Anna Smaill - The Chimes

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.

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.