Anna Smaill - The Chimes

The sky is lightening as we walk. Lucien is tall beside me and I turn to look at him. He stops. We are standing on a hill just past the city.

I can see to the east where the sun is still rising, and the full expanse of the sky stretches out.

The sky is empty. I feel that I have never looked at it before, in the quiet like this. The trees around us move in the wind and the wind’s breath comes into me as we stand there and look out toward where the sun is taking its journey upward.

I see clouds moving. White and blown. Their rhythms are all different and unspelled. They tangle and reshape and you could give whatever meaning you liked to them. Whatever story you liked. I stand there and watch and I wonder if there’ll be a time hereafter when the birds will come back. Whether they will want to return into this new and unremembered silence.

Lucien is moving off already and I follow him. We walk over the green grass together. I do not have to ask where he is going, because I know already.

Down to the river.

Thanks and love to Sandeep Parmar and Imogen Prickett, who were there at the beginning and throughout. To my darling siblings Christopher and Esther, and to Natalie Graham, Jacob Edmond, and Nikâu, Kâhu and Huia. Thank you to my parents Bruce and Barbara, to whom the book is dedicated. Thanks to Dawn and Allan Shuker, and to all the wonderful Williamses and Walronds. To Ayelet Gottlieb, Rowena Tun, Katy Robinson, Sienna Latham and Elizabeth Knox, for belief and encouragement. Thank you to my agent Will Francis, for his clear-sighted vision and general brilliance. Heartfelt thanks to the whole team at Sceptre and in particular to my editor Drummond Moir, who unerringly helped me towards the right resonances and rhythms.

Thank you to my daughter Lotte, who makes all the words new again. And to Carl, always, for your belief in me, and for your true, well-tempered love.