So I do the only thing I can think of. I follow my stomach.
Bar of Chocolate
The first street I pass carries the waft and song of peanuts cooked in caramel and sausages on a grill. I keep down the same wide road and pass bakers singing yeasted bread. Hot coffee. Beer. Nothing close to my mother’s tune, though.
Then a short, busy street to my right and at its end a broad, high-arched building where the smells gather, rich and thick and heavy. The sounds of a market place are familiar even if the accent and the tunes are strange.
I walk through broken pillars and down steps and find a corner to watch and count my tokens inside the vast market square. My stomach is turned with loneliness and strangeness. The people move around me and I am invisible to them. But I sniff; I listen.
A plaintive three-note cry from a sweet-potato man who sings as he pedals a bellow wheel. A tune of golden meat pasties sung by a fat woman with a wink. There are tunes for sandwiches and for potatoes fried in goosefat, and there is a seabrimmed song sung by a boy with dark hair and a shucking knife. A song with a gleam of pearl in it for the oysters he sells. The oysters are from Essex, the song says. Like me.
And then the homely note of one tune weaves its way out of the rest. There is something in it that catches and tugs. A solo voice singing, though it’s not a tune so much as a quick underbreath patter to match the rhythm of boiling water and hissing butter.
Four beats down is the small vending cart, its blue tarp awning just wide enough to cover a tiny bench with a three-ring sterno plate and two beaten-mettle stools. Behind the stove, there’s a woman with greyflecked dark hair caught into a bun. She is wearing an apron and moves presto between two huge pots and a small cast-iron skillet. The pots simmer and she croons to them, ‘Bubble and squeak, neeps and tatties.’
In my mind the voice is joined and doubled by another voice: my mother’s. The tune is the one she gave me.
My throat aches with relief, right up under my ears.
‘Netty?’
I try to keep the hope out of my voice. I try to keep out the questions I want to ask.
When she looks up, she does so lento, as if she’d known I would be standing there. A flicker in the brindled eyes.
‘Netty,’ I say again.
She silences me with a tssk of breath. ‘Sit down,’ she says, sharp. And before I can say more, she places a plate of hash in front of me.
The food silences me better than her warning. While it’s in front of me, I eat like I can’t remember my last meal.
While I eat, the woman called Netty clears up her stall. She tidies a pile of gold-wrapped bars into a neat stack. Wipes down the bench and the stove. Picks up a steelo and starts to scour the skillet. All the while her head is bent and her movements are clipped tight. At last she walks past the bench and looks presto both ways before she pulls the furled tarp down, closing us off from the rest of the market. The late-afternoon light comes through the tarp and makes everything a pale blue colour, old and sad.
She looks at me then. Though her gaze is steady, I see that she is afraid.
‘What do you want?’
‘My mother gave me your name,’ I say. ‘She sang me your tradesong. I’ve come all the way from our farm in Essex.’ This time I fail to keep out the note of desperation.
‘Keep your voice down, boy,’ she says. A presto look to the tarp. Then she returns to scouring. ‘There’s no one left in Essex,’ she says. There is a sour pleasure in her voice and for a second I see the people massed in our village hall for Chimes. Her words make no sense.
‘You don’t understand,’ I say. ‘My mother told me to find you. She meant you to help me.’
Netty sighs and lowers her chin, looks me hard in the eye.
‘Who is your mother, then, when she’s at home?’
‘Her name was Sarah Wythern.’
She says nothing, but she is listening.
‘What else did she tell you?’ she asks.
I try to remember. I search through the last few days of grief and strangeness and I come up empty. My mind is closed tight so there’s nothing in it but the rain on the road and the bumping of the cart and the hubbub of the city. A low dread rises up in me.
‘Nothing.’
‘Then she must have given you something. Something to prove who you are?’
I shake my head.
She hisses under her breath, like the sound of potatoes in fat. ‘A song? No other message?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Only your tradesong.’
Netty is silent awhile. Her face is blank and closed, as if whatever was once warm in her has gone cold long ago.
‘Every fool and his prentiss knows my tradesong, boy. I can’t help you if you have no proof.’
At first I am unsure of what she is telling me. Then she speaks again. ‘I don’t know anyone called Sarah Wythern,’ she says. ‘There’s no place for you here.’
I shake my head against what she says and fix my eyes on the bench, stand still as if she might yet change her mind. I have nowhere else to go. In front of me is the pile of gold-wrapped bars, each purple paper band embossed with the same jingle. I hear again the flat, refusing note in her voice like a door shutting. And as if it doesn’t belong to me, my hand moves out toward the bars and I take one, weigh it in my hand, hear the tune on the paper that is sweet and rich. There is something else in her voice too, I think: she is lying.
‘That wasn’t a question,’ Netty says with no flinch in her eyes. ‘Take your memories and get the hell out of my stall.’
I leave the market by the opera house, shouldering through the crowds to get free. My heart beats like a tambor under my ribs, tight and loud with anger. In one hand I hold the bar of chocolate I snatched from Netty’s stall.
The crowds follow their own paths through the streets, pushing and pulling around me, paying no mind. Only the prentisses watch as I pass, step back to leave an exaggerated berth. Scorn on their shut-in faces. From an open window a man half screeches a tune and all at once the noise is too much. Too many stories speaking tutti, too many melodies demanding notice. I stop there in the middle of the street, as if I could stand solo and be the one still point of the noise and dance.
Then someone shoves past me and my feet slip and I’m flat out on the cobbles. My memory bag across the ground and out of my grasp and all subito the other voices seem to stop as if silenced by some high-raised baton. I leap forward. I stretch out full to grab back the bag from under the tramping feet. Down on the ground, people’s legs move above as if I am not there. A voice curses and there’s a sharp kick to my hipbone, but my hands grip roughcloth and I pull the bag to my chest and kneel there with it cradled like a baby.
After, I stand under the eave of a building, out of the surge of the crowd. My breath comes in short bursts like the carter’s horse. I wind the leather straps of the bag round my hand and wait for the horror to lift. How long would it take if I lost them? How long before you’re one of the nameless, wandering ones? Clustered for comfort with the rest of them, like a sheep on the public green: memorylost.
Bodymemory would keep you going awhile. After all, muscles and bones have their own trick of remembering what to do each day. The habits go right down, deep in there with your breath and blood. My body remembers the shape of fields, though, the right weather for planting, the feel of the earth. My arms know how to turn a seedbed; my hands the depth a bulb will thrive at. And that’s no use here. Only objectmemories can tell me who I am. That’s where you keep the pictures of what happened, stored in scraps and oddments salvaged from passing days. When I hold them, the objects, the pictures come up. My whole life is in my bag. Bits of my childhood. Pieces of the last days on the farm. Everything I ever thought important enough to keep. I fight the urge to reach down right now and touch one, let the pictures cluster and pull me down.