The Chimes

by Smaill, Anna

  ‘The pie, lover, the pie! All the darling birdies. Must let them out. Time to let them sing. You hungry, my love? Whistle up a cuppa, will you? Brown Betty’s behind you.’

  I twist round fast. There is nothing behind me but a tall ladder of shelves stacked with eggcups, toast racks, candleholders, plates. She comes up behind me, a dark shape in her cloak, and reaches down a large brown teapot covered in a wool cosy. Then she kneels in front of the stove, gathers her hands in folds of the cloak.

  ‘Tea, tea, tea,’ she says under her breath. ‘Tea for two and tea for memory. Leaves are in the lolly box, lovely.’

  On the shelf, there’s a tall red mettle tin with a picture on it. For a moment I am sure I have seen it before. The woman removes the green iron tureen from inside the cookstove. Then she takes the kettle hanging over the stove’s mouth. She puts the teapot and the tureen on a small table and gestures to the mettle tin again. In a dream, I reach and take it from the shelf. Bright red, beaten mettle. A strange old man in a black suit hacks into his cloth-covered fist. Where have I seen it? From a cupboard below she removes two plates, two forks and two cups, and puts them on the table.

  Then she turns and grabs me. She holds my arms down and brings her face right up into mine.

  ‘Let’s have a good look at you, my dearling.’ Her eyes close to mine, her lips creased in a grin. ‘My dearling, my darling, my lily-livered starling.’

  She smiles and then she whistles a tune into my face. The tune is our comeallye. I start back.

  ‘Scared, are you? Surprised, are you? Why should you be? Bells tolled to tell me you were coming. No knowing of mine. Memory’s my toll, not telling weather.’ She shakes her head. ‘Cloudy, though, very cloudy I’d say your outlook was. Don’t need much to telltale that.’

  I pull my arms out of her grip.

  ‘Do you know a woman named Netty? She told me to find you.’ Her word mess is getting into my ears. I shake my head.

  ‘Netty. Netty?’ She pauses as if to ponder. ‘No . . . Don’t know no Netty. Not a Netty in the pretty lot of them. Not a one in the net, you know. And you should knot a net to keep it. Keep it from slipping out, dear.’ She looks at me as if she has said something final, conclusive.

  Then she continues, ‘No Netty. But he hasn’t a worry, not he. A bird in the net’s worth two in the bush. Or in the moon,’ she says brightly, flinging a hand toward the window as if to release something clasped inside.

  Then she turns back. ‘Tea, that’s the thing. That’s the stuff to patch it.’ And she breaks into song again.

  ‘The fishers of Galilee,

  they never had enough tea.

  With a net and a line

  and a stitch in good time,

  there’d be more than enough for all three.’

  She looks at me as if expecting a response.

  ‘Yes?’ she asks.

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘Your fellow, your pretty one, waiting under the tree out there. Tea for him?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  No, I think. Let Lucien rest for a bit. Let him think we are moving ahead.

  ‘Right, then.’ She pours tea and opens the tureen and dishes what is in it onto the plates. ‘Drink up. Eat up,’ she says. ‘Remembering is hungry work, you know.’

  I hesitate, smell the pie, thinking of her rhyme about blackbirds. But under the crust is a gravy with mushrooms and potato. The sauce steams and the smell is savoury. I feel my mouth fill with water. I can’t remember the last time I ate.

  She watches me for a while; then she eats too. We drink tea without milk from the big teapot. After we have eaten, she gets up. She holds a hand out to me.

  ‘Now we’ve broken bread, you can’t go back, my dear. Only way out is through the belly of the whale.’ Her palm held out, wrinkled. Her nails long and clawed. I take her hand and let her lead me. I follow her through the kitchen to the cluttered hall.

