The Chimes Read online

  I rub my palms together, listen to my breath. Try to find a still space in my head away from the pull of questions, but I can’t. I think about the three wrong notes that the last two days have sounded: the memory of Clare’s questions that throbs even now on my arm; the empty, silent field at Ropemakers; and the member’s message on the wall at Bow. Accidentals without meaning, or sign of some deeper shift or modulation I cannot read? And whose mistake is it, the awful jarred noise they make – mine, or someone else’s?

  I push my hands into the mouth of the bag. Edges, surfaces, fabrics. Roughcloth, wood, paper. Nothing speaks. I push through the silent memories until I touch the bottom of the bag and feel something hard and flat pushed inside the corner. I fish it up out of the canvas and into the candlelight. A flat, square piece of wood with unsanded edges and a smooth, cool surface, the size of my hand. There is a pencil drawing on paper stuck to one side and varnished over so thick it looks to be floating above the wood. The picture is a portrait of two people – a man and a woman – drawn in blunt pencil lines gone over and over so they are doubled and tripled in places. The many lines make it look like the two people in the portrait are moving. Vibrating. Shaking. And I go down . . .

  I am standing in front of a house with a red door. The house sits in the middle of a large garden, and there are fields behind that stretch into haze. I open the door and walk in.

  The hall corridor is filled with light that filters through corrugated parasheeting. I walk down the hallway and into the kitchen. My mother is kneading bread dough at the oak table. She pulls the dough flat with the base of her hands and then folds it over and turns it and stretches it again. She hums while she does it, and the low tune is one that I recognise. I know she has taught it to me, but what are the words that go with it? She sees me and she smiles.

  Then the light changes and I’m standing in front of the door to my parents’ room.

  All is still and I don’t want to go through the door, but I must. I enter into the smell of lavender and cut bulbs. My mother lying in the tall bed, her body under the white coverlet so small.

  I go and kneel beside the bed next to her and she tries to smile, but her body does not let her. It wants to stretch and grip and pull. Her neck is tight, and there are bars of muscle at her throat.

  Her eyes leave again. They go from mine up to the ceiling. Her whole body goes stiff. The shapes of her legs rise under the white coverlet, as if they are floating up in water. Her fingers spread and claw while I stand there and I cannot move. I watch the spasms go through her. Her chin pulls up to the ceiling and her forehead casts back toward the wall and I neither move nor speak. I sit by her side with my hand in hers, pushing against it, trying to straighten her fighting grip.

  ‘I’m sorry, Simon,’ she says. ‘It’s too late.’

  Then she says something. She says it through pale lips and I can’t hear, but I know that it is something about the song, the one she was singing earlier. Earlier in the day? No, earlier in the memory.

  ‘The ravens are flying, Netty,’ she says. Then she says the last word again to me. ‘Netty.’ And though I don’t know what that means, I understand the look in her eyes. It’s fear. Not for herself, but for me. I am looking at her and my heart is fading, and I know subito that I do not want to carry this fear with me. I want to pull my hand out of her harsh grip and run out into the fields. I am angry at the burden of her death, at the burden of a memory that her word is asking me to follow. I don’t know what the word means, but I know it holds a hard task. A risk.

  My mother struggles to raise herself on her elbows, to hold her head above the water of the illness. She wants to speak again, but her lips cannot do their work and against my body’s impulse I lean towards her to catch the last notes that fall outward into that silence—

  Something breaks in that is not part of it. A figure in the room where it shouldn’t be and where I am standing looking down at my mother’s bed. I push it away, but it comes again, insistent. The picture becomes smaller, breaks into pieces. Dust through corrugated parasheets. Bread dough stretched flat and turned a half-circle. The white-on-white pattern of a coverlet. My mother’s hands. A hand on my shoulder, shaking, and I am between memory and present for several heartbeats.

  The space I emerge into is spoiled and old – cold, flickering. I am sitting on the wooden floorboards of the storehouse. The flickering is the light of the candle, which has shrunk down to a pool of wax on its earthenware saucer, just the wick floating. I am holding a piece of wood in my hands. Shake my head and the air parts around it, chambered in wood, muffled in roughcloth.

