Anna Smaill - The Chimes

‘Nothing. What do you care?’

There’s not much to say to that. Lucien in my quarters, I think. Downsounding. Singing. And the voice that was in my head on waking, familiar and strange at once. A blankfaced, emptyhanded question. One with no answer that I can supply. The arrival in London , it asks, what was it like?

‘Tell me what he wanted.’ She’s facing square to me but I shake my head that I do not know. I think.

‘Clare,’ I say subito, ‘do you remember when you joined the pact?’

She goes tacet; then she takes a few strides and pushes the tyre iron down. She levers it back and forth to clear a space, then pulls it out and looks down at the rush of water that has filled the hole. She doesn’t turn round.

‘What do you mean, joined?’ she says.

A feeling of blankness, like the moment before the run starts. Eyeblind, ears grasping at imagined sounds. A dark room that could stretch forever or end in a wall two steps beyond your face.

‘I mean, how did you come to be here? On the river. In Five Rover. How did you find the pact?’

I hear the tension in her. She bends and pushes her hands into the brief opening she’s forced; then with her two palms cupped she pulls something out, covered in muck.

‘I’ve always been here,’ she says.

I don’t know what to say to her dead certainty. ‘But you had parents,’ I start. The word is unfamiliar in my mouth. Ignoring everything that says not to ask. ‘Do you remember them?’

Clare narrows her eyes, curls lip back from teeth. She is holding herself tight in all her muscles from neck to feet. ‘What’s your major problem, Simon?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You want to see my memories? Like Lucien wants yours?’

I shake my head before she’s even finished the question. ‘No.’

She walks toward me until she is standing close and the mud from her hands drips down my jeans. Her face is in mine, blood flushing her thin skin. The look on it is something not far from contempt.

‘It sounds to me like you do.’

I step back. ‘No,’ I say. The flinch is deep in bodymemory.

‘You’ve seen them already anyway.’

‘No.’

‘Yes. You’ve seen them. You just didn’t know what they were.’

I step off, kick the sand. I’m sick to my stomach with the whole conversation, which seems to have spread into places I don’t have any knowledge of.

What Clare does next is roll up the long sleeve of her T-shirt. She rolls it high up, with a look on her face of challenge. Mud from her fingers is left in streaks. Her sleeve is tight, but she gets it rolled almost to the shoulder, so I can see her whole forearm and from the elbow up past the biceps.

I look at her arm, tacet.

It is covered in scars. They are too clear, too straight, too regular to be accident or injury. She has done them herself.

I have to walk away for a bit and it is a while before I can come back. She stands there until I do, not moving. Her arms at her side and her hands dripping mud.

‘Why did you do that?’

Clare won’t look at me.

‘Why?’

‘Why do you do what you do? I do it because I hate the day coming again and again and never changing and nothing to hold on to. Because I hate waking into it with nothing there. You remember better than me. But this way I can measure something at least. Do you know what it means?’

I don’t answer. I’m still livid with her.

She looks at me, testing. ‘It’s time,’ she says, with a sort of satisfaction. She points to a raised cut, hard with pink scar tissue. ‘This is about an eightnoch. I know that it’s recent because it still hurts.’ She points to a pale, spidery healed scar on her forearm. ‘This one is older. I don’t remember doing it, but at least I know I did it, and I can see them changing. Once that one heals, I’ll start another.’

The outline of her face is keen against the sky. She stares me down. I’m still angry, but what is my anger worth? And what does it change?

Who am I to question her need for something sharp and sure to keep on her own body? At least she holds them with her. At least they’ll never be consigned to thamesmuck and dug up by a stranger. I put my arm across Clare’s shoulders and hold her as we stand there on the strand.

‘Shit,’ I say.

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I have to check the snares.’

‘Did Lucien give you the tune?’

‘Of course.’

Clare has a strange look on her face then. As if she is just meeting me for the first time. As if none of the conversation we’ve just had has happened. I feel a shiver down my own arms, though I’m not cold. How long does memory last? says the voice in my head.

‘What?’ I ask out loud.

‘Nothing. Off you go. You’ll have to run presto if you want to make it back to the river by Chimes.’

I leave Clare on the strand, follow the tune along the north road that goes all the way from the river with Covent Garden market to my west, up past the hulk of Euston and Pancras, toward Fleet territory. The crowds thin past Pancras and the air is colder there, like it’s been left behind from a darker season. Clare cutting a path through time on her own skin, I think. I take two rabbits from the snare in the old Battle Bridge crosshouse and a squirrel from the estate gardens opposite. The buildings are empty, with sightless windows looking down.

I should go back now, but I don’t. I sit on a bench that still has a few of its wooden slats. Lucien in my quarters at night. Downsounding memories. The sound in my head of a note struck. A chime or echo. Sometimes things come up from nowhere, I think. A bubble just pops on the surface. Doesn’t mean it’s true memory. What Clare heard and what Clare thinks she heard are two things far apart. But I don’t believe what I tell myself.

I sit on the bench and I try to go inside my head. I think about waking at Matins and that is easy. But when I try to trace my way back from there to yesternoch, my mind shies from the before of it. I force it anyway. Yesternoch I woke. I sounded Onestory. We ran in the under. We checked the snares. Then in the night, like every night, I chose an objectmemory from my bag and I remembered. I entered the memory and I lived inside it for a little. Then after that I slept.

I try hard to think what memory it might have been. I breathe in the green smell of the tangled weeds, and my hands move over the wood of the broken bench, and after a while the voice comes in my head again. The arrival in London , it asks, w hat was it like?

That is all. Just an echo like the thrum in the air after a note has ended. Try as I like, all else is left behind on the banks of waking.

What is it that tells you to make a memory? I can’t say. Something that sits raised and raw against the skin of the day. Something that presses at you. And I see that even if Clare remembered false, I have to keep it. I start by looking around for an object that could hold the memory. Something with rough edges of its own to give a grip for the picture. But I can’t find anything that feels right.

When the answer comes, I try to ignore it. I push it away off into the shadows of the garden. But because it’s the right answer, it skirts round and comes back unbidden. What I am looking for is a thing not subject to the tides of whim and chance. A thing that I’ll keep whether I like it or not.

I take my knife from its strap at my ankle. Then I stand up, stamp my feet and roll my sleeve as she did. I press the blade into the fleshy part at the top of my arm.

There is numbness first. Blood pools up lento through the cut skin as I watch. An airy rushing in my head. Then pain at last and its sharpness somehow a relief. I push the knife in further. I think hard as I can until I make a picture. The picture is the two of us. Clare kneeled in thamesmud, her wet hands raised toward me in a question. I put the thought of Lucien in there too. A ghosted pale figure between us. Half there, half not, like forgetting. What’s so special about your memories, then? asks Clare’s voice.