  The room we enter is a maze. Boxes form corridors that stretch above my head. Cloths hang down and filter the moonlight that is falling from somewhere, a window high above us. Twists and turns of boxes and finally into a clearing. In the middle of the room, there is a space of cleared floor and on it a woven rug of many colours. A solid bookcase leans against the back wall behind. Ahead is a skeleton leaning slack against a mettle stand, his legs bent in a strangely casual way, from the hip. The skeleton wears a woman’s straw bonnet with faded red grosgrain ribbons and tuberoses made of starched silk. Above him, propped against a machine like a tiny klavier with codeletters instead of keys, is a boar’s head, the mouth open and eyes glazed in surprise. Next to that is an immense stoppered jar filled with glass beads of all sizes. I wonder how it survived Allbreaking.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ Mary says. ‘Or kneel. Knee to heel. Kneel to pray. Pray to heal. Have you ever seen anything so lovely?’ She gestures at the mess all around us. ‘No! Never!’ she answers for me. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

  I watch her move lightly around the room, darting, alighting, swooping from place to place. She ducks down corridors, returns, flits off again. As she goes, she touches objects. At first I think it is at random, a sort of crazed dance, but then I see there is intention in it. She moves across and reaches an arm to grope up to a piece of fabric that hangs down from the ceiling. Then back to a patchwork-covered cardboard box that sits next to me on the floor. She pirouettes over to the skeleton, bows at the waist, then reaches up to tip his flowery bonnet. Subito a picture flashes up of something I saw once; it must have been in Essex. An old memory, at our crosshouse hall. Exhibition Chimes and an organist brought in from the Citadel to play along on our hall organ. A small man in his white robes darting light like that, like a butterfly, changing the stops, tapping the bass out with his feet, the same look of rapt, joyful attention on his face.

  As she goes, her eyes flit and shift, open and close. Expressions enter and then leave. Joy, wonder, humour, affection, love, pride, contentment and a constant stream of patter . . .

  ‘Oh, the beautiful boy, yes, eyes only for him, a mouth like a knife and hair like sunset, ah, my darling. Come, unbutton here. Loosen your collar a bit, that’s it. Yes, of course I remember. Hopscotch and the daisies out. A fine time we had. Five under your feet and it’s springtime. And in the swim we were. In the Isis. You carried me home the whole way, soaked to the skin, never stopping for a breath . . .’

  She stops, turns like a spinning top until she’s standing still at last in front of me on the rug. She closes her eyes and her face glows with happiness and I can imagine her young.

  ‘Such love, my dear. Such capacity for love! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! But I forget – you can’t see it yet, can you? Not standing there like that, or sitting. Patience on a memorial.’

  I shake my head. I look around the room and all I can see is junk, debris. Rubbish. Then her face changes again. She looks tired, even older, if it were possible.

  ‘Oh, but I am glad you are here at last, ducky. I admit it’s getting too much for an old bird like Mary. The pretty ones. I love the pretty ones, but it’s the bad ones, the sad ones, the heavy ones. Too heavy for an old back. They need young shoulders. But we can’t pick and choose to suit ourselves.’ She walks slow, as if she is being forced, and I almost see her back bending, hunching further. She stands in front of a pile of old paintings in frames. On the top sits a small white leather shoe, a slipper.

  Her hand swoops and she clasps it, and as she does, her face crumples. Tears fold out of her eyes. Her mouth opens in a wide broken arc.

  ‘The pretty one,’ she calls. ‘Oh, but I loved her even though I didn’t know I would. There were curls there.’ She strokes her temple, the old white hair at the side of her head. ‘Curls, and they smelt of sunshine.’ The tears are running steady down her face. She holds the shoe under her breast. ‘Curls and a birthmark on her little left leg. And when you tickled her, she laughed and laughed. As if she was made for laughing.’

  She stops abruptly, puts t
he shoe down carefully in its place. She closes her eyes and breathes in silence. When she opens them, they are clear again.

  ‘And what would she be in music, do you think, my dear? A baby with curls like sunshine? A flute, a piccolo perhaps? If they cared for such a pursuit, that is? No. Chimes could not capture that. Where’s the basso profundo for a dead baby, darling? What’s the discant for the mess of loss?’

  The mess of loss, I think. Chaos. Disorder. Junk. And it brings home what I had known but somehow managed to ignore. Before I can think further, I am on my knees and retching. So many memories, so many lives. So much pain, so much forgetting. I want to vomit, but I cannot. I retch until my throat is raw and my head is throbbing.

