The Chimes

by Smaill, Anna

  I nod my head lento. Waves and ripples crashing around. My own memories are distant. How will I choose what to give her? How can I trust myself to choose?

  ‘Here,’ she says, impatient. ‘Give it to me. Lucky dip.’

  I pass the bag reluctantly. She wraps her hand in a fold of her cloak and reaches in.

  She pulls out a big old burberry. Dip of mud at its hem as if it has been dragged through a puddle. The arrival in London, I hear in my head, what was it like?

  ‘The arrival was mud,’ I whisper.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Lucien says. ‘You won’t forget. Don’t worry.’

  I feel light, a bit empty. Mary wraps the burberry inside itself and places it on a shelf. For a moment I see the carter sitting heavy on the strut of his cart, his neck jerking with chimesickness as he breaks his journey to help a half-drowned farmboy. The coat was my only shelter from Chimes that first night in London.

  I force myself to look away and I flex my fingers.

  ‘What next?’ I ask her.

  Mary moves from the corridors and back into the clearing. Forward and backward, stitching memory as she goes. And time after time I go down . . .

  In memory, I give my name to a strange man guarding a door, sing a few notes of melody and walk into a candlelit kitchen. A group of men and women sit in a ragged circle of mismatched chairs and they shuffle back to make a place.

  The circle is one of chanting. First it carries names round and round. Eyes flick back and forth as it goes. Listening, watching, nerved with mistrust. After a while stories come. A young man to my left speaks of how he came to get the name he’s called by, a long, winding tale of mistakes and lost chances. Then an old woman takes over and all she says is the list of her family as far back as she can remember till it’s a litany and a marvel and the others in the group slowly clap in rhythm as she chants. Then the next in the circle is me. And I tell of how I came to meet my wife at a winter dance in the neighbouring village, but that she died, subito, not much after. My hands shake as I tell it. How long ago now?

  Afterward we share other things. Why some winters wheat rots and not others. How best to help a baby sleep. What to do when your daughter falls from a tree and breaks her leg.

  The people in the circle nod. Each story and each piece of knowing is repeated back until the memories are spread like cloth that you could take up and fold into smaller squares. And I go down . . .

  In memory I am pacing across a narrow kitchen. What’s the word for the feeling that sits heavy in my chest? Clinging as a baby. Arms of it round me so I can’t put it down. It takes all the space I have in my lungs and mind. Takes all the time I have left.

  My husband holds our boy in his arms and they watch from the kitchen table as I break the butterknife trying to lever up the floorboards. Use the broken blunt hilt of it to get behind the loose bricks of our chimney. Empty the broderie box for the silver scissors and slit the linings of our wintercoats up to their armpits. Memories. All the memories. I pull them from where they’re hid and pile them in the middle of the kitchen. I see myself and what it must look like. As if I’ve taken leave of my senses. But I cannot stop because if I stop, I will never leave.

  Is it wrong that I pray for forgetting after all? I don’t want to keep the picture of my husband watching me go and my baby with his face turned. When I lift the bag of memories, it is very heavy. What use are words in the end?

  I kiss the two of them goodbye without ever looking once at their eyes and start walking and I go down . . .

  In memory I leave home. I say goodbye to children, to lovers, to parents and friends. I sing journeys backward and forward. I enter new towns and villages, and I carry memories in knapsacks, in bags made of roughcloth and of stickwrap. I travel by cart and by foot and on horseback. In new villages, I convince wary strangers that I can keep their memories safe. I blend into the crowd and keep my eyes blank and forgetful as browncloaked men pass.

  Lento, as I come in and out of memory, I see a web spread out across the country. The web is Ravensguild.

  I go down . . .

  In memory I am in the head of a young weatherman. Under a tree that spreads its branches wide like a tent. Lightning carves the sky and catches the rain in its path so that it could be either rising or falling. Falling or flying back upwards to whence it came.

  Something is near and I cannot run. The runes are waiting to be scattered. Weather waiting to be told.

