Anna Smaill - The Chimes

We are sitting in the narrowboat, having returned through the dark streets of Reading. The sky was getting pink as we walked back the way we came, under the concrete overpass and the craned necks of the tall, broken lamps.

I paced behind Lucien, out of habit, as if we were in the under. He carried the stickwrap bag with the memories Mary gave us. I heard it crackle as he ran.

I sit on the bed now and it’s as if some part of me has been cut off. I keep going to touch my memory bag, to check it, then stopping myself as I remember it’s no longer there. The repetition starts to get irritating. I realise that I am afraid. It is a dull fear, boring and familiar, and it makes everything go flat around me. Like things are stuck to cardboard and I could hit out and knock them over. Only Lucien’s presence is real and solid. But I don’t want to look at him because then he might see I’m flimsy too. Paper and cardboard. There’s nothing inside me and I don’t want him to know this.

Lucien moves and the stickwrap bag rustles; the new memories jostle. They are full of sickness and pain, and I shouldn’t touch them anyway.

‘Simon, are you all right?’ Lucien is leaning back propped on his elbows on the bed.

I don’t want to speak because I don’t trust my voice. I nod. Then I just say what I’m thinking.

‘I have no idea what to do,’ I say. My voice is flat like the room is flat.

‘Just what you said,’ he says. ‘You will put them together so that they make a line that someone can move along. Like you did with your own memories.’

For a moment I am amazed that he thinks it has been, and could be, so simple. ‘I didn’t do that alone,’ I say. ‘I needed you in order to do it.’

Lucien studies me. ‘It’s strange that you see everyone so much clearer than you see yourself,’ he says soft. ‘You don’t know your own gift, Simon.’

I don’t look up at him as I don’t know what is on my face.

‘Most people I’ve met, inside the Order and out, never ask themselves what their own thoughts mean. Never seek to put them together like that. It’s always just one and one and one, and no one ever gets beyond that, in my experience. But you, you puzzle on one thing and you seek to link it to the next thing. You ask where it came from, and why it came. And you seek to hold both things in your hand and move on to the next, to three.’

I am not sure I understand what he is saying.

‘Do you trust me?’

I nod.

‘Then trust that you can do this,’ he says.

‘If I make a story that puts the memories together, what then? How do we share it?’

‘You tend the plot. I sing,’ he says. ‘Isn’t that how the forecast goes? I will put the story to music, and we will play it using the Carillon.’

The full risk of this, said out so plain, shakes me. It seems small to raise the other thing.

‘I’m not sure I can keep them.’

‘You mean your own memories?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re not going to forget now, Simon,’ he says. ‘Think of all the work you’ve done. We’ve done. Your memory is much stronger now. You’re not really scared of that, are you?’

But something, whether my breathing or my silence, must let him know I don’t believe him. He sits back up.

‘OK, here’s what we will do. You’re not going to forget anything. Not your own memories, the ones that make you who you are. Not these new memories, which are our task and our test at the moment. There are things that go deeper than Chimes, correct? Bodymemory for one. We’re going to use that.’

And then he sings our comeallye and orients it to the line of the river and the Limehouse Caisson.

In my mind I am standing in the amphitheatre. I hear the ferns, the outlines of the tunnelmouths.

Lucien sings a tune and I follow it through the under. I see the tunnels, the turns he takes, the shifts, the corners. Then he stops.

‘Where did I get to?’ he asks.

‘The entrance to Mill Wall Tunnel.’

‘Good. Now sing it back to me.’

I do. As I sing, I see myself running.

‘Good. Now, you are going to hide your memories in mind’s ear.’

I look at him to see if he is joking, but his face is serious, intent.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, for each of your memories, you’ll find a turn or a landmark on this run, and then you’ll put it down. If you want them back, you simply need to retrace your steps on this run.’

And so we start. Back at the amphitheatre. Each turn I stop and I search my memory, and I consult Lucien to check them, and I choose one and I see myself putting it down in the under.

The burberry I place down in the muddy water of the sluice gate by the first cadence of the first tunnel. The riverstone I place next, where the next tunnel meets the river inlet. I bury the woodblock at the start of the comms tunnel that breaks off from the river inlet and leads south.

At each turn, each shift in the melody that tells of a split in the tunnel or a change in direction, I place a memory. A roughcloth strip, a bar of chocolate, a dog collar, a paralighter. Until the tune is the tunnels and the tunnels are littered with the story that is my life so far.

‘Now we both have the tune,’ says Lucien.

I sit there, wondering if it will work, wondering how solid a foothold my memories can make in the spiderweb of the tunnels. But Lucien’s voice is confident and it makes me feel somewhat better.

‘You can run whatever direction you need through it. Do it presto, lento, da capo al fine, whatever. The memories should stay in place. I can downsound it with you, anyway, if you want.’

‘Thank you,’ I tell him, and get up. I don’t know what to say. The space between us has become charged with a silence that seems to be growing.

‘There’s one missing,’ I say.

‘Which?’ says Lucien, but he doesn’t look at me. He lies back again, staring at the ceiling and rubbing the spot between his eyes as if he has a headache.

‘The last one I made. The night before we arrived in Reading.’

Lucien doesn’t reply. The silence is thick and it’s like sightreading a difficult tune in front of a cold audience.

‘What happened in the memory?’ asks Lucien.

My mouth is dry. What to say to that? Either he’s forgotten it or it meant nothing to him. Whatever the case, the message is clear. He is not going to help me.

‘Don’t worry,’ I say, with a hot flush of blood in my face. I stand up. ‘I can remember it by myself.’ I pull my jacket back on.

‘Simon,’ says Lucien. I can’t read his voice at all. But he’s trying to return to the way things were. Before. And I don’t want to return.

I need air. ‘I’m going on deck,’ I say.

‘Don’t,’ says Lucien, sitting up.

I turn to him. ‘Why? What’s the bloody point in staying here?’

‘That memory is harder than the others to tell you about. To ask you about. Can you understand that?’ His voice is strained.

I look at him. I don’t know where this is leading.

He takes a breath.

‘There’s no single memory of it for me,’ he says. ‘There’s no single memory for the way it makes me feel. I promised that I would help you remember it, but I don’t know if I can. Do you understand?’

His voice has a demonic clarity that makes my chest feel bruised and open. Like I’ve run too far, too fast. Like there’s something inside me that shouldn’t be there, a nameless element. Subito I know that it doesn’t matter what he says, whether he feels what I do. Because I’d do anything for him. The knowledge gives me freedom somehow. And a kind of elation. His voice is as clear as a knife and I let it cut through me with its silver light.