  The light moves. A candle disturbed by air. A voice has crept back into the storehouse with me. It comes out of the dark with the voice the dark has given it.

  ‘Tell me, Simon,’ it says. ‘The arrival in London, what was it like?’

  I spin round. And he is here. Standing tall against the curtain so that it tightens my breath and pushes the blood down my arms. Lucien in my quarters. And subito I know that he has been standing watching a long while.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I hiss. I don’t want the others to hear. What I feel is a mix of anger and shame. Some other feeling I don’t recognise. Something like biting round my heart.

  ‘That is where we start.’

  And there’s a blur. Lucien’s voice in two places at once. What Clare remembered and what I now see.

  ‘You’ve been here before,’ I say.

  ‘We don’t have time for this, Simon.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I thought we had gone past it.’ His face is cold, with a starry glint.

  ‘The arrival in London is mud,’ he says. Before I can stop him, he steps past me, grabs the memory bag. He pulls open the drawstring and empties out the contents.

  My memories lying on the floor. Out in the open. The wrongness of it in my joints and bones. I shake my head like I can refuse it and I push Lucien to one side and go to my knees to start gathering back the objects.

  Not looking at them, but pictures come anyway, through my fingers. I grab open my bag presto, shove the memories in, feel them fall from me. Arms sweep across the floor like I’m trying to swim. Memories at the tips of my fingers.

  Then from the tangle of remaining things I don’t want to see Lucien pulls something. The burberry from this morning streaked with mud. He pushes it into my hands.

  ‘It’s yours, Simon,’ is what he says. ‘Why the hell don’t you claim it?’

  Before I can drop it into the bag, the picture comes into my head. Hard and clear. A wide highway of mud with rainholes drilled. A heavy sky. Fields like lines of grey along the horizon.

  Then memory comes at me and it is like being shoved under­water. Cold water in my lungs, breaking into my nose. Cold, dark water pushing behind my eyes as if from somewhere inside of me. My body is heavy because I am moving in the wrong element. The ground looks stable and solid. I should be down there, I think.

  I think vaguely, This is what it must be like for him, to be blind, to hear only.

  And in the moment before everything goes black, I see Lucien watching. His eyes are searching for something inside me I don’t know is there. They are pale and cold, but they are not without sympathy.

  Matins

  I wake. The pact wakes. We sound Onestory. I run in the under with Clare. A fight between strandpickers in the mud. A half-toll after None, down in the strand by Green Witch, two pickers working the same stretch. They are dressed in the same dark green roughcloth, their odd bounty of tin and token and old blue stickwrap bags tied and strapped to them every whichway. At Vespers comes Chimes and we hear it on the strand. In the storehouse, we practise round the cookstove.

  I wake. The pact wakes. We sound Onestory. I run in the under with Clare. We take five ounces, and then from the snares at Embankment Gardens I take two rabbits and a squirrel. The skin on my upper left arm itches like it has something pressing to say. There is smoke on the river after Vespers. Th
ick and sweet and heavy like incense. At Vespers comes Chimes and we hear it on the strand. I rid my mind of questions and wait for the circle of chords to take me.

  I wake. The pact wakes. We sound Onestory. I run in the under with Clare.

  We’re at the end of a run and on our way back with the Pale when I hear the cooee. Wistful and lonely sounding, a repeated falling minor third like the playground songs that children sing. My neck bristles for there’s nothing lost or lorn about those notes. Their meaning is scum in the tunnels: poliss. I turn to Clare and she hisses under her breath, her eyes wide and white in the lowlight. She has heard too. The whistle again closer already and then, poco a poco, I hear the footfalls that bring them.

  There are at least three running, by the sound of their far-off tread. I am frozen for a second. Run, or go tacet and wait? Cut stick, or hope like hell they’re moving down here for another reason? In the dark, I push through what pictures come thin and breathless for guidance. None of any other run-in with the poliss. It’s forbidden to hold the Lady except with intent to trade. The law says it and it leaves a hole to get in or out by wide open. There is nothing to stop the poliss breaking us here, pulling some easy Pale, selling it on.