  When I open my eyes again, Mary is kneeling next to me on the mat. She wipes my mouth with a corner of the cloak.

  ‘Who in the guild sent you?’ she asks. ‘I thought they were all gone. I’d almost given up hope that they’d find the next keeper.’

  And I understand what the whole performance has been. She thinks that I’ve come to replace her. She wants me to stay here with her, with all of the memories. I shake her off.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s not what I’m here for. Not to keep the mem­­ories. I need your help.’

  ‘Are you sure about that, my dear?’ Her voice wheedles and curls. ‘You’ve got the gift, don’t you? Who else is going to take these when I’m gone? They’ve left me alone here for too long.’ Then she pulls in close to me again and I hear her voice in my ear.

  ‘They’re all here now, you know. All the memories have found their way back to me. The whole story is here in my keeping. They’re all mine, and they can be yours.’

  She pulls back as if studying me, and she strokes my forearm.

  I shake my head. ‘No,’ I say again. No to the thought of dwelling here in the twilight of all of these forgotten lives, living off the borrowed honey of their pain and joy like a strange insect. I pause and a picture comes. Not like an insect. Like a hunched bird waiting on a treebranch for flesh. Carrion. Carillon.

  ‘I’m not a memory keeper,’ I say again. And then, because she appears to be waiting for more, and because there seems little harm in it, I tell her.

  ‘We are travelling to the Citadel. We are going to destroy the Carillon.’

  Whatever I expected her response to be, it was not laughter. Mary flaps away from me and hoots, her lips tucked over her teeth and tightened like a beak.

  She gasps, breathless. ‘Hoo, hoo, hooo,’ she cries, and wipes her eyes, folds her cloak around her. ‘But I am pleased to make your acquaintance. How gracious of you to call in on your journey to the Citadel.

  ‘So you’re off to overthrow the Order? Ah, my dear, how many pairs of plucked dicky birds have I seen on that errand? And I suppose you’re just going to fly over the wall, are you? Easy as a pie full of blackbirds.’

  I shrug, feeling the anger rise.

  ‘The one I’m travelling with, he has a gift for hearing, and he remembers without aid, without objectmemory,’ I say. ‘He was born in the Citadel, though he broke away and got to London. His sister is there still and waiting. She will help us to get inside.’

  She stops laughing subito. She blinks, and she hums something to herself. She is peering at me. ‘And you?’ she says. ‘What do you do, my fettered kestrel?’

  I stop for a minute because how do I explain my place? I’m here because of my mother’s gift, and because Lucien caught me by chance with the hook of some memories. Mary interrupts my thought.

  ‘He has hearing, your moon-eye out there, you say? A good singing voice? And you’ll follow that voice to kingdom come? You’ve given him your word along with your heart, and you’ll keep it, come what may? And you go, the two of you, to meet another. A girl, you say. Not of the city?’

  Her head twists, swivels, on her neck, up to the corner then back to me. Eyes slitted as if she’s willing something gone. ‘I hear the chime,’ she says to me, or to the invisible thing in the air.

  I stand still. How to answer that?

  ‘I hear it. Oh, I hear it,’ she says, trying to silence the thing. ‘Don’t think I don’t hear it,’ she mutters.

  I wait, confused. She hums again; then she sighs, as if I have forced her to explain a thing against her will.

  ‘Just a silly ditty. A fairytale for fools. Hope is made of fea­­thers, I told them. And we all know what happened to feathered things.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I ask.

  ‘What they sang in the guild when it all fell down. Grasping at pieces. Trying to put it together again. One to sing and one to tend the plot, it went. One forgetting and the one forgot. One who hears and one who keeps the word. Two will come and join a third.’

  The sound of it makes me laugh, though I don’t know why. Tend the plot. Whatever it means in her mind, it makes me think of our fields marked for planting, the bulbs with their secret of colour held close.

  ‘Tell me, lad,’ says Mary, and she looks at me sidelong. ‘How long have you been able to see others’ memories? When did you know you had the gift?’

  ‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I can see my own, not those of others.’

