drives upward and I feel myself swing suspended up and out and away from the storehouse and down . . .

  I am standing alone on a roadside in the rain.

  Everywhere is mud. My whole body is heavy with sleep and with sadness. I look down. On my feet are farmshoes of rope and roughcloth, and they are covered with thick crusts of mud. A roughcloth bag bumps at my leg.

  The fields around me are lines of grey along the horizon as I wait. I have been standing forever when a horse and cart at last come to a stop and the horse takes its brief breather to snort and fill the air with steam.

  The rain is so heavy the horse’s coat is almost black, the fea­­thers round his feet strung out in whips of mud. The carter sitting in the back there gestures ‘get up’ and I get up into the cart presto. When I’m sat in the back midst the wool bales, the carter passes me an old burberry.

  ‘Thank you,’ I sign. He shrugs and flicks the reins. He shrugs once and then two times more, not out of choice. The look of his muscles dancing makes me sick to my stomach. Because I know that clutch somehow, in my own body. An echo of hands that are gripping and fighting. Trying to hold on.

  The road stretches ahead of us and there is a lesson in it, if I was in the mood to learn. It holds no pressed shape, whether that’s of raindrop or footfall or hoofprint. The road is a river, always the same and always changing and I must go ahead on it—

  I come into the flickering light of the storehouse with an abrupt break. Something has pulled me out – a sound, or the new silence after a sound has been cut off. I train my ears like we do in the under. Bare calls from the river, half human, half animal. The sounds of a body turning against a blanket in sleep.

  ‘Who’s there?’ I whisper to the silence.

  There is no reply.

  I get up and hold the candle to cast light into the corners of my quarters, but there is nothing except the tail of a wind that lifts the edge of the roughcloth curtain. And a feeling that is empty and hard. A question that sounds in my mind.

  Arrival, I think, and am afraid. There is no before, no after, says Onestory. Which makes ‘arrival’ blasphony. Yet my mind snags and catches on the word like it’s a splinter.

  Matins

  Darkness and silence. Somewhere in the deep black above me a blurred light. It reaches its fingers down and I swim up toward it. Then from underneath a tug at my legs. Something clings, tries to pull me back. Panic rushes in like water and I kick sharp. Kick hard until I am free and then push up presto to the surface, hungry for air, for light.

  And I am awake.

  Lie still and listen. Hardbitten half-echo of coldness. Foursquare solid walls to each side and the march of the wooden roof beams above, black with old oil. Creak of hammock as I sway. The light in the curtained room is grey and blurred, and down below is a river of sleep without the hardness of a yesterday to push off. But something has come up. Wrapped tight round my legs like wrack or weed brought to the surface. A dull brown garment, a coat, streaks of mud all over as if it’s been long buried and dug up. And there’s a sharp pain in my left arm.

  In the half-light I pull my arm round to see. There is a dark, watery map of dried blood across the top of the shirtsleeve. I lift the frayed shirt gently and unwrap the cotton wrapped below. Lento, easing it where the layers are stuck. The last piece of cloth has dried to the skin in a rusted badge and I grip the edge and jerk it up and the pain comes. The lips of the cut are puckered and dark. All around the wound is numb, and fresh blood oozes at the ragged edge. I press the dirty cloth back down on it and too quick, too close memory breaks into the rhythm of the day and a picture of Clare and me in the under . . .

  Clare down in the muck, wedging her tyre iron into the river’s belly and levering up an object without shape. Holding it gripped loose in the cage of her fingers. The words hanging between us, silver and dangerous. ‘Someone asking questions,’ she says, ‘like downsounding. Singing.’ And then, sharper than threat or puzzlement, the bite of her anger. The arrival in London, what was it like?

  I shake my head to clear it. Clare knelt in thamesmud, her wet hands raised toward me. Night is for remembering, I think. ‘Bodymemory trumps objectmemory,’ I say out loud. And bodymemory says, Join the others.

  There is no sound from beyond the curtain. Earlier than usual. I pull them aside noiseless as I can. Out in the storehouse, the door to the balcony is open. Through it, from the east, the light is just beginning. The clouds all covered in red, and the red covering the river. With the tight throb of my arm and the strangeness of the morning, I hunker at the end of the storehouse, back to the wall.

  To my side, on an old plank propped on two blocks of concrete, are the things Clare has mudlarked from the river. Each day in the mud of the strand her hands go down and the objects come up, obedient as dogs to the whistle. She mudlarks them; she cleans them; then she lays them out on this shelf. I never give a least thought to these things, but today as I crouch in the cold, I look.

  At one end is a red tin with old code and a picture of a strange white-haired man on it, coughing into a handkerchief. Then what must be a child’s toy, a creature with a face neither dog nor cat, knitted in b
rown wool with arms and legs hanging loose at the joints.

  Next an empty cloth bag with a picture of a tooth broidered into it, stitches so cleverly done that they set my own teeth aching. Then a set of silverish rounds like thin wheels smelted from mettle with some forgotten skill. In spokes like knives or rays of the sun. Old code on them. HYUNDAI. VAUXHALL. RENAULT.

  A small hunting knife on a leather cord, a near match for the one I keep at my ankle. A handful of buttons – para, horn, mettle.

  What are they? And whose? A long, lazy mettle spring that arcs over itself. A small woodframed picture of a woman and a tiny baby with secrets in their eyes and gold circles atop their heads. I step closer. Mother and child. Clare and I standing on the strand. But you had parents, says a voice that sounds like mine. Do you remember them?

  I stand and I look at the oddments. They are fished from the river and spread out any which way like a market stall and I wonder what would happen if I were to take them in hand. What if I shifted them out of their still places and into different ones? What if I put them in a line that started in one place and moved to another?

  I reach out toward the woodframed portrait as if to touch it and there is a gasping thump deep in my gut where the air should be. I bend double, half retching. Breathe lento and it passes and after a while I straighten. All that’s left behind is a shameful feeling deep in me. Like something I’ve swallowed down in secret so as to keep close, away from the light. The objects are flat again and without promise. Unlinked and unmeaning. Rubbish that should have stayed dead and buried.

  A noise behind me. A shiver at my back.

  ‘What are you doing, Simon?’

  For a second I wonder if Lucien has been listening to my very thoughts he is that still. I step away from the shelves.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Something interesting in Clare’s treasure?’ says Lucien.

  He must have been out on the balcony for water already. I look again through the gap and to the sky above the river, which is streaked red like burning.