The Chimes (11 page)

‘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. Thick 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 over 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.