  Broken code from a paraboard. Bits of lead from crosshouse windows. Fingers of leaf and other fragments.

  Keening forward and back like the clapper of a bell. Forecast comes out of me whole and it whispers, ‘One to sing and one to tend the plot.’ Though what that means who can say? I say to myself as I go down . . .

  In memory I hold a small mettle bell. I am talking to a friend, a tall woman who is standing close and smells like smoke. Another memory keeper, and the object is a tool that I am using to illustrate my point.

  The bell is small and its hood curves down like a tulip, as if it wants to hold its sound close rather than let it go free. It’s threaded on a wool ribbon broidered with leaves and flowers, felted up in age. Brightly coloured like something a child would own.

  I am explaining something. I gesture up at the sky. I am talking about Chimes. ‘They come down from the sky,’ is what I am saying. ‘And they take something with them. The birds are leaving. When was the last time you saw a starling?’

  I extend my hand with the bell held dangling from its ribbon.

  ‘This is what they do,’ I say. And I shake it. There is no sound. I turn the bell over on my hand for my companion, whoever it is, to see.

  ‘Chimes makes of us silent instruments,’ I say. I shake the bell. Tacet. It has no clapper.

  Each time I come up out of memory I feel pressure pushing down on me. It builds up between my eyes and then rises like bubbles. Each time I come up, Mary swoops across. She stands over me as I hold my memory bag open, and she waits to take one of mine.

  After the burberry, I pull out a dog collar. It’s the memory of our first dog, who used to run in circles when she saw me and pee in the corner out of excitement, and who died when I was still young.

  Then my recorder. Which is actually several memories, though I don’t bother to protest. Each part – beak, body, flue – has its own associations. As I hand it over, I see the day I chose it. The ceremony held in our village crosshouse. All the children paired with their instruments. Klaviers for the clever; trompets for those with brass; a beaked recorder for a farmboy with no prospects. I see my mother teaching me the fingerstops in the kitchen along with solfege. Then playing duets with my father. And, finally, I see my audition for the pact in the storehouse on Dog Isle.

  Mary takes the paralighter my father gave me that is the memory of our first trip to London together for trade. I remember the pleasure of its sound and the spark as I sat across from him in the cart and flicked its burred wheel again and again. My irritation when he told me off for wasting petrol.

  And other memories large and small, important and incidental. None of these scare me, though. I can live without them, I think. I feel lighter, a bit weaker, but still myself.

  At last I fetch out a piece of wood with a sketch on it. Two figures in pencil, the outlines drawn over and over until the impression they give is of blur and movement.

  ‘You can’t take this,’ I say. ‘It’s my parents. It’s the memory of my mother dying of chimesickness. That’s important and I need it.’

  Lucien’s hand moves to my shoulder again. Things are leaving me. I am floating. A feeling of tugging in my arms and legs.

  ‘It’s just one memory,’ Mary says. ‘One family. One boy. One mother. One father.’ She waves my protest away. ‘How many memories like it do you think there are here? What makes yours more important?’

  I am too tired to fight. She takes my parents’ picture and places it among the others.

  After that, things seem to both slow and
speed.

  In the memories Mary gives me, the Order closes in on Ravensguild.

  Village crosshouses chime local curfews. One by one the evening meetings of memory keepers and villagers are broken and dispersed. In memory I sit and watch with other memory keepers as the door to my home thuds and splinters and finally cracks. A browncloaked arm comes through, clasps the door handle, turns.

  In memory I stand straight as a tall, browncloaked man with a broken nose stops me and orders me to strip with a sneer. ‘Where are the memories, witch? Where are you hiding them?’ he asks.

  In memory I see a fellow keeper pushed out of his village and barricaded in a wooden hut in the fields outside it. I hear his cries and chants as I walk past each day. His words lose meaning as he loses memory. What could I smuggle into that place? I wonder. What would help him? But I do nothing. Chimes takes it all, until he’s free to go. Memorylost, starry-eyed, thin as a stick and covered in rags.

