Anna Smaill - The Chimes

‘Hey,’ I yell, and tighten my grip on the knife.

With his spare air, Ratface shouts his friend a warning, ‘ Jakes .’

But Jakes doesn’t hear. He swaggers insolently close to the platform.

In a quick few steps Lucien is crouched beside him. His hand snakes out and he has Jakes by the T-shirt, pulled close under his throat. He grabs the runner’s hand in his fist and removes what’s crumpled in it. Then Lucien leans his head close to the runner and whispers something. A dark second passes. I cannot hear what is said, but I see the runner buckle. His legs weaken and he sways and I notice in shock that he is almost crying.

Lucien pushes him back gently. I let out my breath as he stumbles and falls loose on the tracks.

Lucien unbends and looks straight at me.

‘Under the Green Witch parallel, the territory is open. We leave you, Wandle runners, to prospect there. We typically have more than we need, so we can afford to be generous. However, it would be worth your while to keep in bounds.’ Then he nods to me.

I let go the runner I’ve been holding and shove him forward with my foot. He takes a step and then looks back, as if checking he’s done what he was supposed to do.

‘Get out,’ says Lucien, reasonably.

Ratface jumps to the tracks where Clare’s runner is still sitting on his arse. Then he roughly grabs him, pulls him to his feet, propels him forward. The fallen runner stumbles, as if some life or fight has been taken from him. They push off down the tunnel, into the dark. We are left alone in silence.

Lucien sings the melody for the quickest way back to Five Rover. Brennan takes Abel on his back and Clare walks beside, stroking Abel’s forehead now and again and murmuring to herself in disgust. I’m last. I cast a look back over the platform. I try to think how long we’ve gone without any territory dispute. Why was it worth Wandle’s while to enter our run?

Clare lies Abel down by the cookstove and tries to get some sweet milky tea into his mouth, though most of it dribbles back out. One of his eyes is swollen shut, and a bruise spreads down the side of his face. His eyes move under the lids. Lento, like he’s in no hurry to surface. And I see he needs a push to come up. Or something to reach down and hook him.

I leave the storehouse and run toward the vendors at the edges of the Cut. I run it with my footfalls hard and echoing on the flat concrete. The tunes bristle sharp with banter and haggle among the stalls and carts and blankets. A man with a tall trolley crammed with bottles stands some way down the line of them. Next to him there’s a large pot boiling on a sterno ring that wafts clouds of hot gin steam, heady with sugar and lemon. Rum, sweetwine, porter, brandy , goes the man’s song. Sweetwine, ginpunch, brandy, rum . I fish the tokens from my pocket in exchange for a small, flat bottle of his brandy. ‘Careful of the kick,’ he says, and his braying follows me down the canal.

The swig I take on the way back burns salted fire down the back of my throat and makes my eyes run. ‘Strong enough to bring anyone back from the dead’ is what I say to Clare when I hand it to her.

Later, through the curtains, I hear the muffled sound of Abel coughing, then a low murmuring until all is tacet except the rhythm of Lucien pacing. He did not speak to me when I came in, but his voice is somehow still in my head. Do you trust me? he asks, and the weight of his hand on my shoulder. Every spare moment you have, try if you can to remember. I hold my memory bag, let my fingers move over the objects. Silent textures slip through my hands without snag or speech. And then I come to rest on a piece of cloth with a frayed edge. I fetch it up.

Roughcloth. Hardy, for farm use. The colour faded. Something thrums inside me and I know I have chosen right because I smell the smell of sunheated parasheeting, the peppery perfume of daffs and a green and brown warmth and I go down…

Dappled sun through parasheeting.

Smell of earth, of green things, of sap and leafmould.

I’m standing in the forcinghouse where the hard, driving sun makes flowers open before their time and I’m holding the rotted wood handle of a trowel. I’ve been weeding irises in the near fields with the journeymen and it has broken. I’ve come in here to find another.

Along the walls are shelves that hold tools and supplies. Balls of twine, cardboard boxes filled with old seed packets, leather gloves that still hold the shape of hands, poly seeding punnets that fit one inside the other in tall steeples. But for the life of me I can’t see a single trowel.

I have been standing for several breaths before I see my mother. She is stripping and splitting bulbs at the workbench at the other side of the forcinghouse.

‘Hello, love,’ she says. ‘Why don’t you leave the weeding for a bit and give me a hand with this.’

I walk over to her through the sunshine that’s coming through the leaves that grow up the para panels. She passes me a short, blunt knife. There is a tremor in her hand and she tries to disguise it by gripping her fingers tight into a fist and releasing them by her side. With her left hand she pushes a trug of clumped bulbs toward me. When her hands are moving, I cannot see the shaking. Is it still there, in the joints? I make myself ignore the thought.

There is something familiar about where we are standing and what we are doing, the light, the smell, the rhythm of our hands. We have been here before, standing in the same positions.

‘There are things you’ll need to know when I am gone, Simon. Some of them important.’ As if she’s stepping out for a while to visit a sick neighbour or to the next village to swap seeds.

‘What do you mean, when you’re gone? Where are you going?’ I turn to look at her.

‘Keep working,’ she says. ‘Keep splitting the bulbs while I talk.’

After she’s satisfied that I’m doing so, she continues. ‘You’ve noticed the shaking,’ she says. ‘You know, don’t you, that it will keep coming, that it will get worse. After a while I won’t be able to work.’

‘Then I’ll do the work,’ I say. ‘You don’t need to worry about it.’

She doesn’t answer. Waits a bit.

‘You keep your memories in the green bag. The one in your room?’ she asks.

I am uncomfortable talking about that. I slide a fingernail under a clod of mud, twist the knotted bulb so that it breaks in two. The split is clean and white. I wash the two new bulbs in the bleach bucket and put them into the wet paper. ‘Yes,’ I say eventually.

‘That is good. You should keep them with you always.’ She turns to me. ‘Simon, when you choose a memory, what happens?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘In your mind. What happens?’

What happens when I put food in my mouth? I taste it. What happens when I hold a memory? I see it.

‘I see it,’ I say. ‘The pictures come into my mind. They stay for a while, then they go. What do you mean?’

‘You know not everybody can do that, don’t you?’

I look at her, disbelieving. ‘Why would anybody make memories at all, then?’

‘It’s not an easy thing to explain. What people can and can’t recall. How they do it. It’s a bit like the mudflats.’ She looks at me, then, like she’s fixing something in with the drill of her grey eyes. ‘When the water lies at the far edge of the sky. At its edges the two elements are blended. Forgetting and remembering are like that. It’s hard to tell one from the other at times. But, yes, you’re right. Some people never make objectmemories.