Anna Smaill - The Chimes

Vespers sounds and we stay in the storehouse. I don’t know what else to do. I lead the solfege and the others follow. I am angry at the ease of their acceptance, the way a change slips in and they think it normal, their lack of questions. How long would it take to forget him? It makes me feel sick.

After the last chord has faded, the pact unfurl their legs and arms and bodies from their crouching bracing positions. A feeling in me like a bruise. I can see it in Clare’s eyes too. She rubs at them and presses them deep in their sockets — as if an ache will heal an ache. I look at them and wonder what has been lost.

As night comes in, Brennan begins to get edgy. No one is speaking. The time we would practise passes, but nobody moves. Clare won’t make eye contact with me and she goes to the cupboard and brings back four candles. She passes them round and we hold them, the dark sheltering round the light, which moves with our breath. If you keep staring at the flame, you see many colours. Red, orange, blue. Wet wood in the fire makes it green. The smell binds us to all the nights that went before, that will come. How many will there be?

Clare moves again, this time to fetch a blanket from her quarters and return to the fire. One by one we all follow suit. Do they know we have never done this before? That the vigil is not part of our routine, not part of bodymemory? I feel lonely and I miss the close body blindness of being one with the rest. The smell of damp heated wool is salt-humid and homely. Everyone’s hair is mottled by the fire, shined in it. Clare makes pictures with the shadows of her hands. After a while she turns to me. She scratches her arm through her shirt.

‘Where is he, Simon?’ she asks. And the others turn their faces also, quiet, expectant. A fear so grave it can’t be put into words and can only emerge in their expression as blank trust.

I don’t have anything else to tell them except the truth.

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

I wake subito and I am swinging in the darkness. Something has moved. Lucien is standing over me.

‘Where did you go?’ I whisper. ‘I didn’t know what to tell the pact.’

‘I was in the under. I have to show you something. The last piece of the puzzle.’

‘The last piece?’

It doesn’t feel like the last piece to me. In my mind, whatever puzzle Lucien is making is half missing, half scattered. The pieces that are turned right way up seem to come from completely different pictures. I pull myself out of the hammock.

‘I promise to explain. I couldn’t show you before now.’

I stand there, waiting for more information, but it doesn’t come.

‘Bring your memories with you,’ says Lucien, and picks up my roughcloth bag and pushes it into my hands.

I am silent. I follow.

The night smells of fever and smoke from fires around the city. There’s a dull fog hanging close to the river.

We pass tacet under the huge shadows of the cranes. They stand there, judging perhaps. We jog down the empty race and the direction is the same as ever. We are heading east. East to Five Rover.

I follow two steps behind Lucien, through the cold dark. I want to be in my hammock, under the woolsmelling blanket. I want to wake into the same morning as always. The one where I watch Clare heat milk in the copper pan. The one where I help Abel turn the black earth in the polytubs ready for bulb planting. Where I walk the embankment at None and watch the long white sky up to Paul’s get pink. But instead, Lucien and I are out in this hard-edged morning. Later and earlier than ever.

‘Simon, what is the Lady?’ Lucien’s voice is piano in the cold air.

‘The Lady is mettle,’ I say.

‘She’s mettle, yes. But why is she so precious to the Order?’

‘Because palladium gets the clearest tones for the Carillon,’ I say.

Lucien leads us down the steps, taking them two at a time.

‘Doesn’t it strike you that they might have finished building the Carillon by now?’ We edge round the triprope and down to the strand. ‘What if there was another reason the Order needed palladium?’

‘Like what?’

‘Tell me again. What is the Lady?’

I sigh, prepare to start again from the beginning.

‘Let me put it another way,’ Lucien interrupts. ‘What is the Lady to you? When we’re in the under, how do you hear her?’

‘I don’t hear her,’ I say. ‘I hear what’s not there. The Lady is silence,’ I say. As soon as I say her, I see her. Calm and balm . Pulses of quiet in the rivermud.

‘Yes,’ says Lucien. ‘The Lady is music, but she is also silence. Remember that.’

We enter in the same place as usual. One second the night sky above, the sounds of the sleeping city extending farther than I can hear. The next, the world stretches as high only as the dome of brick and just the whisper of tunnels ahead.

The run starts straight away. No pause to set our tonic, to sing the comeallye and get bearings. Lucien takes one of the large tunnels that lead off the stormwater catchment, and he leads fast.

For a while I try to keep the map up in my head. We enter the stormwater and splash through several bends. We’re still close to the surface and there are thick glass tiles in the ceiling that let some light in, enough to see the patterned brick. Then a ladder of mettle rungs and a new tunnelmouth and a drier, echoing tunnel that pulls north. And the dark presses its hands on me. From where it’s been sitting tacet for so long, panic gets up, sets up knocking. And with that, I am blind. I must trust Lucien.

We run a long time, following twists and turns. Taking the different terrains of the under — mettle, drybrick, bilgewater, tile. Through tunnels tall and arched and ones tight and narrow as being born. We run until we are many miles from our territory.

Then in the middle of a clear straightaway, I hear Lucien stop. I hear his hands patting tunnelbrick and his whistle orient me to his whereabouts. Then he disappears into a tiny tunnelmouth. Through it where I follow there’s grit and concrete dust and it smells like cut bone or hair, something bodily and aloof but not unpleasant. Thin pipes run along the sides of the walls and press against my arms as we move through. Sparks of light cross my blinded vision.

I try to breathe shallow, save myself lungfuls of dust. But as we go, the dust gets thicker. Grit, then chunks of rubble, then broken pieces of concrete under my hands. Raw and snagging and a tear at my nails with a warm liquid trickle down my palms, though I can’t see the blackness my blood adds to the dark. Soon so little space that I cannot push aside the rubble as I crawl. My jeans tear at the knees.

Then, ahead, the sound of something heavy breaking and falling. I jump. The back of my skull hits domed tunnelmouth and I bite my tongue, the pain as bright as a flare in the black. And I am reminded that I have a body still. That I’m more than just a crawling, forgotten piece of darkness.

A cascade of smaller broken sounds further off, breaking and falling lento in the silence. In the dizzy groundlessness, the crash could have come from above me or even below. I wait until all sounds have stopped and I listen for Lucien’s presence. Nothing. The immense weight of the city above presses down on me.

Subito I am tired, so tired, and I want to lie down in the dust and concrete grit and rest. But from below then comes the comeallye, Lucien’s whistle. I feel forward with my hands. There is barely any crawlspace between the rubble and the roof. But I stomach it, pull forward with my forearms, feel the tug and snag of rock on shirt and skin. And my head meets wall. The way ahead finishes like a cut-off breath. I lie there for a while, roll from back to stomach so the tunnelmouth is a bare few breaths from my face. Then I feel a current of cool air play across one hand.