  In the dark, the footfalls come again, nearer now, and there is no time to seek out reasons as the footsteps are coming in our direction. I pitch myself forward. Clare is behind me and we run headlong, tacet as we can though the walls ring loud in our flight. Behind us, the footfalls are heavy. I whisper the melody underbreath as I run. I do not want to be taken. My fear is not of a beating but of a dark box with no window far from the river and I search desperate for a crack in the tune, a hidden cranny to follow off the main wide tributaries. Something that they will not be privy to. There are three of them, and it is clear they know the tunnels almost as well as we do, and they are faster.

  We follow the path that we came on. I turn the melody inside out as we run. I hold to it even through the cold clamour of my heartbeat. After the second cadence we stop. For a while there is nothing in the tunnel but the ragged duet of our breath. I look for the white of Clare’s eyes.

  ‘Do you think we’ve lost them?’ I ask.

  Clare doesn’t reply; she is listening still. I turn my ear in the same direction and I hear what I do not wish to – the dull tread of boots. About the same distance off as before. Again I hear the low murmuring and for a moment I don’t understand. Why idle in the under if they could take us? And then I realise they are in no hurry. We are leading them to the entrance, our amphitheatre.

  I see then what I have to do.

  ‘Here,’ I say. I loose the Lady to her in a short lob. ‘You go tacet. Take the Pale. I’ll lead them off. I’ll meet you at the storehouse.’

  Clare nods mute and is off with silent footfall before I can speak again.

  I wait for five beats and then I pull the small whistle from round my neck. I put it to my lips and blow our comeallye, as high and taunting as I can make it. Strange to hear the tune, innermost and close as a name, skewed in the harsh, baiting echo. I fight the need to run. I wait two beats more past what I think I need to and then I move off. Presto, forte.

  Like some miracle, the path to take is picked out clear in my head, lit by panic. I pull them round in an intricate woven circle. Every few cadences I force myself to stop and send out the comeallye again. I push out in shallow darts from the circle to seem like I’m trying to shake them off.

  I pull them up and down, through all the main stormwater drains with their nice clear echoes, until I hear the shallow sound of running water. For a moment I forget my fear in the small glow of pride. I have kept my bearings. It is the sound of the culvert, the border of our territory with Earl’s Sluice. I pause for good measure; then I send out the comeallye for the last time, sharp and high so it will cut deep into the ears of the poliss who are following as well as into the tunnels of our rival pact. Then I wait.

  I wait for the sounds that I know are coming. Keep my eyes fixed hard on the flickering light of the culvert where it gives into the grey. A wild yell to my right and I breathe and I do not move. Bootfalls come closer on my other side as I stand stockstill, trying to hear into and through the deafening thud that’s inside me. Then clanging sticks to the ceiling, and a tall, barechested figure comes teeth bared down the tunnel with cohorts mad behind. Their faces in wide grimaces of joy to see a Five Rover solo on their legitimate run. Like I’ve given them a splendid gift. I wait, pray some rune I didn’t even know I knew. I hear the footfall to my left at the same moment, and just then the coshes and upswung arms and thick uniformed bodies round the tunnelcorner. And it’s like it’s all gone lento for a few beats almost peaceful and just at the moment they’re nearly on me I ready myself and bend my knees and push out, dive out, into the tunnelmouth of the culvert and the dark, cold rushing.

  Cold of water goes all through me. Sounds echo oddly behind and the current carries me down the sluice, so strong I can’t get my head up, and then I’m full in the Thames. The hard, dark water pushing at my back and I go with the tide that sweeps me down, half drowned, until I am spat back out on the muck of the strand, my chest heaving against any order of mine and a shivering cold so deep inside me I can barely stand.