  And I go back and forward along what I guess is time like a ribbon stretched. Once into a pale and clear-skied time of silence where I watch people walking streets emblazoned and lit in streams of code. Letters everywhere. People carrying small, flat boards backlit and breeding code, and code on vehicles that move without fire or horse. Code in the very sky itself that is revealed as flat and depthless as a blank page.

  I see people at Allbreaking as I have always imagined it. Glass stirring in an instant so it breaks white and clean as ice. People striving to shield their bodies from the deep phase of chords that take root in cavities of chest and lung. The bridges rocked as if by giant hands.

  I recognise the massive redbrick ruin near Pancras on the edge of its vast collapse. People young and old pour out of its cracked glass doors and into a broad stone courtyard. They cover their ears and go down into their last hunches. And the huge mettle statue that is hunched there still watches them, measuring, always measuring, as he seems to be, the silent ringing of an invisible string into pure and perfect fifths.

  I see as if watching from a far-off window a field in London, Lincoln’s Inn or Coram’s, as brownrobed members of the Order move on it. It is night and they walk among the memorylost and they stoop to each and gag them. From the distance their movements are gentle. Bind them and blind them with cloth, tie their hands behind their backs, corral them and herd them like animals from the square – going where? – the blank figures walking.

  Everywhere I see flame, as memories are burnt in their thousands. And everywhere, through the ones that remain, the Carillon tolls and it takes on a tone I had never before heard. I understand as if for the first time. Chimes are tolling out death. Human death and the death of stories.

  I emerge finally from the tide. Tired like after a long run in the under. But weak too, as if from hunger or missing blood or air.

  I catch Lucien up on the memories I have been given, and he places them carefully in the stickwrap bag from Mary. They look so jumbled and meaningless in there. A small mettle bell without a clapper. A handful of lead and some para squares lettered with code. A burnt book. A bundle of twigs bound in red string. A picture of a child painted on cloth. Flotsam and jetsam.

  ‘Last one,’ says Mary. ‘Are you ready, my dear? You look all in.’

  I take a deep breath and pull my shoulders down. The story I will need to tell is all there in that bag, but I feel uncertain whether I can untangle it, what I can make out of it.

  ‘The last one is here.’ She points to her closed left hand, fingers shut in tight keeping. ‘But I need my last one in exchange.’

  Without waiting, she picks up my memory bag.

  From it, she brings forth a candle. It is my memory of the night in the narrowboat. Our bunks next to each other. His hand, that strange moment when the distance between us was crossed. The hardest journey of all of them. The feel of his hair against my hands. His face in the tawny light. The taste of his mouth.

  ‘No!’ I say, forte. ‘I need that one. I have to keep it.’ I am so tired that I feel my knees bending.

  ‘What is it?’ asks Lucien.

  ‘A love token?’ says Mary, her beaklike mouth pursed. ‘I understand, my dear, but we have an agreement.’

  ‘The candle,’ I tell Lucien, because there is little point being embarrassed now, if I will forget it anyway. ‘From the narrowboat.’

  Lucien takes my hand. His is dry and cool. He squeezes my fingers hard and he brings his head close to mine. His breath against my ear.

  ‘I won’t let you forget.’

  But I am filled with dread. What if he is not able to stop it? I look up at Mary.

  There is no choice. Even if there were a choice, there is barely enough of me left to make it.

  ‘Take it,’ I say. ‘You’ve got it all now.’

  She inclines her head, places my last memory on the shelf and moves toward me. She extends her hand and waits until mine is open before pressing the object into it and closing my fingers one by one.

  ‘The last one,’ she says, and smiles at me.

  I breathe in and wait for the memory to take me, but nothing happens. I clench my hand tighter, close my eyes. But there is no movement.

  I open my eyes.

  ‘This isn’t a memory,’ I say. ‘I kept my side of the bargain. Where’s yours?’

  She is looking at me again with the wry, amused look on her face.

