She was right, Netty. There is no place for me here. No place, and the thread I followed my way in on hangs loose already. My mother not two days dead and I have failed her. The city slips outward around me in its awful din and its smell of bilge and rosin.
Then I hear it again.
That whisper of silence somewhere in the south. A cool current through the clutch and noise. It comes like the promise of a place I can draw breath.
I use my hands to carve through the crowds and through the melodies. I take corners as they come, moving blind. Past boarded buildings and vendors and more people. Across a broad street with grand buildings. Through duos and trios of musicians, their instruments flashing silver, maple, gold. Down a narrow grey alley, into a park, two spiked fences vaulted, a push through the scrub and at last, over a wide concrete road, there it is.
A river like a clear, flat highway. A river wider than I’ve ever seen. Greybrown water. The boats like toys on it and the ripples pushing through as it runs east to west. Calm, like it’s been there forever and seen everything.
My arms shake as I look, like I’ve just put down something that was much too heavy. This is where I’m standing when I hear the sky’s half-cough half-shiver. The warning so deep in bodymemory that my muscles are the first to answer. I have lost track of the tolls and it is a narrow minute from Vespers — and Chimes.
At Matins the Carillon sounds Onestory piano — quiet, amabile. Onestory is antiphony: question and answer, call and response. Our voices fill in the melody gifted by the Carillon. We give the right answers, always the same and the same for all. If life is music, as it is, Onestory is the bass. Which is to say the burden, the constant truth beneath everything. There to walk on and also to steer with, each and every morning.
At Vespers, though, Chimes is another thing altogether. Solo and forte, strong enough to bring you to your knees, put you in your place. Different every time, and always changing.
Across the road is a stone platform guarded by two strange catlike creatures made of black stone. One has its face broken clean off. The other still wears its whole smile, calm and pretty as a girl. A glance at the catgirl but no time to make a better acquaintance as I slip beside her and through the twisted mettle bars that keep me from the water. I crouch tight at the top of the stairs that walk down into the water’s mouth. The best I can do is empty my mind as the air pulls in and out like a tide, like a set of lungs, and the smell of pepper comes.
Chimes is like a fist. It unclutches, opens. Starts like a fist, but then it bursts like a flowering. Who can say if it’s very slow or very fast? Chimes is always different, and even after the thousands of times, I couldn’t venture to say what it’s like.
On the south side, people have come out of buildings and houses to form a ragged line along the bank. They stretch up one by one into the great calm of the music. My arms stretch up too, kin with the joints and muscles of those distant strangers.
It’s the melody simple first. We follow in solfege. Hands in concert as the sky is carved by it: Soh Fah Me Doh Ray Me Soh Fah Me Me Ray Doh Doh Soh Soh. Then the melody is repeated, but turned upside down. Then it comes again, but up an octave and another voice takes the inverted melody and they weave together. The chords wash over. They clean and centre me. The weight of the tonic goes down my spine and into the ground.
Follow the melody through its variations, through its opening and flowering. It tells of harmony and beauty. It tells of a beauty wider than any of us. My mind opens with it and everything there is in the world is shown in perfect order in the music. There is no space for any other thought.
The sides of the river unfold. The forward and backward of all objects walk out and present themselves — brick, man, boat. The river thickens as if it’s going to curdle — as if you could walk out on it, right over the crenelling waves and eddies.
It is not painful, not exactly, but nor is it without pain. I’ve seen men crying, certainly. But who’s to say what it is they’re crying for? It is so strong that one by one we crouch. Our foreheads in our knees, our skulls open to the sky.
Riverstone
The melody simple returns at the very end. Like a firm hand nudging me awake.
I open my eyes, blink my way clear of the blur and the ache. Above, the wide grey sky is held in pink bars of sunset. The step I am sitting on is a rough brownish grey, one of a flight that goes down to a river the same colour as the stone. My memory bag is stowed between my knees, and there is a muddy burberry over my shoulders. Fear grips me. Vast chords echo clean and upright through the far and near of my head. I try to push under them, into the stilled watery hush. Nothing. I wait and breathe and lento it comes back, up out of the murk. I am in London. I have arrived.
I look down at my hands. In them is a bar of chocolate wrapped in gold mettle foil and purple paper. The chocolate has melted through the foil and into the creases of my palm. I see a woman holding a skillet and punishing it with a steel pad. Her face is grey and cold. ‘Who is your mother, then, when she’s at home?’ she asks, and turns her back on me.
My mother. I look for her outlines. All I get is the feel of her standing next to me in a light-filled earth-smelling room. She smiles and crooks her hand at me as if to say, ‘Over here, Simon, come.’ I pick up my bag, feel the weight of the memories inside. I will have to trust them. A task, I think. A thread to follow.
The sounds and songs of the city are beginning to fill the air, and the tide is ebbing, so I walk back along the concrete way. With the river at my side and the city crouching heavy and dense with song above, I feel a measure of calm. I will find a park or a crosshouse yard to sleep in down on the embankment, away from the clutch of people. I will find a prentisship tomorrow. I will trace my way back through my objectmemories. I won’t forget. Then it comes again. The silence sits up and calls me from deep in the river.
I shake my head to clear it. Nothingness. Flashes of nothingness like quiet silvery blinks. The need to find that silvery silence grips me hard. Though I have no idea what it is or what it means, I walk towards it like it’s calling my name. And then subito I am running. Without any other thought and with my memories banging at my side. Until, past the embankment’s broken stone, the river is low and there is a huge bridge with blue mettle struts that swoop up into the sky and I can see the bed.
My hands in oily greenness. Deep in the shell and rock and debris and mud. I claw so far down into the silt that the water soaks the pushed-up sleeves of the burberry I am wearing and I almost overbalance. Clenched handfuls of mud and shell and fragment pulled up and cupped under the silted surface of the water. I shake my hands from side to side so that the pieces sluice between them. There is a gulp in my throat, a lump there.
The movement is in my bodymemory, so deep in muscle I don’t even think it. I push down again and I’m in our fields digging for used-up bulbs. Shells and stones prick and scrape against my fingers and palms. Pieces of mettle press under my nails. I push down into the glut of the river’s belly and bring fistfuls back to the surface to sluice. And then again, presto, with a rhythm forming as if there is a purpose to it.