Anna Smaill - The Chimes

I force myself to look away and I flex my fingers.

‘What next?’ I ask her.

Mary moves from the corridors and back into the clearing. Forward and backward, stitching memory as she goes. And time after time I go down…

In memory, I give my name to a strange man guarding a door, sing a few notes of melody and walk into a candlelit kitchen. A group of men and women sit in a ragged circle of mismatched chairs and they shuffle back to make a place.

The circle is one of chanting. First it carries names round and round. Eyes flick back and forth as it goes. Listening, watching, nerved with mistrust. After a while stories come. A young man to my left speaks of how he came to get the name he’s called by, a long, winding tale of mistakes and lost chances. Then an old woman takes over and all she says is the list of her family as far back as she can remember till it’s a litany and a marvel and the others in the group slowly clap in rhythm as she chants. Then the next in the circle is me. And I tell of how I came to meet my wife at a winter dance in the neighbouring village, but that she died, subito, not much after. My hands shake as I tell it. How long ago now?

Afterward we share other things. Why some winters wheat rots and not others. How best to help a baby sleep. What to do when your daughter falls from a tree and breaks her leg.

The people in the circle nod. Each story and each piece of knowing is repeated back until the memories are spread like cloth that you could take up and fold into smaller squares. And I go down…

In memory I am pacing across a narrow kitchen. What’s the word for the feeling that sits heavy in my chest? Clinging as a baby. Arms of it round me so I can’t put it down. It takes all the space I have in my lungs and mind. Takes all the time I have left.

My husband holds our boy in his arms and they watch from the kitchen table as I break the butterknife trying to lever up the floorboards. Use the broken blunt hilt of it to get behind the loose bricks of our chimney. Empty the broderie box for the silver scissors and slit the linings of our wintercoats up to their armpits. Memories. All the memories. I pull them from where they’re hid and pile them in the middle of the kitchen. I see myself and what it must look like. As if I’ve taken leave of my senses. But I cannot stop because if I stop, I will never leave.

Is it wrong that I pray for forgetting after all? I don’t want to keep the picture of my husband watching me go and my baby with his face turned. When I lift the bag of memories, it is very heavy. What use are words in the end?

I kiss the two of them goodbye without ever looking once at their eyes and start walking and I go down…

In memory I leave home. I say goodbye to children, to lovers, to parents and friends. I sing journeys backward and forward. I enter new towns and villages, and I carry memories in knapsacks, in bags made of roughcloth and of stickwrap. I travel by cart and by foot and on horseback. In new villages, I convince wary strangers that I can keep their memories safe. I blend into the crowd and keep my eyes blank and forgetful as browncloaked men pass.

Lento, as I come in and out of memory, I see a web spread out across the country. The web is Ravensguild.

I go down…

In memory I am in the head of a young weatherman. Under a tree that spreads its branches wide like a tent. Lightning carves the sky and catches the rain in its path so that it could be either rising or falling. Falling or flying back upwards to whence it came.

Something is near and I cannot run. The runes are waiting to be scattered. Weather waiting to be told.

Broken code from a paraboard. Bits of lead from crosshouse windows. Fingers of leaf and other fragments.

Keening forward and back like the clapper of a bell. Forecast comes out of me whole and it whispers, ‘ One to sing and one to tend the plot .’ Though what that means who can say? I say to myself as I go down…

In memory I hold a small mettle bell. I am talking to a friend, a tall woman who is standing close and smells like smoke. Another memory keeper, and the object is a tool that I am using to illustrate my point.

The bell is small and its hood curves down like a tulip, as if it wants to hold its sound close rather than let it go free. It’s threaded on a wool ribbon broidered with leaves and flowers, felted up in age. Brightly coloured like something a child would own.

I am explaining something. I gesture up at the sky. I am talking about Chimes. ‘They come down from the sky,’ is what I am saying. ‘And they take something with them. The birds are leaving. When was the last time you saw a starling?’

I extend my hand with the bell held dangling from its ribbon.

‘This is what they do,’ I say. And I shake it. There is no sound. I turn the bell over on my hand for my companion, whoever it is, to see.

‘Chimes makes of us silent instruments,’ I say. I shake the bell. Tacet. It has no clapper.

Each time I come up out of memory I feel pressure pushing down on me. It builds up between my eyes and then rises like bubbles. Each time I come up, Mary swoops across. She stands over me as I hold my memory bag open, and she waits to take one of mine.

After the burberry, I pull out a dog collar. It’s the memory of our first dog, who used to run in circles when she saw me and pee in the corner out of excitement, and who died when I was still young.

Then my recorder. Which is actually several memories, though I don’t bother to protest. Each part — beak, body, flue — has its own associations. As I hand it over, I see the day I chose it. The ceremony held in our village crosshouse. All the children paired with their instruments. Klaviers for the clever; trompets for those with brass; a beaked recorder for a farmboy with no prospects. I see my mother teaching me the fingerstops in the kitchen along with solfege. Then playing duets with my father. And, finally, I see my audition for the pact in the storehouse on Dog Isle.

Mary takes the paralighter my father gave me that is the memory of our first trip to London together for trade. I remember the pleasure of its sound and the spark as I sat across from him in the cart and flicked its burred wheel again and again. My irritation when he told me off for wasting petrol.

And other memories large and small, important and incidental. None of these scare me, though. I can live without them, I think. I feel lighter, a bit weaker, but still myself.

At last I fetch out a piece of wood with a sketch on it. Two figures in pencil, the outlines drawn over and over until the impression they give is of blur and movement.

‘You can’t take this,’ I say. ‘It’s my parents. It’s the memory of my mother dying of chimesickness. That’s important and I need it.’

Lucien’s hand moves to my shoulder again. Things are leaving me. I am floating. A feeling of tugging in my arms and legs.

‘It’s just one memory,’ Mary says. ‘One family. One boy. One mother. One father.’ She waves my protest away. ‘How many memories like it do you think there are here? What makes yours more important?’