Anna Smaill - The Chimes

The waterway gets wider and the road above us higher and we can’t be seen. Lucien moves us into a jog. We go past old cages with their signs and pictures of animals. One of the cages is arched high and has fine netting, and the branches of the trees inside are covered with chalky white splashes.

I can feel a headache coming. I need to stop, to wait and to think. I need to remember. The thought of leaving London is full of dread — dark water that rushes in to break connection. I am not ready for a journey. I whistle to get Lucien’s attention. He wheels round, sharp.

‘What?’ His voice is harsh, but it is worry, not anger. I wait. ‘What?’ he asks again. He is not happy being in unfamiliar territory in the daylight. For a short while I feel sorry for him.

‘I need to stop and wait for a time,’ I say. And for some reason, this is awkward to say. ‘I need to think. To remember.’

‘I know a good place. Come with me.’

We walk further up the towpath and cross a road, and we’re back on the canal. Old abandoned buildings grow high above us. Pipes break into the concrete walls, leaving rust on the concrete where the stormwater flows down.

After a while the canal widens again, and there is a broad tunnel in front of a low estate. We leave the path and walk upward past a fenced place with mettle towers inside. Signs hang on the mettle fencing, their code eroded. A picture survives, of red lightning striking a child’s climbing figure. Lucien leads us between mettle rails that let us pass one at a time, and then round the side of the building with its empty windows. There’s a thick hedge at the end of the overgrown lawn. Lucien gestures to me and I come up close.

‘What is it?’

‘Through here,’ he says. ‘Can you see anything?’

‘I can’t see a thing. There’s a hedge.’

‘No, beyond that. We need to go through.’

I get up close and use my elbows to make a small gap in the piney branches. Through it is a small grassy space that was once a kept garden. The bushes and trees are wild and overgrown with ivy and twining flowers. There’s a small, open-roofed circle hut at one end. No one around.

‘It’s clear,’ I say. ‘How do we get through?’

‘How do you think?’ he says. ‘Push.’

I do as I am told and suffer scratches to my face and hands, and then reach through to Lucien to grab my hands and follow me blind through the space I’ve made.

The garden is so overgrown that the trees have made a canopy. You can’t see out and you can’t see in. It is quiet and still and almost warm in the morning sun. A bee buzzes by the flowers. Lucien drops onto the grass and covers his eyes with his arms. ‘We wait,’ he says. I nod, invisible.

In the circle hut, there is a wood bench, soapy and splintered. I sit on the floorboards and lean back against it. My heart is beating shallow. The thoughts are shallow too. I am losing my place, and have in my body a need for darkness and depth.

I search back over the past days. I follow the path through the days and notches until I reach the dead girl; then I go forward again and what I land up next to is Clare on the strand. I press my fingers into the cut on my arm and I see myself standing next to her and I hear my own voice. But you had parents , I say. Do you remember them? I am angry at the arrogance of it. We were all born on the river and Clare was right. My broken things are no better than hers. I sit there in the sun and think about this for a while. How without mercy and without blame we have all of us been. And how careless to have misplaced so much.

I open my memory bag and search blind through the tangle. I search until between my fingers I feel a pouch of roughcloth with something inside that is hard and brittle like kilned clay. I take it out and look at the undyed roughcloth. Then I reach in and remove what’s inside the bag. A piece of old white pottery the size of my palm. A piece of a plate, I guess. Its surface cool and smooth, with one rough edge smoothed and browned by dirt and another where the break is clean and white and very sharp.

The rounded edge fits easy into the fleshy part of my palm, and when I hold it, the sharp edge faces away from me like a blade. And something shifts sides in my head and I am going down…

A wide green space. The sun above making a buzzing sound like a trapped fly. Like something burning in a pan. Where? Trees high all around, their arms all twisted and bent, lean over me as if listening. And flowers overgrown in beds.

The buzzing sound gets louder. The sun high and frayed above.

And the buzzing isn’t from the sun at all. It’s somehow inside me. Inside the memory. It says, Don’t stop. Keep moving. But I am tired. I have to sit down.

Stretch my legs in front of me with their jeans full of holes. Wrap my arms tight round my ribs to keep the sting sharp and thereby keep awake, keep alive.

I’m tensed before I even know why. Then the voices are clear coming into the yard from around the crosshouse. I hear them before I see them. Singing. Laughter.

Men. Things move lento so I can look down and see my legs like they’re not even mine. Jeans with holes that are ragged like the sun is in the sky. I use my hands to make my legs move; then I get into the trees by crawling.

They are there in the yard.

Two of them. Not the same men as before. I watch them walk. And I see they’re not men at all. They are prentisses. But still I don’t move from where I sit. Prentisses are a danger just as men are.

One wiry, one heavyset. The first one moving his hands in the air and singing too. He is looking around, speaking to the other. Both are coming closer to where I’m sitting.

There’s pain in my arms, everywhere. The buzzing gets louder.

The two prentisses tread toward the trees where I am sitting. In the dirt in front of me is half an old plate. I grab it. Break it again so there’s sharpness.

The first prentiss is walking to me through a window in the buzzing. Dark confounded eyes, staring. Neckbroke rabbit in his hands, looking at me like I’m something he’s found caught in a snare. And sorry for it. But you can’t trust anything in this world, not even kindness.

I hiss at them.

I hold out the only weapon I can find.

I push out, away from the pictures in my head. The thing I’m holding clatters hard on the floorboards. The sound makes me jump and it’s that which shakes the pictures that cling around my head.

Sickness rises in me and I’m shaking. I force my head down between my knees, try to breathe, but it’s like the ground has come up hard and pushed out the air. The memory is not mine but Clare’s, and I have touched it, and somehow the pictures of her memory came into my head.

Things are swinging and I can’t find the place where they stop. My memory. Clare’s memory. I blink at the strangeness of it. How do I have it in my bag? And subito I see it again, but from outside not within, so it is my memory that flashes up not Clare’s. I see her sitting there in the crosshouse behind Paul’s where Brennan and I were singing the snares. So thin you could see the tendons in her face and shoulders and the rib bones through her T-shirt. And nothing in her eyes, though we could see the dark bruises on her, and blood on her shirt. She was terrified and it took me a while to realise that she thought we might hurt her. And though we held our hands out in front of us to show ‘no threat’, it didn’t matter. She still came at us, her teeth bared, the half-broke plate held like a knife.