  Then something breaks between us, the thread of her attention perhaps. She stares at me as if I have slapped her. ‘What are you doing here, then?’ she cries. ‘You shouldn’t be here at all. You’re not the one in the forecast, are you?’

  I feel hot and then cold. ‘I never said I was. I don’t even know what that means. I told you what I knew and I told you what we were going to do. I don’t need any more riddles,’ I spit.

  She stares at me, like I’m a creature she’s never encountered before, and she mutters, shakes her head. Then after a while she smooths her hands over her face, pushing deep into her eyes as she does. As if an ache will heal an ache, I think.

  ‘Ah well. I’m sorry for that. But you’ve been a diversion, my dear. A bit of amusement.’ She looks up, a beaked half-smile. ‘How about you bring in your pretty friend, then? A long time since I’ve had company.’

  I feel her focus slipping away. And something comes to me. The broken plate, the flash when I touched it. It seems a small and uncertain thing, but there is nothing to lose.

  ‘Maybe I can see others’ memories,’ I tell her. ‘At least, I saw one. A flash when I held it, and memory in her eyes, not mine.’

  ‘Really?’ She comes close again and studies me again. ‘Really? You’re not teasing Mary?’ She looks around her. ‘Well, then. Let’s see what you can do.’

  I wonder at my stupidity. What possible point will this exercise have except to extend the time I spend in this cluttered room? She retrieves a nondescript mettle bowl with a deep lip and brings it back to me.

  ‘Here, my lovely. Touch it. Don’t be afraid. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  I shake my head. ‘No, I can’t do that.’

  Mary chuckles. The sound is unpleasant. ‘What do you think is going to happen, little fool? That the Order will break in here and take you? Why do you think the law is there anyway? To stop people like me and people like you. Those who can see, and those who might be able to stitch memories back together.’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s my stomach . . . I can’t.’ Just thinking about touching another’s memory makes my throat close and my gut clench.

  ‘Sick? It’s not in your stomach but in your mind, my darling. They’ve gone deep, haven’t they? Chimes almost had you. Thank Moon-eye there for pulling you out. Love goes deeper than hearing, does it not, dearling?’

  I pull away in surprise. I look down at myself, pat my clothes. What memory has she touched without my knowing? How did she see what I feel for Lucien?

  Her eyes are canny and shrewd and I realise that the nonsense bluster is like the cloak – something to put on or take off.

  ‘Nothing there gave you away.’ She taps her own face between hooded eyes. ‘It’s all right there. Bright and clear.’ She pauses. ‘For his sake, then.’

/>   She takes my hand in her dry wrinkled one and places it on the mettle bowl. I wait, unsure what to do. I close my eyes. After a long, tacet pause I open them again. I am sitting in the cluttered room filled with moonlight. The old woman crouches wrapped in her cloak next to me.

  ‘Well?’ she asks. Her voice is eager. ‘What did you see?’

  I look at her, the wrinkles, the clawlike hands, and fear fills me. I am not the person in the forecast. I am not the person Lucien thinks me. I am not meant to be here. I wonder if I could make something up, broider a tale to tell her.

  ‘I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘Didn’t hear anything either?’

  ‘No.’

  Disappointment crosses her face and disappears.

  ‘But it takes a while. You have to be patient. You’ve only done it once before, you say?’

  ‘Yes, but it was only a moment. Maybe I imagined it.’

  ‘Another one, an easy one.’ She sweeps off again through stacks of memories. I watch her move back and forth between two piles, looking. She locates a mettle urn and holds it up to her eyes and shakes it. Then she empties its contents – old jewellery, coins, chess pieces – and uses a broken wooden peg to pick through. Finally she plucks out something and brings it back to me. I see from the look on her face that wheels are turning in her mind again.

  She opens her palm and on it I see a roughmade bracelet. It is gold with a chip of red stone. For some reason it sets up a strange ringing inside me.

  ‘Here you go, darling. Better to start small.’ She nudges me. ‘London is waking. Daylight is breaking,’ she sings. ‘Ding dong the bells are going to chime. Quick smart now.’