  ‘It’s more important than even a memory, lovely. It’s a little piece of acquired wisdom from one memory keeper to another.’

  I open my fingers. On my palm is a clot of thread. Wool, cotton, silk, different colours all knotted together tight and hopeless.

  ‘What the hell is this?’

  ‘It’s a question,’ she says. ‘The question is, even if you have all of these memories, this grand and noble history of ours, how will it help? What is to make it anything but another version of events, another Onestory?’

  I stare at the knot of threads on my hand. I feel raw and empty and blank. Some part of me refuses to think, refuses to engage in her puzzle.

  She comes in close. ‘A clue, my dear. Where is the Order’s weakness? What is it they are afraid of?’

  The tangled heap of threads is an irritation, a stupidity. It gives me a headache just thinking of untangling them, and then what would I do with it?

  And like that, like a candle being lit, or a chord being struck, I understand the answer to her puzzle. I stare at her.

  Mary nods to encourage me.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mess,’ I say. Both Lucien and Mary have their eyes turned to me. They seem to sway in the lanternlight, but it’s just me.

  ‘They can’t stand mess,’ I say again. ‘Human mess. They can’t abide the things that don’t fit into a perfect harmony, a tidy chord. They wanted to perfect us. Their music doesn’t have a place for mistakes and errors, for people who love the ones they’re not meant to love, for babies with noses that run and those who are deaf and alone. In the end it can’t fit in things like grief and loss and stickiness and dirt.’

  I think of the members of the Order I have seen with their shaved heads and their spare, nearly skeletal, frames. Their paleness not Lucien’s living pale, but of cloisters and practice rooms without sun.

  ‘And bodies. They are afraid of bodies. Because bodies betray us. They grow and change and they love and they leak and they get tired and sick and old and they shake and die.

  ‘They are afraid of these things,’ I say, ‘because they are afraid of dischord.’

  The Map

  We are sitting in the narrowboat, having returned through the dark streets of Reading. The sky was getting pink as we walked back the way we came, under the concrete overpass and the craned necks of the tall, broken lamps.

  I paced behind Lucien, out of habit, as if we were in the under. He carried the stickwrap bag with the memories Mary gave us. I heard it crackle as he ran.

  I sit on the bed now and it’s as if some part of me has been cut off. I keep going to touch my me
mory bag, to check it, then stopping myself as I remember it’s no longer there. The repetition starts to get irritating. I realise that I am afraid. It is a dull fear, boring and familiar, and it makes everything go flat around me. Like things are stuck to cardboard and I could hit out and knock them over. Only Lucien’s presence is real and solid. But I don’t want to look at him because then he might see I’m flimsy too. Paper and cardboard. There’s nothing inside me and I don’t want him to know this.

  Lucien moves and the stickwrap bag rustles; the new memories jostle. They are full of sickness and pain, and I shouldn’t touch them anyway.

  ‘Simon, are you all right?’ Lucien is leaning back propped on his elbows on the bed.

  I don’t want to speak because I don’t trust my voice. I nod. Then I just say what I’m thinking.

  ‘I have no idea what to do,’ I say. My voice is flat like the room is flat.

  ‘Just what you said,’ he says. ‘You will put them together so that they make a line that someone can move along. Like you did with your own memories.’

  For a moment I am amazed that he thinks it has been, and could be, so simple. ‘I didn’t do that alone,’ I say. ‘I needed you in order to do it.’

  Lucien studies me. ‘It’s strange that you see everyone so much clearer than you see yourself,’ he says soft. ‘You don’t know your own gift, Simon.’

  I don’t look up at him as I don’t know what is on my face.

  ‘Most people I’ve met, inside the Order and out, never ask themselves what their own thoughts mean. Never seek to put them together like that. It’s always just one and one and one, and no one ever gets beyond that, in my experience. But you, you puzzle on one thing and you seek to link it to the next thing. You ask where it came from, and why it came. And you seek to hold both things in your hand and move on to the next, to three.’

  I am not sure I understand what he is saying.