Anna Smaill - The Chimes

It starts piano. Brings the long, slow progression of the melody simple. Muted, plain. Today it’s two lines of tune, intertwining. The first is stately and simple. The second lighter, presto. They interweave: half-competition, half-friendship. But something jars, a buzz in my ears. It comes and goes, a tune in the bass progression, something familiar.

The first theme is almost at an end when I realise what the falling minor seventh cadence reminds me of. The bass is tracing an inversion of our comeallye.

By the time I realise, it is too late to turn to Lucien, too late to move at all as at once the chords come thick and heavy and full of thunder.

Our pact tune, split open into arpeggios and scales. Robbed of life and movement, but clear as ours. Chimes slows and examines the tune and it becomes impossibly rich, encrusted with harmony and ornament, and it stretches as if it would last forever and break open the sky.

After, I am kneeling on the deck of a narrowboat, perilously close to the water, my forehead touching a plantpot and one hand gripping tight to the brass track that runs the edge of the deck. The rain is falling fast.

I rise up slow. The shock stays with me. Deep in the bone. Our comeallye flooding the sky. The message clear inside it. Two pactrunners, escapees. Warning. Reward. It makes a joke of the meandering rumour tunes of the narrowboaters.

We go back to the bunkroom in the hold. I stand there shivering, still hearing our comeallye and reeling from the strange violation of hearing it aloft in the sky like that.

‘Who will remember it tomorrow, though?’ I say. ‘Who even knows our tune? Most people listening won’t understand.’ But I know I am speaking just to say something. The Order don’t care who understands. The real message woven into the melody is one we hardly needed reminding of. It is the Carillon’s vast strength as it fills the whole wide air with our pactsong, the private tune we hum between ourselves in secret in the under. Two pactrunners are no match for the power of the Order.

‘You’re soaked,’ Lucien says. He rummages in the drawer beneath his bunk, throws me a clean shirt that must be Callum’s.

‘Here.’

I pull off my T-shirt without thinking. The candle flickers. The light is low.

‘What’s that?’ says Lucien. ‘On your arm.’ He points to the place on my forearm where I scored the memory with my knife.

‘Nothing,’ I say. I pull the shirt on and the shirtsleeves down.

‘That’s not nothing.’ His voice is dangerous, piano. He grabs the sleeve and pulls it back up. His eyes go thin. ‘How in hell did that happen?’

I can’t think of what to answer.

‘It’s a memory,’ I say, because in the end it seems I have no choice but to tell the truth.

Lucien’s indrawn breath is fierce.

‘Fucking stupid,’ he says. ‘Clare may need to do it and I’ll say nothing further about that. But you ? I thought you were smarter.’

I have never seen him so angry. He swears under his breath again and turns away.

I want him to understand that I did it not only for myself. I did it for Clare. A sign of solidarity, wasn’t it? An apology for what I somehow knew was coming — our leaving, our betrayal. But it will only seem like an excuse, so I say nothing. Lucien gets up subito and stalks out of the cabin.

The cut on my arm is painful, but it stings less than Lucien’s anger.

He is gone for a long while. When he finally returns to the cabin, I’m sitting on my bunk. I am playing the recorder tacet, melody without breath.

Lucien says nothing. He rolls my sleeve up again rough and takes a tube from his pocket. He squeezes a white paste on his fingers and rubs it into my arm. The white stuff burns the skin around the cut. Lucien rips a strip from the bottom of my old wet T-shirt and binds it twice round my arm, tighter than is really necessary.

‘Do me a favour, Simon,’ he says with a cold voice. ‘Next time you get some idea in your head, some noble plan for saving memory, don’t act on it.’

We are sitting side by side, but the space between us is immense. I don’t know how to talk to him.

‘Can you see much in this light?’ I finally ask.

He turns his face so that he is looking right at me. He is still angry, but there is something else there too. He has been surprised by his anger as much as I have.

‘Some,’ he says. ‘Not as much as you.’ His voice is dark. His eyes meet mine, then move away.

‘Lucien,’ I say.

I do not know what I am doing, but before I can question it, I put my hand on the side of his face, though I know it by heart and don’t need to recognise it by touch.

I touch his brow with my fingers. I move them down over the fine skin at his temples, the plane of his cheeks, the sharpcut lips. I study his face as if I were blind too. My heart is going so hard he must be able to hear it. It must deafen him. And I am shaking like I’ve been pulled from the river with the cold still on my skin. We sit there like that for a long time.

Then the folly of what I am doing, the gravity of the overstep, hits me subito. I draw back like I’ve been stung. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I am really sorry.’

Lucien shakes his head from side to side. He hasn’t moved away from me. He sits there.

‘That’s not a good idea, Simon,’ he says. Says it slow. ‘It’s too dangerous. It can’t happen. You do not want it.’

I find myself shaking my head also. A slow mirror of him. I don’t know what I am refuting exactly. If I’m saying yes or no to what he said. No, it cannot happen. Yes, it cannot happen. No, I do want it. Yes, I do want it.

‘All that time,’ I say, ‘I followed you. You had my memories safeguarded. You knew where I was from and what had happened to me and you knew who I was. You knew…’ I stop.

Then the shame rises up and it burns. He knew this, the other thing, the secret of my regard for him. Of course he knew. How much longer than me? I think of my heart’s keen leap in his company, my eyes on him always, my fear on the race when I held him, and I cannot believe how bloody ignorant I have been. The embarrassment flares up inside and I know I have to leave.

He shakes his head. He has not turned away. He has not moved.

‘You shouldn’t think so,’ he says. His voice is rough, and catches. ‘You are not so easy to know as you might think. Not so easy to know at all.’

His hand goes to the back of my head then. His smell of rivermud, sky, smoke, as he leans forward and kisses me.

My whole body in my heart and mouth. His hands in my hair. The long lean of his body hard by. The candle flickers.

After a while he pushes me back. He is breathing hard. His grip on my shoulders is so tight I can’t move my arms. I can’t help the huge foolish grin on my face either. The only thing I can think to say is his name.

His grip gets tighter. What is he scared of? It’s simple, I want to tell him. His name then mine. Question and answer. ‘Lucien,’ I tell him, and kiss him.

‘Simon,’ he says at last.

His face is so serious, yet I am grinning away and my whole body feels light. I lift his fingers from their grip.

We take his bunk, though it’s much too narrow for both of us. My bare back to his bare chest. All night the edge of the bunk cuts into my hip and I lie awake listening to his breath, breathing in the same air as him. I feel my happiness turn and wheel overhead.

We travel and the countryside changes. It becomes greener, lusher; the river gets narrower. On the fifth night the moon is full, and there are tall buildings, twisted and bent, in the distance. We go past two small islands in the river. To our port side runs the wide, ugly scar of a concrete road with many tracks. Above it, tall, dead lamps like those still left in parts of London.