Anna Smaill - The Chimes

I try to imagine what she sees in her world without music, without Chimes. I want to ask her where her happiness comes from. The trees are budding their new leaves and a thought comes into my head. They have a kind of rhythm in their upright trunks and their branches that start thick and then divide and get narrower and lighter and faster till they quiver in the air like breath past a clarionet reed. That is a rhythm you can see, not hear. Perhaps music happens elsewhere than in ears.

Jemima stops at a quiet corner of the canal and looks at the water and waits for a while, studying something that is invisible to me. Then she opens the flat bag. From inside she removes a mettle wheel from an old kid’s bike. Over the bike wheel is fitted a woven stickwrap sack like the kind that carry flour.

She ties rope lengths to three parts of the wheel and picks a few stones to weight the bag. Then she throws the whole thing into the water. After a long wait in which I almost stoop to touch her shoulder and sign my question of ‘What are you doing?’ she pulls it up subito. There, silver in the sack, are two fish, longer than my hand. Her grin flashes up at me presto and her eyebrows go up as if to say, ‘Yes? And what can you do?’ She dumps the fish in another sack, ties the neck to one of the iron rings along the canalside and submerges it under the water. I am still watching without any words, intrigued.

‘Dinner,’ she signs. And then she points to a thick bush that grows along the canal path and hands me one of the buckets. ‘Berries,’ she says.

I leave her fishing and walk along the path. The bush is thick with brambles and, behind that, dense clutches of blackberries. I pick hundreds, enough to fill the bucket. My fingers are stained deep red and stinging. I think about Lucien. I think about what we are trying to do. I wonder if we will ever come back or if we are leaving London forever.

We travel lento. Lucien usually sits on the deck hooded, listening for any sign of poliss or the Order. Callum listens too, for the coded messages of the narrowboaters up and downriver.

Two nights in he reports to us there’s a tune doing the rounds. Poliss looking for two pactrunners who have made off with large quantities of Pale. Two of prentiss age and they are travelling by water. One tall with pale eyes; the other has brown hair. A prize rumoured.

‘Three hundred tokens,’ Callum says, ‘is a lot of money. You should both stay below deck as much as possible until the tune fades.’

So we do, though it’s close and cramped and I’m ready to go out of my skin with the itch to be in the tunnels.

To keep busy, Lucien tests my memory. We start with the day we’re on. Lucien’s voice, like in downsounding, leads me through the memories. Then back to the day before and the day before that. I wander through the strange events of the last eightnoch: finding Lucien on the race, the member of the Order in the crosshouse yard, poliss on the run, the discovery of the weapon. I reach six days, then seven, then eight. My head hurts, but it gets stronger each time. Then together we go back through my personal memories. My mother’s death, leaving Essex, finding Netty, losing Netty, joining the pact, finding Netty again. All that I can I share with Lucien.

Like in the storehouse, Lucien makes small notches on the edge of his bunk each morning as we travel. On the third day on the water we start something new.

Lucien asks, ‘How clear is your hold on the map?’

I look at him. In my mind’s ear I see our storehouse and the path down Liver Street steps. I follow it down the strand to Five Rover and I place myself in the amphitheatre. Then I try to see the map as it spreads from there. I can’t do it. My head is blank and empty. Panic starts in my hands, which go tight and gripped.

‘I can’t see it,’ I say, and my voice too is tight held, knuckle white.

‘Breathe,’ says Lucien. ‘Start slow.’

He sings then the tune of our amphitheatre, slow and circular with a slight dazzle of the Lady. I close my eyes and hear it, the fretted ceiling, the rust, the ferns, the silence of the tunnelmouths.

Then he sings the beginning of a simple run. A run that leaves the amphitheatre and moves in a circle of fifths. ‘Wait,’ I tell him.

Instead of trying to see the whole map lit up like the masterwork of some crazed spider, I focus just on the tunnel ahead. I sing the tune back to him as I go and in this way I follow his route — the comms tunnel, then a stormwater drain, then up into the walking tunnel at Mill Wall.

And to my surprise, the network of tunnels we’ve moved through, that spun round me without name in an untethered melody, all shift and settle into place. It’s as if I’m blindfolded and then the blindfold is taken off.

Lucien nods. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘sing me the way from there back to here…’ and he whistles the melody of the Limehouse Caisson.

Before I lose my nerve, I’m off. I take a more complicated route than intended. I get myself lost and tuneless for a while before finding at last a way out, a tiny rivulet of melody that pulls me through. By slow degrees and without anything you could call an elegant tune, I arrive at the contours of the caisson. And it’s like I’m there in body. I can almost see the fastrunning greengrey of the Thames, feel the grit of shells and mud and rock through my thin plimsolls.

But if I blink, I’m back in the candlelit space of the narrowboat, with the low chug of its motor and the sway and slap of the water passing.

Lucien watches me and smiles. ‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’

We have travelled four nights when it happens.

It is early evening and the smell of pepper fills my nostrils for Chimes as usual. We stand on the deck of the narrowboat. A light rain has started and it drills holes into the water around us. No movements anywhere except the steady, light rhythm of rain on water.

In spite of what I now know about the Carillon, Lucien continues to conduct solfege, Matins and Vespers both. When I ask him why, he pauses as he does when he’s looking at a thing from every angle and thinking how to explain. In the end he says not much at all.

‘If you have an enemy, you seek to know as much about them as possible, don’t you?’

I nod lento.

Then he thinks a bit more. ‘Why does Chimes deaden us, our memories? Infrasound, the vibrations in the air. But something else as well. When you don’t grasp something or remember something, I think your mind at last says, “OK,” and part of it accepts this. In the end your mind gets to welcome that deadening. That’s what I believe anyway. Half of our memoryloss is by choice.

‘Vespers is difficult. The most highly trained musical minds compose it. And who are they talking to? A handful of other musicians and scholars. Those who can understand how a certain phrase is a witty play on one from Buxtehude or Brahms. Or that a rhythm is a graceful nod to a Vespers chorale from a month back. Nobody else is meant to understand this. Not really. And what is the cost of all that lack of understanding?’

I look at him, shake my head. I don’t know.

‘The further we can follow in solfege, the better, that’s all.’

Callum stands on deck with us, though he does not follow our solfege. Jemima disappears below and I wonder again how the music strikes her. Do the vibrations speak to her body in a different way?

Chimes comes.