  Black spots float in my vision. Some last energy bestowed by god knows what and I manage to pull myself up to the strand and half walk, half crawl over the narrow road and into the nearest park. Using silence and elbows, I get in close to the huddle of memorylost round a firelit mettle rubbish bin. I warm myself and wait there until the shivering has stopped and my clothes are damp only. And all the while my brain is trying to work. Poliss in the under is wrong. And there was something else too. Some other break from the daily rhythm over the last thrennoch. Through the grey of forgetting I try to chase it. Something wrong. Something to do with Lucien. Something to do with my memories. Some connection between them like a constellation of dischord, a burr round which the fumbled notes cluster.

  I do not know what to do. Though the pact will no doubt think me taken by the poliss, I am not ready to return to the storehouse. So I walk and I think and I try to understand.

  The leftover buildings that I pass are empty and blank-eyed. The floors left above hang empty, like cages. The arch of the bridge with the layers of faded posters. A looted ground-floor shop that still has the sign for a pothecary on the window. The wall of that building there with graffiti in a messy spray of faded red paint, last message from a person long gone. I’ve passed this all many times, I know, and I am also happening on it for the first time today.

  After a while I have walked as far as Tower Bridge.

  I sit then, in the shadow of the abutment, at the bottom of a set of steps so that my feet rest on rivermud. I put my head between my knees. Every few minutes I feel the thrust or shove of a stranger pushing past, home to their family, home to food and Vespers. I have to get back to the storehouse, but I cannot move.

  I take a fistful of thamesmud in my hands as I sit. Sieve it through my fingers until all that is left behind is a single riverstone, dry and gritted and without life. And it speaks to me, or tries to speak, sitting in my palm there like a token of something long forgotten. I raise my head and lean back and I look west to the enormous sprawling ruin. Behind the bridge, untouched and keeping its own memory of Allbreaking, blocks of pale stone lie where they have fallen. Vines all over the broken walls. Two pale towers still mostly whole rise up out of the rubble.

  Between the bent blue mettle of the bridge and the river. There, with its half-arch reflected like a mouth gulping at the river’s green water, a half-moon opening. Between river and city, between water and air. There are letters of white code painted across it that speak in letters I cannot read. ENTRY TO THE TRAITORS’ GATE, they say.

  And something rises up. Bubbles to the surface. A picture.

  I’m lying on my back. Pain in my temple and skull. Head in the water and light flickering through.

  Someone in ragged jeans stands o
ver me. A thickset boy of prentiss age with brown hair. Behind him, someone tall and lean with pale eyes and curled hair. And with the picture come the notes of a song, simple and clear. In the quiet times of power. I hear the notes unfold in front of me, and as they go past, I snatch them.

  And then it’s Chimes.

  I stride through the darkening streets past the tripropes and the gatehouse of rusted cranes, past the rest of them sitting in the storehouse with instruments held and their faces turned toward me tacet in shock and relief and I go straight to my quarters.

  Candle by snuffed candle, the dark comes. Sitting there with my back against the wall, I finger the riverstone I took on the strand. The arrival in London? I go to the shelf where I keep my memory bag. Next to it is a block of hardwood with a pencil sketch of two figures. Next to that is a bundled-up garment streaked in mud. I stand there and look at these two things I have left out in the shallows like a message for myself. I stand there and I finger the riverstone and I see myself flat on my back with my head in the water and I hear the song creeping by me on the waters.

  Oddments in thamesmud, these memories. Unlinked and unmeaning. And then I put them together in a line.

  The arrival in London? the voice asks. I sweep through the debris in my head. Do it like Harry’s hand does to clear shell and stone. Empty so that the pictures can rise. I see myself standing in mud on a long road. What road was it? What was I doing there? I was leaving the farm I had grown up on. Why? What happened to my parents?

  I feel the grip of my mother’s hand, shaking. I see her worsen with the shaking. I see her speak to me in the pause of the spasms.

  I see myself travelling to London alone. No, not alone. With a carter, on the back of a cart. He gives me his burberry and I go into the noisy streets. I was looking for someone, something, but I couldn’t find it. Then Chimes came and everything was stripped clean and quiet.