Anna Smaill - The Chimes

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 brown 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.

‘I wouldn’t call it treasure,’ I say. The feeling of breathlessness comes again.

‘What would you call it?’

I wipe my hands on the legs of my jeans. Onestory must come soon, I think. And not soon enough. I am hungry for it. I stare hard back at Lucien.

‘What does it matter what I call it? It’s nothing. Junk.’

He gives me a long, blind look; then he moves toward the cookstove and slaps the blades of his hands hard against his thighs as if to clean them. Ding and clink as he takes the empty kettle from its place over the cookstove. He was not on the balcony for water.

‘Are you taking over the gardening from Abel?’ I ask.

‘I beg your pardon?’ His eyes flare. ‘What do you mean?’

I have aimed in the dark, but I have hit something. ‘Mud on your hands,’ I say. ‘Perhaps you were weeding the tomatoes?’

‘No,’ he says. And he passes the kettle to me. His voice is cool and distant as ever, but there is something new in it. A mild and distant pleasure, like I’ve finally learnt a tricky bit of rhythm.

I walk to the balcony door and slide it fully open to the burning light. It is not like burning, after all, I think, but blood. Sometimes a picture comes up in its own time from somewhere down below. And so it is that in front of my eyes where I should see the reddened sky, I see a white cloth with blood on it in streaks. Not the bandage from my arm this morning but a garment, fine linen. I shake my head to clear it and I walk out into the day. A bubble on the surface is all. A bubble and a voice inside that emerges, then is lost, reclaimed by the speaking air.

Before Onestory, it’s only Lucien who does not sit. He walks the room with his long stride. He stands at one moment with his head cocked, already intent; then he starts the walk again. I’m almost to the bottom of my tea where the dark bits swirl on the mottled enamel when he stops subito. He stands with his back to us for a while, then swings clear of his thought and strides into the middle of the room.

Light in his sightless eyes and a hard smile on his face. He scissors at the knees and drops to a crouch, then holds up his arms to ask silence, though not a one of us is talking. The look on his face is full of craft and secret. The look that says, I have something I am going to share with you, and it is magnificent. His chest is bare. His fingers are long and pale. He bounces on the balls of his feet.

‘Good morning, men and lady,’ says Lucien in a stately drawl. ‘Are you ready for the day?’ Same as always, we draw together.

‘What is your name?’ he asks Clare, who is sitting to my right.

‘My name is Clare,’ she says.

Lucien’s blind gaze moves on. ‘What is your name?’

Brennan’s voice hard and tight like a drumbeat. ‘My name is Brennan.’ He shifts his weight, cracks his knuckles.

‘What is your name?’ Lucien gentles as he comes to Abel.

‘My name is Abel.’

Then to me, same question, careful and courteous, like he’s asking an especial favour.

‘What is your name?’ he asks.

‘My name is Simon.’

He winks.

I stare at him. A wink is not part of the ritual. A wink is new and therefore wrong. But there is not enough time to puzzle it because it is nearly Chimes.