Anna Smaill - The Chimes

She stops, turns like a spinning top until she’s standing still at last in front of me on the rug. She closes her eyes and her face glows with happiness and I can imagine her young.

‘Such love, my dear. Such capacity for love! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! But I forget — you can’t see it yet, can you? Not standing there like that, or sitting. Patience on a memorial.’

I shake my head. I look around the room and all I can see is junk, debris. Rubbish. Then her face changes again. She looks tired, even older, if it were possible.

‘Oh, but I am glad you are here at last, ducky. I admit it’s getting too much for an old bird like Mary. The pretty ones. I love the pretty ones, but it’s the bad ones, the sad ones, the heavy ones. Too heavy for an old back. They need young shoulders. But we can’t pick and choose to suit ourselves.’ She walks slow, as if she is being forced, and I almost see her back bending, hunching further. She stands in front of a pile of old paintings in frames. On the top sits a small white leather shoe, a slipper.

Her hand swoops and she clasps it, and as she does, her face crumples. Tears fold out of her eyes. Her mouth opens in a wide broken arc.

‘The pretty one,’ she calls. ‘Oh, but I loved her even though I didn’t know I would. There were curls there.’ She strokes her temple, the old white hair at the side of her head. ‘Curls, and they smelt of sunshine.’ The tears are running steady down her face. She holds the shoe under her breast. ‘Curls and a birthmark on her little left leg. And when you tickled her, she laughed and laughed. As if she was made for laughing.’

She stops abruptly, puts the shoe down carefully in its place. She closes her eyes and breathes in silence. When she opens them, they are clear again.

‘And what would she be in music, do you think, my dear? A baby with curls like sunshine? A flute, a piccolo perhaps? If they cared for such a pursuit, that is? No. Chimes could not capture that. Where’s the basso profundo for a dead baby, darling? What’s the discant for the mess of loss?’

The mess of loss, I think. Chaos. Disorder. Junk. And it brings home what I had known but somehow managed to ignore. Before I can think further, I am on my knees and retching. So many memories, so many lives. So much pain, so much forgetting. I want to vomit, but I cannot. I retch until my throat is raw and my head is throbbing.

When I open my eyes again, Mary is kneeling next to me on the mat. She wipes my mouth with a corner of the cloak.

‘Who in the guild sent you?’ she asks. ‘I thought they were all gone. I’d almost given up hope that they’d find the next keeper.’

And I understand what the whole performance has been. She thinks that I’ve come to replace her. She wants me to stay here with her, with all of the memories. I shake her off.

‘No,’ I say. ‘That’s not what I’m here for. Not to keep the memories. I need your help.’

‘Are you sure about that, my dear?’ Her voice wheedles and curls. ‘You’ve got the gift, don’t you? Who else is going to take these when I’m gone? They’ve left me alone here for too long.’ Then she pulls in close to me again and I hear her voice in my ear.

‘They’re all here now, you know. All the memories have found their way back to me. The whole story is here in my keeping. They’re all mine, and they can be yours.’

She pulls back as if studying me, and she strokes my forearm.

I shake my head. ‘No,’ I say again. No to the thought of dwelling here in the twilight of all of these forgotten lives, living off the borrowed honey of their pain and joy like a strange insect. I pause and a picture comes. Not like an insect. Like a hunched bird waiting on a treebranch for flesh. Carrion. Carillon.

‘I’m not a memory keeper,’ I say again. And then, because she appears to be waiting for more, and because there seems little harm in it, I tell her.

‘We are travelling to the Citadel. We are going to destroy the Carillon.’

Whatever I expected her response to be, it was not laughter. Mary flaps away from me and hoots, her lips tucked over her teeth and tightened like a beak.

She gasps, breathless. ‘Hoo, hoo, hooo,’ she cries, and wipes her eyes, folds her cloak around her. ‘But I am pleased to make your acquaintance. How gracious of you to call in on your journey to the Citadel.

‘So you’re off to overthrow the Order? Ah, my dear, how many pairs of plucked dicky birds have I seen on that errand? And I suppose you’re just going to fly over the wall, are you? Easy as a pie full of blackbirds.’

I shrug, feeling the anger rise.

‘The one I’m travelling with, he has a gift for hearing, and he remembers without aid, without objectmemory,’ I say. ‘He was born in the Citadel, though he broke away and got to London. His sister is there still and waiting. She will help us to get inside.’

She stops laughing subito. She blinks, and she hums something to herself. She is peering at me. ‘And you?’ she says. ‘What do you do, my fettered kestrel?’

I stop for a minute because how do I explain my place? I’m here because of my mother’s gift, and because Lucien caught me by chance with the hook of some memories. Mary interrupts my thought.

‘He has hearing, your moon-eye out there, you say? A good singing voice? And you’ll follow that voice to kingdom come? You’ve given him your word along with your heart, and you’ll keep it, come what may? And you go, the two of you, to meet another. A girl, you say. Not of the city?’

Her head twists, swivels, on her neck, up to the corner then back to me. Eyes slitted as if she’s willing something gone. ‘I hear the chime,’ she says to me, or to the invisible thing in the air.

I stand still. How to answer that?

‘I hear it. Oh, I hear it,’ she says, trying to silence the thing. ‘Don’t think I don’t hear it,’ she mutters.

I wait, confused. She hums again; then she sighs, as if I have forced her to explain a thing against her will.

‘Just a silly ditty. A fairytale for fools. Hope is made of feathers, I told them. And we all know what happened to feathered things.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I ask.

‘What they sang in the guild when it all fell down. Grasping at pieces. Trying to put it together again. One to sing and one to tend the plot , it went. One forgetting and the one forgot. One who hears and one who keeps the word. Two will come and join a third .’

The sound of it makes me laugh, though I don’t know why. Tend the plot. Whatever it means in her mind, it makes me think of our fields marked for planting, the bulbs with their secret of colour held close.

‘Tell me, lad,’ says Mary, and she looks at me sidelong. ‘How long have you been able to see others’ memories? When did you know you had the gift?’

‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘I can see my own, not those of others.’

Then something breaks between us, the thread of her attention perhaps. She stares at me as if I have slapped her. ‘What are you doing here, then?’ she cries. ‘You shouldn’t be here at all. You’re not the one in the forecast, are you?’

I feel hot and then cold. ‘I never said I was. I don’t even know what that means. I told you what I knew and I told you what we were going to do. I don’t need any more riddles,’ I spit.

She stares at me, like I’m a creature she’s never encountered before, and she mutters, shakes her head. Then after a while she smooths her hands over her face, pushing deep into her eyes as she does. As if an ache will heal an ache, I think.

‘Ah well. I’m sorry for that. But you’ve been a diversion, my dear. A bit of amusement.’ She looks up, a beaked half-smile. ‘How about you bring in your pretty friend, then? A long time since I’ve had company.’